Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: End of the Rope
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Hodgkinson, Janice
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.janredford.com/
CITY: Squamish
STATE: BC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| 670 | __ |a End of the rope, 2018: |b ECip t.p. (Jan Redford) ECip Data View (“JAN REDFORD lives with her family in British Columbia, where she mountain bikes, trail runs, climbs and skis. Her stories, articles and personal essays have been published in The Globe and Mail, National Post, Mountain Life, Explore and various anthologies. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and holds a master’s in creative writing from University of British Columbia.”) |
| 953 | __ |a re25 |
PERSONAL
Born c. 1958; married (divorced); children: two.
EDUCATION:Simon Fraser University, graduate of the Writer’s Studio; University of British Columbia, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AVOCATIONS:Mountain biking, trail running, climbing, and skiing.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including the Globe and Mail, National Post, Mountain Life, and Explore.
SIDELIGHTS
Jan Redfor lives an active life with her family in Squamish, British Columbia. In her memoir titled End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood Redford tells her story of falling in love with climbing, climbers, and the Canadian climbing community. In the process, she reveals her unhappy childhood, various relationships, and a difficult marriage. In an interview with Redford explains why she decided to write her memoir: “Partly for the kids. I don’t want them to repeat my mistakes. And there’s another reason— I’m still plagued with a self-doubt and anxiety. The book is like a reminder, me giving myself permission, finally, to voice my story and take ownership of my reality.”
Redford writes that in 1971 at the age of 14, she and her family moved to Ontario, Canada. Redford was unhappy at the time. Her father was an alcoholic who constantly berated her and her mother was so overworked she had little time for Redford. Redford started climbing rock faces in an effort to release her growing anger. As she grew older, Redford became intrenched with the primarily male Canadian climbing community and found herself falling over and over again for the high-risk takers. By the time she was in hear early twenties, Redford had fallen in love with a fellow climber named Dan Guthrie. However, not long afterward Guthrie died in an avalanche.
Deep in grief, Redford eventually found some comfort in one of Dan’s friends, whom she calls Grant in the book. Redford and Grant eventually married and had two children. In the meantime, Redford graduated from college and began teaching elementary school. The marriage turned out to be an unhappy one, and the couple eventually divorced when they were both middle aged. At this point, Redford is a single mother and decided to pursue a career in writing, learning to take risks from her life of climbing.
Throughout the book, details many of her climbing exploits and reminisces about the many fellow climbers she met and admired. “Nearly all of Redford’s climbing experiences in End of the Rope involve her battling against your own fear,” noted Bustle website contributor E. Ce Miller. Redford also reveals how more than a few ended up dying in their pursuit of climbing and adventure. In addition, Redford examines what it meant to be a woman in a climbing world that, at the time, was dominated by men. Readers “will certainly never be bored by this no-holds-barred look at a life spent pushing the limits,” wrote Colleen Mondor in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor called End of the Rope “a truly inspiring and honest account of what it means to be a strong woman.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Redford, Jan, End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood, Counterpoint Press (Berkeley, CA), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Colleen Mondor, review of End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood, p. 4.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of End of the Rope.
Publishers Weekly, March 12, 2018, review of End of the Rope, p. 51.
ONLINE
Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/ (June 26, 2018), E. Ce Miller, “End Of The Rope by Jan Redford Is Much More than a Book About Rock Climbing.”
Jan Redford website, https://www.janredford.com (July 17, 2018).
Maclean’s Online, March 31, 2018, Joanne Latimer, “How One Woman Challenged Canada’s Macho Rock-Climbing World.”
Outside Online, https://www.outsideonline.com/ (May 8, 2018), Jayme Moe, “A Climbing Memoir with More Agony than Ecstasy.”
Romper, https://www.romper.com/ (June 26, 2018), Janet Manley, “Mothers, Outdoors: ‘End Of The Rope’ & Wild Places After Baby.”
BIO
JAN REDFORD is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU and holds a master’s in creative writing from UBC. Her stories, articles, and personal essays have been published in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Mountain Life, Explore, and anthologies and have won or been shortlisted in several writing contests. She lives with her family in Squamish, BC, where she mountain bikes, trail runs, climbs, and skis.
How one woman challenged Canada’s macho rock-climbing world
Jan Redford’s memoir about rock-climbing, family life and feminism is right on time for the age of #MeToo
by Joanne Latimer Mar 31, 2018
Jan Redford leading the pendulum pitch on Royal Arches in Yosemite in 1982. (Gary Bocarde)
She chewed tobacco, did finger pull ups and swore with gusto. Jan Redford was a rock climber in the 1980s, long before women were commonplace in that community. Her debut book, End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood, is a swashbuckling memoir of her life “on the rock” in Western Canada, where she faced not only ingrained sexism, but also inner demons. After a heartbreaking loss, she found herself married to a logger and pregnant, struggling to maintain her dream of a less conventional life. In an interview with Maclean’s, Redford, now 57, reflects on climbing’s gender politics in the 1980s and ’90s, on being a single mom attending university (she eventually became a teacher, then a writer), and on why she “highlighted the s–t out of” her copy of The Cinderella Complex. She also predicts how her ex-husband, “Grant,” will react to her depiction of him the book (not well). This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
In the 1980s, it was early days for women rock climbers. How were you received?
