“What are you doing inside on a glorious day?” I said without a hello. I was full of the early autumn glory of the east coast.
“It’s hailing here. And lightening.”
He’d been climbing in the morning but had retreated to his home in Estes Park in the afternoon.
I’ve known Rich since I started climbing in 1975. He and Thom Scheuer were then the rangers at the Gunks, a world-class climbing area in New York’s Hudson Valley. I remember walking down the carriage road beneath the blocky, sheer cliffs, and seeing the two of them in the back of their blue Toyota pick up trucks reading the New York Times, collecting day fees and bantering with climbers. The moment I saw them I knew this was a world I wanted to be a part of.
Since that first encounter, Rich and I had shared a rope for days at a time, as well as many friends, some of whom, like Thom, had died.
“Tomorrow is my anniversary,” Rich boasted.
“You’ve never been married,” I pointed out.
“Tomorrow is the day of my first climb, forty years ago.” Rich has a list of every climb he has done and with whom.
I tried to think back to the date of my first climb, now 39 years ago. I can picture the thick, stretchy goldline rope and the cliff itself, a crumbling piece of rock in Huntington, Pennsylvania. I can even smell the hesitant fear I had then at 15, when I was told to fall, to learn to trust the rope. I can remember the mixture of pleasure and thinking this was crazy all bundled together. I don’t remember the date of that first day at the cliffs, but I know that that fall day draws the line in my life. Before, I was a teenager with energy but no focus, after that day I had a passion that has kept me looking skyward, and led me to climbing areas around the country and overseas.
It’s not surprising, then, that my first lover was a rock climber. I confess that I remember a lot less about that first time and that the shift before and after was hardly the monumental one I had so imagined.
I congratulated Rich on 40 years of happy marriage to the cliffs of New York and Colorado, California, Nevada, Arizona.