Leave a Trace
By Lance Garland
As the horizon reveals itself in shades of ocher and tangerine gas, my surroundings slowly come into focus. We’ve been climbing by the light of our headlamps for hours. Back home, my life has been rendered unrecognizable. I’ve been in the dark and wanting to give up this climb for weeks. Only my childlike wonder moves my footsteps higher.
I can’t see the summit, only the headlights of my rope-team partners, who are for the most part strangers. Alone on Mount Rainier, in a drastically shifting life, never did I think that I’d be climbing a volcano with grief fueling my footsteps. I’m not that kind of guy. This was supposed to be a victory climb, a childhood dream come true. Now, it just feels like a casualty of youth, what little is left.
My team-lead is slow, and the pace makes it hard to stay warm. Is it the altitude that makes everything he says frustrate me? We’re only at 11,000 feet, almost 4,000 feet of nearly vertical terrain to go.
He stops abruptly, waits for us to gather. “I think it’s time for a break.”
I’ve only barely begun to feel warm again from the last break. Slowly, and with great effort, he takes off his pack, opens it, removes his down jacket, puts it on, pulls out a tightly packed bag, unfurls it, pulls out an energy bar, peels it open, and begins to take his first bite. The rest of the team has already eaten their snacks and gathered their things. Our fearless leader is only halfway through his bar. The third rope-partner and I put our packs back on, hoping to encourage him to continue. He doesn’t seem to notice. My teeth start hitting each other, frigid and angry. In laborious fashion, he begins his ritual in reverse, taking care to stow everything perfectly in his pack before picking his ice axe back up and finally asking, “Are you guys ready to— ”
“Yes,” we both state emphatically, stepping forward with our words.
I’m frustrated because the team in front of us is breaking away. I should be on that team. The alpine wind is gaining momentum so I zip up my hood. I’m frustrated from more than this climb. No matter how hard I labor, no matter the amount of my passion, I can’t seem to grasp the elusive thing I seek. Back home, most of my colleagues are married, have children. My life is nowhere near where I thought it would be by this point. What’s wrong with me?
In my culture, the ability to get married is a new concept, a right that we’re still learning to believe possible. For the first year of our relationship, my lover, Bastian, told me how much he longed to get married, to have kids. We even named our future children. Things were aligning perfectly, same needs, same desires. He even allowed me the space to be my adventurous self, was my emotional support as I attempted to become Seattle’s only openly gay fireman. I was in awe of his love and it seemed the lasting kind.
In Paris, his romanticized city, a city I had only just walked in for the first time, I proposed to him on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim bridge over the River Seine, the Eiffel Tower so close one could almost reach out and touch it. The stuff of storybooks. With a hired photographer to snap the surprise moment, I asked Bastian to marry me by reciting a bespoke poem for the occasion. In my hands, a box, not big enough for a finger, big enough for a hand, a hand I’d wrap a promise with, my time. A designer piece with the inscription, Prorsum, Latin for “Forward.” I had finally found the man I would get on one knee for.
He didn’t give me an answer.
We smiled and played the gracious kind, as the photographer escorted us about the city of love in his small sedan, taking pictures in all the most iconic places to commemorate the day. At the Charles de Gaulle airport, Bastian called his mother and sister, and told them that I had proposed. For a brief moment in time, although he had not said the word, it seemed we were engaged.
But as we flew out of that city of romance, there was something in his hesitation that told of things to come. I looked away, in hope, in constrained patience, in a blind reach toward my dreams.
Many great writers have a chosen city. To my mentors, Salter and Hemingway and Kerouac, Paris was that city. But Paris refused to requite me. It was the rugged city of Lisbon, my chosen city. The city that chose me. Lisbon held my face as I raced through its stone streets, searching desperately for the nepenthe to my sorrow. Portugal gave me that antidote. I was only there because, as a doctor, Bastian travelled the world, attending conferences to teach and learn the newest life-saving techniques. Lisbon was never before on my radar. Here I was in a legendary city, almost by accident. He worked while I explored a city with a deep past. On the banks of the Tagus River I ran, yearning for something that sent so many of their original explorers to sea: a future, the possibilities of dreams.
Through the saline air I ran, a half marathon of touring, when I came upon a shop that called me into it. Sweaty and out of breath I browsed the vacant shop. A kind look from the attendant—that familiar and rare reflection—and soon we both wandered the life of the artist Abel Grade. He uses light and movement in his paintings to create a living picture. I was inspired by one painted tile in particular, with a yellow funicular in a city-lit night. I assured her I’d return to purchase the tile, and we walked out of the studio together.
