By day six of the Tor des Geants, the barrier between dreams and waking reality had collapsed. I wasn’t even racing. I was merely supporting Beat during his 200-mile excursion around the steep and technical trails of the Italian Alps. Even my support was minimal compared to what it could be — about once a day, I’d drive an hour and a half along the dark tunnels of the Aosta Valley and up a winding mountain road to meet him at a life base, deliver a fresh sandwich and drinks, help him attend to his little things and wait for him to nap for a few hours. I was also working every night, remotely on Alaska time, which required a shift from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. or later.
My co-workers would laugh at my bleary eyes and darkened windows on Zoom while they sat in the bright daylight of Anchorage. I developed reverse jet lag that made Italy’s bright daylight feel like a blinding version of midnight when I rose two or four hours later to commute to Beat’s location. Then I’d embark on a six- or eight-hour hike from the remote location to make the most of my visit to the Italian Alps. The collapse usually came around dinnertime, when I’d slump back to my apartment with just enough time to either whip up a bowl of pasta or take a nap. Usually, I chose the pasta and a shower. But a couple of nights, I took a nap, which only intensified my disorientation.
For a number of years, my sleep was rarely accompanied by dreams unless they were anxiety dreams — I was high on a mountain in a thunderstorm, trapped under a boat in a raging whitewater river, at the start of the Iditarod Trail Invitational having forgotten all of my gear, or back at PTL, clinging to a cliff and shouting at my teammates in the dark. I’d wake up in a surge of adrenaline and not fall back asleep for hours if at all. It was awful. I dreaded these nightmares and preferred the shallow, dreamless nights.
Last February, I started taking an antidepressant called Lexapro to treat what was becoming unmanageable anxiety. I was warned one of the side effects was “night terrors,” which to me sounded like the most awful of a long list of awful potential side effects. My insomnia was almost unbearable as it was. Now I had to give into “night terrors?!”
I’ve been lucky to experience minimal side effects on Lexapro. But the dreams have been one major change. I dream every night, sometimes multiple times a night, dreams I can remember because I still wake up with some frequency. But they haven’t been the night terrors I feared. My dreams are usually mundane, drawn from memories that I’m surprised are still lodged in my brain, forgotten moments from long ago.
I often dream about my dad. The dreams are vivid but aren’t anything my waking brain would expect. I’m a small child in the hazy shadows of what I can recall of our house near Dallas, Texas, from which my family moved away when I was three years old. Dad is helping me get ready for church, a blue dress and shoes I hate. There’s a tenderness to this dream but also a hint of fear that I think most children feel about their fathers. He expects me to be reverent at church. I must be quiet and not make noise. The understanding of this strikes my suddenly woken adult self in a strange way, unsettling but otherwise impossible to interpret.
Beat was set to arrive in Ollomont, kilometer 280 of the Tor des Geants, around 9 a.m. I had wrapped up work around 4:30 a.m. and slept like the dead for all of two and a half hours before my alarm blared into the predawn darkness. None of my go-to sandwich stops were open, so I pulled off the tollway at a rest stop, the kind of place where one can purchase a quick sandwich in the United States. But this place was a metropolis, a sprawling complex with a hotel, a conference center, and a full mall of still-closed stores. I found the “convenience store” but the sandwich-making process was complicated and slow, and led to several clerks shouting at me in Italian from across the store in order to work through the process (I have finally learned the meaning of “vinire qui.”)
All of this — the sleeplessness, the tight schedule, the baffling foreign systems, and dealing with strangers — would have been a sure trigger for a panic attack when my anxiety was less managed. Still, my anxiety hasn’t disappeared. Even though I averted a meltdown, I was a frazzled mess by the time I pulled away from the rest stop. A gray cloud settled over my mind, a form of disassociation that left me confused about where and when I was.
Beat was doubtlessly in a more pronounced stage of disarray and fatigue. In addition to all of the time on his feet, the sleep deprivation, and the wear on his body, he was battling a virus that had spread through the race field (unsurprisingly, given the crowded conditions at life basis.) We weren’t sure if it was Covid (later, he and I both tested negative multiple times, but who knows?) But he insisted he was still operational despite the coughing and congestion, so he continued. The race itself gave no leeway. The first two days of the Tor des Geants had been stiflingly hot, but since then, cold and rainy clouds parked over the Aosta Valley and stayed there. It was a year of fire and ice, and attrition levels were high.
