Читать книгу Higher Love - Kit DesLauriers - Страница 10

“My dad said to only give ourselves thirty seconds, but there’s no way I can write down everything that fast,” I said to Rob as I handed him a piece of paper and a pen. “Let’s give ourselves a minute.”

Dad probably hadn’t imagined we’d play “the game” while sitting on the dirty, gray carpet at Logan International’s Gate C28 surrounded by throngs of summer travelers. It didn’t matter that we were at eye level with dozens of knees rushing by—Rob and I existed in a bubble of new love’s bliss, without a care for the chaos around us.

“How does the game go again?” Rob said.

“First we write down everything we want to do in our lives—in one minute. Then we write down everything we want to do in the next five years—in one minute. After that, we write down everything we’d want to do if we had only one year left to live—in one minute. Then we share our lists.”

A knot had formed in my stomach at the prospect of sharing my deepest dreams with someone. Seven years after I’d graduated from college, Alta had heard all my hopes and fears, but baring them to another person was new territory for me.

When Dad had introduced the idea of playing this game to us earlier that week, he told us he and Mom had used it as a relationship tool and credited it with helping them to stick together through thirty-five years of marriage and counting. The idea that Rob and I would someday be committed enough to make such serious, long-term plans together seemed like a pretty big assumption. I was twenty-nine and he was thirty-four and we were very much a couple, but we’d met only six months earlier during a ski expedition to Mount Belukha, the highest peak in Siberia. Neither of us had ever been married, and neither of us had thought marriage was in either of our futures.

Rob had been the cinematographer on the expedition, and I was part of the “talent” crew, although without being a sponsored member of an athlete team, I almost hadn’t been. The North Face, one of the companies backing us, wanted its athletes to be a part of the trip, and Rob, who was a team member and a pioneer of American extreme skiing, did his due diligence and found out that I was a nobody in the professional skiing world who lived in the tiny remote town of Ophir, in southwest Colorado. In his estimation, the film would have less appeal with a no-name like me in it than it would if everyone were well-known, and rumor had it he wanted me off the trip.

With a week to go before departure, I was stewing about this development during my fifteen-mile drive to work in Telluride.

“I don’t want to go if I’m not wanted,” I said to my friend Anne, who was riding with me. “I think I’m going to back out.”

“Are you kidding? An all-expenses-paid ski expedition to Siberia? You’ve got to go! Whatever is bothering you, get over it. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

I took Anne’s advice and flew to Switzerland as planned with Ace Kvale, who was an internationally renowned photographer as well as my regular climbing partner and the person who had dreamed up the idea of this expedition. There we met our mutual friend John Falkiner to ski in Verbier for a few days before it was time to fly to Moscow. The night before our flight, a knock came on the door at John’s house and in popped Rob’s smiling countenance. He had young Bob Dylan hair and handsome brown eyes, and they seemed to see right into me.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was like there wasn’t anything to hide or any reason to hide it. It was a feeling of total potentiality.

I spent the night trying to make eye contact with him across the dinner table, but he obviously thought Ace and I were a couple and wouldn’t look at me. It didn’t matter, though—the feeling didn’t go away.

A current of electricity kept Rob and me close to each other over the following weeks. As we shared a snow cave with ten teammates, our pinky fingers bravely found each other outside our forty-below-zero sleeping bags. Not most people’s idea of holding hands, but it was March in Siberia, and under the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine a more romantic courtship.

After we got back from the trip, word of our relationship spread quickly. My grandmother called me one day while I was on lunch break from my stonemasonry job and told me of her approaching eightieth birthday party, and I promised I’d fly to Massachusetts for it.

“Why don’t you bring that young man I’ve heard so much about?” she said.

“But, Granny, we’ve only known each other for a few months!” I said, looking at Rob, who was visiting from his home in Victor, Idaho.

“I don’t care. If he’s as nice as I hear he is, then I want to meet him.” I put my hand over the phone. “Granny wants to meet you,” I whispered to Rob.

“Only if you agree to meet my family afterward,” he replied with a sheepish grin.

And so six months after falling in love in a snow cave, we found ourselves on the family tour, cornered by Dad at the end of a boat dock at the mouth of the Westport River in coastal Massachusetts, where my parents live. He’d never gotten involved in my love life before, but all of a sudden he was giving me relationship advice right in front of my boyfriend.

“After you write your lists and share them,” he said, “come up with the items you agree to focus on, both personally and collectively. Then figure out a financial plan to make your dreams a reality.”

I liked the idea of making a list and sharing it with Rob, but I felt uncomfortable with the idea of joint economic planning, since we weren’t even engaged. Financial matters could wait. Besides, I wasn’t sure Dad’s suggestion fit with my belief in allowing the universe some space for serendipity.

“Sounds great. Thanks, Dad,” I said, just wanting to end the too intimate conversation.

