Death Grip (11 page)

I developed a reputation as an enfant terrible during my formative years in New Mexico and beyond. I once ripped the sole off an expensive rock shoe after failing on a climb my friend Randal had fired as he taunted me with, “Ooh, hardman takes the whipper!” Later I winged a quickdraw (a bartacked nylon runner with a carabiner on each end, used to clip the rope to protection) so hard that it ricocheted off the rock and hit my belayer Scott in the head. I kicked, punched, and chased a two-liter soda bottle through a tangle of ferns, nettles, and deadfall below a Rifle cliff while screaming, “Fuck, fuck, fucking FUCK!” until I'd driven the other climbers away. And most hilariously, I tried to throw my rock shoes into the highway from the hillside bouldering area above Morrison, Colorado, but lacked the pitcher's arm to do so; I had to search for the shoes in a filthy snowbank while my friends mocked me from above. Apparently, I cared a lot. So many of us acted this way, a cadre of irate knuckleheads roiling in our own self-made pressure cooker. Karn, at Rifle, once became so angry upon falling off the last move of a 5.13c that we could hear him screaming a half mile up canyon. Karn's equally talented brother, Jason, broke his toe kicking a wall after he fared poorly in a competition. One friend—name withheld—had a fit that's become lore, becoming so testy with his wife/belayer that she tied the rope off and walked away, leaving him hanging like a piñata until he calmed down. We were all so hungry—for greatness, but also for food.

After high school, I spent a year based out of Albuquerque, applying to colleges—a requirement for living at my father's house—and working as a mover, interspersed with one- to three-month road trips. Basic economics made it easy to stay thin: Paying only nominal rent ($150/month) at my pop's, I'd save up what I could and then once on the road put every last penny toward gas, campground fees, and then, at the bottom of the pyramid, food.

In some strange way, this gypsy lifestyle felt ennobling, from buying canned-goods seconds at dollar stores, to camping down back roads, to taking $2 showers at the KOA. For accommodations, I had a beater REI tent with a busted rainfly I was too cheap to replace, spending stormy nights sloshing in its smelly, wet cocoon. My sleeping pads were just as ghetto, one a thin strip of Ensolite, the other a leaky half-length Therm-a-Rest that I was, again, too miserly to repair. Finally, to combat the cold, I broke down and bought a $10 thrift-store sleeping bag, a cotton bedroll with little deer on the lining. This I wrapped over my synthetic bag for “double protection,” or added an itchy red smallpox blanket ($3 at the Las Vegas Salvation Army store) for triple layering. On nights when the tent became unbearable due to wind or driving rain, we might sleep in my Toyota Tercel wagon, my travel partner and I each dozing upright in the front seats. During a two-day windstorm that drove red sand into my eyes, teeth, and throat at Red Rock Canyon, west of Las Vegas, I finally grokked that I could fold down the Tercel's hatchback seats and stretch out away from the elements. I now had a fine “dirtbag RV,” replete with pine-tree air freshener. I crisscrossed the American West with various friends, from New Mexico, to Colorado, to Arizona, to Nevada, to Utah, to California, slumming and climbing five, six days a week, as much as my fingers could handle.

Dirtbag life was good.

“Dirtbag” is a term climbers love: It implies self-inflicted poverty and career avoidance in the name of screwing off to climb full-time. The term has its romantic connotations, evoking images of self-sufficient outlanders with no need for society or its trappings, but instead only the company of “the tribe” and the rocks. In the 1980s and '90s, before America's current explosion of outdoor recreation, before swelling climber numbers put us on land-managers' radar, you could dirtbag more easily. All you needed was some Forest Service or BLM land and you could squat for months. For years at Rifle the favored free doss was the “Dirt Pile,” a pullout behind a scary yellow-white tailings heap. I met a consummate dirtbag down at the bouldering area Hueco Tanks, near El Paso, Texas, who survived by resoling fellow climbers' rock shoes out of his van, and another ubiquitous character who squeaked by selling customized climbing T-Shirts and hardware out of the trunk of his car. In Yosemite, the historical heart of American rock climbing, climbers have long survived by “scarfing”: risking arrest as they steal half-finished food off tourists' trays at the Lodge cafeteria.