There was a lot of unintended, well-meaning sexism. For example, men talked about taking me climbing, not just going climbing. They didn’t take other guys climbing. They took me under their wing and thought it was cute when I wanted to be the lead climber. But I didn’t want to be cute. I wanted to be a guide.
What drew you to climbing in the first place?
The sport suited me physically. It’s very graceful, like doing gymnastics on the rock. The lifestyle was another big draw. It was like a tribe you belonged to in the Rockies. It’s an identity you develop. We were outcasts from society in the early ‘80s—very counterculture. Climbing is so different today. It’s very mainstream and cool now. People climb in the gym, with bolts. It’s not as much of an adventure, that’s for sure. In my day, it was really alternative.
You certainly took an alternative path. Instead of going to university after high school, you graduated from the gruelling National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming, you climbed in Yosemite and B.C.’s Bugaboos, and you instructed at the National Army Cadet camp in Banff.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be caught dead in Toronto. I belong in the mountains, outdoors, and active. When you’re rock-climbing, your concentration crystalizes. Something washes over you. You know you’re completely on your own. I switched into “nobody can swoop in and protect me” mode. I was full of contradictions: I wanted to be small and childlike so that people would love me, but I also wanted to be big and strong and chew tobacco and be tough. I was definitely the poster child for The Cinderella Complex. So, I felt like a bad feminist because I had that conflict, as opposed to just living with the conflict and acknowledging I had conflict and accepting and understanding it. Because I denied it, I was unable to fully delve into it.
You found happiness with your boyfriend Dan Guthrie, an elite climber. Did that change the Cinderella Complex symptoms?
I’d become afraid of throwing myself into a man’s orbit (again) and whittling myself down. At that time, I sensed how important it was to be alone, and my biggest regret is not spending an extended period of time on my own when I was younger. That’s the only way to truly know yourself, as opposed to in comparison to other people and through other people’s lives. But female climbers were in high demand as girlfriends. You had to be pretty strong to stay on your own.
After Dan died at the age of 27, your life changed radically within a year. What happened?
I trained cadets that summer in a valium haze and began a relationship with Dan’s climbing partner, [the pseudonymous] Grant. I started taking courses toward a degree in education in Calgary, at 26. In the middle of first semester, I [accidentally] got pregnant and subsequently married Grant, just before he took himself off to climb Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. So, I was alone, miserable, heavy, broke, watching soap operas. He made it back for Jenna’s birth. We moved to Golden, B.C., so he could work at a logging camp. I got a job, while pregnant a second time, as a silviculture technician with the Ministry of Forests.
How did that go, being a working mom in a logging town?
Not well. Grant wanted me home with the kids. And he didn’t want me to finish my degree in Calgary.
No offence, but Grant sounds like a chauvinist jerk. At least twice in the book, he asks you, “What kind of woman lets a stranger raise her children?”
And I went easy on him! People who knew us, including my daughter, think I was very kind to him in the book. It reminds me of what Nora Ephron said about never getting any credit for the things she didn’t write about her ex-husbands. It’s odd—I don’t think he actually believes women belong in the kitchen, but he didn’t want his own lifestyle as a climber interrupted by the children. He doesn’t have any traditional expectations of our daughter. In fact, he’s very proud of her. Jenna thinks her father will not mind his portrayal in the book, but I disagree. He’s not going to be happy with it. He read the chapter called “Grant’s Lunch” when it was a short story, and he didn’t like it. He told me he won’t read the book, which is what I’m hoping. But I can’t count on it.
Gearing up to leave Grant, you went to four intense therapy sessions. What did you get out of them?
Therapy was about figuring out why I was with someone like Grant in the first place and that it was a choice. With all the trauma I’d been through after Dan’s death, it was hard to leave Grant. We had this connection to Dan and the climbing community. But I had to acknowledge my role in the relationship. My problem was that I was always reacting, reacting, reacting—not taking action in my life. Going to university was me taking action for the first time.
You went back to university in your 30s and moved into student housing with two young kids. How was that?
Incredibly difficult. The other students—20-year-old girls who lived with their parents in Calgary—couldn’t believe marriages like mine still existed. They didn’t understand the rural logging town existence. My son, Sam, was young, but Jenna saw me struggle on my own because I made this choice to go back to school. She didn’t see me become Gloria Steinem, but she saw me take control of my life. That’s really important.