A few days after Granny’s party, we moved on to Burlington, Vermont, to visit Rob’s parents, and it was in front of his mother’s house on October 1, 1999, that he dropped to one knee, asked me to marry him, and I accepted. It wasn’t a quick decision on my part, though—I’d overheard him ask my parents’ permission the day we left Massachusetts and had given it careful thought. And now, as we waited at the airport for our flight back to Colorado, the idea of playing the game didn’t seem so unreasonable anymore. In the end, the fact that my parents were still married after thirty-five years was good enough for us. Besides, I really wanted to know what Rob had in mind for the rest of his life, and our lives.

Sitting on the floor, we took turns reading from our lists. When we got to the part about what we wanted to do in the next five years, I was relieved that, like me, Rob hadn’t listed having children. And I was surprised by what he did list.

“Denali? Really? You want to ski Denali?”

I’d listed more remote objectives like “ski in Bhutan,” and high on my husband- to-be’s list was to ski in North America? It seemed like a mundane goal, but I did my best to hide my disappointment, as there were things on my list I hoped he wouldn’t shun. After all, we were in this together now.

I’d felt a strong pull toward the exotic since being part of a seven-week climbing trip in Sikkim, India, a year before the Siberian expedition. The goal was an obscure and beautiful 20,000-foot peak called Siniolchu, in the Himalayas. It was my first international climbing expedition, and Ace had invited me in part because of my mountain skills, which included being a wilderness emergency medical technician, a highly trained volunteer with San Miguel County Search and Rescue, and a rookie on the Telluride Ski Patrol.

The demanding peak had seen only a handful of previous attempts, and it took us ten days of overland travel just to reach the trailhead at the final village, which was so remote that the youngest children had never seen Caucasian skin before. It was spring in the high country, so instead of easily finding local people wanting several days’ work helping us carry our loads into base camp, as I was told is often the case when trekking in that part of the world, we were forced to hike into the hills to find farmers willing to postpone their planting to be our porters. And we needed a lot of them. To carry five weeks’ worth of food and fuel, tents, stoves, ropes, and other climbing gear required the muscle of forty porters hauling standard loads of thirty-five pounds.

When we’d rounded up the veritable army we needed, we trekked among blooming rhododendron trees up a valley that revealed itself slowly. The riverbank led us to patches of hardened spring snow that the porters tenuously negotiated in their plastic sandals. In these open areas above the forest, I’d tilt my head so that my ear rested on my shoulder, but I could still barely see the summits of the steep glaciated mountains rising the equivalent of ten Empire State Buildings above our little trail of ants. Making an effort to keep my jaw from dropping lest I remind my more experienced teammates how green I was, I mused about how someone picks a peak to travel halfway around the world to climb. All the snowy giants in the range looming over us looked like worthy destinations.

There was only one thing missing from the beautiful scenario: my skis. As we gained more and more distance from civilization and its urban trappings and I became more and more relaxed, I settled into a deeply personal mental state that led me to a revelation: I felt lost without my skis. I realized that what I was drawn most to in life was climbing and skiing in high mountains—it was a package deal.

The eminently skiable peaks directly above us beckoned me, but we were here strictly for an alpine climb, and it was then that I realized I was different from the others on the trip. While my teammates seemed perfectly content with their climbing objective, I was experiencing a strange feeling of being separated from my highest calling, as if I were a different species from the other climbers. At that moment I made up my mind that in the future, I’d be true to my nature and devote myself to climbing mountains I could ski back down.

When I shared my epiphany with Ace, he smiled the knowing smile of a seasoned climber who has experienced his own moments of clarity in the mountains.

“There’s a magical, mystical mountain range in Siberia I’ve long wanted to visit called the Altai, which means ‘golden mountain,’” he said. “Legend says it’s the birthplace of skiing.”

Most climbers plan their next objective at least as soon as the current one has been achieved, and in our case we didn’t wait. As we retraced our steps down the valley of rhododendron trees and raging, newly melted rivers, we planned our Siberian journey for the following year.

Interestingly, much of that conversation had revolved around the same subject that Dad had raised and that I was now wondering about as Rob and I sat on the floor at Logan: Who was going to pay for it?

Several outdoor-industry companies had funded the Siberian expedition as part of Rob’s film. To pay for the trip to India, I’d saved for a year and sold my mountain bike—worth more than my car at the time—and had nothing else to sell. I was still a stonemason, and in the same week that Rob had proposed to me, he’d gotten an offer to give up his cinematography and ski career in favor of developing a hotel in Teton Village, Wyoming, for a friend who was the landowner. If Rob did a good job of managing this three-year project, he’d eventually be financially rewarded, but in the meantime the project couldn’t afford to pay him a living wage. How could we afford to achieve the goals on our lists?

Under the circumstances, it was no slam dunk that we’d be able to attain the kind of independence it would take to see the world, let alone ski it. Dad had made it sound like coming up with a plan for funding our unconventional dreams would be a simple matter, but from where I was sitting, the road ahead was anything but clear.