Yosemite: On Ledging Out & Falling Hard & Setting The Tone for an Appropriate Afterword
An Essay by Bob Hill
So here we are. It is 9 PM, and I am writing to you from Coarsegold, a central California mining town that is located in the foothills of the High Sierras, 20 miles south of Yosemite National Park. I have rented a one-bedroom here in Coarsegold. The apartment is lavish. The décor is what one might refer to as Midwest Gauche. The walls are forest green and the linens, tan and gold. The bathroom flooring is designed to look like pebbles and it feels smooth against my toes. The artwork reminds me of a fast-food restaurant. There is a painting of a cowboy in the living room and there is a painting of a small-town church hanging above the couch. At night I like to sit out on the patio, to watch the headlights as they make their way along Route 41. This is the first time that I have visited Yosemite, and – due to a hectic work schedule throughout the spring and summer – I have come here in mid-March.
The temperatures have been peaking in the low fifties the past few days. There is still snow on the ground at the higher altitudes, which means that a lot of the more strenuous trails throughout Yosemite remain off limits until further notice. Yesterday I hiked to Mariposa Grove, which is home to more than 500 giant sequoias. A quarter-mile into my ascent the ground beneath me turned to slush. By the halfway point a heavy fog had settled in. There were sequoias now, and they were jutting up like massive lances. Everything but the trees had turned to dust. I began to feel disoriented, and amid my delirium, I found myself repeating a phrase that I had overheard back at the visitor center: ledging out. Ledging out is a hiking term. It refers to arriving at a cliff, or perhaps some sudden break in the earth that prohibits any person from continuing forward. In Yosemite, the most common “ledging out” situations occur when and if a hiker has decided to wander off from the established trail. More often than not, that hiker is assuming that he can simply push toward the summit, at which point he will be able to either reconnect with the trail or piggyback onto another one. Only what if that summit opens out onto a ledge? And what if there isn’t any down-and-back trail? And what if the hike up was racked with loose rocks and precipitous terrain? One’s only recourse given those circumstances might be to dial 9-1-1 (assuming that there is ample cellphone service) or to scream for help. The lesson being that one needs to learn the path before he can stray from it. The universe is not obliged to intervene.
***
I feel relaxed here in Coarsegold. The nights are quiet and the breeze is slight. Last night, I watched Valley Uprising, a 2014 documentary that chronicles the history of rock climbing in the Yosemite Valley. At its heart, Valley Uprising is about creating a scene, but it is also about a sense of belonging. A lot of Yosemite’s early climbers looked like outlaws, and they behaved like gypsies ... dumpster diving for their dinners, camping and drinking beneath the stars. This was a fraternity, but it splintered as a result of infighting, hampered due to conflicts regarding who should dictate policy (and why). Not that any of this was considered newsworthy, at least not at the time. From the 1960s up and through the 1990s, competitive climbing was not embraced by the general public any more than it was acknowledged by the newspapers or TV. Only then came an outdoor boom, and toward the end of that boom, the ascension of an awkward kid named Alex Honnold. Honnold had grown up outside of Sacramento, and he had learned how to climb at an inner-city gym about 20 miles from his home. By the early 2000s, Honnold had dropped out of Berkley, and he was exceling as a free soloist, which is to say that he preferred to climb without the assistance of ropes. Honnold relocated to Yosemite, where he lived out of a van, and where he had taken to free-soloing a number of routes that even the most experienced outdoor climbers could not attempt without pulleys or bolts. In 2008, Honnold became the first person to successfully free solo the northwest face of Yosemite's Half Dome (5,000 ft). In 2017, Honnold became the first person to successfully free solo the southwest face of Yosemite’s El Capitan (3,200 ft). The first feat was documented for a full-length segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The second was documented for an Oscar-winning documentary entitled Free Solo.
During the production of Free Solo, Honnold met a girl, Sanni McCandless, and the two of them fell in love. In the short term, everything became moonbeams. Months later, however, Honnold suffered a compound fracture to his vertebrae, and not long after, he suffered a sprained ankle. Both injuries were sustained while Honnold and McCandless were climbing together. The ankle injury, in particular, occurred as a direct result of McCandless neglecting to belay Honnold securely while the two of them were on a pitch. “I haven’t been injured in, like, seven years,” Honnold explained to a Free Solo camera crew during his recovery, “and then it’s like I’m hanging out with this girl [who] doesn’t climb and I suddenly start getting injured all the time.” This is a familiar touchpoint. It is the stuff of ballads and novels, and fairly often, real life. A romantic interest arrives on the scene and she transforms the pitbull into a puppy dog. It was the subplot of Rocky II. It was the through line of an episode of Seinfeld (“The Abstinence,” Season 8: Episode 9). It may have been the downfall of The Beatles depending on whose side one happens to be on. In affairs of the heart, the woman is almost always considered to be an appropriate scapegoat, particularly whenever the man falls short of achieving his objectives. Is it fair? It is not. But the reality is that no one, not a man or a woman, can give him- or herself unconditionally to one thing and then expect that there will not be any repercussions when love or something like it comes along. Honnold was fortunate. He succeeded in free-soloing El Capitan, and in so doing, he became the envy of the entire rock-climbing world. It is worth noting, however, that Honnold has since pulled back on the severity of his climbs, and perhaps even the frequency of them, as well. A lot of free soloists have died as a result of what they do. The stakes are heightened, and there is zero margin for error. For Honnold, reinvention became a means of battling back against the changing latitudes of chance and age and time.
