I Feel Fine: A Memoir

I was eighteen years old and living alone in Paris when my dad called me one weekend. Hey, I'm driving through France on my way to climb Mont Blanc in a few weeks. One of my climbing friends and your stepmom are coming. We have one more spot. Want to jump in?

Did I want to climb the highest peak in the Alps without any preparation or training? Yep. Sure did. I didn't even hesitate. But it wasn't because my heart longed for nature and I just loved to climb. It was more of a "I'd rather be anywhere than here" scenario. At the time, my studio apartment in Paris, which was the about the size of your average Honda Civic, offered a card table, a lumpy mattress, and a concierge on the main floor who scowled suspiciously at me every time I passed. Other perks of my life there included a half-empty bag of dog food I'd accidentally been eating for nearly two months because I didn't read French well and I had mistaken it in the grocery store for some kind of weird, fortified rice or barley. Plus, it had just been brought to my attention by a kind bystander at the Laundromat that I'd been washing my clothes in fabric softener since my arrival in the country. Apparently I really needed to improve my French. I also really, really needed a break from being a brave, independent, grown up all by myself in Paris. 

As it turned out, climbing Mont Blanc with my dad and stepmom was not the ideal situation for the much needed R&R. 

First of all, Dan has a long and checkered history of leading our family on ill-fated hikes. When I was seven, I slid down a frozen waterfall in Rocky Mountain National Park (it was Sky Pond for you hiking nerds out there), and I accidentally slipped into a hole down under the ice. Luckily, my older brother pulled me out before the rushing water could push me into a watery grave beneath the frozen waterfall, but that incident brought the added fun of finishing the hike dripping wet from the frigid glacier water. On another occasion, my entire family, including my six-month old brother, got caught in an electrical storm above the tree line on Longs Peak and we ended up crouching against boulders, exposed to the elements and praying out loud that we wouldn't get struck by lightening. I have waded through knee deep snow in Keds tennis shoes on the backside of Mount Timpanogos because we lost our way in the dark and couldn't find the camp, and I've barfed my guts out at 16,000 feet on Mount Kilimanjaro because it didn't occur to us to bring altitude sickness medicine. All this to say, I must have been incredibly homesick and lonely in order to accept my dad's invitation to climb Mont Blanc. 

In my zest to escape Paris, I forgot to ask some basic, harmless little questions about the climb. Such as: How big is this mountain? Will I be cold? Do I need to bring food? Is there equipment I might need? As it turned out, Mont Blanc isn't a pleasant day hike or frolic in the fields. I woke up from a long afternoon nap stretched out on the back seat of my dad's car and sat up. "Wait, is that Mont Blanc?" I asked in horror as I pointed at the absolutely humongous, snow covered, Mount Everest-looking mountain ahead of us. 

"Yep," my dad said. "This is going to be a lot of fun." 

You're probably not surprised to learn that I did not pack enough warm clothes. When the topic of food came up, my dad suggested we just "bring a few snacks" because there were probably places to buy food closer to the trail head. There were not. And finally, we took about seventeen minutes to dash into a mountaineering store to rent some boots, crampons, and an ice ax for me. I don't really like tools of any sort, and I've never aspired to carry any kind of ax attached to my person, so I watched all of this unfold with a combination of disbelief and a niggling sense of foreboding. My concern only grew when my dad offered a quick, five minute tutorial on how to self arrest with an ice ax in the event I should begin to slide off the mountain. 

We met our guides the next morning, two professional French mountaineering guides, one of whom was Marc Batard, a professional climber who was famous for his 22.5 hour sprint (sans oxygen) up Everest in 1988. His illustrious resume and extensive mountaineering experience was supposed to be (and should have been) comforting, but it became immediately clear that not only did Batard and his assistant not care for Americans, their primary objective was to get us up and down the mountain as quickly as possible, regardless of our skill or comfort level. 

The first day was hiking. Fair enough. Even a moron can walk uphill for long periods of time, a fact we were proving by the hour as we plodded along, watching our small pile of snacks dwindle. There was soup available for purchase at the hut, which was our stopping point for the day, and where we planned to sleep, but it was difficult to enjoy the bland stew that was offered while we watched the other climbers consume loaves of crusty french bread, cheese, and chocolate that they had lovingly carried with them. I was instructed to go to bed right after dinner in order to be fresh for our midnight departure and push for the summit. This objective was only slightly hindered by the boisterous crowd of German hikers who were merrily drinking away the hours late into the night. I actually didn't mind too much and thought it was funny, but the Italian, French, and Canadian climbing parties sharing the hut were decidedly unimpressed. It was a short night's sleep. 

