A Remembrance of My Favorite Crag Dog
This article originally appeared on Climbing
We sat on a ledge 300 feet above the valley floor. It was late summer, and the grass and leaves flitted around us in drafts of hot, humid air. The ground fell off below my feet into a gaping rictus, tree branches jutting out one after the other in a downward current before reaching into the black asphalt highway at the base. A thin river gushed on the other side of the road, frothing white and bubbly. Above us, the rock was red and crumpled. It folded upwards in a series of horizontal bands. Everything seemed to be colliding into itself, a steady melt. Odell and I rested in the burgeoning shade.
A static line old and frayed billowed out in the air around us, a giant parenthesis tucking us in and extracting us from the outside world. She panted, and I breathed deeply.
At 23-years-old, I had won multiple lead climbing National Championships. I had placed as high as seventh as several Lead World Cup competitions. But in my last year on the international World Cup circuit, I started having panic attacks in the gym. I'd feel them coming on, these rising tidal waves. Suddenly, the air from the room would rush out. My heart would be pounding, hands trembling, senses rushing. Desperate and catastrophic and totally at a loss for words, I'd sit on the floor with my eyes closed. Fellow climbers tried to console me and soon enough, I'd feel far away from myself.
Odell was my grounding. She was a purebred miniature Australian shepherd, a handsome little creature, with patches of fur as bright as tangerines, darkening to shades of clay and current into outlines of thick white. Her eyes were giant wet orbs that held worlds inside them like snow globes. She liked to sit with her head propped on pillows or rocks. She hated being cold. She loved peanut butter. She hated to be alone.
On the edge of the cliff, Odell yawned slowly, her pink tongue curling at the tip, and then closed her eyes. I leaned in toward the wall and fished my hand into a crack to grab my stashed rope. Using it as a pillow, I took in the sky, blank like a page. We were at Redstein, Colorado, a small crag 30 minutes outside of our home in Carbondale. To reach the cliff, we'd hiked 30 minutes straight uphill. There was no service, no people, and no other dogs--only the sound of expansion fills the silence. It was one of the few local places I could reliably take Odell where I knew she'd be calm, where there wouldn't be reason for agitation or aggression.
I could feel memories quaking in the back of my consciousness like loose threads ready to catch. I thought about my regrets regarding my professional climbing career. My anxiety, the eating disorder, the life I could have had--had been so close to having--if only I had been a little stronger, a little better. I could feel the weight of my mistakes, but, there in the silence, I also could feel the future and all of its possibilities.
I read once that we are who we are because of who we were, and I was deciding that wasn't going to be true; that my vision of the future was going to hold equal sway. Odell and I sat on the ledge, and in that liminal space I traced my fingers through the ringlets encircling her neck and back, plucking out plant debris, picking through all our tangles.
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