HWK9MO50

The obituary was what you would expect, it contained no details of the death but all the pertinent information. He had been a part time student, loved snowboarding and friends, was well liked, and would be missed. Suicide or drug overdose written in bold between the lines.

It was the latter. And though his friends and family would grieve him as dearly as had he been killed in an equally pointless death by car accident they wouldn’t mention the cause.

I’d read his obituary before, I’d written it in the past. But in my world other phrases are always been added to the text. The first phrase always contains words like, “avalanche” “rappel” “rock-fall” “SAR” “exposure” or “injuries incompatible with life.”

The second phrase is always, “he died doing what he loved.”

But of course these words are left out of the junkie’s obituary. No one needs to mention the fear, fright, and fury of watching a friend’s life extinguish in an overflowing syringe or a pyramid of white powder. But when it’s powdery snow filling their airways, suffocating a part-time college student, we give them a pass.

It’s okay. No one is shamed by death in the mountains.

We accept that backcountry skiing will result in years of confusion and fruitless searches for meaning by parents. We know that climbing progresses only with a wake of crushed spinal columns, hemorrhaging femoral arteries, and pathetic attempts to repair leaking skull fractures with an ACE bandage and aspirin.

I question if there is a difference in the final moments of an oxygen starved consciousness if that state is caused by opioids or a blocked airway. Whether it makes a difference if a broken neck is caused by an alcohol fueled jump or an adrenaline induced fall.

For the recreational victim it matters little. For the parents and friends it’s a nice facade. No one whispers “skiing” they way they do “heroin”. One death is sanctioned, the other shamed.

Well meaning nonprofit groups pass out clean needles, warn us to wear helmets, and remind us that should we dial 911 we won’t be charged with either crimes or SAR fees.

Twenty-something’s in Crested Butte and Bozeman attend funerals as do their urban counterparts. But we don’t call it an overdose of soloing.

We call ourselves adrenaline junkies, but we’ve never embraced all of that label. The funerals. The broken families. Divorces. Lives spent below the poverty line, backs turned on society, always searching for the next fix, the next peak, and the next line.

Harry Harlow was a scientist who worked with monkeys studying love and depression. In one experiment he took newborn monkeys and placed them in a cage with a robot mother. This cloth covered contraption fed the babies, acted as much like a mother as could be modeled, and also at random intervals shot out a metal rod that hit the babies. This experiment simulated abusive relationships between parents and children. One of the results Harlow discovered is that when compared to the control monkeys being raised by a real monkey mom, the “abused” children worked much harder to find affection in their robotic parent than the actual children did. Harlow surmised that these monkeys were internalizing the pain delivered randomly to them, and trying harder to build a relationship with their placebo parent. 

I thought of these experiments last night at The Front. Cathryn had just bought a membership, and I came with to do a bit of bouldering. The scars over my elbows are long healed. And, I hoped that for the first time in six years I might be able to climb until my muscles hurt. No tendonitis. No cubital tunnel. Just the good pain of a workout. 

On the second problem the pain seared through my shoulder and I had to walk it off. I’d crashed my bike a month previously and with a sore shoulder stayed off climbing for weeks. But it was back. And again I couldn’t climb. I could watch the other gym members having normal pump. Feeling a burn I can barely remember. And I thought of Harlow. For the last decade I’ve spent most of my life dedicated to this sport. I’ve had surgeries. I’ve spent hours walking alone up foreign paths to solo. Physical Therapy. Electrophoresis. Massage. Nerve Glides. I’ve spent more time on those activities than climbing.