Still, I couldn’t help but envy Beat as he marched away from Ollomont and back “up the col” for the 24th (or thereabouts) time this week. Amid issues with my physical health, grief, and volatile mental health, I’ve largely turned away from endurance efforts. Still, the desire lingers — to push until I’m free of the assumptions and expectations and stories I tell myself, and can grasp clear-eyed views of myself and the world and the universe and even, occasionally, The Void.
Friday, Sept. 15 was my only day off all week — I had even agreed to work Saturday amid a staff shortage. But it was also the day Beat was set to finish the Tor des Geants, and he was on track to finish between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. This meant if I wanted any sleep, I was going to have to grab it in the afternoon. I should return to Courmayeur and nap, I thought. Anyway, it was a lousy day for hiking — 45 degrees with misting rain. The cloud ceiling was so low that visibility was sure to disappear just a few hundred feet higher. And yet, that familiar strangeness I’d been chasing all week called to me. When I looked up the valley, all I saw was gray. But I knew there was a trail that would take me all the way to the Swiss border and beyond if I heeded the call.
Fatigue is an interesting state of mind and body. I was so tired I could have sat in the uncomfortable front seat of my rental car and dozed off in the 45-degree chill. But my body also had no problem hoisting itself up the slope at the typical Alpine rate of 1,000 feet per mile. It feels better to move, and much more relaxing than braving a winding mountain road and the baffling Italian tollway system in a vehicle. As I hiked, I became blissfully relaxed, floating through shifting abstractions of clouds and rock. Then the clouds began to lift, revealing a wide cirque surrounded by cliffs. Just as quickly, the clouds rolled back in, enveloping even the closest boulders and trail.
It was in this gray abyss that I began to climb steeply again. These must be the cliffs that looked unclimbable from below, I thought. I picked my way through the boulders, straining my eyes to locate yellow-dot trail markers. My thoughts had been flickering between the present moment and dream-like memories for much of the day, but here I encountered my first hallucination: Two mountain bikers! They were wearing body armor and full-face helmets, riding big machines that looked to be burly downhill bikes rather than the electric-assist bikes that I’m used to seeing in the Alps. They were stopped at the time. One had his bike turned upside down and was inspecting a wheel. The tire wasn’t flat and the rim didn’t look bent, so I couldn’t tell what was wrong. In Europe, I often see intrepid cyclists on impossible-seeming trails, but this one was outrageous. It was difficult to hike, almost a class-three scramble. I don’t think I could even carry a bike up or down this trail. So I decided these mountain bikers must be in my imagination.
“No way, are you guys really riding this?” I called out loudly as I passed. The guy who wasn’t working on his bike looked toward me and titled his helmet sideways — I couldn’t see his face behind the mouthpiece and goggles. He didn’t reply and it’s likely because he didn’t understand English, but this only bolstered my conviction that I was having a hallucination.
Not long after, I reached the col that marked the border of Italy and Switzerland — Fenetre de Durand. I looked at my watch and saw I’d reached an altitude of 9,200 feet. A faint purple line on my map — something I’ve learned indicates “a trail, barely, even by Alpine standards” — indicated the summit I had been craving, Mont Avril, stood at 11,000 feet and was a mere 0.75 miles away by this barely-there trail. This sort of math I can conceptualize even when very tired. This is an average grade of 45% or an average angle of 42 degrees. It basically means that for every two feet you walk forward, you must climb one. Imagine an isosceles right triangle. Now imagine that covered in loose scree.
The clouds that had briefly cleared to let me see the trail sign again became all-encompassing. Visibility was so poor that even my shoes looked fuzzy. Or was that the sleep deprivation? My voice of reason attempted to break through the haze. “You do not have to bag a peak, even though it’s kind of cool to bag an Alpine peak. You can’t even see where you’re going. You are probably going to walk off a cliff.”
But then I looked down and saw a faint outline of the strangest track — a mountain bike track. Those imaginary shredders had been real! And they had somehow survived a descent from this ethereal summit while riding their brakes so hard that they ground a two-inch-deep trench in the loose talus. I could follow their track! Why not?
