A Loose Grip On Life

I had just enough time before my first therapy session.

The initial 5.7 crack of the Eldorado Canyon classic Bastille Crack felt awkward. My shoes hung off a sling on my shoulder and they bounced against my side as I worked up the polished crack. Descending in climbing shoes would suck but having my clunky boots hit me as I smeared up Outerspace’s corner would be worse. I unclipped them and watched them smash into the base below.

I climbed higher. It’d been two decades since I last free soloed, but I remembered the feeling of the air beneath me—and how to ignore it. I stepped out of the security of the crack and onto Outer Space (5.10). My shoes pasted onto the rock. I pushed into a technical corner section and fought through the insecure bits.

The Bastille taken shortly before my therapy session

Stepping off the ledge at two-thirds height and into the roof section, I recalled a friend’s words: “The hardest part is at the perfect height.” It felt higher and more exposed than North Overhang in Joshua Tree, where I had fallen 100 feet while free soloing in the winter of 2004. Rehearsal had made the moves feel secure. “Dancing in the Moonlight” by Toploader played through my headphones as I danced through the holds and swung my body across the sandstone.

Soloing felt different than when I was in my 20s. I felt more confident in my climbing; I had a better awareness of my ability and of myself. I also felt more aware of the consequences.

A few songs later, I stood on top of the Bastille. Across Eldorado Canyon, the 600-foot arete of the Naked Edge stared at me. I wondered when I would kill myself. I checked the clock, popped my heels out of my climbing shoes, and descended to my therapy appointment.

The moon rising on the ledge of Outer Space

When I was 11, shortly after my parents divorced, my dad put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He’d left the safety on—his suicide attempt was just that. I’m unsure if this was his plan or not, but he was intentional about relaying the story of his depression to his kids.

In the early 2000s, Carsten Dietrich and I climbed Southern Man on Yosemite’s Washington Column. He had glasses, a mustache, a talent for skateboarding, and an awkward personality that I picked on. I wasn’t very mature at the time. He battled with his Christian upbringing and played guitar in a MySpace band. We lost touch after that. A few years later, I heard he’d shot himself. There’s a bench that overlooks the Dihedrals at Smith Rock to remember him

From the early 2000s until the later part of the decade, Katie Helmstadter sent me postcards from around the world. We’d met in Yosemite and corresponded with each other often, talking about Steinbeck or Kerouac. She was a runner but struggled with an eating disorder. After exiting a mental health clinic, she visited me in Berkeley. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches together. I wasn’t in the best place mentally and neither was she. I lost track of her for a bit and then posted a message on her Facebook wall. I hadn’t received a postcard. Katie was teaching me how to check in on my friends. Then a mutual friend called. She told me that Katie had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

In 2005 or so, Raleigh Collins, who I had climbed with the morning of my 2004 free solo fall, ran off the top of Sports Challenge Rock in Joshua Tree. He fell seventy feet and died.

“I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared.” Alex Honnold, Sanni McCandless, and I listened to Julie Kennedy read Hayden’s suicide note at her home in Carbondale. An avalanche had buried Hayden’s partner and lover Inge, and Hayden couldn’t find her under the snow. After hours of searching, he drove to a nearby cabin, swallowed a ton of pills, washed it down with booze, and wrote the note. His parents made a memorial for him in their backyard in Carbondale.

Lacking social media, Hayden preferred to spend actual time with his friends. He refused to text long conversations and instead we talked on the phone. He visited me while I worked at Climbing Magazine

Dave Pegg used to put clementines in his gin and tonics in the desert of Mesquite. He’d often walk through Rifle searching for his lost dog with battered shins. He was suffering from bad insomnia when he hung himself.

In the interest of learning how to write again, I read “Pity the Reader” by Kurt Vonnegut and Susan McConell. Vonnegut came home on a three-day pass from the army to visit his family on Mother’s Day. He found his mother dead, having overdosed on barbiturates. “I used to think of it (suicide) as a perfectly reasonable way to avoid delivering a lecture, to avoid a deadline, to not pay a bill, to not go to a cocktail party,” Vonnegut wrote in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Carsten, Katie, Raleigh, Hayden, and Dave had all found a way to end their problems.

Like the majority of the world, 2020 had been rough for me. Just before the pandemic, Climbing Magazine laid me off. Promises of international climbing, photo work, and a career change disappeared with the appearance of COVID-19. I buried my head in local climbing and published the Yosemite Bouldering guidebook with my coauthors. I fought a looming depression. Unaware of my declining mental state and the rockiness of my relationship, I proposed to my then girlfriend. When 2021 started, I thought I’d pushed through the difficulties. Then spring cracked my life. My fiancé chose to be with someone else. On our fifth anniversary, in Yosemite, she ended our relationship. A few days later, my van’s transmission stranded me in Reno. When I emptied my bank account and fixed the van, I returned to Boulder to move out of our apartment. I found a momentary respite at my friend’s house while I tried to figure my life out.

