Coming home

Ty and I never got to say "Goodbye." We became separated while claiming our gear at the Dallas US Customs terminal. I looked for him but soon realized our flight from Santiago had arrived late and I would have to scramble to make my connection to Seattle. I felt a profound sense of sadness as my jet left the ground. We had been through so much together. It didn't seem right to be done without proper closure. I had wanted to thank Ty for being my partner in this adventure. I wanted tell him he was right when he said "some day we are going to be a couple of old guys sitting around telling stories, and this is one of the stories we will tell." I wanted to call him "Brother."

I stepped out onto the tarmac in Bellingham after 29 hours of travel. The timeless catatonia of international flight cleared from my head as the fresh cool air settled on me. I knew Lin would be waiting in baggage claim and the anticipation that had been building slowly over several days suddenly swelled. I found myself jogging.

Lin met me at Seatac when I returned from climbing Kilimanjaro. She was dressed in a leopard print body suit with fuzzy cat ears in her hair. When I returned from Russia's Mt Elbrus she greeted me in the shawled garb of a Babushka. Now, with a red rose clinched in her teeth, Lin struck a dramatic Tango Dancers pose in a room full of confused travelers. The voluptuous black and red dress she wore had been concealed until the appointed moment by a trench coat thusly cast down at her feet. We embraced.

I spent most of the next day sleeping. It was good to be in my own bed and move about in my home, personal space so stark in comparison to the last month that it was at once comfortable and disquieting. Over the preceding weeks my sense of time and perspective had shifted. An hour felt like a day. What use to be a big deal no longer was. I milled about aimlessly for an afternoon before deciding to call my Father in Anacortes, Washington. "Hey, when are you leaving on that mountain climb," he asked. My Father loves me, and would gladly lay down his life for mine. But he is so easily confused that by the time he got around to it he would in fact be sacrificing himself for the next guy in line.
"I just got back," I told him. "Hey, that's a pretty good deal," I added in an attempt to spin positive,"it all worked out and you didn't have to go through the worry." "Yeah," he agreed tentatively. And that was good enough. We talked a bit about the climb, a bit about the dogs he is taking care of for various neighbors. I invited him for Sunday supper.

It would be a full week before I felt my rhythm return, a month before I went back to the gym. The people around me knew what I had been through and expected very little from my day to day performance. "Dave made the coffee?! Hey, well done Dave!" Several times I met up with someone who had read the Blog and seemed interested in talking about my experience. This I welcomed, hoping clarity might come in the telling, the big message of this experience left floating in the bowl before me. But most of the time I just found myself parroting journal entries, feeling it had all been said.

Yet I feel there is something more. In the fullness of time I have come to recognize powerful meaning in each of the prior climbs. It took two years for me to really understand what my experience on Denali was all about. I was mowing the lawn when it came to me out of nowhere. There is a great line in the film Searching for the wrong-eyed Jesus that speaks to this; "Sometimes you got to look away from a problem to see the answer." So, in the mean time, I will wait without waiting, contemplate the indifferent, and busy myself with the pedestrian yard-work that makes up a good and useful life.

I thank you for following along and being a part of this adventure. It is my greatest wish that you found the ride worth taking. There will be another mountain, and I will post the address to that Blog here when I figure out what mountain that is. Until then, be well.

Dave Mauro