Michael Werner
A few days ago, I called my rock climbing friend Rich Perch,
who lives in Colorado
“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 thenthe 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.
Rich is a funny man, prone to puns, which I actually laugh
at. But for a moment his voice became serious. “Listen, I have to tell you
something. I learned that Michael Werner killed himself last fall.”
I waded through twenty-eight years to remember the blond
skinny man I fell in love with. For a moment I didn’t know what to say—his
suicide didn’t entirely surprise me but his death did.
Before I met Michael I was half in love with him. I’d grown
into climbing on Werner brother stories that made both Michael and his older
brother Peter heroic. The grandest feat was Michael’s 150-foot fall at the
Gunks. He hit the ground, breaking both legs. But he was still alive. A few
weeks later he sawed off his casts and was out climbing. When I met him, I
found the way that his long skinny legs bowed particularly sexy.
I met Michael in Colorado the summer I graduated from high
school. My climbing partner, Neil, and I climbed during the day and usually
camped out in the Eldorado parking lot, but from time to time we showed up hoping
to scrounge a meal or a shower at the house Michael shared with some mutual
friends.
Michael was not immediately taken with me. In fact, I wasn’t
entirely sure he even liked me. He was older (a worldly 24 to my 18) worked in
a tool die factory, smoked, listened to Dire Straits and drank a lot of beer
then spouted his political views, which were so far right I thought he must be
joking. Or drunk. We didn’t really have much in common except for the climbing.
Still, after watching him move on the rock—he had delicate precise footwork—I
was smitten.
I spent my freshman year of college hoping to hear the phone
in the hallway ring and then that one of my dorm-mates would tell me it was for
me. I fantasized Michael arriving in his wide Buick Wildcat to say we were off
to climb in the Black Canyon or nearby in the Garden of the Gods. But he didn’t
call until February—I’d given up hope and had found a boyfriend—to ask not for
a date but did I want to go to Tuolomne for the summer. I said yes.
He came down the next weekend and we climbed together. But I
didn’t see much of him after that until he called in April to say his car had
died, did I mind hitchhiking.
So early June after my sophomore year, Michael and I stuck
out our thumbs and headed to Tuolumne Meadows, which rests at 9,000 feet in
Yosemite National Park.
Every morning that summer we hitchhiked to the rounded granite
domes that make up the glory of Tuolomne climbing. Hitchhiking was easy because
everyone picked us up—mothers alone with their children, tourists from France,
other climbers fortunate enough to have a car—because we looked so wholesome
and we were (if a bit unwashed). For hours every day we tip toed our way up
smooth solid gray rock, testing our finger strength but more our minds that
bent with staring at scarce protection and long falls. Michael appeared
fearless, taking the sharp end of the rope on fantastic leads. I cheered him on
through moves where he hesitated—he was, after all, immortal. His constant play
with the edge was not suicidal, it was a celebration of life. He wanted the
next hold; he reached for the summit.
Most days we arrived back at our tent with just enough
energy to cook a meal and crawl into our sleeping bags. Back in Boulder,
Michael often drank too much, but there in the mountains we didn’t want (and
couldn’t afford) beer. I don’t think I have ever been so physically satisfied
or openly happy. By the end of the summer we were both scrawny and strong, and
climbing hard. And in love. With climbing.
We both kept journals, writing every morning over coffee,
and for Michael a cigarette or three, at our camp table. At the end of the
summer we agreed to swap, an idea no therapist would think good for any
relationship. Mine was filled with meditations on my love for Michael played
out through the rope that kept us bound on the rock. I wrote with all of the
obvious, juicy metaphors between climbing and love—the commitment it took, the
patience, the ability to anticipate when Michael would move up or fall and my
ability to catch him if he did. I literally held his life in my hands and I
found this glorious. But really, my journal was mostly filled with an
overwhelming self-satisfaction, a dreadful ego that perhaps a young climber
needs but that I would rather never claim. To read that journal now is pure
embarrassment.
I peeled apart Michael’s notebook and read his neat
handwriting. Climbs listed by name and grade, his fear, some drama, some humor.
He was a good writer, a good story teller, spare and crisp. My name didn’t
appear once.
That fall, I came undone in college. My studies (Nietzsche’s
overman!) and the climbing collided so that when I went home at Christmas I
didn’t want to go back. It was easy to blame some of my problems on Michael and
so I did and so the relationship ended. The love of my life lasted for a year.
Michael killed himself. What do you do when you learn that
someone you loved, someone you have not spoken to for 28 years has died? A
silent sadness lodged in me as I thought of how unhappy he must have been in
this world. I spent one frantic night trying to learn more, wondering how he
died, did he perhaps jump and fall, a final plummet to the earth that shattered
more than his legs? There is no reason I need to know this, and my quest
implies that a death by falling would somehow make this sad end more noble or
right. It would not.
I’m reading the Inferno for the first time. The suicides are
there, in the 7th circle of hell. When Virgil encounters the dead
what they want is to be remembered to those still alive. So this is what I can
do: remember Michael, the way his long skinny legs stepped high for a hold, the
California sky blue, his smile punctuated by a Marlboro that greeted me on
those thin belay ledges. What I can remember is that in that summer of climbs
we shared a love that for me has lasted a lifetime.