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Never Let Go

Guest post by: Jeff Evans

Article Overview: Introduction to my life of mountaineering and adventuring around the world...discovering the power of teamwork, adversity and leadership along the way.

Never Let Go

Clinging desperately to the cascading wall of ice in front of me, I finally realize what the end looks like. I’m going to fall, and that will be that. My entire face goes numb and my heart screams as the rest of my body catches up with my inner ear. A moment ago I was clawing my way up this frozen tower. A split second later, one of my footholds has broken and I’m half a mile up and slowly sliding backwards. A million thoughts are trying to jam their way into the front of my mind, every one of them looking for a way out—any way out. My hands are in a frenzy, scratching with my ice picks against the slick surface in a losing fight. My boots can find no purchase below me, but I can’t stop my legs from flailing wildly. The ice itself has warped my fingers into a frozen ache, but my face is burning white hot from the sun reflecting off it like a mirror. The pain is intense and searing, but I can’t stop fighting because I’m running out of time. More than the hurt, I’m aware of how this will end if I don’t find a hold quickly. Thousands of feet above a pit of rocks, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, there isn’t a lot of doubt about what my fate would be. I can see a dozen yards below me before the drop that will send me to my death. Trees and bushes look like small dots from the distance, but I’m aware of the jagged stones that surround them. This is almost cliché, so many climbers I know have gone just like this… Fifteen feet now, still sliding. Why didn’t I stay home? Twelve feet. I don’t want to die. Now ten. I wish I’d called my mother. Five feet and I’m picking up speed now. I wonder who will find my body? My feet are the first to be freed of ground, swinging in the open air below them. I think of my family and hope they’ll be alright. And then, in that moment, I close my eyes and cringe. I hold my breath and wait, but the end doesn’t come. Instead, I slowly open my eyes and realize that I’m stuck on something. I’m lying face down on an icy ridge, my hands bruised to the bone and my face burnt and blinded, but I’m breathing and not falling. There’s nothing to do but smile and try to figure how long it will take me to get back up to where I was before I slipped. Most people wonder from time to time how death will find them. For climbers this isn’t just a morbid curiosity. Crawling up rocks and ice is one of those hobbies that provides you with plenty of opportunities to get whacked. I’ve got seconds to live, and a thought jumps into my head: how does a guy who failed racquetball end up here? I blame the ice cream man.

I’m asked again and again how I got started in climbing. It’s tough to say how anyone truly gets into something like this, but I think it began when I was young. People like to imagine that I was the illegitimate child of a famous mountaineer and was raised by Sherpas. They wonder if I learned to walk on the icy slopes of Nepalese ranges, or maybe made my first ascents in the Alps while I was learning to read. These would make better stories, but the truth is I grew up near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. If you were to look on a map or a globe, you’d notice they’re the kinds of mountains that are marked with green, not white. Which is to say, they aren’t very high. Most people think of my neck of the woods as a place where moonshine comes from, not adventurers. Nor were my parents the globe-trotting thrill seekers you might imagine. Neither one of them has climbed anything higher than a ladder, much less a large mass of ice and rock. My mom would really have preferred me to take up chess or golf, and it would have made sense. Besides living about as far as you can from any major mountain ranges, I wasn’t a standout physical specimen. I was deemed too small to play basketball, too weak to play football, and too slow to run track. Even with all these strikes against me, I think it’s only inevitable that I found my way into this lifestyle. Because even though I wasn’t fast or strong, even though I didn’t come from the right place and wasn’t the descendent of a long line of adventurers, I always wanted to see more. I was always a seeker. The great thing about being young is that it doesn’t matter if you’re too small or too slow. You don’t know enough about life to be bothered by limitations. For a kid, an adventure might be as far away as the front yard. And that’s where the ice cream man comes in. You see, when I was a small boy, maybe ten years old, the ice cream man was a magical and powerful figure. With a white truck literally filled with ice cream, he was something of a minor deity in my eyes. He was also, however, a very fast driver. One of my favorite pastimes was to camp out in an old tree that grew in our yard. It had the kind of long, thick branches that just seemed to beg to be climbed. When school was out, I would spend those hot summer days scrambling from one wooden step to the next. For an imaginative kid, it was perfect. I would take in the breeze while sitting amongst the leaves, dreaming of far away places. Those branches gave me a love of climbing and exploring that’s never faded. Practically the only thing that would get me out of that tree was the sound of the ice cream man coming. By the time I heard the jingle-jangle music of his truck, I knew I only had a few seconds to get down and stop him before he passed my block and sped on to the next neighborhood. If I were too slow, it meant going without ice cream. With so much at stake, I developed a habit of maneuvering down the tree recklessly and then sprinting out to the street. Every day, the truck’s melody would reach my ears and I’d fly into action, my hands and feet knowing exactly where to go. I always took it for granted that the branches would hold me. And then the branches, like so many things we take for granted, let me down. I was working my way down at the usual break-neck pace on a particularly hot afternoon, when one of the tree’s small arms snapped beneath me. My hands held on above, but both feet had given way and were dangling. I found myself hanging high above the ground. I was too young to figure how far down I would fall, but familiar enough with casts and crutches to know I needed to hold off gravity. It was the first time that I can remember feeling like I’d worked myself into a spot I couldn’t get out of. I struggled to think clearly, fighting back tears as the callous bark dug into my hands. It was frightening, but also exhilarating. At that moment, I was forced to learn an important lesson. When you’re stuck – in a tree, on a rock, or in life – you basically have two choices: fall, or find a way down. With my fingers bleeding and my shoulders burning, I realized falling was not an option. I started to edge myself from side to side, trying to reach another branch. Each movement seemed to bring a fresh wave of sharp pain. Every piece of me begged to let go, but none more than my hands. They stung, spilling fresh blood as I inched myself along the rough bark. Finally, through short breaths and choked tears, I swung my left hand toward a smoother branch that offered a relief. If I could reach it, I’d make it to safety, but if I missed, I’d be in for a nasty spill. Luckily, I was able to get to it just in time, and after a couple of painful minutes, I was back down on the ground. The ice cream man was gone, but I had discovered a passion and a strength that would help me for the rest of my life. That situation has played itself out for me hundreds of times on rocks and ice around the world. The scenery has changed, I’m no longer in my favorite tree, instead I’m usually facing an unfriendly wall of rock and ice. But the premise is the same: hang on or die. Though sometimes it’s cut a bit closer than I’d like it to be, I’ve survived in this profession not by being the biggest or fastest, but by choosing not to fall. You can choose to hang on, too. Remember, I’m just a kid who wanted some ice cream. Who were you?

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Article Tags: ache, boots, bushes, climbers, dots, fate, fingers, five feet, frenzy, half a mile, hundreds of miles, inner ear, legs, mirror, nearest hospital, rocks, running out of time, screams, slick surface, wall of ice



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