And because I felt that odd new sensation that seemed akin to a maternal tug — and because I didn’t want to be the loser who disappointed him, I huffed out a melodramatic huff and said, “Fine.” The opposite of what I thought it would be. This would be anything but fine!
“I hate your theory of opposites,” I said to Vanessa, as she stepped into the van before it steered away.
“Don’t hate the playa, hate the game,” she said, slamming the door. As if that made any sense, as if that had anything to do with anything.
Nicky and I hugged, and he consulted his map and started off to the left, hiking up and up and up, the cameraman on his tail, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared around a ridge, and then it was just me. (And Rick, my cameraman, the very same one who had emailed me the bungee photo. But he wasn’t allowed to talk to me unless I was faced with a medical emergency, so it was mostly just me.)
Thirty-six hours solo. On a mountain. It figured.
Since I didn’t have any choice in the matter, I put one foot in front of the other, and I started walking. My map indicated that my first food stop was about three miles away, which didn’t seem so bad. It was hotter than expected, but I wiped the beads off my brow and kept going. I had all sorts of positive self-talk and theories to steady me, to steel me, so I focused on the ground beneath my feet, and I thought about my guts and not too much else. Not Theo, not my dad, not Shawn.
And looking back, it was easy to see how the producers set their trap — how they lull their constants into a false sense of security — the vipers or bears or lethal berries never look too dangerous until you get closer, and that’s when the trouble starts. When everything is near enough to kill you. That first mile up the mountain was cake.
Then I came upon the rock wall descent. I turned to Rick and said:
“Are you kidding me?” But he wasn’t allowed to answer. I saw his lens focus in on a close-up of my huge and open pores that were emitting an angry army of sweat, so I turned around quickly and said, “Fuck it,” and read the instructions to the harness, and then secured said harness to a boulder and jumped over the side. I’d done it before, after all. I could see now how Vanessa had prepared me, training me like a soldier, raising me like a child who would finally be ready to go out there and face the world.
I may have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, but I’d never scaled the side of a mountain. I bounced and bounced and bounced against the scorching hot rock, limbs splayed every which way, profanities shouted every other way. My elbow started bleeding, and a gruesome cut opened up on my left cheek. About halfway there, I looked down and realized exactly what I was doing: dangling 100 feet in the air off a cliff with no literal net, with the sun crushing down on my shoulders and GORP as my only sustenance, and that is when I started to panic. The all-too-familiar rebellion of bile arose in my throat, but I inhaled through my nose and out again through the same pathway, and I found my reserves.
So what? What now? What’s next?
I steeled my shaking hands, and I eased down until my feet hit the dirt, and I rejoiced, “Hallelujah.”
Rick was already waiting for me at the bottom, which Ithought was a little fishy, but when I questioned him, he mimed a little zipper in front of his mouth, which I found super-irritating, but I continued on my way. Two miles or so later, I reached my first food drop, and I thought:
“I can do this. This is a joke! This isn’t a dare!”
And I sat and enjoyed my Gatorade and my two granola bars and banana, and I let the sunshine soak into my cheeks, and for a moment, I felt content. I thought about Nicky and knew that he’d be killing it, that he probably had already reached his campsite, and I deemed myself the most genius substitute mom in the world. How cool was I? Taking my nephew on to
Dare You!.
I was the coolest. I was going to be the coolest mom in the history of the world.
—
When the sun starts setting on the mountains, the temperature drops perilously quickly. You don’t think about things like this when you’re a city girl, and your only experience with mountain climbing is one other outing on Mt. Rainier, a mistaken abandonment in the Alps at the age of eight, and cyber-stalking Cilla Zuckerberg’s Chicks Who Dig Mountain Climbing page on Facebook.
I should start by saying that in hindsight, I had gotten overconfident. I lingered on my snack site too long. The sun felt good, and I felt good, and readers, as you well know by now, it’s not often that I, Willa Chandler, just feel good, so I may have savored my Gatorade (
Dare You!
is sponsored by Gatorade) a bit too long, not minding the time (we weren’t allowed watches anyway), not caring too much.
I was here! I was on
Dare You!
. I had guts!