Why write the memoir now?
Partly for the kids. I don’t want them to repeat my mistakes. And there’s another reason— I’m still plagued with a self-doubt and anxiety. The book is like a reminder, me giving myself permission, finally, to voice my story and take ownership of my reality. I still have voices in my head that come from other people—my ex-husband, my parents. The book is me finally replacing those voices with my own. But by getting it down on paper, it makes it real.
Did your feelings about climbing change after having children and losing Dan, along with many other close climbing friends?
I still climb, more cautiously, but mostly I mountain bike and climb in the gym. As a mother now, seeing younger people die, I empathize with their parents. I don’t understand climbing as well as I did when I started out. I don’t understand how somebody can leave behind a two-year old child and wife, or parents. So, my dedication to climbing has certainly changed. But it’s important to understand that climbers have a life wish, not a death wish. That said, I’m conflicted. I wouldn’t understand climbing at all if it took my daughter away from me. She’s a very good climber and a very different person. She doesn’t hurl herself off cliffs and hope she grows wings. She’s smarter than I was on the rock.
Because there’s such a strong feminist theme throughout the book, tell me your thoughts about the #MeToo movement.
#MeToo has shown that things haven’t changed that much. The big difference is that women—particularly young women–are not accepting it. They are not being silenced. They don’t feel it’s acceptable. In the climbing community, I felt like I couldn’t say too much because I didn’t want the guys to think I didn’t have a sense of humour and I wanted to be one of the guys. Women today limit themselves less than we [Boomers] did. We were still gaining more freedom and we weren’t quite there yet. Whereas young women today grew up with more freedom and believe they have the right to that freedom, but society is still trying to keep them down—with the high cost of daycare, student loans, pay disparity.
What did you learn on the rock?
When anyone’s climbing on the rock, the truth comes out. Your true personality emerges under pressure. And the ultimate pressure is when you have children. Who’s going to be doing most of the child care? Usually women. We’ve come a long way, but in some ways it seems we’re standing still.
Redford, Jan: END OF THE ROPE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Redford, Jan END OF THE ROPE Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 8 ISBN: 978-1-64009-030-9
A memoir of mountaineering and life by a Canadian alpinist.
In 1972, 14-year-old Redford moved from the Yukon to Ontario with her family. It wasn't a happy time, she writes, with an overworked mother and a father who retreated into a bottle; she sublimated by climbing such heights as she could find to "blow off some of this fuck you! anger." The confused teenager morphed into an adult with a yen for fellow climbing fools who live dangerously and sometimes pay the price. A tragedy, major or minor, comes along every couple of dozen pages, peppered with plenty of near misses ("I'd chopped my rope and I'd almost killed my friend") that, in the way of mountaineers, get shrugged off ("I'm still here, aren't I?"). The author's firsthand look into the mores of the climbing tribe is occasionally overheated but seldom digs deep; it's a matter of cold beers, righteous peaks, and free-wheeling cliches ("I'd never get sucked into a middle-class existence again...it was a thinly disguised form of enslavement"). Her reckoning with the conflicting demands of marriage and motherhood is often superficial: "If the boys came back with the second ascent of the Rupal Face and, on top of that, Everest, they'd be heroes. I'd be just another woman who'd popped out a baby." However, Redford hits true- sounding notes when she contemplates how mountaineering women who had scaled Everest and other big peaks and then had children and retired from the sport were at least alive to tell the tale. Better, and worth the price of admission, are Redford's up-close encounters with the rock itself: "Ropey tendons popped up on the backs of my hands, white with chalk as I clamped down on each hold like a vise. There was no noise in my head, no voices telling me what I could or could not do."
Fails to scale the literary heights of Arlene Blum's Annapurna: A Woman's Place (1982) in the canon of women's mountaineering books but still worthy for aspiring climbers
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Redford, Jan: END OF THE ROPE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700306/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f0938cf8. Accessed 25 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700306
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End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood
Publishers Weekly.
265.11 (Mar. 12, 2018): p51. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood Jan Redford. Counterpoint, $26 (344p)
ISBN 978-1-64009-030-9
With a wonderful combination of adventure and introspection, outdoor writer Redford tells of a life lived on the fringes of society and in the heights of the Banff mountains in British Columbia. Her love of climbing began in 1974 when, as a 14 year old, she shrugged off a fear of falling and free climbed a cliff "four times as high as" her house. The sense of achievement and approval she got from subsequent successful climbs pushed her into a life of adventure. In her early 20s she fell in love with fellow climber Dan, but he soon died in an avalanche. She found comfort in one of Dan's friends, an extreme climber named Grant; they married, had two children, and she got a teaching degree and taught elementary school. As Redford reflects on the evolution of both her marriage and her professional life, her prose seamlessly moves from witty and gutsy to introspective and sad ("[I] sat on the edge of the mattress, my knee bouncing up and own like it did when I was scared out of my mind on a climb"). She divorced in middle age and became a single mother; it was then that she took lessons learned from climbing and quit teaching to pursue writing. Redford's is a truly inspiring and honest account of what it means to be a strong woman who can reach new heights because she isn't afraid to fall. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood." Publishers Weekly, 12 Mar. 2018, p.
51. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531285133 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bd3ce223. Accessed 25 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531285133
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End of the Rope: Mountains,
Marriage, and Motherhood
Colleen Mondor
Booklist.
114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p4. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood.
By Jan Redford.
May 2018. 344p. Counterpoint, $26 (9781640090309). 305.4092.
Canadian Redford chronicles her personal history of rock climbing as well as her many romantic entanglements with fellow climbers in this spirited and often surprising memoir. Tough-talking, tobacco-chewing, and occasionally downright dangerous on the rope, Redford has had more than her share of adventures and delights, and she regales readers with the good and the bad as she looks back on her years spent pushing body and heart to the limits. Her refreshing honesty, especially about her mistakes, is a welcome respite from more self-aggrandizing memoirs, and her refusal to shy away from the more turbulent parts of her past, including a tragic loss, balances well her lighthearted reminiscences. In an era when women are still proving themselves worthy of equal pay, Redford has made her mark through sheer willpower and muscle. It's a toss-up whether readers will identify more with her athletic prowess or her sexual escapades, but they will certainly never be bored by this no-holds-barred look at a life spent pushing the limits.-- Colleen Mondor
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mondor, Colleen. "End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood." Booklist, 15 Apr.
2018, p. 4. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537267974 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=25786129. Accessed 25 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537267974
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'End Of The Rope' By Jan Redford Is Much More Than A Book About Rock Climbing
ByE. Ce Miller
2 months ago
Jan Redford often describes herself as afraid; or occasionally, in her words, “chicken sh*t.” In fact, she’s actually kind of a badass — at least, the story she tells in the page of her debut memoir leads me to believe as much. That memoir is End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood, out from Counterpoint Press on May 8. End of the Rope tells the story of Redford’s journey from a young, world-traveling rock climber to a rural mother of two fiercely fighting for her right to an education. It’s a story filled with grit and loss, intensity and resilience, adventure and self-discovery, profound grief and immense wonder. And, yeah, you’ll love it.
End of the Rope opens with Redford literally clinging to the side of a mountain. Fourteen-years-old and angry at a father who had just moved the entire family to a cabin in the Laurentian Mountains of Québec, Canada (though mad because her father has excluded her from the “men’s work” of moving, not due to the move itself) Redford goes climbing. Filled with teenage fury she heads out on her own, ultimately free-climbing a crumbling, black lichen-covered rock face. I’m going to be a mountain climber when I grow up, Redford writes in her diary that night.
The anger that propelled a young Redford into the adventure of her life is one that recurs throughout the memoir. Anger seems to be one of the climber-turned-writer’s motivating forces throughout End of the Rope — beginning with that first wall climb and threading itself throughout Redford’s future decisions. In a cultural moment where women’s anger is, hopefully, being validated more than ever before, it’s refreshing to read a writer exploring her own so thoroughly on the page.
“Anger gives me a backbone,” Redford tells Bustle. “Even thinking about being angry makes me sit up straighter. It’s my favorite emotion, but one I still have trouble accessing. It’s an emotion of defense, of strength, of dominance. That’s why women aren’t supposed to be angry. Why it’s ‘unfeminine.’”
End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood by Jan Redford, $24, Amazon
She’s mindful to distinguish between productive and unproductive anger — one that needs to be made more often, especially when discussing anger’s gender bias. “I’m not talking about throwing things or overpowering another,” Redford clarifies. “That’s not real, healthy, productive anger. That is usually a result of repression. Repressing anger is what slowly corrodes our spirit. I can attest to that personally. But when I feel healthy anger, and express it constructively, I feel like my inner protector is rising to the surface to be there for me. When I repress it, I repress my protector and I’m fair game. Anger, being such a strong emotion, usually leads to action. Movement. Coming unstuck.”
"But when I feel healthy anger, and express it constructively, I feel like my inner protector is rising to the surface to be there for me."
Gendered spaces and gender bias — not just of anger — is at the heart of End of the Rope. Redford, after all, spends much of the book clawing a path for herself in the boy’s world of extreme mountain climbing. In the first few pages of End of the Rope she notes wanting her father’s life. In romantic relationships, she describes wanting to be her partners, as opposed to just being the girl who is with them. I ask Redford about this: what it meant to be a woman in a culture of men, what it meant to seek out a life for which there were few-to-no female role models, and how that played out in her early relationships?
