I keep the first mountain I climbed in my skin. I carry it on my back, perched atop my shoulder blades, those never-grown wings. I am not concerned when others hem and haw over the finality of it all, that the ink will follow me all through my life and decompose with me, or burn, or sluff, bubble — explode? I don’t know how I’m going to die and the anticipation keeps me alive.
Years ago, I set out to climb the mountain now on my back, a fourteen thousand foot peak named, in all seriousness, Mount Sneffels, in the San Juan range of the Colorado Rockies. I had no intention of becoming a mountain climber when I set out for Sneffels. Some friends were going camping in the basin below the peak and thought it would be fun to try to climb it the next day. I didn’t realize, until I got into camp and looked up, what I would be undertaking. The San Juan peaks are memorable as a broken face; their ridgelines suggest tar-addled shattered teeth. Everything else is green, golden, and blue. Green valleys, golden skies at sun’s rise and set, water as blue as the middle-day sky.
As I worked my way up Sneffels’ flanks, my hike turned into a scramble, a scramble into a climb. I was picking my way up a razorback of granite ridgeline following the faint voices of other climbers ahead of me. I didn’t think about anything more than foot and hand placements for what felt like a long time. I abruptly froze while straddling a jutted vertebra of rock. I felt as if I had woken up from a dreamless sleep to the sounds of a stranger in the house. I could just make out my orange tent still pitched in the green grass two-thousand vertical feet below me. A wild thought came into my mind: that if I jumped out and away from the ridge, I might come close to hitting my tent. My heart beat in my ears, my legs shook, and for a moment I was petrified my hands would betray me and somehow slip off the rock. I took ten big breaths. I commanded my legs to stop shaking. I peeled my gaze off the valley floor below and looked at the rock that held me, looked at it until the speckled surface streaked through with lichen seemed illimitable, as if the rock was an expanding galaxy under my hands. I kept climbing. Each stone I grasped could slip free, and some did. One basketball-sized rock crumbled beneath my boot and went jouncing down the mountainside like the footfalls of a great loping god. I climbed on, holding each rock like life in my hands.
Years after, I sat around a living room with my boyfriend Chris, an EMT, and his friends. They were all in medicine, EMTs, paramedics, doctors, and there was me, a writer, insisting they couldn’t say anything that would terrify me (and should I be ashamed that it was a lie?). They talked about all the ways they’ve known people to die. I learned from them that there are good and bad ways to die; don’t die in a way that will cause your death to go red-faced and feel ashamed for you, I jotted down after everyone had left. That night as we lay in bed together, Chris and I talked about the ways we should expect each other to die. Our relationship was new then, and the buoyancy of his voice told me he’d been wanting to say this to me. He spoke of colleagues, friends, who had been struck while responding to car crashes, who had been charred in helicopter crashes transporting patients, who had been shot for trying to keep a person alive that someone else wanted dead. He told me, in a reverent whisper, of a climb gone wrong last summer when he clung to a rock face after accidentally getting off route. Yes, he climbs too.
“I should have fallen,” he said, “I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t think I’ll grow old. I think I’m going to die in the mountains,” he said. Then he concluded with a smile, “I’ll do something stupid probably.”
No one ever knows why they don’t fall, but that elusive knowledge is just as vexing as knowing why we do fall.
That night listening to Chris talk about all the ways he could’ve died and all the ways he still might was the night he became real to me. I held him; I didn’t chide him for knowing death so well or ask him to take up a safer profession. Instead I told him I would give him one hell of a eulogy. We settled into the shadows cast by the sailing moon, I loving him as a newly created person, wonderfully warm, fragile, and real.
After that night, I began cataloguing everything that is beautiful and good about him, and also every way he could die. I have two separate lists, but often I am careless and they overlap and knock into each other.
My home is in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, in a tiny town called Leadville. It is not the most beautiful place. Entropy runs amok throughout the town; the wildflowers do not grow well here, too high; the children do not grow well here and emerge from their mothers’ wombs needing bottled oxygen. The people who live here are athletes or they are the poor who cannot afford to live in the posh resort towns where they work so they live here and commute. We do not look at one another in the post office or in the coffee shop and I like this about life in my town.
