Rising Abruptly (2 page)

Knees bent, she walks awkwardly along the kitchen floor. She hasn't yet learned to estimate elevation gain. She may be three hundred, perhaps six hundred metres above the valley. She can't say. She climbs on chairs, shields her eyes. Scrutinizes the floor.

So high up is she, and because of the broader perspective, cars appear as slowly moving toys along the road. So high up is she, their annoying car noises no longer reach her.

She says: Bliss. Blissful silence.

Now she climbs a jagged ridge. She is standing on the stove.

Exposure tugging at her back, she grips the rough limestone that abrades arms, cuts fingers, tumefies knuckles, shreds knees.

She paws cupboard doors. Reaches for knobs and hinges. Six hundred metres above ground (she figures), she hangs on, wrapping her arms around the hood of the fan above the stove.
Confident
. She is that confident, as if, with every move, the rock itself were teaching her how to climb. She runs the palms of her hands up the greasy wall near the ceiling. And, over there, she tells me, she was moving up her vertical line of rock with as much ease as me walking across my kitchen floor.

She tiptoes along the edge of the counter. The summit ridge becomes so narrow that my delicate sister must climb à cheval, a technique that consists of straddling the ridge, feet dangling over the void. She squats, dangling one leg off the counter and resting the other foot in the sink.

Only to imagine her in that terrifying position, not ninety-two centimetres off the kitchen floor, but six hundred metres above the valley floor, my heart climbs into my mouth and my ears start to buzz. I am overtaken by
real
vertigo.

I feel the wind as she jumps off the counter to rush to my rescue.

Curled up on the floor, I scream at her: You could have killed yourself. Are you raving mad?

She spins across the tiles, chanting: Madly in love, oh, yeah. So very, very madly in love. And it is for life, my dear brother.
For life
. Get up.

Now, I know something is very wrong. I pick myself up. Pick up my chair. Sit down, head in hands. For life, I repeat in my head. For life, I repeat in my hands. For life.

At long last, we get to the goddam gendarme. Honestly, I had forgotten about the rotten man. Man! I go straight from debilitating vertigo to jittery laughter. Can't stop sputtering wise cracks. Now, it is my puzzled sister's turn to think that I am the mad one. Not mad. Relieved. I pour her a fresh glass of water. Watch her drink.

I say: Let me guess. You met an experienced climber, right? A partner who kept you from falling. And one thing leading to the next, your night with that gendarme. Now, I understand. What a relief! A liaison—tightly tied to your lover's climbing rope, I hope—a liaison on a mountain isn't cozy as in a great big bed or soft as a roll in the hay, right? A night of lovemaking on rock is bound to leave scrapes and bruises. Isn't that right, eh, Sis?

I laugh and laugh, relieved. Dear me! So very much relieved.

You see, more and more Europeans flock to our Rockies, because their Alps are crawling with crowds lining up to climb. So, on her mountain, my sister met a Frenchman. Nothing unusual. After all, it was a Frenchman, Doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard, who invented mountain climbing. And way back in 1786. Almost exactly three years before his countrymen took the Bastille by storm. As for Paccard, he took Mont Blanc by grit and gall on August 8th, 1786. Accompanied by a resident of Chamonix, the hunter Jacques Balmat. Yes, I know these mountain-related things. Possibly because I am overly attached to flat ground, I very much enjoy reading about people who choose to give themselves trouble, sometimes impossibly great trouble, clinging to rock. So, it is conceivable that my ethereal sister met a climber who happens to be a French gendarme on holiday in our Rockies.

I ask: Is he a Jacques Balmat, of the rough-and-tumble hunter type, or a Paccard, of the considerate country doctor type?

Now, it is my sister's turn to laugh: The things you dream up, brother! A gendarme is a rock tower occupying and blocking an arête.

