The War at Home by Rachel Starnes

Author:Rachel Starnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-26T15:13:53+00:00

CHAPTER 13

When Ross and I were first dating, we took a trip to climb the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado. I had never climbed real cliffs before, only the brightly colored plastic knobs of indoor climbing gyms. You feel realistically human-sized in a climbing gym, substantial and weighty, and people on the floor are able to hear you when you say you are terrified and they offer suggestions about where you might want to put your foot next, or they just say reassuringly, “You’re not going to die.” On a real cliff face, you are an afterthought, lint, something that may or may not blow away with the next strong wind. Your voice feels tiny, a squeak under the great blue dome of indifferent sky, and there is no guarantee that anyone can hear it.

At one particularly bad moment, I was clinging with two fingers and a toe to a wall with no other visible holds, and Ross was so far above me, and the wind was so strong, that he never heard me shouting, and then all-out screaming, for him to let some slack into the rope so I could remaneuver. I couldn’t see what was above or below me, but I knew there was a very real chance I would finally find out if our knots were well tied. I cried and leaned my face into the cold, iron-tasting rock, waiting to see if I would lose bladder control or my shaking fingers and toe would give out or the next strong wind would shove me off my hold. None of that happened. Instead I took a deep, shaky breath and somehow found another toehold.

Ross would have anchored me if I had fallen. He would have felt a sudden tug and I would have felt the springiness and give built into the rope as I dangled like a spider, swinging back and forth in front of the rock, trying not to choke on my own thundering heart. But I didn’t fall. Maybe I was too afraid to fall. I trusted him then, but I trust him even more now, having come closer, metaphorically, to falling in the years since when he was even farther away with the rope. But I’ve still never actually fallen, and the possibility is magnetic and cold at the back of my mind.

Trust does not, however, protect us from the gap in our experiences with climbing. I was inexperienced, afraid, and out of my element; he was not. I was screaming for slack into a wind that swallowed my voice and he was leaning comfortably against a high ledge chatting with our climbing partners, a freakishly talented rescue climber named Russell (whose thumbs stuck out at perfect right angles from his wrists and who had just demonstrated the night before that he could climb the unadorned brick wall of a pub to its roof) and his equally at-home-with-heights girlfriend, Kat. When I finally scrabbled my way onto their ledge, the switch from pure fear coursing through my veins to molten rage was quick.

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