“It takes a long time to learn to parent yourself when you weren’t properly parented as a child,” Redford says. “I figured out pretty quick at age 18 when I went into the world that I was defenseless because I didn’t have an internal defender. I developed a very tough personae. I tried to be more macho than the guys — chewing tobacco was my most disgusting tactic. I called it my handy-dandy man-repellant but that didn’t seem to work. I was tough on the outside but I lacked congruence, which makes a person constantly on guard not to let others find out how squishy they are on the inside.”
“I found this all out with a very good psychologist,” she adds.
Redford’s relationships throughout the memoir are as up-and-down, as much journeys of self-discovery, as the rock faces she spent her young life climbing. She describes choosing tough, unavailable, confident, and skilled men who exhibited all the qualities she wished for in herself. “Maybe I thought I could become competent by osmosis,” she says. “Just by being near them. But I turned them into the parent I lacked internally. That’s a heavy responsibility for a guy, and most of them didn’t want to carry the parent torch. They just wanted someone they could swing leads with climbing.”
"I was tough on the outside but I lacked congruence, which makes a person constantly on guard not to let others find out how squishy they are on the inside.”
But, she says, calling upon the worlds of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, “ ‘We have become the men we wanted to marry.’ That is the journey I’m on. And it’s a goal I’m closer to now. But I have to almost make a checklist of everything I’ve accomplished in my life and pull it out regularly to remind myself that I really am quite competent. Go figure!”
Photo courtesy of Jannicke Kitchen Photography
Redford’s struggles with feminism resonate throughout End of the Rope as well. She calls herself a feminist, but notes the frustration she feels at not living up to the ideals of feminist leaders.
“I’ve written about being ‘the worst feminist to walk the earth,’ and ‘the poster girl for The Cinderella Complex,’ and ‘a non-practicing feminist.’ We have to struggle with our need for love, approval and acceptance with our need to walk the talk of feminism. It was and still is the “F” word in a lot of circles. And because we were created in this world, it can take a lifetime to grow into feminism.”
Growing up in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Redford shares her internalization of her parents’ relationship — the gendered power imbalance that she witnessed not only in her own family, but in the families of her friends as well — and the cultural messages that were (and often still are) sent to young girls and women every single day.
“I, like most of us, grew up with the statements: you run like a girl, you throw the ball like a girl, you cry like a girl — being the worst insults imaginable. What a message to receive day after day! And because of what I saw in my family, I rejected my mother’s life. Me being me, I took that a few steps further and rejected anything feminine: the color pink, dresses, heels, make-up, talking politely without throwing in cuss words. I was contemptuous of anything feminine because I associated it with weakness. Essentially, I rejected myself. I love the book: The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. She clarified my journey for me. We separate from the feminine and identify with the masculine, then we go on our long, convoluted, bumpy journey back to embracing the feminine. I’m a better feminist now that I’m not trying to feel like a man. Now that I can wear fuchsia pink mountain biking shirts. I see openness, honesty, pink, softness, expressing feelings, admitting to fear, as strongly feminist.”
She adds: “The little girl next door wears a pink Cinderella dress, body armor, and a full face helmet riding her mountain bike around our cul de sac. That’s my ideal feminist.”
Nearly all of Redford’s climbing experiences in End of the Rope involve her battling against your own fear. But even after the devastating climbing deaths she faces, including the death of her boyfriend Dan, Redford keeps going. She keeps choosing to climb, even when near-debilitating fear threatens to overtake her.
“I seem to have a very deep well of optimism and tenacity to draw on. My parents were wounded by their own experiences, but were very strong people. I think my mother passed along her rose-colored glasses, and my father passed along his ‘Jesus Christ, quit your whining,’ glasses. I have a lot of internal conflict, but the belief in the goodness in life and in people always seem to win in the end. I’ve always wanted a meaningful life, not an easy one. Seems to be what I got. After my boyfriend Dan’s death, my father said, 'You won't know this for a while, but one day this will make you stronger.' That’s what has happened. I’ve thrown myself at life with a lot of enthusiasm, and I can write funny stories about that, and it’s true it has brought a lot of heartache. But it has also brought a lot of joy. That’s what shines through.”
"I have a lot of internal conflict, but the belief in the goodness in life and in people always seem to win in the end. I’ve always wanted a meaningful life, not an easy one."
The twin ambition to Redford’s life of climbing is her tireless pursuit of higher education — a desire she had to fight tooth-and-nail for, against a family, a husband, a lifestyle, and a culture that made higher education, especially for a woman, nearly impossible to achieve.
“Education came to symbolize power for me,” Redford says. “The power to be in the world as a competent, confident, skilled adult. It meant I could have a meaningful career and support myself and my children so I could be in my marriage by choice, not out of dependence. It is what gave me the courage to leave that marriage. Climbing made me stronger, then education saved me.”