Climbers hate paying for anything. I have friends who've lived for years in tents, caves, or vans rather than deign to work a proper job. I suppose I was only a “half-dirtbag” in the sense that I had my father's house as a home base, though I still embraced the parsimony. Poverty also gave me a handy excuse to do the bare minimum to fuel myself, and I became notorious for my execrable nutrition. Even while friends had tidy food boxes and Igloo coolers full of produce, cheese, and yogurt, I skitched by with a couple grocery bags stashed behind the driver's seat filled with whatever crap was on sale. Usually ramen noodles, Parmesan cheese, store-baked French bread, Cheez-Its, off-brand Dijon mustard, vanilla-crème cookies, red vines or Twizzlers, tortillas, refried beans, moldering cheese, diet hot cocoa (for appetite suppression), and powdered Café Vienna. When I couldn't take the hunger anymore, I'd power down a “Cheez-It hoagie”: half a loaf of French bread slathered in mustard and stuffed with crackers. But most nights, too lethargic from climbing to fuss with my cranky camp stove and boil water for Ramen, I'd slump in my lawn chair and silo cold beans from the can, staring at the dirt, saying little. About once a week, we might hit up an all-you-can-eat salad bar or buffet, shoving rolls into our pockets to eat back at camp.

I organized my road trips to scope the climbing around prospective Southwest university towns. I had to be near climbing. I'd passed through Boulder the summer before my senior year in high school and fallen in love with it. As you near town on US-36, the Boulder Turnpike from Denver, you crest Davidson Mesa and the city fans out below, framed by the Boulder Mountains with their iconic Flatirons, the summits of the Indian Peaks looming behind, and then Longs Peak, a dark, diamond-tipped hulk to the north. On the Boulder Mountains' south end, a deep cataract named Eldorado Canyon teems with sandstone cliffs up to eight hundred feet, while on the north, past the bouldering haunt of Flagstaff Mountain, you'll find Boulder Canyon, a winding defile full of ancient gray granite. North again stretches gentle Mount Sanitas, its spiny southern ridges comprised of beetling backbones of maroon and orange Dakota sandstone. Everywhere you look: fields and meadows, cottonwood-lined ditches and streams, rocks, and mountains. It was late June and Boulder's many beauties were out in force, wearing clingy T-shirts and high-cut summer shorts, strolling the sidewalks, riding bicycles. A young man could be happy here, so I was delighted to learn, in spring 1991, that I'd been accepted into the University of Colorado–Boulder. Like so many climbers drawn by Boulder's reputation as ground zero for American climbing, I emigrated both to pursue my passion and, with the brashness of youth, make a name for myself.

At first blush, Boulder was intense. Even as a college freshman, consigned to the dorms by night but out at the rocks every free hour, I quickly found myself rolled into the fray, bouldering up at Flagstaff and trading belays with famous climbers I'd seen before only in magazine photos. (Boulder had only one gym—today it has
five
—so you'd see everyone either there or at Flagstaff or Eldo after work.) I met personal heroes like Christian Griffith, whose slideshow I'd attended in Albuquerque, and Derek Hersey, a British wild man known for his free-solo (unroped free-climbing) exploits in Eldorado Canyon. Derek, whose mane of dark hair blew upward in Eldorado's drafts as he trusted life to fingers and toes, his wool socks pulled up to his calves, his rock shoes two sizes too big so he could leave them on throughout his all-day climbing binges. And Bobbi Bensman, aka Madame Muscles, a woman so enviably buff and talented that most guys were scared to rope up with her. Or Colin Lantz, tall, wiry, with finger tendons like steel cables who could do Flagstaff's hardest boulder problems in Tevas with a cigarette in his mouth, pulling on holds the size of lima beans. I'd scored a shoe sponsorship in New Mexico to the tune of a few free pairs a year, but my connection at the bootmaker La Sportiva said I might lose it in Boulder, since “there were so many other good climbers.” And he'd been right: Whereas in New Mexico in the early 1990s maybe ten people could climb 5.13, in Boulder I stopped counting after my twentieth “honemaster.” If I wanted to keep getting free shoes, which cost $150 at the shops, I needed to step up my game, which meant no more food, preferably ever.

I wanted to be just as ripped, just as honed as all the top dogs I was meeting and to whom, in my bottomless insecurity, I felt I'd never measure up. Hell, I wanted to do them one better and be the skinniest and strongest myself. So many climbers move to Boulder with that very notion. Twenty years along, I see younger versions of myself at the gym, freakishly low body fat, shirts off, making “dig-me” grunts as they throw down on some 5.13. I miss that youthful yen to climb hard—in most of us it fades with age, especially as old war wounds creak and ossify. I miss that boundless sense of possibility that comes with athletic improvement at one's physical prime, of feeling the near-godlike potency of “levitating” on microscopic grips out an overhang, the ground skewing away, swifts and pigeons darting past in the ether. I feel fortunate to have even tasted it, even if I was to pay a terrible price.

