As I had passed the graveyard of careened freights and cars, whose bodies were estranged into the parallel ditches of molten white, I tightened my grip. Body positioned as a tank crew soldier in some unholy war, tense and awaiting the worst. This had lasted for a few hours until snow turned to slush then turned to rain. Relief when it was over and only nineteen hours all the way to El Paso. The environment morphed slowly over my tired eyes as hills and rock began to wash over the snowy midwestern plains.
A stop in Oklahoma City, a diner meal, and a long ponder. It’s been quite a while since I had done a solo trip, exactly nine months. Last year I was accompanied by my partner but this time I was alone. She had urged me many times throughout the year to leave home, I was too sedentary and socialized and it had worn me ripe. I recognized this as I was especially so a shameful recluse up to the trip, pacing between apathy and anxiety only to give in to so few. Yet there had been some sense of melancholy in my departure. A parallel of a plan only a few months out to conception, to leave once again but for work and white peaks out west in California, a continuation of my previous year living in the car and working as a field ecologist. I had thought about the people who despite my wishywashyness, I loved dearly.
As dusk cast over the desert plains, I had come up to El Paso in the night where millions of lights lit up the land like twinkling starlit andromedas. The Franklin Mountains painted black against the barrage of light tucked away in valley below. I had arrived at my Tia’s home that night, welcomed with warmth. My cousins had traded places with me where they promptly resided in my last childhood home as soon as we had left for Chicago. It remained the same in its rustic pueblito architecture surrounded by the adobe housing adorned with handmade furniture and pottery. After a meal, hot tea and a smoke I went to sleep quick as for tomorrow I was to go back to Hueco.
As the suburban sprawl weakened along its sidelengths, the road thinned, the sky opened, and the hills and mountains perched into view. Hueco Tanks juts out as an enigma in the corner of the valley, it’s characteristic bullet hard rock contrasting against the soft sand foothills and mesa’s that surround it as if it had crash landed from a distant distant star. The pond at the base of the entrance teemed with life, little birds and furry critters scurry and converse. The gravel path transmutes to holey red rock and leads upwards upon a chained natural stairwell as if they lead to golden gates. It’s quiet, its bluebird with ghostly wisps of white, its empty. A playground of beautiful alien rock where ghosts of past leave their powdered white imprints on all the possibilities. It had felt so good to be back.
I ended up spending quite a lot of time in Hueco, only spending off days to go out and hike and hang out with cousins. Despite my teeming reclusivity, I had been exceptionally happy to be socializing with the climbers that inhabited Hueco. Two particular people I met were two Americans, one a dirtbag who lived the title affluently, and the other a welshman who found love in the states long ago and has been traveling since with his other half. I was never much of a boulderer, and despite it being the second outdoor outing I've done, I was pleased with what I got done and what I had scouted out for next.
Outside of climbing, I had also came to El Paso for another reason. My younger cousin had grown apathetic towards the city. A relationship that seemed to go nowhere, a brother who bore family and grew into internet hermitdome, a strained familial relationship, and a music scene that continued to seem more juvenile the older she got. She had asked me to take her away back to Chicago, to start anew. I was apprehensive with putting words in her head as she was still unsure. For everyone else, they wanted to let her know how much of a good idea it was. But I knew how hard it feels to leave, to rip flesh and feeling from the things we were comfortable in, and I wanted her to have the last word about it.
A few days before I had left I had made plans to head up north to New Mexico. I had planned a summit of the Organ Needle. Arriving early that morning at the trailhead I had met some other climbers who intended on doing a route on the Tooth. We had diverged paths when the bushwacking began. Traversing a sea of cacti and agave, I had spotted a faint climbers trail and made my way upward. Following course through the wild landscape towards bright golden rocks that gleamed against the backdrop of sand and drab green. As I made my way from open valley into the interior of the mountain I pass one party, exhausted and telling me that they had turned back a bit aways from the summit. I noted a probable point where I should refuel and reconsider. Following a wall of overhanging choss soups me up into an open field just under the needle. Looking onto the single motherly pine that careens itself back in forth in the wind under acacia and sagebrush, I rest and bask in the last bit of sun ill get until the summit. Forward into the night valley tucked between the needle and an adjacent spire, I grow weary. My turn back time is approaching and I figure I would only have a few minutes left to linger on the summit. The tight dark valley continues and wraps around just behind the Needle and up forth opens up. Pure exposure, the surrounding spires of rock poke out in every direction, disorientating, as if I had just been transported into an asteroid belt. The Sugarloaf, a leaning perfect granite nubbin, reveals itself in the distance. I am led by little passageways in thickets of bush next to the cliffside and realize that I must make my way up, I just hadn’t known when as every little opening in the bush showed me 5th class slab onto the summit. I chose the perceived path of least resistance but halfway up on a ledge I realized I was in for it. I donned rubber shoes and dropped the pack. Twenty Meters of pure slab climbing, I could rest with the gradient but any obvious handhold proved loose and insecure. At an impasse where I knew I needed to traverse my fear grew. What the fuck was I doing? If I fell I might have been slowed down by the brush but it would have been a long hobble back to the car at best. Taking in breaths I bit my tongue and climbed up. A mantle to the summit and a flat patch where I had sat down. I soaked the slight wind, the sun on my face, I swallowed the fear if only for the few minutes I lay there, and came back down. An anxiety ridden reversal, swearing myself off as to why I had made the choice to begin with. Back down to brush I began to descend the needle, heavy breathed, losing my way, retracing, and arriving just as when alpenglow fades back to night.
Back to earth, exhausted and worn I began to head back to the twinkling city. Texts from loved ones flashed upon the screen in the dark expanse. Dinner was ready, my cousin wanted to see me, another said sorry for not seeing me earlier, my lady asked how it went. All I could do was weep, a deep ugly cry, the one where you cower your face even when there is not a soul to see it.