It was July and I curled in a ball in Tara and Greg’s basement, wrapping myself in white blankets. They let me stay with them while I tried to recover. Unable to cook, I lived off rotisserie chickens and sparkling water. A week into my stay, a thousand flies invaded the house. I forgot how to clean; I could barely take care of myself. Instead, I built a portfolio of my writing, photos, and videos and swatted flies for three weeks. Apathy stopped me from climbing. Random panic attacks broke me down. I attempted to calm myself by taking pictures of my own tears. I tried dance classes, I bopped to an eight count. The movement helped my sanity but the flies still buzzed through the house.

Tara talked to me about the mess. I could barely focus. As she struggled with fixing the dishwasher and the over-flowing garbage disposal, I tried to sweep somewhere, anywhere, to contribute something.

“You don’t have to do that James,” she said.

“I have … I have anx … anx …,” I stuttered, choking on tears.

“Anxiety?” Tara said. I broke down. I felt ugly and out of control. I hadn’t cried in years and now I’d become a monster of emotion. My mental health tanked as she hugged me.

I drove to South Lake Tahoe, Vegas, and Yosemite to work for a few weeks with Alex Honnold, Renan Ozturk, and Jon Griffith, shooting a VR film. In Yosemite, Alex and I rapped into the climbs at Taft Point. The thousand feet of exposure terrified me. It felt foreign after so many years of bouldering. I saw the notch that Dean Potter and Graham Hunt had tried to fly through, their crash site fell just out of view.

Later in the shoot, I watched Alex climb the 5.11 roof section of Desert Gold in Vegas’s Black Velvet Canyon. Two hundred feet of space hung below his horizontal body as he moved across the roof. If he slipped, he’d fall straight to the ground with his prone body ready for a casket. How convenient, I thought, feeling a twinge of inspiration.

The notch where Dean and Graham crashed is in the lower right corner.

When I returned to Boulder, I dropped a rope down Eldorado Canyon’s Naked Edge. At 600 feet, I would certainly die if I fell off of it. If by some unlucky chance I did survive a second free-solo fall, I’d die from embarrassment. I worked the upper 70 meters, dialing in the chimney moves, the slick boulder problem, and the short hand crack.

The panic attacks intensified. Most of the time I felt dead like life had escaped me. Then suddenly, emotion would well. My breath stopped. I choked. Tears flowed from my eyes. The intensity overwhelmed me. Death seemed like the best escape. I tried to breathe through it.

Sometimes I’d set a 15-minute timer and watch the numbers descend. When the tidal waves subsided I felt exhausted and empty. I wondered how to escape the pain. I could be one of the 50,000 people who kill themselves annually, 70% of which are white men. I could be a statistic. With nowhere to stay except my van, I felt homeless, unemployed, and worthless. The future seemed too daunting, too overwhelming. I rid myself of extraneous possessions. I put a simple will in my glove box. When I met with friends, I couldn’t speak. I stopped making plans. I ordered my affairs so I wouldn’t be an inconvenience in death.

“I give you 50-50,” Justen Sjong said. “Those are very British odds.”

Justen followed me on the Naked Edge as I put in my third session. His comment stopped me. I wanted to die on my terms; gambling seemed foolish. I could send the route and huck myself off the top. I’d get a running start like Raleigh Collins. Justen and I climbed it more. I stopped to work the moves into the chimney and the boulder problem before the hand crack. I climbed it with Becca, Kate, Eddie, and a few more times with Justen, leading it in a single pitch. I hiked up in the rain, dropped my rope down, and climbed the upper pitches as the rock soaked. In the dark, I slipped off a boulder problem near the top and flew into space. When I swung back in, I felt the sandstone tear at my skin as tears rolled down my cheeks. What was left in my life? I accounted for it all as I climbed. At the summit, I found the sum lacking. I wanted this part of my life to end. I scrambled down from the Red Garden Wall with my iPhone in my mouth to light the sandstone.

“There’s never a hurry,” Alex told me when I asked him about soloing the Naked Edge. “Just let it simmer and do it when the time is right. Seems like you’re on a good path if you want to do it.” He encouraged me to wait for better temps. Patience couldn’t come fast enough.

“Make a list of things to do if you feel suicidal,” my therapist said. I’d written climbing at the top and then questioned if it was a good idea. After soloing Outerspace, I felt confident. I wondered when I would solo the Naked Edge and if I was ready.

