Ruth

RUTH

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.  ~William Shakespeare

Ruth:  From a Hebrew name which was derived from the Hebrew word re'uth meaning "friend". This is the name of the central character in the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament. She was a Moabite woman who was the ancestor of King David.

“I heard you were going there and suddenly felt so compelled to tell you a story.  It was April, and I was 21.

You see, at this point I had been climbing for seven years.  Still trying to define a life, trying to write myself into the books of my heroes, or to create my own legend.  Alaska was the place I’d decided on; it was full of the myths of others. 

I’d tried to grab the dream of Alaska once already, eleven months earlier, but I had watched ashamed at myself, short of a kind of courage, as the plans slipped through my fingers.  Loneliness, love, the pull towards home, and a generally troubled time in the world – all created their own kind of hypoxia in me without even setting foot on the great South Buttress of Denali.  I just turned around and pointed the van back south. I couldn’t explain that failure to myself.  How could I explain it to anyone else? My preparations, the thousands of kilometers that rolled under my wheels - suddenly in sharp contrast against the hard evidence of failure.  The story I’d tried to create, now a fiction.  I’d lost my focus, and paid a high price – losing not only cash and time in the process, but the more important alpinist’s currency of confidence and intent.

So at 21, I tried again, this time going to the Ruth Glacier.  But part of me was unsure if returning north was just unfinished business, the closing of a circle, hubris in defiance of a possible archetype I didn't want and didn't feel I'd deserved.  Watching the sunset through the plane window over the Gulf of Alaska en route from Seattle to Anchorage that April, I had no idea of the cascade already in motion in and around every area of my life, the effect that it would have for years to come.  Looking back now all these years, I can still see through that window as I looked towards another huge mountain in the coming darkness.  It was Logan.  Fifteen years after Alaska, I would become obsessed with solving a riddle inside me spoken by that great mountain.  Fifteen years later, I would come to know that my attempts on it were part desire for the mountain, and part swimming in the nostalgia of the months of my life at 21.

While I was away that April on the Ruth, there was an awful thing that would happen back home. So when I returned, understandably changed from a climb and a place unlike anything my young mind had yet known, I would be forced to change again, and forever.  But for the moment, right now, I was headed to the West Fork of the Ruth Glacier.  A member of an expedition under the leadership of a climber I’d greatly admired and whose mentorship I sought, who was part of a story I thought I wanted to be a part of.  His interest in this nameless, numbered peak and his encouragement seven months earlier while we climbed together in Colorado were all I thought I needed from life as I lay in the tail section of the ski plane. Finally throwing my own first arrow of intention and deliberate action into the Alaska Range. 

I should tell you that the climb was amazing. It was beautiful and it was also terrifying.  Cold mid-April nights.  Open bivouacs on chopped-out ledges. Tip-toeing across narrow ridges of snow; it would haunt me for years to come and would be a part of my undoing in the St. Elias fifteen years later.  I have a memory right now

high above the glacier, a climber heads steadily up a long snow couloir which leads in turn to a massive overhanging granite block on the ridgeline.  His rope slithers down to me, along with the snow he clears away to allow tool and screw placements in the old black ice underneath.  The scale is incredible. 

The night before that moment occurred, my confidence was boosted by the arrival of a good campsite that finally allowed the ropes to come off and no fear of boots being dropped.  The summit, visible for the first time since leaving basecamp.  Bravado probably accompanied the belief that we'd easily be on the summit tomorrow, but it was not supported by the facts: big scale, mixed grovelling on snow covered rock, and a four-man team which was – with the exception of our experienced leader – new to Alaskan mountaineering and moving slow.  I realize now looking back that he probably knew reaching the summit would take longer and would be harder than we thought; maybe he just didn’t want to diminish our esprit de corps.  Either way, a lesson was at hand regarding over-confidence in the Alaska Range. We climbed all day until

a bivouac after midnight, on a platform of ice that takes over an hour to chop in 45 degree ice.  I sleep in my harness with an ascender attached to the rope, leading to an anchor of pins hammered into a frozen crack.

Earlier that day there was a tense exchange of words with one of my partners as I traversed to a gendarme, words about our schedule and the potential for me to miss a connecting flight back to Vancouver.  It seems ridiculous now, but in those years I was in love with a beautiful dark-haired, blue-eyed girl.  Supportive as she was, I knew she was scared. And as much as I wanted the climb, I also didn’t want her fear nor to subject her to the cruelty of waiting.  She was set to meet me in Vancouver. My summit photograph contains a picture of her coloured scarf amidst my gear.  That and a few negatives are the only pictures I have left of her now, over twenty years later, a seemingly ghostly image, a vapour trail of our love’s eventual end.  Living on a different continent now, she is completely unaware of the impact of those moments on my life.

