009 — Bluegrass

and how it nearly got me killed.

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He walked out of the pub lips still wet.

“Didn’t think you were coming with us…!” Gentle ribbing. We’ve all just watched him make out with the girl who does open mic nights.

Consternation. “Well, she didn’t invite me back...”

“You need to stay longer.”

We’re down at a pub in Jericho in Oxford and I’m talking to a neighbour, a new friend. He lives on my road but we’ve never had much occasion to chat. I only met him once before, last summer back when our village pub was still open. He beat Joel at chess.

He told me he used to work as a brewer at a local brewery.

“The one with the face?”

“Yeah, the Green Man. Good knowledge.”

He used to work 12-hour days, 6:30 to 6:30, mixing the wheat with the malt and laying it into casks. He got a raise at the same time as he quit, saying he didn’t want to be a brewer for the rest of his life.

He told me he’s going climbing next month. He just started getting into it.

I said, you’ve got the build for it. Then, self-conscious and guilty: this is flirting in climbers’ language.

He said it’s interesting how people climb differently depending on their build.

I said, yeah, like I bet you like steep, overhanging, shoulder-y stuff.

He laughed, how did you know?

“It’s obvious.” I shrugged. “Whereas I like slabby, vertical, technical climbs with little finger holds.”

“Ah, you’re one of the lizard people!” he said, and I laughed.

We’re at this pub where the carpenter’s band plays a regular set (remember my carpenter friend from the pub committee?).

I’ve heard they’re great and I’m sold from the off when their first song is a cover of Down Home Girl by Old Crow Medicine Show. I can sing all the lyrics. I know those words, hell I even quoted them before in Town and Country.

I can tell from your giant step you’ve been walking through the cotton fields.

I’m singing along, bouncing, oblivious to the rest of the well-behaved pub. I can feel people watching me, but I just dance. It’s such a tune.

Listening to this music, with that peculiar finger tapping against the glass, leg-stomping rocking shuffle that goes so well with bluegrass, I told Helen it’s the only music that ever made me want to learn an instrument.

Bluegrass transports me. It takes me back.

It nearly got me killed once.

Let me explain.

To explain, I have to go back.

I’m on Tioga Pass in California. It’s August 2008, a few weeks before Burning Man.¹

My friend Carson and I are at the Mobil Mart in Lee Vining, drinking mango margaritas from plastic cups and twirling on the grass. I’m wearing a long skirt that cost me a dollar from the thrift store. Up at the flagpole, we’ll sleep on the open grass later, next to Carson’s car, two among many other bodies on the lawn.

You can’t miss summer Thursdays at the Mobil Mart in the Eastern Sierra. It’s an institution, absolutely essential. It’s music, on the lawn of a gas station, at the back entrance to Yosemite. They do a grill too, fish tacos and burgers — and mango margaritas.

When I lived in the area, every week featured a bluegrass band, more or less well-known, doing covers of Doc Watson, The Osborne Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs — and more modern stuff too: Old Crow and Devil Makes Three and Bonnie Raitt, and their own stuff.

It was a Thursday. One of my favourite local bands, the Rusty Strings, were playing live bluegrass at the Mobil that night. I had looked forward to it for a month.

During the day, I went climbing in Tuolumne Meadows up in Yosemite. That wasn’t unusual. I went climbing every day. It’s why I lived there.

Everything was connected over that day, climbing and falling and dropping into place like some enormous joke that was too big to see the edges, too big for a punchline.

First, we were at the crag and I couldn’t get up it.

“It’s only 5.9. What the hell?”

“It’s old school 5.9. That means stout.”²

I watched my buddies climb. Chris flew up it.

Watching people climb made me think of this line from my favourite Josh Ritter song:

Clouds climb the mountains without strings.³

You want the strings when you’re climbing — even if you don’t want to need them.

I was starting to be interested in Chris, out of spite, borne out of a vague feeling that I’m not getting enough attention from Lonnie, the guy I was seeing. No text messages from him all day.

Sitting chatting to another friend in the sun, we watched a scrub-jay beg for crumbs.

“It’s lost.”

“It’s not lost.”

“It looks lost.”

“It’s a bird. Birds don’t get lost.”

“Well, it looks lost.”

“It’s not lost. And if it is, it can just fly up and see where it is.”

When Chris came down, I wanted another go. I tried, again and again, but I couldn’t get up that damn climb.

Eventually, fingertips shredded, I gave up.

Because of my repeated attempts, we were late leaving the crag. On the hike out, I worried we’d be late for music down at the Mobil. What a fail of a day that would be.