Ultimately, Redford earns her degree, all while raising her two young children — and instilling that same reverence for education in them. “It gave me the feeling that if I could do that, I could do anything,” she says. “It really wasn’t the degree that counted. It was the process I went through to get it. It was the transformation along the way.”
End of the Rope is a must-read for any young woman challenged with forging her way in a space that is still largely dominated by men — be it in the world of extreme mountain climbing, the boardroom, or anywhere in between. It’s a tome to both harnessing and pushing against fear, and the power of arriving on the other side.
“The biggest lesson I had to learn, that I’m still learning, is that because I’m scared and self-doubting on the inside, it doesn’t mean I can’t just go ahead and do whatever I want anyway,” Redford says. “I can do it while being scared sh*tless. I believe my boyfriend, Dan’s words: ‘Fake it 'til you make it.’ If you stand up straight, walk like a big person even if you’re five foot one (and a half), you eventually feel like one. It makes so much difference how you move physically in the world; how you talk to yourself. Instead of saying: ‘Jan, you’re a chicken shit,’ I try to think of what my mother kept telling me: ‘Jan, you’re so much stronger than you give yourself credit for.’ We all need a mother inside us saying that.”
“I can do it while being scared sh*tless."
Anyone curious what Redford’s climbing life looks like now might be surprised to learn she'll express the merits of fear. “Sometimes being scared protects us from death and gory injuries. I didn’t have enough fear when I started climbing,” Redford says. “I climb more for the joy of the movement now, not the need to push myself too far out of my comfort zone. I push myself just to the edge of fear, which doesn’t take much. I’m nudging myself out of my comfort zone but not risking death or a life in a wheelchair. It's freeing that my ego isn’t as involved. It’s freeing to be older. I can climb for the love of climbing.”
A Climbing Memoir with More Agony Than Ecstasy
Jan Redford's 'End of the Rope' doesn't shy away from the author's climbing, relationship, and career pains—which makes it a refreshing new contribution to the canon
Jayme Moye
Jayme Moye
May 8, 2018
In the first climb that author Jan Redford narrates in her debut memoir, End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood (Counterpoint Press; $26), she’s an adventurous 14-year-old enraged by yet another broken promise from her hard-drinking father. She charges out of her family’s vacation cabin in eastern Canada and into the woods, where she discovers a rock cliff four times the height of a house. Still fuming, Redford spontaneously scales the formation, scaring the wits out of herself and forgetting her anger at her dad.
So begins Redford’s complicated relationship with both men and climbing, a struggle that will continue for at least the next two decades. It’s one of several threads in her memoir, recalling her gritty coming-of-age and her goal of becoming a professional guide—which she achieved in 1986, at a time when there were few other women guiding in North America. The book is a welcome addition to mountain literature, where women’s voices (and stories like lactating all over yourself in the woods while on the job) are still noticeably rare.
In a departure from typical climbing narratives, Redford doesn’t write about her greatest accomplishments on the rock—while she was a talented climber, she didn’t make first ascents or do expeditions on mountains like Everest. Instead, she shares her worst moments, from nearly rappelling herself off the end of the rope on 3,000-foot El Capitan to panicking while guiding a group of army cadets up what should have been a routine alpine summit in the Canadian Rockies. “I wasn’t writing about the things I did right, the climbs I breezed up and had a beer at the bottom,” Redford explained over the phone from her home in Squamish, British Columbia, the rock-climbing capital of Canada. “I was writing about the things I learned from.”
This includes her personal life and her early dirtbag days after catching the climbing bug. Redford officially learned to climb after high school, at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Wyoming. As she writes of her 19-year-old self, “I felt like I’d been sleepwalking through my life, and climbing propped open my eyes. Made me fully alive.”
After NOLS, Redford goes full-bore climbing bum. She waits tables and works seasonal jobs doing ski patrol and tree planting in Canada to support her lifestyle. She dreams of becoming a professional guide but settles for dating them while she accrues more experience in the outdoors. The men she’s attracted to are always older. They’re also masters over their chosen outdoor dominion: alpinists, big-wall climbers, kayakers. Much as Redford is drawn to these men, she’s also dubious of softening, of losing her position as a foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing, one-of-the-guys badass. Describing this apprehension after meeting a man during one of her five seasons climbing in Yosemite, Redford writes, “Rik was 25, four years older than me, and he was such a good climber that I knew I’d follow him around like a baby duck if I slept with him.” She maintains this straight-shooting style of self-awareness throughout the book.
Redford starts to crave more stability when she meets Dan Guthrie. A big-wall climber, ice climber, and alpinist, Guthrie is arguably Redford’s first real love, and they’re soon living together at his place in Banff, Alberta, where Redford considers “getting my shit together” and attending university in nearby Calgary. In 1987, when Guthrie dies tragically in an avalanche while climbing in Alaska, Redford derails. Two days after the memorial, she ends up in bed with Guthrie’s good friend and climbing partner. Redford gets pregnant and chooses a shotgun wedding over an abortion.
