Climb Every Mountain

This is a story I wrote for a wedding photo book I made for our friends, Jill and Grant. They were married in a mountaintop resort in Washington and the story is allegorical of how a married life together is like climbing a mountain. It is long, but worth a read! Sue.

Marriage is like climbing a mountain. You think about it for a long time, you decide you really want to do it if you can find the right climbing partner. You assemble all the gear you will need for your climb and with a kiss for good luck, the pair of mountaineers are on their way. At first the climb is easy, the slope gentle and the weather is perfect. All your equipment is new and shiny and you love the novelty of seeing the sunrise from your brand new sleeping bags. After a while, you notice that the incline is a bit steeper, but still manageable, and the zipper on your sleeping bag is sticking a bit, but if you rub soap on it, it works better. Life is good and there is no doubt that you will make it to the top of the summit.

After climbing for a while, you and your climbing partner realize that however fun it is to climb together, wouldn't it be nice to have some companionship along the way? So you adopt a pair of bear cubs, and the climb becomes way more difficult, but at the same time, WAY more fun. Now you not only have to worry about getting yourself to the top of the mountain, but you have the responsibility of two other little lives. Years pass, you climb and climb and climb, and your cubs grow and grow and grow. At some point, you may even wonder, is this all there is? It seems that all you do is walk and sweat and climb and you wake up in the morning in a now dirty sleeping bag and do it all over again. But then you think about your climbing partner and your cubs and how much joy they bring to your journey, and you bounce out of the sleeping bag a bit quicker because you remember there is another gorgeous sunrise outside the tent waiting for you.

Once you've been climbing long enough and you get into a routine, things get a bit easier. You plant flowers along the path, hoping to make the climb nicer for the generations of climbers that might come after you on their own life quest to the top. You meet up with other climbers along the way and you share your evening campfire with some of them, even your food. A few special climbers become like family as you realize that sharing DNA with someone is no guarantee of closeness in a relationship. Those special climbers you meet and "adopt" would drop their gear in a second to help you if you needed help, and you would do the same to them. You realize that you can never have enough people to love you, and the climb is too long (or too short?) to waste your energy on high maintenance relationships that only bring negativity to the journey, Your years of climbing experience has taught you that and surrounding yourself with the good people in your life will sustain you and support you when the climbing gets really tough, as all mountain climbs eventually do.

You will learn many things on your ascent to the top. You will learn that NO journey is without peril and bad luck. EVERY climber thinks that the others have smoother trips than they, but you'll learn that is an illusion. Their base camp may look more organized than yours, and they have flowers growing near their outhouse, but if you look closer, you'll see that there are holes in their tents too, and while you may have a mosquito problem, they are covered with black fly bites the size of M&M's. And those flowers? They are plastic! Totally fake. They just have DIFFERENT climbing challenges than yours, but they don't have a clean slate, no matter HOW MUCH IT APPEARS TO BE SO. Remember that.

You will learn that when bad things happen to your fellow climbers and you learn about it, you won't just ask "what can I do?" You will just FIND SOMETHING to do and just do it. It may only be that you will carry their backpacks for the next mile, or clean out their campsite when they are too sick with Traveller's Revenge to do it themselves. Your new maturity will help you to realize that even when you "don't know what to say to them...." you will just "shut up and show up" and that simple gesture will mean everything to them. You will understand that if you wait to be able to do some huge thing for them, you will never do anything, because there rarely is anything big that you CAN do. You will never be able to build a helicopter from tree branches that will bring your unfortunate friends to safety. You will never be able to Just a bunch of little things that will make them feel cared about and not forgotten. Your mountain climb will teach you that lesson if you are astute enough to learn it.

A painful lesson that many climbers learn too late is what a wonderful instrument God has blessed you with in giving you a healthy body. Often people learn too late that they should have taken better care of it. A mountain climb will tax your body like no other and if you haven't looked after it, every step can be painful. Your knees will hurt, your back will creak, your neck will be stiff when you climb out of your sleeping bag in the morning. You would still enjoy the sunrise if you could just see it better, but you neglected your eyes by refusing to wear sunglasses. Hopefully it won't be too late by the time you learn that lesson and you can begin to treat your body better by only putting good fuel into it and by listening to your knees when you can clearly "hear" them shouting, 'Enough climbing for today. Build a fire and relax now...."