We waited in the Meadows for a pal who wanted to come hear the music. He was going to drive us — and he was late too. I was super impatient and wanted to get going.

The band will be starting soon.

Waiting at a picnic table, knitting, I met a self-proclaimed “biblically aware” girl. She was knitting too and said she was an “early Christian”. I asked what that meant and she said, no possessions. She was making socks and told me she used to be like me. I didn’t know what she meant by that: what was I like?

I checked my phone again — still nothing from Lonnie — and felt a fool.

On the way out of Tuolumne, still no texts.

The day before I’d said to Carson: “I don’t know how to tell him I like him in a cool way.”

She blinked. “I don’t think anyone was ever in love in a cool way.”

The sky was pink and blue as we slid under the columns of the Dana Plateau, and the light fading along the lines of loose rockslides beneath us. I was in the passenger seat, not driving.

It was the RV in front of us that did it.

It was going so slowly, picking its way down the highway that skirts Lee Vining canyon from Tioga Pass.

Tioga Pass is a pretty famous road: famously deadly. It’s the highest mountain pass in California just shy of 10,000 feet and most months of the year it’s closed, under drifts of snow thirty feet deep. The road doesn't open until the snows melt each year and the plows can get through — often not until late May or June. In some years, not until July.

People die on it — and die falling off it — almost every year.

To quote dangerous roads.org:

There are no guard rails along most of the drive, so if you go off the road, it's a thousand-foot drop down the side of the mountain.

We crawled along behind the RV. Goddamn it, we’re going to miss the Rusty Strings, I thought. I wanted to be there so much, kicking up my heels and spinning with Carson. I wanted to up and fly down that valley, no strings, like a jay on a downdraft.

Our buddy decided to try to get past the RV. He moved out to pass on a double yellow just as the tires failed to grip. We skidded and he turned the car sharply in towards the mountain, away from the drop off the edge of the road.

Lonnie said we had spirits watching us that day but I don’t know anything about that.

When we rolled, I wondered whether I would feel the release of gravity for a second when we shot off the side of the canyon — the release climbers seek. I saw the scree slide descending thousands of feet to the valley floor, rent with boulders big as houses. I wondered if it would hurt more to land with my eyes open or shut.

I wondered if anyone would know we were hurrying to catch live bluegrass at the Mobil Mart. Bluegrass, bury me under it.

Pissed at the thought that I wouldn’t get to finish the gloves I was knitting. Desperate for the feel of another person, answered by hands on me.

We had stopped moving. Wished I’d paid more attention. What goes through your head when you think you might die?

Nothing was moving. Dust in my eyes and mouth. Sitting sideways, hanging from the seatbelt. The glass of the window was demolished and grit was in my mouth. It must be the glass, I thought, then realised it was my chipped tooth.

We were in the outside lane, car on its side, but still on the road. We hadn’t launched the canyon’s edge. We’d all be dead if we had — final scene Thelma-and-Louise style, deader than dead.

The second we stopped moving, Chris reached to touch me.

“Is everyone ok? Jill, are you ok?”

“I’m fine.” My voice sounded normal. Silence from them. Nobody moving.

I imagined a sudden fireball. “Guys, don’t you think we should get out of here?” Imagine if we survived rolling three times on Tioga Pass only to burst into flames.

Kicking rocks by the side of the road, sitting, crying, shaking. The woman in the RV was hysterical. She thought we were all dead.

But we were all fine, walking around. My shoulder was bruised and tooth chipped — still chipped — but otherwise fine.

The driver examined the wreckage of his car. All I wanted was a ride down the mountain to the music.

The lady in the RV obliged, still gibbering. She couldn’t believe we were all fine.

I made it down the road in time for the second half of the set.

The next day, Lonnie called me.

“That was you?!”

Yes.

“I could see the whole thing. We were climbing up on Tioga cliff. I could see the ambulance and the blue lights and all the cars stopped. I can’t believe that was you.”

It was.

“I think the spirits were looking out for you.”

Lonnie is descended from the Yosemite Valley natives. I don’t know why the spirits of his great-grandmothers would give a shit about an Irish-Russian white girl — but I’m grateful to be here either way.

The constant presence of death in the mountains is unnerving.

Back then, I lived in a tiny village on the edge of Yosemite. One day in summer, a sous-chef from the restaurant topped himself in the mountains above town. The guy who works in the fly shop was out mountain biking the trails under the ski resort when he saw him hanging in a tree. He’d been in the coffee shop where I worked that morning. I made him a sandwich to take biking.

Climbers peel off crags all the time. When you get good enough at something, you want to hurt yourself trying to get even better. You want to get inducted into arcane secrets of the trade and become willing to test out obscure advice to improve even minutely.

