MY LIFE OF FIRST ASCENTS

WHETHER YOU CLIMB BIG MOUNTAINS OR JUST DREAM OF DISCOVERING NEW ROUTES, THERE’S AN ALLURE TO PUTTING YOURSELF INTO A LANDSCAPE – REAL OR IMAGINED.

BY LEATH TONINO

that little has changed over three decades. In an alley between my local supermarket and my local liquor store, a pipe protruding from a brick building dribbles a weird, gross, yellowtinted fluid. During summer, this fluid creates only a dark stain, but during winter—damn! A hidden gem of an ice climb! An intricate, daunting, six-foot monster that no human has successfully surmounted! Friday afternoons, en route to a beer purchase, I find myself transfixed by frozen details. No, I don’t pull actual Lego knights from my pocket and strap crampons to their blocky boots (they’re already wearing helmets, duh), but something related does occur in my psyche. Five minutes will pass— focused minutes of front-pointing and crux-puzzling, intense minutes of burning lungs and dizzying exposure— before I recall the sixer still in need of buying.

Washburn right now, the famous Alaska Range photographer and mountaineer, good, because there’s definitely a parallel: Snyder scrutinizes Fan K’uan’s scroll for belay stations in the manner that eager, youthful alpinists scrutinize Washburn’s black-and-white prints prior to attempting untried ridges and faces. “Climbers take pleasure in gazing on ranges from a near distance and visualizing the ways to approach and ascend,” Snyder writes. Whether we’re dealing with the elemental range or the two-dimensional image, this gazing remains a constant. Likewise for the pleasure it engenders.

Okay, putting artsy stuff aside, I want to briefly mention another hobby of mine: Legos. Throughout my childhood in the Champlain Valley, I enjoyed nothing so much as taking plastic figurines into the micro-wilds of the backyard, and then leading them—or rather having them lead me—on multi-pitch epics. A low boulder becomes Half Dome. A flagstone retaining wall in winter becomes the Eiger’s Nordwand. And the mailbox on its gargantuan post becomes K2, deadliest of Himalayan peaks.

I am unashamed to report

What all this amounts to is, as mentioned earlier, the love of landscape, the love of envisioning elegant lines through complex terrain. It’s a truism that we dinky humans engage giant mountains to feel small and—simultaneously, paradoxically—to feel huge with that smallness, as though insignificance itself were a kind of soulexpanding drug. A feeling, yes, that’s what this is all about: a feeling that can be felt in Patagonia and the Karakoram, but also in in the artsy armchair, the dribbly alley, and a million other underappreciated “Great Ranges” of the nearby, the everyday, the beneath-yournose.

Despite my dashing, heroic expeditions in China and beyond, I remain a humble, self-effacing Yankee. So please, don’t take it as braggadocio when I say that my life of first ascents is just beginning, just starting to crank. An unremitting fascination with the topographical world drives me onward, ever onward. Honestly, I can’t help but order books of landscape paintings via interlibrary loan, lean forward, reach high—and send.

Vermont writer and contributing editor Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections, most recently The West Will Swallow You (Trinity University Press, 2019). A version of this essay appeared in Adventure Journal.