On the wall outside, a memorial with what looked like the word placement of a poem on it. My eyes lingered. The woman, with those kind, gray eyes, asked if she could translate the Portuguese for me. My lips turned upward in affirmation.
“The poet is giving thanks. Fully thankful in being, which reaches thanks from the pain that he really feels.” The merchant woman places a hand on the back of my arm. “Pessoa lived in the apartment above this studio during 1917.” She moved her hand to the bronze tile on the wall. “There is a bookstore where you could buy an English version…”
A day later Bastian and I explored the castles of Sintra. We met the artist Lanca Semedo while on the descent from the colorful Pena Palace. I bought a painting of the Alfama district in downtown Lisbon as he whispered, “Art depends on the viewer, it can be beautiful or tragic depending on the perspective.” He said it almost under his breath to no listener in particular.
Later, I found the store recommended by the merchant woman. I bought the book, Lisbon Poets, in which I found Pessoa’s “Autopsychography.” The translator had a much different view of the meaning of the poem than the lady in the art shop. Instead of the word “thankful” being used repeatedly, the defining word of the poem to this man was “pretender.”
Was I being thankful for what I was experiencing, even after a proposal without a yes, or was I simply pretending?
On my solitary rambling, through the city that gave my heart solace, I decided that my interpretation of the poem, of life, was like the merchant woman’s. It was not my method to pretend. I would be wholeheartedly myself, and I would be thankful for anything that I received, anything that continued.
It was only later on that journey, on Portugal’s golden beaches, that he said it was a maybe. In the Algarve, we found a way to love beyond our expectations, and it was there that our relationship peaked in the Atlantic sunbeams, salt, and brown-sugar sand.
We spent two years postulating after that, and we continued to travel. He asked me if I wanted to go to Patagonia, said that seemed more my style, a rugged terrain on the edge of Earth. Somehow it seemed a fitting place to reveal to us what we meant to each other, how far we would go for the other. On the shores of Last Hope Sound, in a hotel that resembled a hobbit house, I asked him if he had thought any more of my proposal.
“This is not the place to talk about that.” His words, embittered and costly. A warning to keep away from such a prized and guarded place. I receded far away from him. It seemed we were the only people for miles.
We tramped around Chilean Patagonia, driving across its dirt roads to cross the border to Argentina. The customs shack had an adorable golden lab that shat on its linoleum floors. No one cleaned it up. It was a handsome premonition of our future together. We had a golden retriever puppy waiting for us back home. It was the biggest commitment he could give, becoming a dog dad.
But for now, we had to cross this border, and the Argentine agent was not keen to let us into his country. It took him many a prodding from the young attendant to even come to the front desk. We waited more than an hour. When he finally arrived, hungover and red with fury, there was a palpable threat in his every mannerism.
We made it past the border, driving dirt roads to nowhere. In the midst of an austere landscape, marked only by the occasional herd of sheep, Bastian and I drove for hours. We were deep in the wilderness, lost in it. When the brilliant emerald waters of Lago Argentine came into view we felt the thrill once again of being found, and the color revived in our eyes, and something deep therein rekindled.
A few days later we were back in Chile, under the cathedral mountains of the Towers in Torres Del Paine. I decided there that I would indeed live my dream to climb mountains. In that spiritual moment under those towering stones, I came to the understanding that I was finally ready to climb.
Back home in Seattle, as I began to research climbing schools, I mused whether it was better to walk away from my life with Bastian, but something kept me there. Perhaps it was my history of running away that stayed me, and my desire to move beyond my previous limitations. Perhaps I was creating a new map for my life. Perhaps true love stays. I told myself that even if Bastian ultimately decided that he didn’t want a future with me, at least I could learn how to have a healthy relationship. No one knows the future, so I practiced patience, and a deep gratefulness for this present moment. As I began my yearlong course with a local mountaineering organization, I told myself that my dreams were possible. I would climb toward them.
The training was challenging. People kept dropping out of the program. Months went by. Bastian’s and my relationship went on autopilot. In my awareness of the present, I began to realize that I was becoming a fixture, something reliable in his life, but not fully seen. We were living the life of a long-married couple, but there was no commitment. In flagrant attempts to wake him up, I asked him to focus on us, to be together. There was always an excuse. Work was demanding. He would get around to it. But I began to see his excuses as aversions. Were these aversions also my own? I fell back to the Portugal dilemma: was I thankful, or had I started pretending?
I’ve always disdained being forced to do anything, and I spurn ultimatums, but I needed an answer. A major character flaw of mine: this disdain for ultimatums that I end up giving. I asked him to describe what I was to him, what future he saw with me in his life.