There is a level of despair when your body limits further progress.

I remember ripping calluses, chunks of flesh clean off, to the point of exposing muscle layers on the fleshy under-lobes of my fingers.

A friend smiled and shook his head when I told him I moisturise my hands with shea butter.

“Nope, it’s all about pork fat.”

“What?”

“Yeah, what you do is buy a block in the shop. What’s it called? Lard, yeah, thats it. Then you mix it with some Vitamin E oil in one of those little jam pots you get free on planes or something, then stick it in your fridge.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, cuz all those vegetable oils, your body doesn’t know how to process them. But pigs are like 85% genetically identical to us and the fat just gets soaked right in. I swear, your fingers’ll be like leather in a week. I reckon pork’s the best, but it’s a running debate. Apparently Chris Sharma rubs his fingers on fried chicken skin. And he’s a vegan!”

This is the problem, eventually. If you define your life by what your body can achieve, by what rocks and mountains you can get up and down, sooner or later, the flesh will stop being willing. Some calamity — accident, injury — will stop you. When that happens, you need to be able to take solace in intellectual pursuits.

Or despair.

The night of the car accident, after the gig, up at the flagpole, there was more music, more fiddles. Some guy started chatting me up, a visiting Scot from Edinburgh. He and I fell asleep with arms round each other. Just friends, but it felt nice to have options.

I left California shortly after that to go do a Masters in London. I thought it was time to exercise my brain. It was September 2008.

Grappling with whether to stay or go, I confided in a friend (and one-time lover), a climber from Idaho named Vic who lived in Bishop.

“Well, it’s a selfish life. We all come here to play. Sounds like it’s just not enough for you any more.”

I thought about my climbing gear thrown out of the car, torn and scattered down the mountain like old prayer flags. I thought about the sous-chef in the tree. I thought about Lonnie, and all the other men I loved in the mountains. Surely, they’d never love me the way I needed.

So I left. There are no right decisions or wrong decisions, only pebbles in the river and the decisions that make our lives what they become.

I feel glad in this life to have known how it feels to drink a mango margarita in the soft high alpine desert and dance barefoot on wet grass. To listen to banjo and fiddle spar under granite crags. To know that while I dance in summer, the mountains above still bear snow in shaded places.

The mountains are waiting, always waiting.

Last Friday, listening to my friend play bluegrass down at the pub in Jericho, I missed California like a weight in my chest. Watching my neighbour with plans to pack in the day job and go climbing, I remembered what’s it like to circulate free and easy. I felt a solid iron ache for the mountains and the Mobil and dancing in a long skirt after a day of climbing.

Nonsense, I told myself. You’re not 23 anymore and it’s not so cute sleeping on the grass at 38.

But still I ached.

The music at the pub played on and Helen shoulder-surfed some woman who was looking at her phone.

“She was just looking at plant pots. Who does that in a pub?”

Later, I looked up and the woman was scrolling a page full of ears. I think it was about ear piercing.

I wanted to tell her, put down your goddamn phone and dance, for the moment that’s in it.

At the end, everyone was filing out to catch the bus back to our village.

The carpenter raised an arm to salute us as we left, even as he kept playing.

Gotta find ways to keep playing.

After all, the grass is always bluer — but the bluest grass is 23 in the mountains.

— Pair this piece with Doc Watson, Shady Grove.

Here’s the car after the crash, and the place it happened:

A few weeks before the crash, up on Tioga cliff. The crash was on the road in the background: the horizontal line across the far mountain.

And this was the car.

1. That year, the theme of Burning Man (a.k.a. Vegas for hippies) was the American Dream. I worked mornings in the central coffee shop to pay for my ticket and got given my Burning Man name by a boy and his father buying hot chocolates. That name was Cloud and our camp was No Strings Attached — because clouds climb the mountains without strings.

2. From the Wiki entry on the Yosemite Decimal System:

“In the 1950s, members of the Rock Climbing Section of the Sierra Club's Angeles Chapter divided Class 5 into Classes 5.0 to 5.9. At that time, people thought a 5.9 was the hardest climb a person could do. In the 1960s, as people got better at rock climbing, and as rock climbing equipment got better, Class 5.9 climbs became easier for some people to do. Classes of 5.11, 5.12, and 5.13 were added to classify harder climbs.”

Which makes me feel marginally better that I couldn't get up that old school Tuolumne 5.9.

3. Post-facto editorial: I just learned that this lyric is actually “clouds clung to mountains without strings”, which I guess works too. Meaning no disrespect to the unparalleled lyrical genius of Josh Ritter, but I prefer my version.