Michael Werner

    A few days ago, I called my rock climbing friend Rich Perch, who lives in Colorado

    “What are you doing inside on a glorious day?” I said without a hello. I was full of the early autumn glory of the east coast.

    “It’s hailing here. And lightening.”

    He’d been climbing in the morning but had retreated to his home in Estes Park in the afternoon.

    I’ve known Rich since I started climbing in 1975. He and Thom Scheuer were then  the rangers at the Gunks, a world-class climbing area in New York’s Hudson Valley. I remember walking down the carriage road beneath the blocky, sheer cliffs, and seeing the two of them in the back of their blue Toyota pick up trucks reading the New York Times, collecting day fees and bantering with climbers. The moment I saw them I knew this was a world I wanted to be a part of.

    Since that first encounter, Rich and I had shared a rope for days at a time, as well as many friends, some of whom, like Thom, had died.

    “Tomorrow is my anniversary,” Rich boasted.

    “You’ve never been married,” I pointed out.

    “Tomorrow is the day of my first climb, forty years ago.” Rich has a list of every climb he has done and with whom.

    I tried to think back to the date of my first climb, now 39 years ago. I can picture the thick, stretchy goldline rope and the cliff itself, a crumbling piece of rock in Huntington, Pennsylvania. I can even smell the hesitant fear I had then at 15, when I was told to fall, to learn to trust the rope.  I can remember the mixture of pleasure and thinking this was crazy all bundled together. I don’t remember the date of that first day at the cliffs, but I know that that fall day draws the line in my life. Before, I was a teenager with energy but no focus, after that day I had a passion that has kept me looking skyward, and led me to climbing areas around the country and overseas.

    It’s not surprising, then, that my first lover was a rock climber. I confess that I remember a lot less about that first time and that the shift before and after was hardly the monumental one I had so imagined.

    I congratulated Rich on 40 years of happy marriage to the cliffs of New York and Colorado, California, Nevada, Arizona.

 

Rich is a funny man, prone to puns, which I actually laugh at. But for a moment his voice became serious. “Listen, I have to tell you something. I learned that Michael Werner killed himself last fall.”

    I waded through twenty-eight years to remember the blond skinny man I fell in love with. For a moment I didn’t know what to say—his suicide didn’t entirely surprise me but his death did.

    Before I met Michael I was half in love with him. I’d grown into climbing on Werner brother stories that made both Michael and his older brother Peter heroic. The grandest feat was Michael’s 150-foot fall at the Gunks. He hit the ground, breaking both legs. But he was still alive. A few weeks later he sawed off his casts and was out climbing. When I met him, I found the way that his long skinny legs bowed particularly sexy.

    I met Michael in Colorado the summer I graduated from high school. My climbing partner, Neil, and I climbed during the day and usually camped out in the Eldorado parking lot, but from time to time we showed up hoping to scrounge a meal or a shower at the house Michael shared with some mutual friends.

    Michael was not immediately taken with me. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure he even liked me. He was older (a worldly 24 to my 18) worked in a tool die factory, smoked, listened to Dire Straits and drank a lot of beer then spouted his political views, which were so far right I thought he must be joking. Or drunk. We didn’t really have much in common except for the climbing. Still, after watching him move on the rock—he had delicate precise footwork—I was smitten.

    I spent my freshman year of college hoping to hear the phone in the hallway ring and then that one of my dorm-mates would tell me it was for me. I fantasized Michael arriving in his wide Buick Wildcat to say we were off to climb in the Black Canyon or nearby in the Garden of the Gods. But he didn’t call until February—I’d given up hope and had found a boyfriend—to ask not for a date but did I want to go to Tuolomne for the summer. I said yes.

    He came down the next weekend and we climbed together. But I didn’t see much of him after that until he called in April to say his car had died, did I mind hitchhiking.

So early June after my sophomore year, Michael and I stuck out our thumbs and headed to Tuolumne Meadows, which rests at 9,000 feet in Yosemite National Park.

    Every morning that summer we hitchhiked to the rounded granite domes that make up the glory of Tuolomne climbing. Hitchhiking was easy because everyone picked us up—mothers alone with their children, tourists from France, other climbers fortunate enough to have a car—because we looked so wholesome and we were (if a bit unwashed). For hours every day we tip toed our way up smooth solid gray rock, testing our finger strength but more our minds that bent with staring at scarce protection and long falls. Michael appeared fearless, taking the sharp end of the rope on fantastic leads. I cheered him on through moves where he hesitated—he was, after all, immortal. His constant play with the edge was not suicidal, it was a celebration of life. He wanted the next hold; he reached for the summit.

     Most days we arrived back at our tent with just enough energy to cook a meal and crawl into our sleeping bags. Back in Boulder, Michael often drank too much, but there in the mountains we didn’t want (and couldn’t afford) beer. I don’t think I have ever been so physically satisfied or openly happy. By the end of the summer we were both scrawny and strong, and climbing hard. And in love. With climbing.

    We both kept journals, writing every morning over coffee, and for Michael a cigarette or three, at our camp table. At the end of the summer we agreed to swap, an idea no therapist would think good for any relationship. Mine was filled with meditations on my love for Michael played out through the rope that kept us bound on the rock. I wrote with all of the obvious, juicy metaphors between climbing and love—the commitment it took, the patience, the ability to anticipate when Michael would move up or fall and my ability to catch him if he did. I literally held his life in my hands and I found this glorious. But really, my journal was mostly filled with an overwhelming self-satisfaction, a dreadful ego that perhaps a young climber needs but that I would rather never claim. To read that journal now is pure embarrassment.

     I peeled apart Michael’s notebook and read his neat handwriting. Climbs listed by name and grade, his fear, some drama, some humor. He was a good writer, a good story teller, spare and crisp. My name didn’t appear once.

     That fall, I came undone in college. My studies (Nietzsche’s overman!) and the climbing collided so that when I went home at Christmas I didn’t want to go back. It was easy to blame some of my problems on Michael and so I did and so the relationship ended. The love of my life lasted for a year.

 

Michael killed himself. What do you do when you learn that someone you loved, someone you have not spoken to for 28 years has died? A silent sadness lodged in me as I thought of how unhappy he must have been in this world. I spent one frantic night trying to learn more, wondering how he died, did he perhaps jump and fall, a final plummet to the earth that shattered more than his legs? There is no reason I need to know this, and my quest implies that a death by falling would somehow make this sad end more noble or right. It would not.

    I’m reading the Inferno for the first time. The suicides are there, in the 7^th circle of hell. When Virgil encounters the dead what they want is to be remembered to those still alive. So this is what I can do: remember Michael, the way his long skinny legs stepped high for a hold, the California sky blue, his smile punctuated by a Marlboro that greeted me on those thin belay ledges. What I can remember is that in that summer of climbs we shared a love that for me has lasted a lifetime.