I drank that Gatorade like it was champagne, and I thought about how I would tell my father what I had done. I climbed a mountain; the Alps hadn’t scarred me for life! And then I tried not to think about him again, but that didn’t prove easy either. The truth is that we are all, always, works in progress, so yes, I sat on the rock and I thought:
screw you, Dad! This is so much better than the fucking Alps!
But then I also thought:
I hope that he forgives me for doing this.
And I considered that for a long time, wondering why I needed him to absolve me or why his absolution still mattered.
And then I contemplated fate and timing and how if Vanessa hadn’t dared me in the first place — way back in June — I’d be home with Shawn right now, not here on a mountain, with the taste of freedom on my tongue, with that freedom throbbing in my veins. And then I thought about the broken condom and how fate probably does mean something. Just likely not everything that my dad always said it did.
By the time I pushed myself up from my resting place, the sun had dipped below the crests of the surrounding mountains. I consulted my map and saw a fork in the road. When I turned to ask Rick for guidance, he was packing up his gear, ready to head back to where we started.
“You’re leaving me?”
“The mountain is rigged with cameras. You’re covered.”
“So now you talk to me?”
“Just following protocol. I’m here until sunset. Then I see you in the morning.”
“You suck, Rick.”
“It’s just my job. I’d rather be filming for Spielberg if it makes you feel better.”
And just like that he was gone, and I was alone.
A solo. With a fork in the road. Two options. One choice. Even I got the metaphor.
I stared at the map until the sun had nearly disappeared. How could I choose? I had no idea what lay ahead to my left, what lay ahead to my right. This was the moment where my dad’s philosophies should have offered comfort: did it really matter, since both paths allegedly returned me to Nicky, to sustenance, to shelter and a warm shower? Perhaps not. But in that moment, it did matter. Left or right, right or wrong, Shawn or Theo, my old life or a new one? If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?
And still, I couldn’t choose. And I stared at the map and stared at the map, not really seeing anything, until I looked up suddenly, and it was black. Blackness on both sides of the fork. And a mountain enveloped in blackness is so very, very different from a mountain warmed by daylight. You have no depth perception, no sense of what is next, no view of what you’re about to step into or on top of. My pulse accelerated in my neck, and I tried to exhale in the way that Ollie would want me to. I remembered my headlamp, which I switched to “on,” and I reached for my phone on instinct, because I thought the screen could light my way. Of course, they’d taken my phone from me, like they’d taken everything else.
The headlamp was flimsy, at best, and offered only a foot or so of visibility. Within three steps, I overlooked a gopher hole and my ankle turned, the snap so loud it echoed down the canyon.
“Fuck!” (This is the first of many beeped-out portions you heard during the aired telecast. Sorry.)
I sank to the ground to assess the damage, the tendons in my foot already throbbing. I unspooled the ace bandage from my first aid kit and wrapped myself up the best I could, in the near dark, on a mountain, without a nurse. I hobbled upright but realized I still hadn’t chosen: which way — right or left. Or down. I supposed that I could go down. It wouldn’t be the first time I had quit on a mountain.
I quit!!! I yelled just a few short months back.
But before I could decide:
Something stirred in the bushes, and I definitely heard a yap. A whine. A yelp. Then branches cracking and leaves stirring and crunch, crunch, crunch. And I forgot about my ankle for the moment, and I only thought mountain lion or bobcat or bear or something that is definitely not human, and I started running. With my busted wheel but running all the same.
Left or right, left or right, left or right?
I didn’t even think, I just ran. I gave into what my father’s theories have taught me all along: that it didn’t really matter, so just go. Just run. Just point yourself in a direction and leave everything else behind. Wherever you end up is meant to be.
The ruckus trailed me all the way up the path — the rustling of the bushes, the endless crunch, crunch, crunch, the smashing of twigs and leaves and dry brush. I wasn’t in nearly as good shape as I should have been — better than before, sure, but not eve close to where Ollie would have wanted me — and I was slowing. I could feel myself lagging, feel the creature behind me gaining. I thought of how I was going to die on this goddamn mountain, bloodied and flesh-eaten and totally unrecognizable because a mountain lion had chewed off my face.