***
For nine of the past 12 months, I have been in a relationship with a woman named Deborah. Deborah and I first met 30 years ago in Wildwood, New Jersey. Deborah had a huge impact on my life then, much like she has had a huge impact on my life now. In terms of what went south, well, that’s a story for another essay. The short answer has something to do with what Deborah had written to me during one of our final exchanges. “We don’t want the same things,” she insisted. And Deborah was correct, albeit in a much-further-down-the-line kind of way. Relationships should be fueled by equity. One side is supposed to support the other, and both sides should be supporting the whole. For a time, Deborah and I did support each other. She would say, and quite often, that I had brought hope back into her life. And I would say that she had brought hope back into my life, as well. Deborah and I were both attempting to address our own flaws, accumulated baggage, so to speak; an array of issues that we had either been avoiding or putting off for far too many nights. Both during the 1990s and the now, our relationship had followed a similar trajectory ... three stages, if you will. The first stage was characterized by a feeling of euphoria. Everything appeared heightened and idealized, beyond the beyond. Deborah and I would go out for drinks and we would talk about all of the places that we were planning to visit together, about all the things that we were planning to do as a couple. This was future faking, as it turned out, the type of sentiment that mixes well along with a proper lager on an autumn evening. After a few months, all that kibbitzing gave way to a devaluing stage. Our relationship went from being two-sided to being one-. Deborah withdrew from me, first physically, and then emotionally, and then entirely. Now and again, she would reinforce the idea that I had become a turnoff, that she had little interest in what my wants or needs might be, and that she was simply too busy to be dealing with me at all. In the final stage, I got discarded, both in the 1990s and in the now. You live and you learn. Maybe I should take it up with Narcissus. Who knows. What I have discovered is that people run from the truths that they cannot confront. In the three months since our breakup, I have remained single. In retrospect, I try to look at the relationship with something other than hurt. I can accept that I drug my feet on things that I could have, and definitely should have, addressed sooner. In all of my broken relationships, I have been the common denominator, and I know this, although I also know that self-improvement is a process and it requires time, along with faith and a shared commitment, and empathy, if not an overall sense that neither party will have to go it alone. Deborah was entering a divorce when she and I first started seeing each other again. Within a few weeks, her identity had shifted after nearly two decades of functioning as a wife and a mother and the sole breadwinner in her household. I felt great compassion for Deborah given all the turbulence that she had been through. And I accepted her not wanting to be with me. All the same, I know that I did not deserve to be disposed of in that manner, just as I know that I did not deserve to be ignored for the final two months that we were in a relationship. Doing so was cruel. It not only felt like Deborah had turned on me; it felt as if she was trying to get back at me for something, like I had put her through some undue hardship, as if I had mistreated her or done her wrong. The truth is that I loved Deborah, and if I give my love these days, I give it fully. I am reminded of something that Patti Smith once wrote: “I did not waste my time on things I did not love.” In my head, I have always heard that line as two separate-and-yet-related thoughts: “I did not waste my time on things. I did not love.”
Protect your heart.
***
I have come to Yosemite for want of diversion. I have also come to Yosemite as a means of writing an afterword for a collection of essays. I like the idea of writing an afterword. The pressure disappears. The readers have already made up their minds. If they have suffered through my collection, they’ll be more prone to stop short of the outro. If they have relished the experience, the afterword will become more like a cup of coffee following the movie, a pleasant walk before we say goodnight. You can find a lot of me within my essays. In fact, I have spent the past few winters traveling in pursuit of new work. To that end, I have written entire essays while on the road, in planes and on trains, in hotel rooms and in rented spaces. I wanted my pieces to feel experiential, in motion. I wanted a sense of place, and I wanted a sense of many places. I wanted every narrative to be conveyed by way of a unique filter. Thus, Yosemite seemed like an appropriate place to dim the lights. It is the scope of things in the High Sierras, and the splendor. It is the open sky at night and at dawn. This morning I am eating breakfast at a Denny’s along Route 41. This Denny’s looks like a biker bar. The urinals in the men’s room are all caked with filth. There are faded air fresheners strung along the ledges of the toilet stalls. The in-house speakers are playing “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” by the Electric Prunes. My waitress, the only waitress, has a tattoo of a hunting blade across her arm.