Somewhere in the middle of the climb, somewhere around the second base camp, you will notice something about your baby cubs. You will notice that they are not so little any more. Hopefully, you will have stopped to play with them when they were little and wanted nothing more from you than to splash in the stream, or to go fishing with you. You notice that they now tower over you and weigh about 700 lbs. They could EAT YOU ALIVE if they wanted to, and you have to have patience during those times of adolescence when they threaten to do just that. They don't need your help any more to fish. One swipe of that big paw and they have a 20 pound salmon to munch on for a snack. If you've done your job correctly, the saddest thing in the world will inevitably happen -- the day will come when they tell you that they are leaving. If you haven't done your job correctly, however well meaning you are, they will be living in your tent forever, taking up ALL the free space and you will be catching salmon for them forever because you didn't teach them how to sharpen their claws so they could catch their own. As sad as it will be to watch them venture off and start their own climb, be happy that you taught them how to be self sufficient and know that you will reap the benefits some day when they have cubs of their own and you watch them teach THEM the lessons that you worked so hard to teach.

It will seem strange at first, after the cubs have left, to have just you and your climbing partner to share a tent once more. It many even be scary. You may even be susceptible to the many traps that befall climbers who are trying to adjust to a new routine of "empty nesters." Perhaps you will spend all your time polishing your camping equipment. Checking and rechecking your cllimbing lines. Collecting firewood and mapping routes and having no time with your climbing partner to just be together. You will need to find a new routine TOGETHER, because if you don't, another climber might come along and sensing your emptiness say "Come climb with me for a while...." While the illusion of a nicer base camp may be a tempting thought, it is just an illusion. You have a whole journal full of life stories of snow storms on the trip, raging waters and rivers you've crossed, predators you've slain together....as flattering as it is to have another camper tempt you to join his/her climb, you don't have a HISTORY and a journal with them. It just isn't worth it. It's an illusion. Remember that. No matter how good it appears, it is just an illusion.

As you approach the summit, you need to look back periodically and see how far you have come. Why, it just seemed like yesterday and you and your climbing partner were just starting out with a shiny coffee pot and new hiking boots. Now your boots have the tread worn off and your sleeping bag is held together with duct tape. Your tent had to be patched with your worn out long johns and the tent pegs have long been replaced by pegs made out of trees you've encountered on your journey. At this point, you don't have to tell your partner where to set up camp. You know EXACTLY what each other is thinking and you work in sync together. There are times when you still feel like either signaling a distress call to a passing aircraft with the shiny part of a soup can, but that too shall pass, and you know that your life partner is your soul mate, no matter what.

Finally the big day arrives. As you approach the spot where you are ready to plant your Life Flag and claim victory over the mountain, you look to your left and see your cubs approaching. What is that walking behind them? They have cubs of their own, rolling around and wrestling with each other. You look down below and you see the path you have climbed together. It is full of flowers that you have planted along the way. On your right are all your "people", the climbers that you have adopted as family and they are cheering and clapping, reveling in your success in completing your life journey. Tears are shed for the climbers who didn't make it, through climbing errors, or dysentry, or who just plain 'ole gave up the climb. You look back into your mind's eye and you remembered the day that you stood on the top of the mountain on your wedding day with your people surrounding you , vowing to make the climb to the top together again one day. You've made it. You look up and thank God for all the lessons and blessings. You have completed the journey. Life is good.

SURPRISE!!!

Anybody who knows me well, knows that I hate surprises. When my kids were born, I didn't know the gender of any of them, which drove me nuts. Consequently, they had to wear green or yellow clothing until the supply of neutral colored baby shower gift clothing was used up, while visions of pink or blue danced in my Mommy head. How FUN it would have been to be able to paint the nursery pink or to KNOW that splurging on the BLUE Dior diaper bag was ok, because I was having a boy. Expectant parents have the option of knowing the gender now, and that makes so much more sense.

Then there is the issue of surprise parties. DON'T EVEN GO THERE WITH ME ON THAT ONE. Here's typically how it goes: They plan a surprise party for you. They have the date booked weeks in advance, they sneak around and tell you lies, and go to great lengths to hide all the pending fun from you. For WHAT PURPOSE? So you'll be pissed off that the plans YOU made are cancelled, and they get to surprise you for 5 seconds? Doesn't make any sense to me. You are the only one who didn't get to anticipate the event, maybe buy a new outfit, get a great haircut, take time to do your make up just right.

