heavy, like floating

“Think we could make it up there?” I ask.

I grin. It’s a long way and its steep, we can tell that much from where we are. We don’t have good shoe traction, no gloves and Ryan (12) has never done anything like it before.

He narrows his eyes and smiles, like me, and we set off.

The first part of the trail was mild, a little rough and rocky, slight incline, some brush to maneuver through. We pass someone at work with two hiking sticks, and I remember thinking to myself that we might end up wishing we’d brought some, too.

Later, I’d be glad we didn’t.

Such a great afternoon. We had our jackets tied around our waists and our water bottles clipped to our packs. The sun subtle, the wind light, the air perfect for a walk — just slightly cool and smelling like fall. After awhile, the incline picked up significantly and we found ourselves more and more grateful for those things.

Before I could second guess much, the trail moved quickly from moderately strenuous but safe to steep, unstable, off-trail-on-your-own. Ryan was ahead of me by a few feet, since any fall would have meant a pretty long but still relatively tempered tumble down. I had old, cheap hiking boots, but his sneakers were worn and smooth on the bottoms. There was nothing to catch the earth and hold him steady, so we took it slow and moved from foothold to foothold. Shortly after that, it got steep enough and the ground was unstable enough that we needed both hands and feet at work digging into the rock and dirt to climb any further.

This is challenging, with cacti and prickly pears and thickets of prickers and other sharp dry brush to contend with. The dirt here is light, fine and sandy, not deep, damp and packed in like back east or in the Pacific Northwest. At one point Ryan slipped back about five or six feet and caught himself on the scraggly root of a Pinon. I grabbed onto a rock and reached my hand out to pull him up. It took us three tries, and some justification on my part as to whether we really ought to keep going. But before I knew it, we were plucking sharp rocks out of the mountainside to use as hand stakes as we continued climbing - both of us with one in each hand - burrowing them into the ground to steady ourselves and pull while our feet found the solid rocks around us.

We both comment about the same time that the mountain didn’t seem this high or this steep when we started.

Our hiking position goes from upright to leaning in to careful crouching and climbing. It’s a hell of a long way down now, and seeing Ryan’s feet trying hard to grip and his hands fumbling ahead for where to go next against the backdrop of high heaven and little else, I stop.

“Im not sure,” I say.

Ryan wedges his foot in a rock and sits down on top of it.

“We’ve only got two hours before the sun sets. It’s getting cold and windy up here. Look at the way this shoots up at 90 degrees a little farther up. This is a bad idea. Maybe we should turn back.”

“Mom, look, I can see the throne rock from here. It’s just a few more feet. I’m feeling ok, we can get there ok,” he says, pointing through the cracks in the Pinons to the peak - which feels barely in sight to me.

We have some water and I sit and look out over all of Albuquerque and the three or four ranges I can see from there. I look down at my legs, scratched and torn up from prickers and twigs and cactus along the way. My hands stinging with prickly pear needles and the skin scraped off in places from grasping sharp, rough rocks. My ankle, throbbing and still swollen from a previous injury. And then at Ryan, looking confident and strong and ready to prove something to himself and to me.

Looking down that mountain, there’s no turning back now anyway. I’m aware by then that gravity is operating against us and we’ll need to find another route down. We have no ropes or gear to protect us and the long, gentle fall from earlier has turned itself into a jagged, steep, what-kind-of-mother-are-you plummet from the side of a mountain.

“Grab that rock and put your foot sideways, dig it in. That root over there, it’s stronger. Use it for your right hand.” I gather myself and stand.

And we keep going up. And up. I spend the next 15 minutes to the top conflicted between feelings of exhilaration and sheer stupidity.

We relay the rest of the way. I instruct him on getting to the next big rock or Pinon to grab onto, and I wait below. Once he’s there and solid, I ascend behind him. We do this eight or ten times until we’re there, alive, at the top. At the throne rock. This could easily be a sacred place for the people here, so unmistakably sitt-able and on watch over the whole valley and its people.

There we sit and talk and we take in what we’ve just done, still cautious about moving too quickly or losing our concentration. We still need to find a way down. We watch the sun move lower and lower in the few moments we rest in the quiet and light. We need to go now if we plan to beat the sun down.

We survey ourselves and our options, and head carefully down in the direction of what looks a slightly gentler descent. It’s rocky. Bigger, sharper rocks, but less to slip and slide on. I go up ahead this time, scouting and testing, shouting warnings up to Ryan behind me and letting him know the best places to place or grip his feet and hands. We do this in relative slow motion, close to the ground. The cactus is thicker here and we’re both badly scraped and sore. At one point, I’m forced to stop and pick dozens of fine, tiny needles out of my palms before I go any further.

We weave our way down, down… through a steep maze of sharp and unsteady things. Then, eventually coming to the edge of a sheer rock face with no other way down or around, we stand there and stare at each other. Ryan has to go to the bathroom. Motherly advice fails me, so I turn around and face the other way and hope for the best.
It’s tempting to go back, find another way. But below the face, the land levels out some. Not far after that, it appears, we’re back on the trail and home free.

I go first, giving Ryan what I’m holding and turning myself around backward and taking my obligatory deep breaths. It’s not that far down, I talk to myself. And I slowly lower myself down the rock face and fumble for the lip of the next one with my feet. I find it. Stop. Breathe. Steady. I grab surrounding roots and rocks and lower more now to the side, stepping onto the edges of the rock and swinging myself around to land on the dirt beside it where I can “skid” the rest of the way.

It’s Ryan’s turn. He tosses his and my things down to me and turns around, mimicking the way I did it and following my instructions. Steady and calm. Right then I felt such a tremendous pride and excitement for him, dangling there off that rock. As a mother, that probably should have been my hardest moment. But it was the best of the day. He never uttered a word of nervousness or doubt, never questioned my direction and never tried to show off or shy away. His sure-footedness impressed me. For a split second, I felt ready to send him off into the world alone, knowing he’d be just fine.

He makes it down and we sit for a second, and then smile the very same smile. What did we do? What were we thinking? Let’s do it again!

We stand up, brush off and plow through the remaining brush and scrub and rock until we duck out from under our canopy of Pinon and thicket into a clearing. The trail is visible now, up ahead.

So we did it, there on that mountain. After months of bickering and butting heads and struggle, I figured out that I can let go and trust his developing judgment. He figured out that we’re a team and we’ve got each other’s back, for better or worse, no matter what the circumstances.

All the way home along the trail as the sun sets, we talk about what big things we’ll tackle next and how we’ll always remember how steady one must hold themselves to pee in the wilderness, hanging off a rock under heaven.

Posted by tee in favorites, sense of place
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