The town sits in a narrow, slanted valley; the Mosquito, Sawatch, and Gore ranges hunch over from all sides and seem to huddle near each other like cattle in a storm. Yet there is space here, not just between people, but in the pine forests which cover the lower elevations like a magnificent pelt and, above treeline, in the great glacial basins which can be seen from nearly everywhere in town. Each valley and basin has a name that every local knows: the Amphitheatre, Africa Bowl, Black Cloud Basin, Chicago Ridge, Ice Box Fingers, Hagerman Tunnel, just to name a few. These names began with the first settlers who came chasing minerals, foolhardy men and women full of hope shot through with fear. I think they named these places to take some dread out of them, to feel that they were somewhere among so much nameless land. But that’s just a guess.
I have lived among mountains many years, yet I still feel like an unblinking, owl-eyed infant gaping at the point where their summits meet the sky. As long as I live here, no matter my mood, I will always be looking up. It is a compulsion of mine to loiter at windows, just looking, staring like a cat, thinking nothing, feeling the familiar ache of wanting to be out in the world. I have never seen a thing freer than a mountaintop. Mountaintops are empty spaces and mountaineers only inhabit them for a brief moment and never make claim. Can you own a chunk of sky? What about a section of flowing river water? I am sure some damn fool somewhere has tried both, but try as one might, such spaces can only be witnessed as you are passing through them, you cannot stay.
Perhaps this is why mountaineers are fiercely individualistic. Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner once said of mountain climbing, “I do this for myself because I am my own fatherland.” Mountaineers seem to belong to no place but themselves. They seem utterly unconcerned with their deaths and leave nothing of themselves behind when they go to the mountains; their families, spouses, loved ones, experiences, memories, goals: all weighed against a single summit. The summits they’ve known grow into them like spreading lichen. Being around grizzly old mountain climbers feels a little like standing on a summit; I can dwell with them for a time, but there is always some part of them that evades me. I think about that often, to be the place I come from and the place I return to. I think it would be lonely, and perhaps wonderful.
This morning, I read a press release announcing the death of a young man on another fourteen thousand foot Colorado peak, Capitol. The release said he’d fallen a thousand feet to his death. Chris has told me that when a person falls from such heights, the body bursts upon impact. This one exploded, I’m sure. I nodded indifferently as I read; so that is how it happened for him.
I’ve climbed Capitol. I found a bleached white skull of a mountain goat smiling at me below a vertical cliff band there. I chuckled to myself upon seeing it, remembering a climb I did with a friend months ago. We were just below the crux of the route, a thirty-foot wall of rock. She must’ve noticed I looked nervous because she clapped a hand on a shoulder and said, “You won’t fall. You climb like a mountain goat!”
Looking at the skull on Capitol, the ringed horns pointing skyward, I thought to myself, maybe I climb like this goat. Live goats followed me on Capitol all day and watched me with their black eyes. At times I wondered if a goat would charge me and punt me off the mountain like a football; goats move so quietly in and out of sight on a mountain. They disappear into the white veil of winter, or slip away into deep gullies and ridgeline notches, and reappear suddenly as if returning from a secret world. I wonder if they watched this climber fall, or caused his fall. I touch my back, where my mountain rests, grateful. I don’t mourn for those who die on mountains; they knew, just as I know, what they risk when they go. His body, the parts that weren’t sunk like shrapnel into the snow, would be a substitute corpse for the many which are never recovered.
Chris and I volunteer for the local Search & Rescue team so we both know how the mountain wilderness can swallow people. Many people go into the mountains and never come out. I keep this as a trinket, the knowledge that the Rockies are hoarding bodies that quickly become bones that become nutrients of the soil. Because of the many carnivorous animals of the region, after about a week we are not searching for a whole body, we are searching for remains. Families, grief-addled and strung out on hope, think of nothing but retrieving the pieces of their lost. Often we fail to return any tangible part to them. Would you be comforted by your son’s finger bone? Your husband’s teeth? Could you extract some essence from a loved one’s bare skull? In my list-making, I record what will remain of Chris after he is gone, to say nothing of the sentimental value of his ribs.