Up until this point in the book, Redford has been following a storyline popularized by female adventure memoir authors like Cheryl Strayed: one that puts a greater emphasis on gaining control of our emotions than on mastering anything in the external landscape. While Redford continues to deftly handle this form in the second half of the book, she complicates her own narrative because she isn’t ultimately healed by the outdoors. More the opposite. Redford loses not only the love of her life to the mountains, but also one of her best girlfriends, Niccy, who falls to her death while teaching rock climbing in the Cascades. By age 30, Redford is an uneducated, unhappily married mother of two, living in a podunk logging town in British Columbia with her equally miserable climber-turned-logger husband. Redford eventually finds her way out of her failing marriage and dead-end life by leaving the mountains, moving to Calgary, and finally attending university.
In that way, Redford’s book tells the story that rarely makes it into an exciting adventure memoir—that of a person whose life isn’t magically transformed by climbing or who sometimes feels the betrayal of the wild more strongly than the benefits. The book is often more relatable than aspirational, and that can be a good thing.
While reading about another of Redford’s crippling episodes of self-doubt on the rock, I wanted to reach into the book and shake her. In retrospect, I may have been seeing a little too much of myself in Redford during those moments. Similarly, her mini epiphanies, on the rock and in life, resonated with me. In the epilogue, Redford writes about getting past fear while climbing: “If I can control my body, I can control my mind. I always thought it was the other way around. But if I put my body in motion, my mind has to follow.”
Much of Redford’s narrative may not strike readers as awe-inspiring in the way of the typical mountain-conquest story or as motivating as the increasingly typical healed-by-the-outdoors story. But it will resonate with anyone trying to find her path in a confusing world that still sends women far too many mixed signals about who or what we should be.
Filed To: Climbing / Canada / Adventure / Family / Culture / Books / Women's
Mothers, Outdoors: 'End Of The Rope' & Wild Places After Baby
By Janet Manley
2 months ago
"I knew my muscles would reappear — I'd reappear — if I could just get back to work."
For Jan Redford, the Canadian climber and author of End Of The Rope: Mountains, Marriage, And Motherhood, getting back on the wall, back out into the bush, after having a baby was essential. When she writes of returning to her work in forestry, of the shared female experience of expressing breastmilk into "logging slash," the clean, bright air and the feeling of hope rushes out and around you.
"We wanted to be out in the field tromping around getting exercise, because we'd have to go home and look after our children," Redford tells Romper by phone of her days with the women of silviculture (growing trees) in early motherhood. "We [were] in the truck four-wheel-driving through the bush, gabbing about our children and sh*t-head husbands." At home, friends wet-nursed her baby in a pinch, and her desire to get out and climb was trumped by her husband's need to bag summits (today, she says of their power dynamic, "I don't think he believed it existed").
The book... feeds into a growing concern about the ways we have cut women off from nature; from spidering up a granite cliff in a climbing harness, from hiking as they heal from birth.
Redford's memoir follows her climbing career from her days following (and sometimes leading) the men of Yosemite, to the death of her beloved boyfriend Dan in an avalanche, to a pregnancy, fraught partnership, and leap into motherhood in the immediate aftermath.
The book has resonated with men as well as women — Redford says she has been seeing lots of men at her book events — but makes a powerful case for motherhood in the outdoors and feeds into a growing concern about the ways we have cut women off from nature; from spidering up a granite cliff in a climbing harness, from hiking as they heal from birth.
She shares some of these concerns with author Molly Caro May, whose memoir Body Full Of Stars: Female Rage And My Passage Into Motherhood came out earlier this year, and who told Romper, "I can't imagine being in a place where I wasn't able to stretch my body out on the grass or go into the woods and be alone." May's book draws a line from a woman's physical movement to her emotional health postpartum. "If a woman doesn't get to be out by herself occasionally, it's hard to connect to that body, because we are an animal body," she said at the time.
When I had a baby, I wanted to walk, to be outside. The Ergo carrier was a blessing — I could get out in the wind and hike a mountain again. Of course I also worried about falling and crushing my baby in a freak baby-sling-breastfeed-hiking-accident. There aren't no risks involved in getting out there.
But we don't tend to encourage new mothers to get outside. We give them Boppies and car capsules and baby monitors. We tell them to "take it easy" for six weeks.
For Olympic champion cross-country skier Kikkan Randall, the advice was the same. She told Romper in February that she injured her back just carrying her baby around, because her core had disintegrated in the absence of exercises to help her recover strength postpartum.
It's not like I'd found Jenna under a fucking cabbage patch. She'd been ripped out of me, and no one was lining up to interview me on CBC.