A few days from now, I will collect my things and I will drive 250 miles south to Venice Beach. I have traveled to Venice during each of the past five winters. Some of these trips have been planned, and some of them have been spontaneous. I never pack more than one bag and I never take anyone with me. When I travel to Los Angeles, I prefer not to have an agenda. I keep a short list of the places I might like to visit. On this trip, I think I might like to hike up and through Laurel Canyon allowing for stops at the one-time homes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. I enjoy seeing where my heroes lived when they were at their most prolific. I find that there is still an energy about those places, particularly when the property has not been memorialized by statues or placards or (god forbid) admission and tourists. In the documentary Woman of Heart & Mind, Mitchell refers to her use of signature tunings as a search for “chords of inquiry.” I adore that, the notion of sharpening something until it has achieved the perfect tension. That, to me, feels like editing. It feels like the ongoing struggle with dissonance. It feels like the search for something, a phantom signal perhaps, or the gleam of a pearl, the coin of the realm.
Anyway, whenever I am in LA, Venice is the homebase – ideal for running and reading and thinking and writing. The fact that everything about Venice remains a bit left-of-center appeals to me. At night, I am more drawn toward Santa Monica, toward the amusement lights and the movie theaters, toward the Third Street Promenade and its open-air beaneries. My walks to Santa Monica are nothing short of serene, although it is the walks back that tend to flood me with emotion. To wake up in Venice is to feel that the world is somehow lighter. This despite the clustered tents that shift in herds from street to sea. A lot of LA’s homeless are instinctively drawn toward the venetian coastline as a result of its soft-sand beaches and its sun-swept aura. Venice provides the homeless with unlimited access to public restrooms and outdoor showers. It provides the street vendors with a constant churn of tourists. I can see myself in those coastline drifters. I can see me as the teenage runaway who wound up sleeping on the beaches in New Jersey. I can see me as the twenty-something alcoholic, and I can see me as the thirty-something who had developed a mental illness. The past is with me whether I want it to be or not. Time and again, I find that I can still see the past, that it is still glaring back at me in the mirror. I do feel more at peace now than I did during the early 2000s, although I do not feel as at peace as I did during the eight years that I spent sober (2012-2020). When I first stopped drinking, I was unemployed and I was living in New York and I was existing on my savings and what little income freelance writing could afford me. It was the best time of my life. What a gift to be in that city, to have the yearning and the flexibility to explore all five boroughs on my own terms, unattached, and unencumbered by the drowning responsibilities of love, family, or any type of professional climb. I know now that I will return to a life in New York City, just as I know that it will not be something that is born out of nostalgia. I want to be a middle-aged man in Manhattan. I want to settle into old age there, to visit Coney Island in the winter, to attend afternoon matinees and midtown galas, to have a friend who I can meet for coffee, but most of all to write. Writing helps me to make sense out of the world. It is the glue that holds all of the other pieces in order.
A month ago, I had no idea that I would be embarking on a trip to Yosemite. In short, I went to where the writing took me. I wanted to explore the outdoors. I wanted to be in the open spaces. Circumstances have a lot to do with the way that a narrative is recorded. My hope, one of many, is that my writing will reflect its chosen surroundings. To that end, I have been shopping in the downtown thrift stores here and I have been taking in some of the local culture. Yesterday I stopped in at the office of a nearby campground and I asked the owner if she would be willing to take a picture of me standing in front of her family’s 1960 Ford Falcon. She obliged, and the two of us spent several minutes talking along the roadside. We shared a connection, and it made the day seem richer. Even more so because I could hop into a rental car and leave as soon as that conversation was over. I like that. I like that I can walk the streets here as an unfamiliar. To be a stranger is to feel almost weightless. When I wake up tomorrow, I will do so on my own terms without any alarm bells or any office to report to. What pressure to roll out of bed day after day knowing that you need to be somebody, knowing that so much of what we do is based on someone else’s expectations. The real discipline is in remaining true to one’s self. And that is a lot, or at least it is for me … to be happy, and to be present, and to embrace the everchanging person.
Bob Hill is an essayist whose work has appeared in more than 40 publications including Pop Matters, Paste Magazine, and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. He is also the co-founder of the Cloudburst Reading Series. For more, please visit thisisbobhill.com.