I teach high school English at a tiny charter school and sometimes I eavesdrop on my students at lunch. They talk of horrid things, and I often think them under some collective lunatic spell. On weekends they get in cars with drunk drivers at the wheel. They snort, smoke, or inject things until they pass out, freak out, or check out. They are looking for death, but they’re still sure they’re invincible. Instinctively, they know that death must balance the scale, but they don’t really believe it yet. I sit against the wall just outside the door, listening, thinking of the places I go to weigh my life. It feels good to understand death, but I still worry for them. Should I help them look or teach them how to spell? I’m never sure what my job is. I know once they discover death, they’ll fall on their knees, speaking in tongues, of love and life and all that is sacred, a monk in gasoline-drenched robes, a deer in a lion’s jaws, a pilgrim about to meet his God.
One of my students, a tall 9th grader, who seems some days to have been put on this earth to search for his lost glasses, has a habit of telling other students to go die. The words are lobbed out of him with perplexing ease, two little stones that sail high and out of sight. I pull him aside each time, asking him to confide in me and when he will not, I tell him, in my contractually obligated way, that he can’t tell students that.
“Yeah, but Miss,” he protests, “It’s not real,” as if death is a unicorn. We share this little exchange several times per week but I am shocked every time, as if death had just run down the hall and slapped me in the face. Why do I want him to believe in it?
Any death related to drugs or alcohol is a very bad, stupid death, my medical friends agree. But I always feel a little quivering inside me at this. I wonder, what if my students love their rushes as I love brooding mountains? Surely my own choices leave no room for me to pass judgement about how others choose to live and die. I once sat on a bar stool on a Thursday night staring into my key-lime-pie martini. Would I die for this? The glass was rimmed with pie crust crumbs. I waited, wondering if my death would appear among the faces at the bar, but I only got drunk and felt nothing.
Some nights I lay in bed drifting, awake, wondering what is the one best thing I could teach my students. I want to teach them about a joy so near to delirium that they would understand the phrase, love is a madman with no face and no body and I love all this nothingness. I want them to stop likening death with suffering; I want to show them the edge of a rocky precipice with nothing but wild air beyond them. Would they understand then that the will to live is fed by an understanding of death? There are absolutely things worth dying for, a single moment of life being the foremost of these things.
The Buddhist Sherpa people find their gods and goddesses in the high peaks of their Himalayan homeland. The Himalaya is vast and so too are their gods and goddesses, each bearing a different name and speaking different words. This makes perfect sense to me. On earthly peaks, their deities are in reach of awe, their homes already symbols of grandeur, might, and death. I like the corporality of this system. When the divine resides on earth, there is but one earth, one life, and both are attainable, unlike in Christianity, where your true life happens in heaven, after.
The most sought after peak in the Himalaya, Everest, houses the Goddess of Inexhaustible Giving, Miyolongsangma. It is no surprise to the Sherpa people that many have found riches in climbing the peak; Miyolongsangma loves to see her people become rich. Indeed, it is said that many of the gods and goddesses accept climbs of their peak, so long as the climber is not boastful or arrogant of treading upon the home of the deity.
Not all of the divine are so accommodating. Takar Dolsangma, the Goddess of Security, is said to ride a jeweled dragon of shimmering green scales. She makes her home on one of the Himalaya’s most dangerous peaks, K2, the Savage Mountain, and there the locals say she has taken on a new charge. Of those who attempt to climb K2, one in four will die. They say she reigns there as the Goddess of Death.
If there are gods or goddesses said to inhabit the peaks of my homeland in Colorado, I have not heard of them. But we mountain dwellers all know of an energy. It draws us by some magnetic frequency that is as irresistible as it is inescapable. Perhaps it is the magnetism of an undiscovered god, or maybe the mountains simply offer up freedom and access to beauty that can be found nowhere else. Personally, I think the mountains call to a certain type of person, those who are both restless and reckless, craving success but needing escape from the obligation and ugliness success brings. Start asking people their stories when you are in the midst of a high mountain town and you will hear tales of happy ruin. They say: I was a six-figure earning stock broker, a lawyer, a banker; they say: I had a penthouse, vacation homes, cars, power. They come from the East, the tamed Midwest, and from the South, from every urban splendor turned to squalor and land of no wilds. They say: I gave it all up to the mountains. They called to me, so I came.
