Hiking in to this sacred place, Jeb walks along as usual without saying much. I rattle off small talk, posing and answering many of my own questions, as I always do. The little peak on the left, which holds so much mystery for me even now, reclines there, as it has for centuries, silent and dark.
"What do you think of going up there?"
"You've been there already, haven't you?"
Jessie and Tyler wander the fading two-wheel track just ahead of us. Young lovers, unconcerned with destinations. Jeb and I are drawn to their youth, their innocence. Nineteen, twenty years old...
"They toddle along like little babies, don't they? Everything in their grasp, and they don't even realize it..."
"Ahhh. Kids."
Where would I be now, where would I have been, if at their age I'd been climbing, instead of wasting my parents' money on college? At 23, I realized that I could rope up and actually learn about climbing; at 33, I achieved a personal mountaineering goal, climbing to an elevation of over 20,000 feet; now, at 38, I'm scrounging up routes on back-country virgin rock, feeling the tick, tick, tick of time, urgently groping for every good hold I can find. Jeb, who is already well into his next decade, displays an easiness like that of someone who has broken through onto a brighter plateau. His daughter at University, his life seems to have just begun. And he is wise. Gifted in many ways, he lives by the pulse of the river that meanders, crawls, and cascades through his quiet valley.
I'm jealous of him. I live nine miles from the border, in a place where the tempo of the Front Range insidiously pervades my every molecule. I wish I knew how to stack hay...
"How're your guitar lessons going?"
"Oh, I'm looking forward to Sor. Carcassi keeps me pretty busy now."
"Jeez, I wisht I had some time on my hands."
"Maybe you should have your guitar in your hands."
"Can't. They all wanna help Daddy play."
Jeb chuckles. He knew that would happen. I had no idea.
We too wander the track, together reminiscing about climbs left and right. The Dark Buttress of the little peak still draws my attention, no matter how I try to let it go by. To climb on that brittle granite, heavily populated with colonies of green lichen, would be masochistic, and yet we suggest possibilities to each other. We know for a fact that the cracks are blind --- bottoming out, hard to protect. They might hold the very tip of an angle piton in a few places. Sheer madness. Jeb seems to yield momentarily to my obsession. Just when I think he's going to commit, we walk on. And the Black Buttress seems to grow taller, steeper, and darker the farther away we get from it.
The old concrete bridge has collapsed on one side, but the little creek still runs through the culvert. There beside it is the dihedral I climbed almost three years ago, when my dad was here. He'd never seen me climb until then, and I chose this: a slightly-overhanging open book, replete with loose rocks the size of small kitchen appliances. He watched in horror until he couldn't stand it any longer, and my sister took him back to her house. I didn't exactly feel good about the route either, visibly scared out of my wits.
"Look, all the missiles are right where we left 'em."
Jeb keeps moving forward. Jessie and Tyler are rock-hounding in the creek bed. She holds up a rock for her dad to identify.
"Gneiss?" she asks.
"Oh, Jess, that's the stuff I was telling you about," he answers with a voice full of wonder. "Yeah, it is nice, isn't it?"
We turn up a hillside, leaving the lush bottomland of the creek, entering the arid steppe of tertiary sediments.
"Three climate zones in ten steps," says Jeb. Cacti and sagebrush join forces to complicate our ascent. We weave separate paths toward a promising stand of crags atop another small mountain. Only when we are finally at their base do we realize that we have been deceived: they're only thirty feet tall. Nevertheless, I go off around the corner by myself, fabricating the most complicated route I can find to the top.
From this summit, I gaze at the little peak a few miles away. I wonder if the cairn I built there is still standing. I wasn't expecting to have any more sorrowful ache; I'm not disappointed that I no longer feel sad. I stand there, facing into the wind, knowing it's the Sou'westerly making my eyes water. Glenn and Cindy had gone up there, on that peak, to pay their respects as well. As I look at the peak, I hope her family wouldn't mind. It is such a lovely place.
I scramble down and around to the base of the cliff, out of the wind, where the others are eating their spartan lunch. I haven't brought so much as a drink of water. Somehow, Asceticism goes well with being in the mountains. Jessie gives me her apple.
"I think we could drop down and practically walk up the back side."
"But we'd have to cross over the top of the mountain between this one and that one," Jessie points out. Jeb adds that Jessie and Tyler have to get back home pretty soon.
"You went up that ridge when you climbed it?" he asks me.
"Yeah," I trace the line with my finger, "the one coming out of the canyon proper."
"Well," he tells me after a pause, "there are so many other climbs you could do."
"Yeah." I give it up.
I keep staring at the peak, as the angle of the sun gives the ridge a purple silhouette. It is a beautiful, lonely little promontory on the Planet Earth. Even though I've been up there, I don't know what's on the summit any more.
I don't think I'll ever know.
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