He stood next to me and I looked down at the beautiful, frigid water 30 feet below. I balked a couple times, so he didn't believe me when I finally counted 3 and jumped.
The leap is quick. It's over in a moment, but the rush brought on by the pull of gravity lingers long. By the time you return to the top, courage has faded, and it's another fight to jump again. Climbing has weakened my fear, but hasn't erased it.
When someone says they could never ___________, I tell them I'm afraid of heights. To say fear stops you – it feels inhuman. It is a broken part of human nature after the Fall. People cringe at all sorts of things, but I hear most often that people are afraid to lose control and to be alone.
The leap is important and it's real despite the way the flash makes you wonder if your heart played a trick the way you're not certain if the light flickered or if you blinked. The leap proves it's in there. When the questions outweighed the answers, you stopped worrying long enough to do something remarkable – apply to that job, ask out that girl, whatever. If it's in there, you can build on it.
The leap is easy because it's over before you've registered the danger. You pack up and move far from home, riding the wave of adrenaline until you realize the job you thought you'd find right away isn't willing to oblige. And then you need more than a leap. Every day takes courage. Less like a leap, more like a long hike to find the way down. The edges you stand on are reduced to your doorway where he goes away for days and weeks at a time because we both have this dream that his skills will take us to amazing places if we just wait a little bit longer.
We reached the foot of Hallett Peak and the sky was clear. I pushed down the nauseous nervous feeling as we tied in, standing in a snow moat. He started the climb. A little ways up, he dislodged a boulder. I pressed into the corner and kept my head down. No harm done.
Five or six pitches up, I started to get tired and we moved a little slower. We saw the clouds in the distance, right on time but too soon. This is the only way to practice, but it will involve figuring out what to do when we're caught in a storm at 13,000 feet.
He'd reached the top and anchored his body between two boulders when the hail came. I started the crux pitch, which is probably the crux because of the way the slightest bit of rain turns the rock into a slippery mess with no holds. The clouds broke briefly and I made it to the top to see the system he'd put in place with the backup knot that would hold me if he'd been struck by lightning.
At the top, you're only halfway there, and most injuries occur on the way down. You lower your guard. The rain quit for awhile, but the clouds closed in around us, and the recommended way off the mountain seemed quick but dangerous. We turned our backs to it and hiked higher.
The top housed a meadow of little yellow flowers in patches of grass. Nearby rocks bore lightning scars. But what else do you do? Keep hiking. Quit asking why – quit wishing you preferred beach vacations. I could barely see him 50 feet ahead of me, and he could barely see the grin stretched across my face. I've never felt so alive.
Do you know why we didn't have to stop and pray for strength and wisdom? Because Ben wasn't lost. He looked at the mountain and the map and knew a ridge would bring us downhill, around the lake and back to the car.
Sometimes courage is leaping before thinking. Other times it's outsmarting the fear. That's the difference between a series of sporadic adventures and consistently looking at the world differently. You learn to act according to a new set of rules and circumstances. You build a new foundation of natural responses. You become a new person. Instead of throwing on courage at the edge, you wear it everywhere you go.
And soon you'll stop asking how you got here because you'll remember the hike.
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