Conveniently for my Climborexia, I loathed the starchy carnivore fare at the CU dorms, hated eating in the cafeteria with all the cliqueish dipshits, and often returned from climbing so late that I'd missed dinner anyway. Everyone says college is better than high school, but it's not: It's the same tired adolescent crap, only with the volume turned up to eleven because there's no adult supervision. Campus, with some twenty-five thousand students, felt like a teeming mini-opolis that would swallow me whole, brimming with undifferentiated sexual tension, macho posturing, and alcohol-fueled hostility. I never clicked with its party-bro rhythms, and always hated the throngs on campus even though I ended up spending eight years there before I'd completed my master's. Infelicitously, my first roommate was a hard-partier, and also an achondroplasic dwarf—he snored so loudly when he'd been drinking (he slept on his back because of his physiology, though he
could
vomit into trash cans while standing) that I'd try to sleep in the hall, where some drunken hooliganism was usually going on and the lights shone in my eyes. One night as a “prank,” one of the besotted morons on my floor soaked my roommate in lighter fluid and tried to ignite him; that was the caliber of behavior. I never fit in—I had no interest in drinking, football games, chasing girls, the Grateful Dead, weed, concerts, fraternities. I wanted only to climb and get on with my studies. Once, as I used the bathroom at Norlin Library, I saw that someone had penned “Hate weed, hate beer, hate parties, hate college” in the stall, which pretty much summed it up.

I was also horribly self-conscious, locked, thanks to Climborexia, in a severe case of body dysmorphia. Attending a friend's party with my dwarf roommate that fall semester, I felt the eyes of my friend's housemates upon us as we approached. Surely they were looking at
me
, repulsed by my hideous, bloated form as I waddled up to the fence (I weighed only 135 pounds). Only twenty years later do I realize that the “spectacle” was my roommate, four feet tall and wearing a loud tie-dyed T-shirt that hung past his knees. And I could barely talk to girls, having spent so much time solely in the company of dirty, sweaty, gassy dudes—unlike today, which edges closer to a 50-50 split, women numbered about only one in ten climbers at the time.

It was better to throw myself into climbing.

Boulder is a magnet for top outdoor athletes, not only climbers but also cyclists, triathletes, runners, mountain bikers, skiers, and so on, who come to train at altitude (a mile high) and for the easy access to open space. It can be overwhelming, confirmed by a trip to the eternally clusterfucked Whole Foods at Pearl and 28th Street, where shoppers' net average body fat hovers around 3 percent and where spandex and GORE-TEX are more prevalent than cotton. Just this morning, my wife and I were walking the dog when a kangaroo-legged runner couple passed by on the path. They trotted at an almost recreational pace, not cantering or sprinting, and Kristin and I turned to each other wondering the exact same thing: Why weren't they running
faster?
That's how it is in Boulder: You get so used to seeing exercise junkies engaging in constant, insane, high-octane workouts that you forget it could be otherwise. It was the perfect place for a fiend like me.

By the end of freshman year I'd starved myself down to 125 pounds. Climbers had just begun developing Rifle in autumn 1991, and I'd gotten on board from the get-go, driving out with friends all autumn, even venturing out in the dead of winter to “stake a claim” on the primo lines by bolting them while it was still too cold to climb. We'd tie red string through the first bolt to mark each “red-tagged project,” warning other climbers off. By spring I had bolted and climbed my first 5.13c, a radical sixty-foot climb out a pendulous overhang I named
Fluff Boy.
So clueless was I to just how much my weight loss had made climbing easier that I graded the climb 5.12d, three notches below its true difficulty: a “sandbag rating.” Meanwhile, my climbing partners had taken to calling me “Auschwitz Boy,” a nickname I embraced.

I don't track what I weigh today—I avoid scales, and will shut my eyes and ask them not to read my weight out loud at the doctor's office—but at last check I was a buck sixty. I'm five foot six and a half, bowlegged, Slavic-stocky with dense slabs of muscle. I don't have the typical lithe “climber's build,” but I don't care. I can still climb 5.13, even onsight, which might put me in the top 5 percent of climbers. Good enough. I eat three meals a day, snack when I'm hungry, and eat dessert, every night. If my harness gets too tight or I have a project in mind, I'll drop the dessert for a week—this is as far as the dieting goes. I do not deprive myself of food anymore. I can't afford to.