Of course, I know that in mountain parlance, a gendarme is a rock tower occupying and blocking an arête. But how does she know that? I must tell you the day after she landed in Calgary to visit me, although heights make me truly queasy, I dutifully brought my grumbling sister to Banff and Lake Louise to see the mountains. She barely glanced at them, declaring that she shared painter Alex Colville's opinion that mountains are silly. So, you can imagine my dismay that evening when she storms into my kitchen, gushing about the gendarme, silence among stones and quiet mind on the vertical line. More to the point though, that evening, I so wish a man with climbing experience, French or not, and not too audacious, were with her to keep her safe. I so wish she were not alone with her mountain. Any
silly
mountain.

Seriously, I ask: A gendarme, eh? How big was your gendarme, the one blocking the way?

Taller than a tall man.

You can't climb on. Can you downclimb?

I didn't get that far only to bail at the first obstacle.

What did you do then? With your gendarme taller than a tall man? Standing on the edge of the precipice?

My metamorphosing sister keeps quiet for a long time. She and I in growing darkness, in deepening silence. I sit, she stands. Both of us quiet. For a long time.

She pours herself a glass of water. Drinks. Climbs on the end of the counter.

She says: In fading light, I can see that, farther on, the ridge is rising abruptly. To continue, I'll have to wait until morning. But something tells me that I must contour the gendarme before sunset. You see, this is a rite of passage. If I ace that test, tomorrow I'll reach the summit.

Rite of passage?

The motor of the fridge kicks in.

How did you manage that?

It was a rather intimate encounter with the gendarme.

In other circumstances, I'd fall back on dumb locker-room jokes. Not tonight. No. In the darkness filling my kitchen, darkness falling on the rocky ridge where my addle-brained sister is perched, I am too moved to laugh, too petrified to move. An initiation into the mysteries of what she calls the vertical line. This can't be my sister the unbeliever talking. And yet, here she is, standing on the end of the kitchen counter, talking about rite of passage, initiation, falling in love. Where might that lead, if not to disaster, certainly to another disappointment?

My usually sharp-tongued, impatient sister speaks softly. In a voice I never knew she had. A voice to share secrets. I am listening. Holding my breath. Even Calgary outside my kitchen window, I swear, is holding its breath. So silent the summer evening, it may have drifted into town from a very ancient place. Oh! To capture such rare silence and offer it to my strange sister, so that she would agree to stay among us, flatlanders.

My zany sister, who has no experience, no gear, no partner—my sister, whom I love dearly, is, to go around the gendarme, about to face deadly exposure.

She demonstrates. Wraps her arms around her gendarme. She hugs the fridge. Stretches her left leg and, on the side of the drop, finds a tiny hold on which to rest her big toe. She stretches her leg as far as it will go across the fridge to reach the other section of the counter. Her stance looks unstable. She'll fall. To reach the other side of the ridge, she must jump.

She says: Just a short jump.

Jump? Jump? Are you crazy? Jump as in
jump
?

My heart skips a beat. A
short
jump! How short is short? What else is she required to do? Perform a swan dive? The leap of death?

Deadly calm, hugging the fridge, my lunatic sister gets on with her story: I must do that little hop to free the tiny hold on which my left big toe is resting and make room for the tip of my right foot. You understand, there's not much room for error…

At this cliffhanger, I hit
pause
, interrupting the flow of the narrative, to make an observation that has probably occurred to you already. My charming sister is standing in my kitchen, in an off-balance position on the edge of the counter, telling me about her night with her gendarme, so it is obvious that she survived her one-night stand with the mountain. Also, as I mentioned earlier, although I am a man who enjoys his routine in a safe and familiar environment, I get my thrill vicariously by reading accounts similar to the one unfolding tonight in my kitchen. Even if those accounts are written in the first person
after the fact
, making it clear that the author survived the ordeal, as I turn the pages, I allow myself a certain measure of emotional involvement, suspending my disbelief and playing along. As I am doing this evening. With the exception that, in this case, I care a whole lot more about the narrator of this tale than I do about any writer-adventurer whom I will never personally know. So, tonight, I greatly fear the future. After all, my emotional sister is in the grip of first love. And gravity, maw wide-opened, awaits. I hit
play
. Let's get this narrative over with.