As I looked out from the summit, friends would be gathered in the local café back home in different worlds.  Experiencing other pleasures, or horrors I wasn’t yet aware of.  I descended.  Back to my love, surrounded by a kind of consternation from my partners and in spite of them. 

I would return as a veteran of sorts - perhaps those are stronger words than necessary for my weaknesses, I don't know. There were no heroics involved, save the heroics of making it through something that alternates between elation and terror.  But I was  scarred in a way; scared of what I’d seen but secretly wanting desperately to return.  Recognizing the addiction.  Back home, haunted in my sleep, I would find myself for several days as a strange type of sleepwalker, waking up in the night in the midst of methodically moving pillows – I was still dreaming, you see.  Until I awoke, I had been moving rucksacks from the tent at the start of each climbing day.  But the final imprint of the Ruth on me occurring a beautiful sunny day in May after I got back, when I was told of a good friend’s accident, quadriplegia at the hands of a drunk driver during my absence.  All the blood and force drained from me. So that then, only a few days later in an unlikely spring storm, I watched as the fat, wet May snowflakes pelted my windshield.  Not having slept, I found myself staring right through a newspaper and I melted into a blackness; I remember  as ambulance tires splashed on slick black pavement.  So at that moment, the Ruth and any return was far away.  The only glory given was the painful reminder of permanence, and that many of the dreams of the past, as well as promises of the future, would no longer exist for either of us in the same way again.

In the years to come, other relationships came and went.  I was married for five years, and then got divorced.  Later, I entered a new relationship with a young, beautiful green-eyed girl I’d thought about for a long time, it would seem, even before I first met her.  But our relationship was not without turbulence, waves and ripples in our life together caused by big rocks dropped in the pond before we’d come together.  And the plan to return north was always in my mind, simmering for years until it burst forth suddenly in the spring of my 36^th year.  It was then that I entered the Logan labyrinth, another act in partnership with the north that would irrevocably shape my life. 

Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.

Joseph Conrad

I would like to tell you all of the details of that first failed climb on Logan.  Or of how I felt when it was over; quickly, suddenly, as if it never happened.  Of the inner ear infection, the resultant labyrinthitis and balance disorder low on the route.  Maybe I would talk of the road up to Kluane, how the June Alaska Highway, pulled under and behind us, flowed like a river. The sweet metis girl we met who was so inspired by our plan as to make my partner and I each a small leather pouch containing some of her grandfather’s tobacco.  “For guidance and protection”, she told me as she handed them to us along with a falcon feather.

I could also tell the story of the crippling load I began carrying long before the training started or I even pointed my skis forward to haul my sled towards the beautiful, classic route that is the East Ridge of Mt. Logan.  The resistance of my family, the inertia of my job, my life, my love.  And the tough and alienating choices I would make, like deciding to go ahead with the trip even though I’d be missing her university convocation.  While she was alone on stage I was sitting in a tent in the clouds, chasing that same old dream.  That hurt her as I left; it hurt her even more as she thought of it while I was gone and once I returned.  There I was in the St. Elias, pulling the weight of a growing bag of shadows. 

And after my failure, I would do it all again to her the very next year, missing another convocation, another important milestone in her life.  I returned. Quicker than if everyone had actually wanted me to be there.  Getting higher on the mountain this time, the weight behind me was nonetheless just too great, and after the knife edge my courage left, along with the good snow conditions.  Losing my nerve under the weight, I failed the dream my partner and I held for three years. My love for her, my love for the mountain, my love for my climbing partner tearing me apart.  

You see, the weight of it all was something like a poetry I’d once written.  You must understand that while she and I were apart I thought of her and the many roads that intersected between us.  These lives of ours, as lines of gravel or asphalt coming from other landscapes for now joining together on a map.  But all the while haunted by that fierce map geometry.  For it spoke also of roads moving away in separate, showed how we would eventually come to lose each other within the grid of possibility.  Journeying alone, I kept tight the cord that bound me to her.  Not to let my ship loose, to wander too far. 

And so I sailed through those days like this.  Amidst the water of decisions, but never beyond the borders, and always, I thought, with a view back to her as land just on the horizon.  You see, that geography of skin, voice, and tears I was held to was as visible as earth.  While I was cold, at night it shone in the distance.  Of dark houses lit by soft lamps, of their gentleness, predictability, security. 

So I went away to that mountain, but never really left. 

But when I came home, it was as a man with knowledge of the New World, who had even seen a glimpse of it inside and around himself.  Remaining addicted to the landscape, I still feared an earth of flatness and believed in the chance of dragons waiting for me at the world’s edge. 

So now, every waking hour of every day, all I can think about is when I will return. That's not a lie, it's truly how often that place and the desire for its acceptance and rejection, the draw of my heart,  occupies my mind.   I hope it’s not the same for you, but somehow I know it will be.”

...our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone – has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash – together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.

Joseph Conrad

© 2005 J. Popowich