“Let’s go to Rifle!” Chris Weidner texted me. It felt good to be invited, to know that my friends wanted to spend time with me. I felt horrible the first few days on the limestone. I split a tip, having climbed 12 days in a row. Exhaustion fell on me and the canyon crowds gave me anxiety. While I couldn’t jump off the Red Garden Wall, I found myself driving with my eyes closed, praying to crash. I talked to Chris about my feelings. He responded, “If you ever feel like you’re gonna kill yourself, you’d tell me right?” I stayed silent, nodding. Dave Pegg once told his friend that he wouldn’t kill himself. I wondered if I could make that promise. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in Rifle. I felt so lost. I wanted to go back to Eldo to die.

That night, a DJ played at the community center for the Rifle Rendezspew event. I channeled the dance classes I’d been taking before I started therapy. A shirtless man danced without inhibition. He’d taken to soloing after a divorce then ripped a hold off the wall. He nearly died in the fall. After piecing his life back together, he tattooed “Don’t Die” above his chest. The dancing felt therapeutic. At the party, my friends reached out to me. I met new people. It felt strange to feel good. My emotional pendulum rocketed towards happiness. I waited for it to arc back.

Hayden Kennedy and Inge Perkins memorial site in Carbondale

At the confluence of the Carbondale and the Colorado River, two engraved stones sat next to each other: one for Hayden and one for Inge. After the night of dancing, I visited the memorial and imagined what Hayden would say about his suicide. I pictured his cleft lip moving and his lanky body gesturing as he defined some semi-Buddhist concept of death, of talking about the loss of love and the death that brings. Then the image faded. Hayden wouldn’t speak to me because Hayden was dead. I stepped away from his gravestone and returned to Eldorado.

A weird corner leads to a roof at the start of the Yellow Spur. I felt unbalanced transitioning to the sandstone from Rifle limestone. I wanted to bail immediately, vastly aware of the difference between onsight free soloing and having something rehearsed. I adjusted my foot higher and thought, “Fuck it. Nobody cares if you die.” I rocked over onto the foot. “Especially when you don’t even care about yourself.” I climbed through the corner, stood over the roof, and quested up the Yellow Spur.

Texting Justen a picture of the arete on the Yellow Spur

“Are you done texting while soloing?” Justen Sjong messaged me. Five hundred feet of air swept below the arete and the small ledge I stood on. A short ladder of pins pointed at harder climbing than I wanted. I felt an overwhelming desire to give up. My therapist had told me that if I felt suicidal, I should call or talk to someone. I switched my feet in the narrow stance. The bubble of a text message, the indication of Justen writing, showed up. I swapped my feet again as his text message came through. He provided a bit more direction on how to climb the arete. What am I doing? I thought.

“Do you think I would do something where I thought I would die?” Stanley texted me after I saw him BASE jump off Yosemite’s Taft Point. A few years later, I searched for his body outside of Zion National Park. He had crashed into the back of the Third Mary. Dean Potter and Graham’s death came next. They crashed into a gully after jumping from Taft Point.

The French call it L’appel du vide, “the call of the void.” It’s the feeling of standing near a cliff’s edge and wanting to jump off, of wanting to swerve into traffic, or the desire to stick your hand into a fire. Researchers suggest that people with higher levels of anxiety are more prone to these feelings. There’s evidence to suggest that the call of the void stems less from suicidal ideation than from a desire to live, to come close to the edge and step away. Stanley, Dean, and Graham all answered the call of the void. They stepped off the edge. And they died.

Confronting the arete, I heard her voice: “I’ve waited five years for you to change.” And then “You’re a psycho.” I wasn’t enough. I never had been. I could climb this section without falling, but only if I could hold back the emotional tidal wave. I needed to feel secure in myself when my world felt insecure. My fingers wrapped the arete, my feet smeared on the sandstone, and my body moved past the pins.

I pressed my fingers into a crimp. They tightened on the hold. My shoulders and body relaxed while my fingers bore down. The small hold led to an exposed arete. For a moment, as I balanced on the knife-edge, I felt alive. I denied the voice in my head and, in doing so, regained a semblance of confidence. While descending the Red Garden Wall, I texted Justen, “I’ll stick to driving and texting now.”

That evening, I worked the top four pitches of The Naked Edge. The following day, my fingers dug into the lower finger crack, the route’s initial difficulty. I climbed the route five times over two days, belaying myself on a fixed-line with a Grigri. I stashed comfortable shoes at the top for the descent. Outer Space had been a test on my ability to rehearse and execute a dance on the wall. The Yellow Spur was meant to handle my ability to onsight, to prepare for the unexpected. The ideal window to climb the route, before the sun-scorched the final hand crack, came at sunrise. My alarm would go off at 4 am. I felt physically prepared but wondered if I had 35 minutes of emotional control. I woke up at 3 am twitching with excitement. The finger crack could be exciting. My sequence felt off but I knew everything else. There’s the move in the chimney with the high left foot smear. There’s the off-balance move to the undercling. I pictured myself swinging into the hand crack, staring down at the sandstone sea, the rock that could swallow me. With more mental clarity, I could do it. Maybe I’ll die on a Monday, I thought.

