The Cliff

“They mess you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

I never wanted kids until I was in my late twenties and something rolled over in me, and suddenly I did. It took my wife and me five years to have our first daughter, followed by another six years for our second. When the first baby came, my wife was a doctor and I was a writer, so we had little discussion about who would earn and who would stay home. We lived in the woods near a river, and I was resolved that my kids would have the outdoorsy sort of childhood I’d dreamed of as a child of the suburbs.

When I was a kid, rock climbing was exotic, the kind of thing my parents would never have tried in a thousand years. My folks took me car camping on the North Shore of Lake Superior and to the Rocky Mountains during annual summer road trips, but climbing was aspirational. When I got my driver’s license, though, I could start.

My friend Brian taught me the climbing basics, and we began visiting the cliffs of Interstate State Park along the St. Croix River. Our ropework was poor, and I had a near miss in the Black Hills and another in Wyoming, but I was always lucky and avoided injury. My interest in climbing waned somewhat, but I always enjoyed the physicality of the moves and the feeling of being on a cliff.

I was resolved to introduce my girls to climbing as soon as they were able. At the time, we lived in Wisconsin and had a cliff at the end of our backyard. It was an extraordinary thing—pale sandstone 40’ tall and stretching horizontally for 200’. The sandstone was too brittle to climb, though in winter I dribbled water from a hose over it for ice climbing.

I tried a gentle approach to interest my older child in climbing. “Do you want to try rappelling?” I’d occasionally ask, imagining myself as perhaps the coolest parent on earth for offering such a thing. But she never did, and I became more insistent. I’d built a short climbing wall in our garage, 9’ high and overhanging, and for summer exercise when she was in early elementary school, I’d instruct her to climb it using a series of grippy holds. She’d protest once she got two feet above the ground, but during summer vacation I demanded she climb it once a day. Next to the garage, we had a maple tree into which I’d screwed climbing holds to a height of 20’. High up the tree, I secured a thick eye bolt and hung a climbing rope from it. At my behest, my daughter would climb it. She would quickly become frightened, though, then let go and shriek as she dangled from the rope. Neighbor kids came over, and I belayed them as they used the holds to scale the tree, while my own child watched.

This was eerily similar to a childhood experience of mine that I regarded as a prime example of parental good intentions gone awry. When I was a kid, my father installed a basketball hoop in our driveway – I suspect it was to recruit friends for me. Yet, I did not want to play basketball. Neighborhood kids my dad knew from coaching baseball would come over and play. They’d ask me to come out, but I would sit in my room. I was, I suppose, both following a natural inclination and asserting my independence by refusing what was expected of me.

I see now that for both of my parents, playing organized sports was something they had both wished they could have done during their own childhoods. When my mother was a girl, there were no girls’ sporting leagues. My dad grew up on a farm where there were plenty of chores but not much in the way of youth sports. For them, readily available sporting leagues were a delightful suburban amenity. And I was foisting rock climbing on my kids the same way they had done on me with the basketball hoop. In viewing my daughter as a version of myself through which I could fill the gaps in my past, I was neglecting her existence as a separate being. In doing so, I risked turning her into someone who specifically disliked climbing, rather than a climber.

At the time, though, I wasn’t going to give up so easily. She was going to rappel the cliff, and the experience was going to blow her mind with its awesomeness and win her over. The cliff was beautiful with old prairie plants growing on its ledges. When blazing star and leadplant bloomed purple in the summer, I’d stand on the ledges with the open feeling of space under my feet while hummingbirds sipped nectar inches from my face, their wings literally fanning my cheeks. One day, I told my older daughter that she was going to rappel down our cliff whether she liked it or not. I rigged a rope system down the cliff that would give her a chance to lower herself and give me backup control in case she erred. Rappelling is easy, requiring little more than sticking out your feet and not letting go of the loose end of the rope. I was sure my child would love it once she accepted the rope’s strength and the rare vantage it afforded her. I suppose this sentiment was the same as my dad’s figuring that once I had a home basketball court to practice on, I’d be a normal American boy swishing jump shots with a boisterous gang of suburban pals.

I tied her into the rope and downclimbed using holds I’d carved into the soft sandstone with a knife. Standing at the bottom of the cliff was pleasant and shade-covered under a basswood tree where a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks nested and squeaked at me peevishly. I shouted to my child to descend. Eventually, she backed off and immediately began to shriek. I lowered her slowly. As she continued to descend, she kept shrieking until it became a blood-curdling scream. She sounded as though she was being murdered. My face went hot. I was sure someone would hear the awful sound and call the police. I finished lowering her to the ground, and we hiked without speaking along the cliff bottom to where the slope lessened, and we could walk up.

A few weeks later I demanded she try again, to the same result. That was the last time I pressed rock climbing on her. We eventually moved away from Wisconsin and into the woods of northern Minnesota, leaving behind the climbing wall and cliff.

Now that my older daughter is starting high school, I remind myself that she is not a younger version of myself, and that she may buck against the habits I press upon her as a means of expressing sovereignty. Climbing may have been a failure, though she has taken well enough to hiking, biking, and skiing. And more times than not when we are in the woods and I ask her to identify a plant or bird, she does so correctly.

In four years, as I often tell her as an incitement to take more responsibility, she’ll be an adult. I failed at recruiting her as a climber, though, as I am surprised to reflect now; when I was her age, in addition to never having rappelled a cliff, I’d never canoe-camped or backpacked, things that would soon become very important to me. Thinking back on it, my life didn’t feel like it had begun until I was slightly older than she is now, a bittersweet realization in that what has seemed so significant to me, for her may fade to background noise. Perhaps that’s the most important part of parenting, laying a wide and sturdy groundwork upon which a developing consciousness may tread to leave behind.