Just as I started up, the clouds suddenly released an intense wind and ice pellets so shocking that I dropped to my knees. As carefully as I could muster while being blasted by the wind, I put on every layer of clothing I had with me. The layers were okay for a “normal” autumn hike, but these were full winter conditions with a far-below-freezing chill and precipitation that I was lucky was the frozen sort, and not a soaking rain. And still, I wasn’t deterred, even as the voice of reason continued to prod me. “This is like climbing the worst Stairmaster ever inside a ping-pong ball. There will be nothing to see at the top. What are you doing?”
I couldn’t answer. Earlier I had been (barely) listening to an audiobook about the language of cults and our susceptibility to them. But anytime the gray ping-pong ball descended, I became too motion-sick to tolerate voices in my ear. Fatigue, silence, and lack of anything to see again forced my brain to mine the deeper regions of memory for distraction. I thought of a song that was one of my favorites, an ever-present part of the soundtrack during a particular period of my life, that I’m not sure I’ve thought about in 10 years or more. My brain played it for me, over and over. “Adventures in Solitude” by The New Pornographers.
Balancing on one wounded wing
Circling the edge of the neverending
The best of the vanished marvels have gathered inside your door.
It’s a beautiful melody and the lyrics always struck me as the thoughts of someone who had been lost in something insurmountable — depression, perhaps, or grief — and is slowly emerging. But the depression or grief has forever changed them, and the cycle is never-ending.
Less than forget, but more than begun
These adventures in solitude never done
To the names of our wounds
We send the same blood back from the wars.
Beyond the looping melody, the fog thickened and my muscles stung from the strain of the climb. My extremities were cold, my lungs sore — was it the heavy breathing, or was I catching Beat’s virus? In response, my brain lapsed farther into itself, dredging up my recent dreams. Dad was pushing me in a grocery cart through a store. I was driving a car with the same interior as my first car, a 1989 Toyota Tercel. Then I saw an angry sky, the same eerie color of green I saw before the 1999 tornado that ripped through downtown Salt Lake City. Dreams lapsed into dreams, and it occurred to me that nothing was happening in these dreams. They were moments before something happened, or they were nothing in particular at all. The in-between moments. The moments that have no reason to stay with me.
“The moments that actually make up a life,” I thought.
I reached the angled rock that seemed to rise no farther. My watch told me this was the top of Mont Avril. I walked to the last I could see of the rock and knelt at what seemed to be an edge. All around was the same thick gray and pelting ice that followed me up 2,000 vertical feet. But just then, the encompassing fog that was in fact a small cloud finally lifted. The ledge became more clear, and then I could see snow slopes below me. They were a long way below me. The ledge I was practically leaning over dropped at least a thousand feet to the cirque below, likely more. I suddenly felt nauseated, struck with vertigo so severe I couldn’t move, even to back myself away from this precipitous edge. I could only continue kneeling there, head spinning, wondering if I was in fact falling, but having no strong emotions about it either way. It’s difficult to describe. I was feeling all of the physical reactions to fear, but I wasn’t feeling the fear itself.
Finally I grasped my bearings and managed to scoot back far enough to gain the wherewithal to stand. Behind me, the fog was beginning to lift higher. I could see blue sky and fragments of mountains. It was apparent I was higher than most. 11,000 feet is a lofty perch in the Alps.
The views into Switzerland were even clearer. I smiled that I had climbed all this way — more than 6,000 feet — and was magically given the views I had earned but hadn’t expected. Before this spectacular moment, I was climbing just to climb. I was suffering for no discernable reason while reliving mundane moments that my brain had cataloged for reasons unknown. The same moments I can relive in my sleep —and frequently do these days. I don’t know why those memories stick with me. I wish my memory bank would just hold onto these spectacular moments — every perch above an expansive mountainscape that I earned with my sweat and determination — so I could continuously reap the rewards. I wish all of my dreams about my dad could evoke our favorite moments together — crossing the Grand Canyon for the first time, or when he told me at the finish of the Tour Divide that he’d never felt prouder. But that’s not how it works. Because these aren’t the memories that make up a life.
Later that night — well, at 4:47 a.m. Saturday morning — Beat crossed the arch in a rainstorm to earn his eighth finish of the Tor des Geants. Beat loves to repeat his favorite experiences, no matter how difficult or harrowing they were the first time around. Sometimes I wonder how well he can even distinguish his memories from year to year. Or if it matters — each moment is rewarding and worthwhile in itself. These are the moments that make up a life. They’re all beautiful.