A great article came out in the latest (last?) issue of Climbing magazine, by a badass 49-year-old woman. Climbing usually does not have a lot of content that wows me. Its target audience is not me, a middle-aged female rock climber and parent, who doesn’t climb as much outside as she’d like. Yet. So when I saw what this article was about, I clicked on it immediately. It’s a really good story written by Wendy Williams, who is my age and just sent a sick-hard route in Rifle Mountain Park, Colorado, a climbing area that breeds hardcore climbers– men, women and children alike. Williams wrote this article about what she had to change in her approach to life and climbing in order to get this hard route done. She held my attention for the entire article– I loved her unique and strong voice– until near the end when I read this sentence:
“The send itself is not significant to the climbing world.”
What?!
A 49-year-old woman sent a 5.13d at Rifle– why did she say this? Maybe she is trying to be humble. Instead what I hear is an apology for taking up people’s time and the space in the magazine. I wish the editor of the article would have edited Williams’ defeatist sentence out– the young female editor who had asked Williams to write the article in the first place. And why did she ask Williams to write it? Because the story about what William’s did is significant to the growing number of aging climbers who inhabit the climbing world. Not all climbers are under the age of 33. Not all climbers will be forever young either. I was so disappointed and sad– which at my age manifests as rage– that she wrote that. So I ranted to Brian for a couple of minutes, and then decided to write this.
In the climbing world, women do this ALL. THE. TIME. They constantly diminish their accomplishments if they don’t reach some extreme and elitist measurement. It’s why there are also more climbing videos and movies about men than women, and the women who do make it into the videos sometimes say they aren’t really climbing hard enough to be included. I know this is changing but the language is still out there all over the place. We complain when routes or boulder problems get downgraded (usually by men) when women do them, but then we are just as quick to do exactly the same thing to ourselves. Williams negates her entire article with that one sentence. When women diminish their accomplishments or apologize when what they are doing doesn’t seem to meet some arbitrary standard, they are diminishing what any of the rest of us are doing too. We all need to tell our stories, and I think we all need places to tell them where that kind of a sentence would be eradicated. Ironically, or not, in the same online issue where Williams’ article is found, so is a repost of “Studies Show Women Under-acknowledge Accomplishments,” and two of the tips are “stop self-effacing behavior” and “apologize less.” I would add “stop writing and publishing sentences like, ‘The send itself is not significant to the climbing world.'” Climbing needs to follow its own advice.
I realize that Climbing is there to report the exceptional stories, about exceptional people reaching exceptional high points, but I don’t understand why they can’t also leave more room for more stories about regular people too. Regular people like Williams do some pretty kick ass things all the time. I wish climbing publications could be different. I wish they’d publish more of the stories I’d like to hear, but often they don’t. I read the following quote in a book about the history of walking , and while it’s about books written on mountaineering specifically, I think it speaks into what I’m trying to say here:
The history of mountaineering is about the firsts, the mosts, and disasters, but behind the dozens of famous faces are countless mountaineers whose rewards have been entirely private and personal. What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history– though if often becomes visible as literature (emphasis mine).
Wanderlust: A Short History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit
This quote also speaks into my own purpose of writing a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood– I’m writing climbing literature that “won’t become visible as history” because I’m not climbing hard enough and I’m not famous, but I believe it’s a story that needs to be told. I also am writing this book because there aren’t a lot of these kinds of motherhood memoirs out there, and because I’m having trouble finding any other place where my work fits. I do admit, I haven’t tried very hard to submit to any of my work to rock climbing mags because, even if they accept submissions, their content doesn’t really match up with what I’m writing– more reflective, longer, personal essays than shorter adventure articles or training tips. However, maybe the fact that I’m giving up without really trying is coming from the same place that Wendy Williams’ diminishing statement is. Maybe I just don’t think I’ll measure up either.
The questions remain and we can only answer them for ourselves: How do we tell our stories from a place of humility and yet without apology? How do we stop being so dang hard on ourselves and confidently take our place in the climbing world without asking for permission?
