I've finally had a chance to sit down and surf the net. From social networking sites I learn how negligent I've been ... dog deaths and lots and lots of climber deaths. I'm heart stricken for one of my climbing heroes, Majka, who once driving back from an ice climbing clinic informally interviewed me on being a lady single climber as I unwittingly answered and she smiled and nodded her head knowingly ... as my responses proved her hypotheses.
She wrote on how deaths of climbers are getting closer to her and I thought yes. I also think about the social commentary one of the proprietors of Rock and Snow in New Paltz said as he introduced one of the oldest climbing documentary films on climbing The Nose (how wild, drinking water out of bleacher jugs, and using pitons and eating utensil ... those were some hard men). He claimed corporate America was taking away the sense of community, that it sought to replace the sense of community with happy hours and family picnics, and long hours at the office fueled by a guilty nagging sense one could not survive if one did not bill 80 hours a week. I partly believe him. Climbing has given me a sense of community back. I think about the friends I've made from Alaska to Texas to South Africa to Jordan. How far that community spans. But having a community also means more people closer to your heart. When we indulge in the ultimate litmus of life's tests on the rock or in the mountains, exuberant in the feeling of having everything move in synch... muscle sinew mind soul ..., it's just as memorable and fleeting as the deepest meditation or daydream. So when we've lost our friends ... its perhaps a reminder of how much richer we've made our lives by being close to them. And the loss of any partner in the passions of same soul of a community ... is probably in equal and measurable parts painful. Although I will caveat, I have not lost a friend who was a climbing partner but I have lost many classmates and former social acquaintances from boating to car accidents, to disease ... but by the time they passed away, we were no longer held by the same bonds of community, and I can't say I felt stricken with grief for them.