A few weeks before my Rainier climb, Bastian truncated our relationship. He was finally able to say he did not see a future with me in it. With such perfect, ill timing, I moved two hours away from the home Bastian bought in Seattle, into a cottage on an island that was supposed to be our retreat from the city, a house whose previous owner had recently killed himself because he lost his lifelong love. He was only sixty. “They didn’t tell you?” my new neighbor asked with a grief-stricken face. The scars of that love were written through the remains of my new home: the whole house reeked of nicotine, door frames cracked and scraped from a walker of a wife on her long road out of this life, a brand-new bathroom floor amongst faucets of fixtures falling apart. The other neighbor was still scarred by the actions of the previous owner. “He shot himself,” practically whispered out of the mouth of a recent widower, who wondered aloud if we are all destined for such a fate. And here I was, a first-time homebuyer, heartbroken myself, in a home with a history, a history as recent and raw as my breakup. In those first lonely nights—clutching my dog on a lone mattress in an empty room—I begged the resident ghosts to have mercy on me, because I too was grief-stricken. For better or for worse, I was staying in the campsite they abandoned.
To cope, I joked with myself that I moved into Hemingway’s final home, and as a writer it was my job to turn that box full of bullshit into something beautiful, for me, for my ex, and for the previous tenant and his wife.
Only a few months before we were in New Zealand. In Christchurch, the devastation from a past earthquake still visible six years after the quake. It is strange that a different quake from 2011 was still felt in our lives. Much like the Christchurch quake, there was a lost love, a great devastation that created the conditions where Bastian and I exist today.
Before I knew how to love myself, I fell in love with a gregarious man who garnered the affection of those he encountered. But Orion didn’t love himself either. From the start, we were a spiraling dance of comets, careening through the night, coming closer together, pushing each other apart. He was my first true love. “You and me versus the world,” he promised. I relinquished control. Our passion burned brightly, and there was much risk. After a year and a half together, and having just moved into a new apartment together, he left me at the start of a snowstorm. Sporadically, he would return. Months went by. He swore I was the only one, that we just couldn’t live together right then. But the borrowed car wasn’t his. I knew there was another. They say that we accept the love we think we deserve. I accepted and gave all manner of disrespect and belittlement mingled with passion, but I finally said goodbye to Orion. Some years later, he came to me looking for a nepenthe for his heartache. He told me all about Bastian. As he told the story, I put all the missing puzzle pieces into their places. Unknowingly, he confessed that Bastian was the one he was seeing all those months while I lived alone in the apartment we moved into together. Bastian was the one Orion left me for.
The last stop in New Zealand was Kaikoura, a desolate place of catastrophe from another earthquake just weeks before. We were barely able to get there, driving roads that crumbled to dust below us and nearly broke our rental car in half. There in the destruction, in a vacant tourist town, we spent our last night overseas. New Zealand was our last international trip together. The roads washed into the sea.
On the final night together, sitting in the house I helped refashion, I asked Bastian, “Why did you pursue me so fervidly if you weren’t sure. You knew I wasn’t open to you. After Orion—” the frustration muddled my thoughts and words. “I wasn’t in that place. You have no idea how hard it was for me to find the forgiveness in my heart in order to open myself up to loving you. And now, you break up with me.” My words barely audible between the quivering tumult. The sifting of two storylines into one. You only ever see the true story from the end. If great love does indeed grow from deep sorrow, my soul is fertile for its roots.
“I’m so sorry,” is all he could say. With little ceremony, he abdicated my love, our life together.
The next day, the great birch tree in his backyard fell. He said to write that down, a poetic finish. It said all that we could not.
The night before the climb of my childhood-dream volcano, I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s How To Love—a gift given by a concerned friend after returning from Paris, and the aftermath of the unrequited proposal. As I, she too was a remnant of Orion’s life, now made Bastian’s. I am now a remnant of both.
The book spoke of loving lightly, and letting go of those not meant for you, of leaving no impact and other noble pursuits in life. This was the second time I read this, and I returned to it hoping to find some wisdom in the uncertainty.
Although I respect its edicts of letting go, I find an all too similar point of connection in its philosophy and my ex-lovers. The book says to let go if it doesn’t work perfectly. My lovers let go because it didn’t feel right.
As I slowly put this broken house back together, alone, nothing feels right. I wonder how many times I’ll put someone else’s house back together again, only to have to leave. The last time I was alone on a mattress on the floor was when Orion left me for Bastian. Hemingway and the last tenant come to mind. Heartbreak multiplied. Heartbroken, heartsick, a single man living in a two-bedroom... This has happened before.
