End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood

When I scrunched my body under the big roof, preparing myself to commit to pulling up and over the edge, I looked down at Doc, eighty feet below. It was a long way away. My two blond children danced in front of my eyes for a moment like fairies. Your children will be okay if their mother's okay, Sarah had said in Victoria. Did I want my kids to see their mom bake cookies all day and make lunch for a logger, or climb steep cracks and go to university? Which mother would they believe when she told them, “Follow your dream!” I was up and over the roof and cramming another piece of protection in the crack. With my feet stemming the wall on either side of the corner, hands sunk deep in the crack, I felt like a climber again.

I like memoirs, like learning about how disparate people have put their lives together, and as a metaphor for the struggles of life, mountain climbing is a perfect fit. In End of the Rope, author and climber Jan Redford outlines a gripping life that mirrors her own frustrating “yoyo” style of climbing: two steps up, driven by desire, one step back, succumbing to fear. But just as Redford always finds a way to the top of those literal cliffs and peaks, she digs down deep and eventually forges her own path to the pinnacle of self-fulfillment. I liked Redford's gritty voice, was fascinated by stories from the world of mountain climbing, and was rooting for her to succeed; everything I like in a memoir. (Usual caveat: I read an Advance Reading Copy and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

I'm sucking in little gerbil breaths. Hyperventilating. Fear makes my body instinctively hug the rock, which puts my weight in the wrong place. One foot starts to shake, up and down, up and down like a sewing machine. I grip tighter, and the tighter I grip the more I shake. Dan doesn't say anything. There's nothing to say. He can't swoop in and rescue me. This is my moment. The one I usually try to avoid. The one I came here looking for.

I see that End of the Rope is being marketed as “in the tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild”, but to me, they differ in two significant ways: After I read Wild, I mentally flirted with the idea that I could do a months-long hike like that, whereas I know I couldn't face even the easiest rock wall climb that Redford describes; and while Strayed tested and proved herself with this one life-changing event, Redford has spent most of her life going on climbs; she's a rock warrior before anything else. And it's Redford's community of climbers that I found most fascinating: those people who work a few months in order to qualify for unemployment insurance and live out of tents for the rest of the year, travelling in rusted out beaters to North America's most fabled peaks; this “incestuous” community that eventually sees most people hooking up with each other at some point; these rock warriors who are itching to get back on the mountains, even as friend after friend of theirs fall to their deaths or disappear in avalanches. This level of drive and commitment to doing the impossible – forcing yourself to the limits of physical and mental exertion when the only payoff is personal satisfaction, under the constant threat of death – is so foreign to me that the details of this book had me constantly enthralled.

Fake it till you make it; how you live your life is how you climb; if the head she fits, the body he will follow; she didn't die doing what she loved, she lived doing what she loved.

As to Redford's personal journey: as the child of a frequently violent alcoholic father and a distant and enabling mother, Redford recognises herself as a Codependent-type personality; and despite years of self-help books, dream journals, and visualisation boards, she is as hesitant to demand what she wants in her personal life as she can be hesitant to take the lead on a climb. It's hard to reconcile the strength of mind and will that it takes for her to swing herself up and over rocky barriers to the portrait of a woman reduced to frequent bouts of sobbing and succumbing to the demands of the men in her life, but it all makes for fascinating reading; this is a the story of a big life, well told.