At 4:30 am on Sunday, I parked in the Eldo lot. Becca Droz and Kate Kelleghan planned to set the women’s speed record on the route. From across the canyon at the Bastille, I pointed a long lens at the women. They danced up the wall, and I could almost feel every move as I watched them climb. They finished quickly, climbing the route in a speedy 37 minutes and 40 seconds. I’d be slower during my solo. Back in my van, I watched the video of the women climbing. I rehearsed the moves in my mind. The sun fell, night came, and I prepared. I went to bed thinking, It’s OK if you die.

“I’ve waited five years for you to change,” the voice said as I parked my van in Eldo. The sun hid somewhere in Kansas. It felt cold. My climbing shoes and chalk bag stared at me. I could do it. I could return to the life I’ve always lived. Emotions welled in my chest. My breathing stopped. I could solo the Naked Edge. I could die. I could do whatever I wanted. A moment of indecision washed over me as I tried to regain my breath. The weather would be cooler later in the week. I could climb the route when my body felt more warmed up. “Five years,” I heard the voice say.

After a few minutes, I grabbed my tripod and hiked to the Jason Wells memorial bench near the top of the Bastille. Wells, a Boulder climber, had died a few years ago during a simul-climbing fall on El Capitan. From the bench, I watched the sun rise on the Naked Edge’s arete. For the second time in a week, I tried to take a time lapse of the sun hitting the route. I failed again. My anxiety caused me to push too many buttons when I’d needed to set the controls and wait. I felt like a failure. How could I make a timelapse? How could I push beyond being a writer, a climber, a dirtbag? I could barely summon the courage to climb. The sun turned the arete from red to orange and then to yellow. Climbers descending from the route relayed how hot the rock had been. They said cooler temps would come later in the week.

Maybe I’ll die on Thursday, I thought. For a couple of days, I met with friends, climbed, and hung out. Wednesday night, done with my social obligations, I Googled “How not to kill yourself.” The search engine sent me to suicide hotlines. I thought about calling but figured I’d be put on hold. One friend suggested medication. A second told me to think of the people I’d leave behind. My ex-fiancé said she heard sirens at night and thought it was the police coming to tell her I was dead. She never reached out though. Most people can’t or don’t know how. I didn’t need advice. Or friends telling me to consider them. I certainly didn’t need apathy.

I felt alone, unseen, and unheard. My natural voice stutters and words come painfully slowly to me. When I need to be vulnerable, I can barely speak. My emotions fail to connect to words. In my search for empathy and someone to listen, I started writing. I used the mask of words to tell the truth of my feelings. I typed out the beta of the climb. I imagined how it’d feel to grab each hold. I pictured how it’d feel to let each one of them go.

Flashing Jules Verne to Lene’s Dream (5.11c) with Greg Kerzhner

I could solo the route right now, I thought as I drove towards Eldorado on the weekend. Mid-week rain had left the rock wet. Brenton and I had tied in and hiked up The Naked Edge while the rock was still damp. The following day, I climbed the route with Madaleine Sorkin in the morning, and then in the evening I tried a harder variation with Justen. The next day, I flashed Jules Verne to Lene’s Dream with Greg Kerzhner and finished on The Naked Edge. The more I climbed in Eldo, the more comfortable I felt. The more comfortable I felt, the less I wanted to solo. I wasn’t laying in a bed swatting flies. My panic attacks had dissipated and when they did happen, I was better at controlling them. Sitting in my car, heading towards Eldorado, I felt my confidence returning.

Justen Sjong climbing early in the morning in Eldo

“Wanna climb in Eldo in thirty minutes?” Justen texted me as I drove towards the Naked Edge. I wondered if he was trying to keep me from killing myself. The feeling of coincidence fell as I realized that no one or nothing could stop me from suicide. I could ignore Justen’s message, solo the Naked Edge, and jump from the summit. I could turn head first into traffic. I could end my life in a thousand ways.

I parked my van in Eldo, walked to the bridge below the Red Garden Wall, and stared up at The Naked Edge. I thought of each move, of the rock on my skin, and of the experience—what would happen if I did it and what if I fell. At any point, I could walk towards the route. At any point, I could turn away from it. Either way— returning to the same life or pushing into new terrain-- would be hard. I felt empowered by the ability to decide. My decision would start at that moment, and I’d have to continue making that decision for the rest of my life. The sound of the South Boulder Creek hitting the rocks under the bridge echoed against the cliffs. My grip on life had loosened. I looked up at the Red Garden Wall.

The Pink Bench

Catharsis