A bunch of girls threw me a surprise party years ago. Since I didn't KNOW about the party, I had made a dentist appointment for the time and didn't mention it to anyone. When the friend, Martha, showed up to pick me up "for coffee", she had to track me down at the dentist's office. I was flat on my back, wearing a paper bib with spit on it, drooling like a hyena over a sheep's corpse, and she comes rolling into the dentist office. The dentist was a mutual friend, so he didn't mind. "Hey, Sue, do you want to go for coffee??" HUH? It was 6:30 pm and I would normally be going home to feed my husband and kids after my appointment. I said, "arrggh. msfft ung froo." (She probably took that to mean, "sure, when I'm finished here." What I was really saying with my mouth full of spit and dental instruments was "Are you fucking crazy? What are you doing here?" Whatever. When I was finished getting my tooth filled, I told her that I'd have to call Mike and tell him I'd be home later and I went off with her to a Mexican restaurant. That should have been my first clue right there. We have Starbucks, Gloria Jean's, Daily Grind, Natalie's, Seattle's Best....trust me, there is NO SHORTAGE of coffee joints in Orange County and she was bringing me to a Mexican Restaurant??? My so stupid. I remember thinking, "that's ok. At least nobody will know me here." I don't know what YOU wear to get a tooth filled, but I was wearing dirty sweat pants that I"d probably slept in, a well worn Root's tee shirt with dental spit and filling shavings all over the front of it. I had no make up on, and my mouth was still so frozen that I could only mumble my words, and I was drooling all over myself without even realizing it. My hair looked like I'd tried to fix the toaster, and failed, so I grabbed a baseball hat from under the seat of my car and stuck it on my head in an effort to at least hide the bed head. The hat said, "Beer Bitch" on the front of it and unbeknownst to me, had a hunk of hair-filled bubble gum stuck to the back of it, but I figured I wouldn't know anyone there, so whatever. I'd was as exhausted as the mom of three young kids would be and caffeine was looking pretty tempting right then.

Imagine my surprise when we walked in to the restaurant and 10 of the women from our church were sitting there like the cats who ate the canary, "SURPRISE!!!!!!!!!!" Now you have to understand women in the OC. Public outings are a time to pull out all the Girl Stops. Their hair was perfect, Dior and Gucci and Chanel sunglasses perched effortlessly on the tops of their uber coiffed heads. Their make up was impeccable, everyone was wearing their favorite Tiffany jewellry and designer purses matched their Jimmy Choo shoes. "Surprise!" said Jenna, with freshly done manicure. "Surprise!" said Denise, with her fabulous sundress with the sweet heart neckline encrusted with Swarovski magic. "Surprise!", said Lorena, just back from her vacation home in Hawaii and looking refreshed and youthful and perfect -- everything that I wasn't. I thought to myself, "Surprise? SURPRISE????????????? Fucking right I"m surprised...." I was horrified. Here's the rub though: you aren't supposed to get mad when that sort of thing happens. You are supposed to be grateful to your friends for being so thoughtful as to throw a surprise party for your birthday. Well, I wrote the book on passive-aggressive behavior, so I'm not sure if I recognize it when I see it, OR, if I recognize it when it really isn't there, but I was ready to choke the bunch of them. I didn't have the option of picking out what to wear, doing my hair, looking forward to a dinner I didn''t have to cook myself. The reality was that I had eaten already, in anticipation of having a frozen mouth, and since I wasn't in any shape to be actually talking with swollen lips incapable of forming sensible words, I could only sit at the head of the table, feeling like a skunk at a fucking garden party, listening to all these beautiful people talking about how "they almost let it slip -- remember when I said...." To add insult to injury, Martha told everyone at the table how stupid I must be to not have realized what was going on when she showed up in the dentist's office. Right? Not only am I sitting there swollen, frozen, and ugly -- a pimple on the face of Orange County's most fabulous female humanity, I was stupid too! Needless to say, that was the event that solidified my feelings about surprise parties and my refusal to ever throw one for anybody. Ever. No matter what.

I said all of that to say this: Just say "no" to suprise parties. The next time you have to urge to "surprise" someone, at least consider the words of a fellow suprise hater who said this: I"m not much for surprises. Anticipation is more my thing. Anticipation lets you stretch things, build them up, shower properly in advance. Anticipation is a turkey in the oven, long pregnancies, the 12 days of Christmas, spring training. A surprise is one juicy bite, anticipation is a long, splendid feast.