…There's not much room for error. With my left foot, I feel my way to safety along the flat ridge on the other side of the gendarme.

I shout: Safety? What safety is there in hopping over the void?

She stretches and rests the tip of her big toe on the section of the counter beyond the fridge. Pushing with her other leg and gripping the sides of the polished, cold white fridge, she lunges. And loses her footing.

I jump up from my chair, try to break her fall and, together, we tumble to the floor. I holler. She laughs.

She says: Obviously, up there, it went without a hitch.

At this point, I'm so bewildered, I slap and hug her at the same time.

I yell: The mountain has gone to your head. Snap out of it. Right this minute, snap out of this. Neither of us has ever been a big supporter of love at first sight. What your climbing Frenchman, if he existed at all, would call the coup de foudre.

She says, giddy and raising a finger: But, dear brother, that's
exactly
what it is.

I continue, still yelling: This insane situation proves the point. Besides, must I remind you that, a few days ago, you declared mountains to be silly? When are you planning to go back home? Away from this delusion? When?

She laughs. Picks herself off the floor. Reaches for the pitcher of water. Drinks in big gulps. Lets it drip off her chin.

She says: I hug my gendarme with all my might. We are very intimate. As the sun's going down, I am making love to an entire mountain. And think what you will. It is
not
silly.

I sit down squarely on my chair. And say: Suddenly,
not
silly, the mountains?

She is beyond rational thought. If my usually cynical sister's uncharacteristic behaviour tonight is not the result of
silly
love at first sight, it's possible that she is suffering from a mild form of mountain sickness. Altitude sickness, that is real enough. Disorientation. Brain edema. If you don't come down to a lower altitude, death. Granted. The mountains in Kananaskis Country are not high enough to cause altitude sickness, but my lovely sister is a lowland creature. Who's to know if even the mild elevation in Calgary isn't affecting her. Beside myself with endless speculations, I can't stop fidgeting on my chair. Can't control the palpitations. Black dots pulsate in front of my eyes. Any second, I'll drop dead in my kitchen filled with darkness and secrets, while the wretched gendarme remains stone cold in the face of this dizzy affair. Saying dizzy affair may convey aloofness on my part. Trust me. I was, am, anything but detached.

Out there, up there, daylight dims. The land loses its relief. My elated sister has a trickle of a pee before she ties herself to the gendarme until dawn. With what? Since she has no climbing rope, what does she use to secure herself to the mountain? Her long hair? I don't dare ask.

This, I ask: The night must have been endless? Dark? You must have been thirsty? Cold? You must have been in pain? Afraid?

The yellow walls of my kitchen have lost their cheerfulness. I keep seeing my sister storming in, limbs black and blue. And her wild, wild eyes that will always haunt me. And that urgency of hers: gimme water.

She answers my questions: You know how impatient I am. I thought dawn would never come. How wrong I was! Au contraire. Night flies. Don't you see? Already, I am honing patience on the rock. Did you know? Stones multiply at night. It must be so, because the more broken rocks I removed from under me, the more there were. And the night. How extraordinary, the night! Even without moonlight it was never dark, because the sky was a riot of stars. Maybe not very comfortable, reclining on stones, but no tossing and turning, no fidgety mind. Simply, dear brother, simply, stillness.

In my kitchen, my over-the-moon-in-love sister drinks. Paces and drinks. Won't she sit down? She won't sit down. And that thirst that cannot be quenched.

Oh, yes, up there throughout the night, thirst torments her. In the starlight, her gendarme invites her to lick its stone. A trickle of moisture seeping through limestone. Moisture that, during the day, the sun evaporates instantly. But at night, the limestone releases water, an offering. The trickle appeases her thirst a little. Never fully.