In Redford's story, the outdoors is restorative, and a source of knowledge. The rock face reveals her weaknesses, her thought process, the changes in her body. In her first lead climb as a mother, a friend goads her to hurry up as the climb is *only* a 5.8 grade. "I can die just as easily on 5.8 as 5.10!" She fires back.
The view from up there changes. Our kids change us.
"The shift was happening a little bit before kids, but seemed solidified after my daughter," Redford says of the way she approached risk after becoming a mother. "My marriage was so unhappy that I didn't want to leave [Redford's daughter] in the family that I had married into," although she notes her husband "would have been a great dad if anything would have happened to me."
More so, her instinct about where the edge lay became better honed. "I'd already developed a fear of death," Redford says, recalling moments leading a pitch when her daughter Jenna would "dance in front of my eyes literally" down below.
Leading the pendulum pitch on the Royal Arches Route in Yosemite. Photo by Gary Bocarde
Redford positions motherhood as equal to and adjacent the accomplishments of men on the world's tallest and most dangerous peaks. After her husband returns from a Pakistani expedition and is being interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, she writes, "They'd suffered up there, I knew that, but it's not like I'd found Jenna under a fucking cabbage patch. She'd been ripped out of me, and no one was lining up to interview me on CBC."
Motherhood, she argues, is an expedition. And it's a theme mothers keep picking up on.
"This foot, that foot. I'm pretending I understand what's real and what's not," says a pregnant creation of Samantha Hunt in Mr. Switchfoot as she treks on and on toward birth. "I won't go back to what I was before I started walking."
I think we're left almost floating when they [go].
The outdoors often seem diametrically opposed to motherhood. "It’s not about women being fit enough or strong enough or not having the right academic background," ski guide Shannon Werner, 38, told Outside Magazine in an exploration of why female outdoors professionals put off starting a family. "I know motherhood is possible, but for me personally at this point in my career, I have to be strategic and plan it."
On the other side of things, End Of The Rope is punctuated at regular intervals by loss — a husband lost in a fall here, a boyfriend buried in an avalance here, someone's friend, someone's de facto. For the wives, partners, and mothers left behind, it is one more slice that threatens to cut them off from the outdoors.
"I think we're left almost floating when they [go] because we want to be a part of the climbing community," Redford tells me, explaining that her decision to bunk down with a fellow climber soon after her boyfriend's death is a common scene.
Redford's story — her grown daughter is also an avid climber — is proof that women need to be supported in getting outside. The most difficult parts of the memoir involve her being left to watch her children in remote logging towns. Her empowerment as a climber and adventurer is crucial in helping her to identify and leave a toxic marriage. There, the reader makes a natural leap to that other feminist memoir involving a woman battling her demons out on the trail, Wild.
"Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told," wrote Cheryl Strayed. "I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me."
Redford's story, too, is one about overcoming her own thought patterns. She plots the domestic scenes with her dominating ex-husband slowly and carefully, demonstrating the way she would move from one piece of protection (to use a climbing term) to another. Eventually, she solves the puzzle of how to get to the next hold, leaving her husband, finishing her education, and, eventually, becoming a writer capable of telling her story in a cracking memoir.
Counterpoint Press
End Of The Rope: Mountains, Marriage, And Motherhood by Jan Redford, $32, Amazon
Maternity leave was an opportunity for me to stroll around the park a lot, baby on chest, and reconsider what I was doing, how I felt in my body, and what I was good for. Walking seemed like a natural way to unfurl all the thoughts I had as I radically rewired my brain. It's an essential but overlooked part of our postpartum adjustment, and Redford shows this on a larger scale.
"I've been able to pinpoint a lot of patterns in my life that have been passed down from my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother," Redford tells me. The hope in writing the book is that she has saved herself from passing along those "demons" to her own daughter.
And in researching her family history, Redford discovered something a little incredible: her grandmother had been a climber. Redford's grandmother appears in a photo at the foot of Canada's Mt. Robson in 1913 with the Canadian Alpine Club. She had worked in the Yukon, attended med school, and then withdrawn when she got married — another woman headed indoors to raise a family.
For Redford, it was a revelation. "I had never figured out why I was climbing."
The final piece is that women can and must be out there together.
"There were so few of us while we were climbing," says Redford of climbing in the '80s, "and then of course the whole world of child-rearing was very female dominated."
Though Redford dates a few different rock climbers before motherhood comes along, one of the most impressive characters in the book, other than Redford herself, is a female climber and friend, Niccy, who is with Redford for longer than any of her romantic interests.
The outdoors might be a male-dominated space, but, says Redford, "My women saved me."
Check out Romper's new video series, Bearing The Motherload, where disagreeing parents from different sides of an issue sit down with a mediator and talk about how to support (and not judge) each other’s parenting perspectives. New episodes air Mondays on Facebook.