A black day in the Texas desert
By Matt Samet

Know this — I’m a functional madman. Doctors, girlfriends, climbing partners have diagnosed me with every mental condition they could confabulate short of schizophrenia. In no particular order, I’ve been labeled Type II bipolar, major depressive, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, seasonal affective disorder, mood-cycling disorder, misanthropic altruist disorder, disorder-disorder and orderly disordered disorder. I accept these labels; I reject them. Whatever.

It’s been like this for 25 years. I’ve tried to burn clean the pain in too many wicked ways to list, yet climbing always proved to be the most effective. I’ve snapped wrists, broken bones, popped tendons, seared leg sinew, and blown out my shoulders and knees. Ill health, for a spell, detoured me off the climbing path. In those stale months following injury, my withdrawals from climbing were as acute as any three-day detox, replete with sweats, shakes, and a hollow head that rendered all pursuits equally bleached of meaning.

But the meaning is the message. On the lighter side, we’re all pretty good at deluding ourselves: “Hey, climbing is good for you!” and “It beats shooting up!” and “Climbing is my religion!” Pleasant thoughts all, and probably true on some level. But I dwell in darkness: I climb because I have to. If I shut my eyes and trace the contour of my life past the boulder problems, ridgelines, ill-begotten sport piles, and razor-edged splitters, I arrive at a specific day, marked like an “X” on a topo map. It was the day a love for climbing turned to lust, a black day bathed in chemical self-loathing. That day, the energy went all sour and wrong, fueling a mortal urgency to climb that hasn’t since left.

1989: Hueco Tanks, Texas. Mesquite and cat’s claw tore at my legs as I walked with my friend Dave across the raspy folds of the Chihuahuan Desert. In my hand, I held a bear-shaped cookie, chocolate sandwiching a lardy crème. It tasted like death in my mouth — a stale, heavy brick. It was my fifth Fudge Family Bear. Dave and I noodled through the dust along the southern tip of Hueco Tank’s East Spur, our minds not right because — for one of a very few, regrettable times in my life — we’d taken a hallucinogen. 

Aside from half-devoured packet of Fudge Family Bears, we carried some water and a chalk bag. Although most of that day has been whitewashed by time, I remember tearing the family apart, limb from limb, which provoked a terrible guilt. But it was the only food we carried: the massacre continued apace. We walked until we reached the Sandmaster Boulder, a lonely prow of iron rock at the Spur’s southernmost tip, exposed and beaten by waves of sun and sand and with a cave hollowed along its northern crest.

I slumped down onto a rock shelf beneath the wildly overhanging wall. Within that cave, my gob stuffed with Bears, I beheld an intimidating line of scalloped huecos — Sandmaster (5.12b) – defined by a couple of funky star-drive bolts that looked as if they might rip with a climber’s weight. I look beyond those, parsing an iffy fixed Stopper, and then above that, another bolt or two: <I>Calling all the Heroes,<P> a Todd Skinner 5.13d, then one of the hardest routes in the country. In the harsh, drug-fed light, it looked evil — a forest of razor blades on a shimmering plaque. 5.13d — who climbed 5.13d? Me, ever… never? Did it really matter? Somehow, I knew in that instant that I’d never complete this route. I would never measure up to a Five-Thirteen-D.

In AA, recovering drunks recite the mantra “One drink is too many, and 100 is not nearly enough.” Without the correct words, I had stumbled upon that truth. I looked out across a future teeming with caves and boulders, cracks and overhangs, and realized that no matter how many routes I climbed, I’d never quite measure up. One climb is too many; one hundred is not enough. I realize now it’s the same yawning emptiness that drives all addicts. My stomach grew heavy and hot, chewed and dismembered Bears clawing back up my craw.

Dave, meanwhile, sat on a rock munching Bears, his eyes glassy and red. I wanted to leave, I told him. I wanted to leave that cave.

We exited, the cave’s riptide of unholy energy pulling thickly against our faltering steps. We looped around West Mountain and leaned into a wind that skimmed the dam’s gravel lip. The End Boulder, a house-sized dollop of chocolate brown, cradled against the tapering southern flanks of the Front Side. There, in a pair of threadbare Converse Chuck Taylors, I surged into a V0 on the right, a jug ladder to cool the hands, feeling the rough crystals along the crest of some lips but also the smoother bevel of its older holes. A car emerged from the chaos, the black American luxury sedan creeping to a halt at the tip of the End Loop.

The windows cranked power-smooth down the doors. A clicking — camera shutters; I started, awash in visions of El Paso gangbangers come for an initiation sniping. An elderly couple — tourists — unfurled their bones, to stand on the pavement. They began to bicker about the camera. They stopped bickering to watch me climb. I held onto a hueco and looked their way, at their flickering and crenellated pie-holes, agape with unmerited awe. I climbed because there was nothing else left to do.

They clapped when I topped out and snapped more photographs. What I had done was not so very special — a 15-foot nothing on concave ledges — but they clapped nonetheless, the sound carrying across the wastes like Spielbergian thunder. The man and the woman could not know that I felt naked and obscene, awash with Fudge Family Bears. They couldn’t see that this climb lay beneath me, an aspiring “radboy.” They had no way to peer behind my Wayfarers to see that my mind had been commandeered, and that their clapping only drove home daggers of self-hatred. (Lose some weight already! Climb harder! Stop with those bears!). They could not know that their clapping sickened me.

As the late-winter afternoon sun paled behind a strip of cloud, I saw myself in that aging couple. In some distant year, I, too, would be 80, standing outside my newly waxed Buick LeSabre, bickering with a wife I’d hated for well nigh a half-century. I too would age, wither, and die. No rock or mountain anywhere could change that. Climbing itself would prove meaningless — I could have been free soloing Wyoming Cowgirl, an overhanging 5.12 just 20 feet to the left, and garnered the same applause. It was as if the desert had conjured these demons simply to remind me of what I’d already learned below the Sandmaster — to confirm, once and for all, that there was no escape.

After all these years, climbing is still the only thing I consistently care to do. On the surface, I know that I’ll never have time to do all the climbs I want, though secretly, I hope I will. I carry the sickening surety that even if I onsight an entire crag in a flurry of Legrand-esque dropknees and Sharma-like kips and battle cries, the minute I drive away, some mad developer will add one more line — perhaps the hardest one — and I’ll have to return to scuttle up the route. I know that one climb is too many, and 100 never enough, but I climb anyway. There is no choice.

Still, next spring, if I train hard, perhaps I’ll go back and — old bolts or no! — give Calling All the Heroes a try. Maybe, just maybe, it’s in me to navigate those ancient and neglected cruxes. That would be great, right, clipping those chains? Calling all the Heroes vanquished, self-worth reclaimed, demons silenced, purpose and meaning and balance restored? Very tidy and an ending that makes you smile. But here’s the thing: I think you could add a sit start. And if you were really keen, maybe traverse in along the wall’s base. And what about placing another bolt or two to hook left through even blanker ground? It’s all there and it’s all waiting. It’s waiting in the wind-scoured desert. It’s calling me and I’m calling you. I’m calling all the heroes.