Billie was raised in Boulder, Colorado along with a younger sister and an older brother. Her parents were both rock climbers and mountaineers and had all three of their children out in the mountains at an early age. Billie took to the mountains like a duck to water, she couldn’t get enough. By the time she was in high school she already had a name for herself amongst the climbers in and around the Boulder area.

She earned a certificate in Outdoor Recreation Leadership at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville, Colorado. After that she worked at the National Outdoor Leadership School out of Lander, Wyoming for a year, working with young adults. For whatever reason, she left NOLS, moved to Salt Lake and started working for REI. She was one of the toughest women I had ever met. Her mornings before work were at a nearby cross fit center. I would join her a few times a week and she always showed me up with her strength and stamina. She thought nothing of a ten run mile at five in the morning. Her goal, by her thirtieth birthday, was to solo Everest. She was now twenty-three. I had no doubts she could and would, somehow, manage to do it. At this moment, I was wondering if she would live that long.

“Billie, dammit, set some damned anchors. You’re scaring me,” I screamed up to her.

She yelled back down to me, “Shut up Ryan. I’ve got this. You’re making me nervous.” She reached for her next handhold. Then she stretched out her leg at an impossible angle, found purchase with her toes and swung her body another two feet upward, two feet closer to the top or, possible disaster. She had maybe ten or fifteen more feet to the summit. She now had to be over sixty feet high, her last belay anchors set maybe thirty or thirty-five feet lower.

Another climber had joined us. “Wow, she’s amazing. That’s a really difficult route, gotta be in the 5.12 to 5.15 range. She’s gotta be one of the best climbers I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, she’s good alright but I wish to hell she’d set herself some anchors.”

“Oh crap! Yeah! Oh my god, yeah, she hasn’t. That’s no place to be free climbing. That’s a dangerous wall.”

To be continued . . .

“I’m tired of trying to see the good in people.” Becky was having iced coffee with her friend Richard. They were sitting on the patio on Main Avenue where they could watch and make fun of the gawky tourists. They were on break from their jobs as sales experts in the new marijuana industry. Both were in their late twenties, college educated, and liked the small mountain town ambience where they lived and were happy being away from their midwestern roots.

“What do you mean? Another asshole stoner customer?” responded Richard.

“No, I’m used to them. It’s my dad. He’s being jerk as always. Still wants me to come back and work in his fucking car dealership. He called me again last night and he was just awful. Called me an ungrateful bitch. My own dad called me a bitch.”

“Why would he do that? Haven’t you told him you don’t want to move back to Des Moines? You’ve certainly told me, like a thousand times.”

“Oh yeah. I’ve told him, keep telling him, but he somehow thinks I owe it to him to carry on the family business. My brothers bailed. Did he call them ungrateful bitches? No, he blessed them and sent them on to their own lives. But me? He always demanded way more of me than my brothers and I hated it. It was always, ‘Excel in sports. Excel in school. You’re not trying hard enough.’ Mean time, my lazy ass brothers sat around playing video fucking games all day long.”

“Maybe he just wanted you to do great things. Wanted you to do something other than work in a weed dispensary.”

“Who the hell side are you on? I like my job. I like living here. I like the people here. I don’t need or want my father’s overblown expectations. And I don’t want to sell his fucking cars.”

“Hey, check out that couple. Total tourists. Both wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with some five-k run from their hometown. They come out here looking for something special, but can’t leave their home town. Weird.”

“You’re changing the subject. Whose side are you on anyway?”

“I’m on your side. Just observing. Sorry. What about your mother? What does she think?”

“My mother. She doesn’t think unless it has to do with tennis or golf, or some fundraiser. She was always too busy to pay much attention to what was going on.”

“Wow. I’m sorry. Do you ever talk to your bothers?”

“No. We’re never really close. They’re both married and have kids. Both got away as fast as they could. But, somehow, I’m the one who’s the ‘ungrateful bitch’. Talking about it makes me want to cry. You never told me about your childhood? I’m the one always whining.”

“Pretty mundane. Grew up in Sioux City. Dad worked at a bank and my mom raised my older brother and sister and me. She went back to teaching after we were all in school. We did a lot of family stuff on weekends, camping, hiking, canoeing, stuff like that. My folks are happy I got through college and am gainfully employed, even though they aren’t real excited about my present job. But they tolerate it.”

“Wish my parents would be like that. Can I meet your parents sometime? I might like them to adopt me. Hey, time go back to work. Thanks for listening.”

Becky and Richard took their empty mugs into the shop, depositing them on the counter. They walked away hand in hand into a sunny southwestern Colorado afternoon.

bloused camo pants
black spit shined birkenstocks
torn led zeppelin t-shirt
adorn a once virile body . . .
wasted by alcohol

drug addled mind
inside a greying ponytail
from 1972
new mexico hippie commune . . .
by the sacred mountain

walking through 
silent city streets
reciting 
Proust
Baudelaire
Burroughs
Kerouac
Frost
verses and cantos
keep him alive . . . 
insane

a lone sparrow
juno 
searches for crumbs
in a darkened alley

Sutliffe bridge Sunday morn,
driving by fields of growing corn.

Ashes away into the flood,
darker and thicker than our blood.

Away, away brother of mine
to see a world much more divine.

I was relaxing with my second late afternoon Margarita, soaking in our hot tub. My wife was away visiting an old friend in California. I was listening to old jazz on Pandora: Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker and others. Such memories of those days of jazz in underground smokey bars, drinking whiskey sours and smoking my Camel straights, driving home wasted at 2:00 in the morning after last call. Then getting up at 6:00 for my work as an apprentice carpenter. Then the Navy, college, a masters degree, teaching.

Were times better then? Maybe simpler, but not what I would say were better. I remember driving to work during the Cuban Missile Crisis wondering what the nuclear attack would be like, what it would look like. Would I see mushroom clouds? Would I survive? I elected it would be better to be part of a mushroom cloud.

Women’s rights weren’t. Neither were any civil rights. We lived in a world struggling to still know who we were after the horrors of WW II and Korea. I realize now how the veterans of those wars drowned their memories in alcohol and drugs, trying to pretend they were okay when they staggered home after work, after drinking in some dive bar, home to an indentured housekeeper wife and children who feared his anger, his hand, his sorrow.

No. The world wasn’t really settled, is never settled, we aren’t ever settled. Life is the time, the times, we live. Why does it seem always a struggle? Wanting more? A newer car? A bigger house? More wealth? Living in fear of  ‘the other’ as we are told to do on the evening talking head news during commercials selling crap no one really needs. I sometimes envy the Buddhist ascetic who gave away everything and has nothing, but has everything.

Other days, some nights, I long for those youthful days, those jazz bars where I spent my time and money all those many years ago, satiating my own fears of what my own life might bring. I already know what it has brought to date: my family, a beautiful home in the mountains of Colorado, a quiet retirement from the university, my meditation practice, my writing . . . all of which is more than I could have ever imagined. 

Maybe the older I get, the more cynical I become, but in my own present slightly alcohol satiated mind, the world seems more screwed than ever. We face more crises now than ever. Sure, we have women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights that still do nothing but incite ridicule and derisiveness in many who find solace in ignorance, false religions, anger, guns, and hate. 

Tayatha om bekandze bekandze maha bekandze radza samudgate soha.