The San Francisco Peaks smile down
on all of Northern Arizona, a reminder of the bubbling, molten stone underneath.
I could see these mountains from the picture window in my old house just
seventy miles away in Prescott. After big snow storms The Peaks seemed
florescent, like something out of a dream. It’s no wonder they’re so sacred
among the various cultures that came long before the railroad.
I
spent quite a bit of time in the last two years sitting at the kitchen table
with my back to that picture window, my fingers sweating onto the keys of my
computer as I wrote countless stories and essays now strewn across my hard
drive like laundry on a teenagers bedroom floor. I always wrote stories about
people in far-away places. Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Bishop, El Paso,
Colorado, Utah—all the states surrounding the one in which I lived. I wanted
real mountains, and I thought I wanted a real city, one with traffic and
freeways, anonymity in numbers. I wrote so much I wore a small dirty patch into
the beige carpet under the table with my toes. I was proud of it, still am. My
mind was my world and looking out the window at the distant mountains or at the
Ponderosa in our yard was the closest thing I got to going outside.
I
was too busy to go climbing with any kind of frequency and sometimes when I
couldn’t sleep I’d wonder if I would ever get to start again. I always marveled
at the people who breathed climbing and day-tripped to Joshua Tree and then
somehow, almost overnight, lost interest and tossed their rock shoes into the
back of the closet. I worried this was happening to me, and I lost sleep over
it. Climbing is something I need. It’s not just the movement of body over
stone, it’s not the long drives through the desert with John Coltrane, Miles
Davis, Ry Cooder, and Bill Frisell blowing and plucking their way though the
speakers and into my ears. It’s all of it. The climbing movies, the constant
trouble of raw or peeling skin on my fingertips, the strange shape my toes have
taken, the fractured vertebra and all the other injuries, I love it all, and it
has shaped who I’ve become as much as anything else.
Last
May, Christina and I packed away all our possessions into a storage unit. We
had plans to travel for a few months. All that was left of us in our home of
two years were the various stains and traffic patterns worn into the carpet and
a man was coming to erase those as well. I studied the dark spot on the carpet
under the picture window one last time. It was all that was left in the house
of months of effort on one project. I had obsessed, so much that I wasn’t
myself anymore. I hardly climbed, and I had been a bad partner, a bad friend. When
I went to the bar people were surprised to see me still in Prescott. “I thought
you graduated,” I sometimes heard. All I did was write, read, and watch bad
movies to calm my mind. I felt like something had started to trim the fat of my
personality, but I liked all that fat, it was still part of me and I never
agreed to give it up.
I
watched the carpet cleaner as he shampooed under that picture window framing
the San Francisco Peaks. He dragged his heavy machine over the spot once,
twice, slowly the third time and it was gone. All those months of
over-caffeinated work, the labyrinth in which I’d become so lost was wiped
clean with mechanical indifference.
I
don’t have a direct view of the Peaks anymore but whenever I leave my apartment
I see them bright with snow and bigger than I remember. They’re much closer to me now and those
old mountains always surprise me as if I forget they’re there, smiling back,
reminding.
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