Lawton’s wall
Again, this one starts with a crying baby. This time the baby is Isabella, and we’re deep in a wild Mexican canyon called El Salto, an hour from cell service, 15 minutes from a village where people don’t even have landlines or interwebs. Paradise.
I’m watching her sleep, pondering her preciousness and the delicate nature of humanity, while Dad is a hundred feet off the ground, pinching onto a limestone tufa while Mom belays.
Then, the baby wakes up and starts bawling, “Mama, mama, mama… .”
I pick her up awkwardly, and bring her closer to Mom. Dad finishes his route and is lowered down. Mom takes him off belay and gives the baby what it wants: milk. This routine was played out over and over again during a recent trip to the Monterrey region of Mexico, where my dear friends Mark and Norma live in the winter.
I write trip, because I don’t like the term vacation. I don’t like to vacate when I travel, I like to experience, to be fully present, to feel it, to be inspired and moved so I have something to write about when I return. The world can keep its fancy cruises and five-star hotels. Let me sleep in the dirt and get sunburned and scraped by cactuses and beaten down by the wild in order to feel something more.
But let me back up. The plane ride. Falling in love with words again. I love reading, and that’s the reason I’m a writer. All the truths are in books, and stories weave the fabric that is humanity. To be on the creation end of storytelling is humbling. When people tell me I’ve inspired them, it’s the ultimate form of payment.
I’m falling in love on the plane with The Fault in Our Stars. I don’t read as much as I’d like because it’s difficult to carve out time in the day-to-day grind. I’ve had The Fault sitting on my bookshelf for nine months. I guess I picked it up at the right time, because the story immediately creates the feeling that good writing creates: the notion that life is short and precious. Plus, I’m a sucker for prose and poetry, and The Fault has just a perfect dose of that while it tells the story of young cancer patients on death’s door.
In The Fault there’s this character that the young cancer-stricken narrator refers to as “The Ball-less Wonder.” He’s a one-dimensional testicular cancer survivor who leads a support group that the narrator reluctantly attends. Right away my thoughts lead to, “can you still have a sex drive without testicles?” I mean sex is an important part of life, and I can’t imagine life without it.
“Hormones,” Mark starts with. He himself is a testicular cancer survivor who lost one of his testicles to cancer. “You have to take hormones if you lose both.”
Mark was never quite sure if his boys could swim post surgery and had some sperm frozen before the removal of his testicle in case. Turns out, as evidenced by Isabella, his boys could indeed swim, and he didn’t have to make a withdrawal from the bank.
Mark got cancer in college, 10 years ago, and to see him as a dad and husband makes me happy. We share a hunger and passion for climbing; a feeling that we’re always chasing. And for eight days, he showed me the immense opportunities for climbing, mostly with the family along for the ride.
Our most memorable day was attempting Lawton’s Route, farther up the canyon in El Salto. It was just the men this time; this was no place for babies. Our third companion was Joel, a Mexican dirtbag fluent in English who is fighting for climbing access in another nearby canyon full of limestone. Monterrey is surrounded by limestone, with as much rock, maybe more, than the Moab desert.
The Monterrey area has had an abnormally wet and cold winter. Because of this, we had to navigate a small, chilly, crystal blue pool at the bottom of a cascading and winding waterfall. We debated for days how we were going to get our gear and ourselves across the pool, which ended up being about 5 feet deep. After a failed attempt to find a little raft at Wal-Mart, at the last minute Mark remembered his surfboards.
The plan worked well. We ferried our packs across on the surfboards and waded into the shoulder-deep water. The cold water woke us up and gave us a feeling of adventure. After a half hour of those shenanigans and another 20 minutes of hiking, we arrived at the base of Lawton’s Route.
Lawton’s Route is named for my closest friend who has ever died, Adam Lawton. He was a skier, climber, boater, runner and biker who had an insatiable appetite for adventure. He was killed in an avalanche in 2012, and Mark decided to bolt this four-pitch route in his memory. Mark successfully climbed the route after bolting it, and for the last three years it has remained in obscurity.
A small plaque scratched on a rock marks the start of the climb, and I get all nostalgic and teary-eyed thinking that deep in some Mexican canyon is a tribute for one of the finest human beings I ever knew. I can see his crooked, scheming smile in my mind.
Right after I smile because of his smile, we hear nearby rockfall, and I’m quickly snapped back to the moment.
“Can I lead the crux pitch?” I beg. They quickly agree. Mark leads the first part, grunting and occasionally cursing. “Dammit, Three-Years-Ago-Mark,” he jokes. “You should have placed more bolts.”
When it’s my turn, 10 feet up I break off a hold and with rope stretch I fall about a foot from the ground. I also curse Three-Years-Ago-Mark but get back on the rock and climb to the belay.
Then it’s my turn to lead the second crux pitch. I pause briefly to take stock of my surroundings: palm trees grow from rock; millions of cactuses do too; the river weaves drunkenly through the canyon; and behind us is an unclimbed thousand-foot wall with a massive orange overhang. Above the overhang is hundreds of feet of gray rock, soaring to the sky. It’s like a virgin Mexican limestone version of Yosemite.
Fifty feet up I’m scared, again cursing Three-Years-Ago-Mark, yelling expletives to the rock. I try to channel Adam’s spirit. Nothing. I think of Tommy Caldwell, the Dawn Wall hero with whom I share the exact same stats: 36 years old, 5”9, 150 pounds, lives in Colorado. Nothing. For every Caldwell, there are 10,000 Mehalls: everyday climbers all too in tune with their lack of courage.
I hang on bolts, and finally, not gracefully, get to the next belay, painfully aware of my fragility. But somehow none of the mistakes and cursing adds up to any sort of shame or failure. Climbing is a Zen sport, not a sport where we keep score.
The canyon is still beautiful; shortly I’ll be joined by one old friend, and one new friend. And, then again, I smile and take stock of my surroundings.
– Luke Mehall