Vacations are the act of grabbing minutes and hours and days with both hands, stealing against the inevitability of time.
Cold Tangerines
About a year ago or so, I read this quote in a short essay by Shauna Niequist, and it shed some light on the sense of urgency I feel about our family taking trips and in generaly spend as much time together as possible. From the moment I read it, I decided to convice Brian and the boys that we should return to Hueco Tanks. We needed to take a trip together, all four of us, every year. The past couple family trips have been sans Seb. It didn’t feel right.
Hence, this trip back to Hueco Tanks this year.
I’m happy to report, we made it! Brian and I drove the van from Pittsburgh to El Paso in four days without hiccup. In fact, the only hiccup we have had (so far, knock on wood) was driving out of the campground the day before the boys were to arrive in El Paso via American Airlines. More on that later…
We successfully scooped the boys up at the El Paso airport on Sat, Nov 18, and we had six great days in the park and ate a bunch of pizza from Ardivino’s. We climbed together, we explored together, and we argued about all the details of Hueco Tanks we remembered differently from each other. The past few years, I have been writing a lot about some of our escapades to Hueco and returning has been eye opening to the number of details I have held in my mind incorrectly: how to get to certain areas, how to climb certain problems, the variation in the color of the rock. I have some revising to do. We also navigated the park on our own for the first time, without our friends and guides, Paul and April and their kids. Even if some memories are blurry, we know Hueco Tanks, and we found our way to even some of the more remote, hard to find areas on North Mountain without a guidebook: Cave Kiva, the Fox’s Den and Denizen, and Bloodline. I have never eschewed climbing for exploring until this trip, and I am glad I did. Finding hard to reach places and getting back to where we started held a different kind of satisfaction than sending hard boulder problems.
We all came here with different expectations and agendas. Oren had a tick list of climbs he wanted to try, and Seb wasn’t sure he wanted to climb at all. Brian and I were really apprehensive about what climbing here would feel like after five years of aging. We had to find some sort of balance to meet everyone’s needs, to ensure that one or the other of us didn’t end the day completely dissatisfied. That isn’t to say that we didn’t end some of the days without disappointment at all. When you come to a place with high expectations, I think you are bound to be disappointed in some ways. We have done this every visit to Hueco Tanks, and this trip is no exception. My intention with each trip is to come with less and less expectations to mitigate disappointment, but I don’t think it’s possible to do that perfectly.
Anyway, Oren was sick the week before he joined us and didn’t get to the gym to climb at all, so he found the climbing a lot harder than he thought it was going to be. Or, he found himself weaker than he wanted, and he came to the realization that he wasn’t going to be able to do any of the climbs he wanted to this trip. He managed to salvage some sense of accomplishment by trying an easier climb, not on his list but still a classic Hueco Tanks problem: Lobsterclaw.
Seb had a hard couple of weeks of life before leaving, and we wondered whether he was going to make it onto the plane. He came to Hueco with the lowest expectations of all of us, though, and as long as he didn’t have to sit around and watch the rest of us climb and did a bit of climbing himself, he seemed to be satisfied with what he found here. I think he even found some motivation to try to climb more, in case we come back in the future. He was more into exploring and seeing views, so he got what he came here for. We also revisited some out of the way pictographs on a rock art tour, and that hit a sweet spot for all of us. Nothing like a visit to the Tlaloc and Starry Eyed Man.
Climbing-wise, on all the past trips, we learned one thing for certain: the first week of the trip, we will feel weak and will wonder if all our climbing training was for naught. So Brian and I knew, if we were only going to be here for two weeks, we were going to have to have a pretty small tick list. Both of us came here with one problem to throw ourselves at– putting all our eggs in one basket, so to speak– and we are both still throwing ourselves at these problems with two more climbing days to go before we leave. The week with the kids here, we backed off of the amount of time we worked on said problems in order to allocate time to what they wanted to do. Now that they are back home (thank God for Thanksgiving weekend traveling mercies), we can go back to being single-minded. Both of us are still making a bit of progress on our projects each day, thankfully, but neither of us is sure that we will walk away with a send. Being 50 doesn’t mean we can’t still climb hard, it just means that we can’t spend as much time climbing hard as we used to, even in our mid-40s, and recovery takes more time. I usually leave Hueco with a successful tick list of problems I was able to do, so it will be hard for me to leave here without that. Brian is used to it though. Hueco has not been kind to Brian, so I hope for his sake, he sends. He’s close! though he’d say he isn’t.
It felt appropriate to end the time with the kids with a Thanksgiving Day celebration, just us four. We were all thankful for the few days together, even the dark and chilly evenings smashed together in the van to eat dinner and playing games or talking about music or whatever. Next year, we will do it again, somewhere if not at Hueco Tanks.
Stay tuned for sending (or not) news…