I screamed, “I am going to die on this goddamn mountain! And my sister, Raina Chandler-Farley, is going to sue your asses off! I hope you hear that, Vanessa Pines! That I am giving Raina the right to ruin you!!”
And then I remembered all the many things I have ruined in my own life, and then my left foot sank into another goddamn gopher hole, and I tripped and landed on my face and split my right eye open.
And that’s when, naturally, I threw up.
Then, for my next act, I started to cry. I wailed, and I moaned, and I shook my fists at the sky, and I screamed: “This was the worst idea in the whole fucking world! Do you hear that world? THE. WORST. IDEA. IN. THE. HISTORY. OF. YOUR. WHOLE. FUCKING. EXISTENCE!”
And when I finally stopped screaming, I noticed that the crunch, crunch, crunching had stopped too. But I felt something still watching me, something eyeing me, wondering if it couldn’t just take me out, wondering if I might not make a nice dinner. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t just the cameras that the crew had hidden along the way, so I wobbled to my feet, and I tiptoed (metaphorically) to the bushes, and I crouched down and used my headlamp as my eyes. (And I’m not going to lie: I felt like I was in the middle of the Blair Witch Project, and when you saw it back on TV, it looked, actually, like I was, right?) Slowly, then slower still, I crawled along the path, searching for whatever it was that hunted me.
And then I froze. Paralysis.
The headlamp beamed out and what beamed back at me were two eyes that were as dark as the landscape in front of me (but hungrier).
My shriek echoed down the canyons of the mountain, and then I leapt to my feet and kept running. The pain in my ankles was gone now, the blood from my eye irrelevant. What mattered was that everybody dies sometime, and right now, when I still had the chance to unruin my not-so-horrible life, I didn’t feel quite like I was ready for my time to be up.
—
I ran until my left ankle snapped. It literally gave way completely. I tumbled onto the ground and felt my head hit the crusty mud and the cold air sweep over me, and then the pain mounted all down the left side of my body, and then, whether or not I intended — because, to give credit to my dad, some things we cannot control, even when we’d like to: I blacked out.
—
The sun woke me when it rose. The first light of morning on my face was too bright. The old vomit in my mouth was sour, and the blood had dried underneath and around my eye, which was also mostly swollen shut. I pressed myself up and dropped my head between my knees. I pried open my GORP and managed to swallow three yogurt-covered raisins.
So what? What’s next? What now?
“Can someone please come get me?” I yelled. “Like, I know that you’re out there. Don’t I qualify for an airlift yet?”
But no one came. I was left, as I always feared I would be, to my own devices. Solo.
I crept to my knees, then to my feet, though my ankles shouted in agony. I consulted the map, and saw now what I hadn’t seen last night, blinded by the darkness, blinded by my faulty notion that my choice didn’t matter, that all roads led to Nicky. No. In fact, when I examined the map closely (which I was only able to with my good eye), I saw that the path — the one I’d chosen — was a dead end. There was a tiny line that ran perpendicular to my course. A crevasse. Or a rock wall. Either way. All of my progress from last night was for naught. This wasn’t the road that could bring me home.
“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Seriously, Vanessa, I hate you!” I cried. “This wasn’t part of the deal!” I raged. And finally, because it was simply my instinct, I threw my weight behind the most furious parts of my voice and shrieked: “I QUIT!!!!!”
But despite all of that, despite everything, my words just bounced around the landscape below. The birds tweeted back, the trees sighed out, and the mountain lions (because I knew they were out there) kept sleeping.
The only way that I was getting home, readers, was with my guts, by rising and rewriting my master universe plan. By getting the hell up and moving forward. There literally wasn’t any other way. My tears began again now, quick, hot, heavy. Washing some of the crusted blood away, stinging the open wounds that the blood left behind.
I matted my face with my dirty shirt, and I realized, just like Vanessa had urged me to since we were eighteen, and just like Ollie and I had discussed when I made shadow bunnies on the wall, and just like Theo had wordlessly pushed me into conviction — that “meant to be” could add up to a lot of things. There’s always more than one path, and to think otherwise is what resigns you to fate.