At midnight, as the guides put me in a harness, strapped me to their rope, attached crampons to my boots, and demanded that I "walk" up a fifteen foot vertical wall using the toe points of my crampons, the reality of my situation started to sink in. What in the name of all that is holy? I had no business being in that harness, and as I rammed the toe of my crampons into the ice wall and took my first, hesitant step, I thought, this might actually be the end. 

Surprisingly, it was easier to climb in the dark. There were other expeditions that had left ahead of us, and I could see the glow of their headlamps on the mountain high above us, like a darkened Christmas tree with only a single strand of lights. But as the sun rose, I gradually became aware of the 5,000 foot vertical drop on either side of our ridge line trail, and with slabs of ice hanging precariously off the mountain above, I began to leak tears. There was one section of rock that required hand over hand climbing, and someone ahead of us had obviously fallen because there was blood smeared all over the rocks. Growing tired of my overly cautious, time consuming movements, the guides barked at me, urging me to climb faster. Little girl, stop crying, Batard snapped. I will not let you fall. He made that promise, but we both knew it wasn't one hundred percent true. 

The problem started with my crampons. Like little metal teeth strapped to your boots, with crampons you are supposed to walk with your toes out to prevent the claws from snagging on each other. I struggled to master this concept, and periodically locked my crampons mid-step, which caused an instant face plant into the snow. The guides were always razor sharp in pulling the rope taut so that no one would fall off the ridge, but they weren't always quick enough to prevent the face plant. My fear of falling combined with the repeated idiocy of locking my crampons and face planting made the climb stretch on interminably. The only break from the constant strain was when I had to pee. This involved the guides and my dad turning their backs while I squatted right there on the ridge in plain sight. The sudden hoots and hollers from the Canadian expedition climbing directly above us (we forgot they were there) was both mortifying, but provided a much needed burst of laughter. 

When we reached the summit the first thing that came into view was another climber leaping off the top of the mountain. I watched in amazement as the wings of his portable hang glider caught the wind and he peacefully looped his way down to the fields, 15, 777 feet below. Within moments, a handful of other climbers followed suit. I felt so cheated. No one had offered me the option to jump off at the summit and float down, and believe me, after my fire hydrant gulping introduction into the world of crampons and ice axes, I would not have hesitated to add another party trick to my mountaineering repertoire. Hang gliding from the roof of the Alps? No problem. I would have done anything to make it stop.

My burst of enthusiasm to get off the mountain suddenly became a great asset to our expedition when our French guides, ever eager to be done with us, suggested we go off trail and sled down the glacier on our backsides. This is incredibly dangerous, not to mention illegal, but since they claimed to know the mountain terrain intimately, and sledding relieved me of walking on exposed ridges and tripping on my crampons, not to mention it would shave a considerable amount of time off of our decent, I was all for it. My memory of sledding down Mont Blanc is a terrifying blur of snow fields and a relentless death grip on my ice ax, which I was instructed to have ready in the event I headed for rocks, ice, an overhang, a hole, a crevasse...let's just say there were lots of reasons to hold on to my ice ax. 

We summited around 8:30am, and we descended the final leg of the dirt trail in the early afternoon. The rented boots had rubbed burns into my shins, I had blisters on my feet, my clothes were wet, I had dropped about ten pounds from exertion and starvation, and I'd never felt so relieved. It was over. As we dropped into our seats on the train, my stepmom said, "Well, that was hard. Really hard." Then she paused. "But I feel fine. I'd do it again." 

I looked out the window as the train picked its way back to the village of Chamonix. I liked that my stepmom used the phrase I feel fine, and I've always remembered it because in the moment it reminded me of the lyrics from The Beatles, or James Taylor. I feel fine. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I did feel fine. Some of life's most brutal moments resolve, once the dust settles, with the realization that we are fine, we will be fine, and that we are capable of so much more than we expected. That afternoon I could see all good things from the train window. The Alps towered above us like a rocky castle with snow fields and glaciers streaming downwards, but almost as soon as the snow ended, wildflowers poked up from a blanket of green that washed down into the valley. I felt sharply aware that I wasn't ready to go back to Paris. My life there had some good things in it too, but like most spontaneous, ill advised, terror-filled adventures, the two days I spent climbing Mont Blanc had allowed me to float in a bubble. Up, up, up. Neither here nor there. Just me and the mountain, one foot in front of the other, face plant, my step mom encouraging me and my dad counting steps, face plant, the thrill of sledding, the rub of unfamiliar boots, Germans laughing until my eyes grew heavy. It was so hard.  It. Was. So. Hard.

But man, did I feel fine.