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Climber Girls Babes on Belay (cont.)
After some painful conversations, her ex, a pro climber, had moved to Boulder. Now he was leaving messages on her cell phone, and she missed him. "I've never had a guy cry over me before," Sheyna explained as she slid onto the tailgate of Andy's pickup, spoon poised over a salted avocado. "But he's just really spoiled, you know?" So far the trip had been going pretty smoothly. But the emotional undercurrents were more complex: These women were shockingly nice to one another, really—lending gear, kissing each other goodnight—but that didn't mean a few tensions didn't threaten their cohesiveness. First, only Sarah and Janet were training for Peru. Second, Sarah would soon be abandoning the gang for Wyoming. Third, Andy, sweet as he was, had provided an entrée for male interlopers, several of whom had parked their trucks for days right next to the girls' campsite. And fourth, and perhaps most destabilizing, Sheyna was officially single, a situation guaranteed to trigger drama and chaos. The morning drifted by as always, a slow mix of yoga, coffee, and discussions about the questionable appeal of Victoria's Secret underwear. Sarah preferred the selection at T.J. Maxx and, as she would do today, occasionally climbed in a girlie camisole. Around noon, the girls scrambled up to the Way Rambo wall, emerging from the boulders under a party of three handsome men. "Sick! This is gonna be sick!" a shirtless guy in dreads yelled to his partner as his friend started up a route called the Monk. The boys' comments stood in stark contrast to the girls'. While the guys shouted, "Sports action! I like to take in sports action when I can, and run from whipper to whipper!"—"sports action" meaning drama, and "whipper" meaning fall—Janet and Sarah, who was climbing in a red cotton-and-lace camisole, affectionately hooted at each other, "Hey, white legs! They're hot!" and "You rule! And you rule in sexy lingerie." Janet was lighthearted and joking, but there was a depth to her that made her seem older than she was. She'd found a real home in climbing, a break from the equestrian circuit she'd competed in back in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and an outlet during her parents' pending divorce. "It's all about flowing through fear," she said, airing out her feet and watching Sarah on belay. "It's just raw living." Last winter, Janet's mother had come up to New Hampshire, taken a bunch of Janet's friends out to a bar, and asked the obvious parental question: "You all know people who have died climbing. Why do you do it?" "There's no good answer," Janet admitted now, wiggling her toes in her flip-flops. "You just have to do what fulfills you, and for me climbing is fulfilling." As her friends belayed each other, Sheyna joined the boys, heading off with a buzz-cut climber in painter's pants. Her plan after the trip was to train as an aesthetician, maybe out west, and work in a resort town as a facialist and massage therapist. Her mother, for her part, hoped her daughter would come home to New Hampshire. But Sheyna was having too much fun; she was committing to nothing, at least for more than a few hours at a stretch. Finally, around sundown, she reappeared, face lit up, fresh red gobies dotting her arms. The light was perfect, mysterious, and kind, bringing out beauty in the rock that you never knew was there. While the others sneaked in a last route or two, Anne ascended a static line, collecting her camera and jumaring toward the sky. The cottonwoods shimmered, the dirt turned gold, but back at camp that night, everyone's nerves frayed from a long day on the rock, emotions ran high. Anne's simple question "What should we have for dinner?" boiled over into an outburst from Sheyna about how certain people never bought any food, even though their parents were loaded—the standard too-close-for-comfort stuff. Meanwhile, Sarah had turned inward, worried about whether her relationship with her boyfriend, 35-year-old adventure cinematographer Jim Surette, with whom she lived in North Conway, could survive her going off to earn a Ph.D. in Laramie. Janet paused to join Sarah for a moment, the two girls sitting close on the tailgate like the roommates the four all used to be before Sarah had moved in with Jim. "She's not just leaving her man behind," Janet reminded me warmly, though not without making her point: At the end of all this, Sarah would be abandoning her climbing partner, too, and the trip was already half over. Tomorrow the girls would be leaving Indian Creek, pushing through Las Vegas and on to Yosemite. "You know, right now I don't even know if I want to go to the valley," Sheyna confided just before she turned in. She was worried about climbing over her head, worried about her money running out. Plus, she said, "Everyone's going to have a boyfriend." The moon shone like a sequin, and the air smelled like sweat and sage. Sheyna pulled her knit cap tight over her head, as yet unaware that a single girl in Yosemite was as rare as summer rain.
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