In the summers, I hike through the evergreens that every day die from an invasive beetle, but are nevertheless, incredibly, still here, and up into the treeless basins to watch the summer storms build like a clenching fist over the adjacent ranges. One such day, while the darkening fist flexed its knuckles somewhere above and beyond me, I wrestled down through grasping bushes to the Black Cloud Creek to refill my water bottle. I picked through the bramble, letting my body think as animals think, unconsciously and by sense-thoughts, until my body spooked back and at once I realized, again in my human way, that I was looking at the slender tendril of an elk leg. It was perfectly intact up to the elbow, and I dumbly looked for the animal it was attached to, but instead saw a perfectly white radius bone end, pristine in its wholeness and complexion.
Dead! This thing was utterly inanimate and it thrilled me. I have heard of being struck with awe at seeing living wildlife, but this was far more vivifying. I stroked the still-soft fur on the cannon bone, the moisture of the building clouds in my nostrils. I felt an urgent need to whoop, caw, and bellow! To celebrate my heart and blood and fingers, every extremity of myself that would one day peel from their course. It was not death I was celebrating; I am no more driven to die than the elk was. I want to live as the elk did: with the foreknowledge of death in my cells, not as a mystical proposition but as a creature real and present, the pulse of it through my body like footsteps, each saying now, now, now.
I met a conservation ranger in New Zealand while trekking the Kepler Track in Fiordland National Park, a temperate rainforest of jungled mountains and endless waterfalls. He was an old man, his burnt orange hair shaded with gray. He carried two things hidden in the inner pockets of his beige ranger uniform: a wooden Maori flute and a taxidermied stoat. For one day and one night I stayed at his hut, which was perched on a mountainside above the tangle of forest and provided astounding views of Lake Te Anau far below. I lounged among the alpine grasses outside the hut watching the sun and wind create mirages of color and motion on the surface of the lake. Wisps of breathy soprano flute tones occasionally caught on the breeze which ruffled the grasses.
That night, the small mess hall was packed with trekkers and the ranger moved about the crowd, answering questions and creating a visitor log. The stuffed rodent rode in his breast pocket, its smiling mouth opened to show its tiny white fangs. Its expression and stance made it appear as if it had just popped out of a birthday cake.
The stoat was a point of discussion; mammals are invasive in New Zealand, and the stoat is the most lethal of all, wiping out scores of native bird species. Birds, the ranger noted with genuine sorrow, which were unique to New Zealand and are now gone not only from his native land, but from the world.
Later, when the crowds had mostly retired to their bunks and the hall had emptied save for a few shadows of people quivering by the wood stove, trying to catch light for reading, the ranger joined me as I sat gazing out a large window. We both looked — aware of each other’s vigil — upon the blue dusk shape of the mountainside before us. The stars appeared like opening eyes, looking back at us.
“When I die,” he told me, “I want my body to be left up on the mountain for the weasels and the stoats and the rats to eat.” He pointed vaguely out the window; I understood the mountain to mean his mountain, somewhere far beyond the trails I would walk. I noticed he wore no wedding ring. I wondered if his life had been lonely and what drove him to steward this single mountainside for the long summer season. “My body will be poisoned,” he said with a small knowing smile.
I wake up. I go to the mountains. I am drawn on a single gossamer thread. It is delicate, so thin it cannot be seen except in the drenching morning sun pooling about me as I go. Sapped and wild I go, capering and crawling, following the only path, the one spooled before me. The thread trembles as it climbs, many days I am sure it will break. But no, it sways in the mountain’s breath, goes taut like panic, and ascends, ascends, like life, like me. The mountains are far-flung and fickle, and their backs are brawn. Here, the flowing water. Here, the depth of stone. Here, the burning blood. Here, the smiling alabaster skull. Here, I will die.
One day, perhaps today, this life will be destroyed. But what if each creek and river were laughter? If each stone were joy? And if each step I took rose and fell like the happy labors of passing years? What if alpine meadows were kisses and the swayback saddles above were sighs at day’s close? If the summits were the aquifer of love I felt spreading ever deeper? What would death become then? A small, white, mountain goat could disappear into the veil, as it has done many times before, and reappear a smiling alabaster skull.
Rebecca Young's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bird’s Thumb Review, Literally Stories, The Chronicle of the Horse Magazine, and others. She is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction and nonfiction with Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in the tiny mountain town of Leadville, Colorado.