As I stand on the edge of this volcano, nothing feels right, and yet, I still climb.
Orion said he couldn’t be with me because I want to get married, that I live in a fantasy world. It’s true, for years I wanted to get married while it wasn’t legal. I fought for our right to get married. Not one moment of that felt right. Bastian said he couldn’t see a future with me because I want children and he wasn’t sure this is a world that supports two dads raising kids. But few parts of my experience as a gay man in this world have felt supportive. And yet I persist. We persist.
This climb doesn’t feel comfortable. Just because I can’t see the summit doesn’t mean it’s not there. I bristle at the idea that things come naturally to everyone. My life has been a struggle and upward battle against forces greater than I. The idea that things will simply fall into place and feel right, to me, is an idea riddled with privilege. Things don’t just happen. We have to act. We have to try. And we can’t do it alone. The cleanup doesn’t come easy. It doesn’t feel nice. I would never have loved Bastian were it not for the hard cleanup from the aftermath of Orion. In the alpine landscapes of my heart, I have much stewardship to do if I am to attempt a summit with another.
At basecamp, by the ranger station at Camp Schurman last evening, I imagined a man who will reach the summit with me. As prayer flags rippled with the wind, and a trio of hummingbirds flitted about in the alpine air, the idea struck a chord within me. Maybe it’s not just about one peak, but the ability to keep climbing, because there are many peaks.
On the summit of Mount Rainier, the wind angrily rages. The newborn sun blinds the eye. My imagination had me expecting grand vistas, epic sights, but from this height, the most notable features are the few other volcanoes, sitting in their solitude, spread out in their towering loneliness. The view from up here is desolate, otherworldly. It seems a place of deep meditation, a plane between space. What I thought would be a crowd of jubilant people, instead is a mass of exhausted faces, leaning downward, shoulders heavy. Instead of lingering at the top, most climbers hurriedly leave the summit, more than happy to begin the descent.
At the climax of my relationship with Bastian, he whispered these words to me: “Until you, every breakup I’ve had was because of substance or abuse. I didn’t know people could breakup from a healthy relationship.” With all the heartache from that finality, I can, at least, take solace in the fact that I’ve left a person in a better state than I found them, that I too am left in a better state than before. Perhaps, instead of leaving no trace, we can try to leave the campground better than we found it. Leaving no trace simply isn’t good enough for our generation, good enough for our relationships, or for the earth. So much damage has already been done. So much baggage and trash are already strewn about our lives.
It’s not about the peak, entirely, but also about the exhausted moments where you stop to take a break, to see a view you might never see again: the first birth of light from sunrise, a stray comet whose tail lights up the night and that you alone notice, the morning star far behind, white glacier burning pink at dawn. Those were more beautiful than the summit to me. It’s about the waypoints at base camp, where you pick up other people’s trash, and strangers tie down your tent when the wind is raging and you’re not there to do it yourself. It’s about overcoming your own capabilities, pushing past the hardest moments of your life, and continuing still, not just for yourself, but for everyone else on your rope-team.
It’s not just about a relationship highlighted by travels through Europe, Patagonia, and the islands of the Pacific; treks through far-off mountains, jungles, and beaches; adventures by sailboat, seaplane, and horseback. But it was as much about the mundane days, habitude and home-cooked meals, moments of fragility, vulnerability, moments where breakthroughs happen, of growth because of deep forgiveness, of hard-working love.
And it’s not just about the summit, but also the long way down, the long way out. And it’s not just about this climb.
Maybe loving is about being a good steward, one who doesn’t own, but rather cares for as long as they are able to. Because it’s not my mountain, it was their house before I moved in, and he was never my man, although I’ll always be a part. In all this change, I’ll try to leave my trace—a cleaner campsite, loving memories for those whose path I cross, and words that may last longer than my footsteps. I can only hope to contribute in such a way: to love with gratefulness, not to pretend, and to honor the days. My first mountain taught me that.
There are always other mountains, and maybe, just beyond this vantage point, is someone who wants to climb them.
About the Author:
While Lance fights fire in Seattle, climbs the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and sails the Salish Sea, he writes. He is the author of ITINERANT, an e-book adventure series on Amazon and a forthcoming podcast in 2020. His writing has appeared in OUTSIDE, MOUNTAINEER, and THE STRANGER, who listed his essay, “Assaulted and Silenced,” as The Best American Journalism of 2018. He is a finalist for the 2019 International Book Award in LGBT fiction and a finalist for Memoir Magazine’s 2019 Essay Contest. He resides with his fiancé and two dogs in Seattle WA.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.