(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
A Great Idea
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why climb a mountain with your daughter? Aren't there easier father-daughter bonding activities?
Geoffrey Norman: Well, why climb a mountain at all? That question has been asked a million times and never answered satisfactorily, though I always liked George Mallory's great crack to some insufferable newspaper guy who kept pestering him with the question, “Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest?”
“Because it's there,” Mallory famously answered. Don't you wish for presidents to be so pithy? By the way, Mallory was a great friend of Robert Graves who writes about him affectionately in Goodbye to All That, and gives you a feeling, anyway, for why people climb mountains — for the sheer, exuberant hell of it.
As for “bonding,” I dislike like that word almost as much as “closure.” When I said I wanted to try a little mountain climbing on my 50th birthday, my daughter said she wanted to go. We'd gotten used to doing things together — her, my younger daughter, their mother, and me — and after a little thought, it seemed like a good idea. Turned out to be even better than that.
A Way of Clarifying Things
Lopez: Did you ever expect to get to know Brooke so well in this way? Were you intimidated by the thought of daughters, first off? And then at the thought of climbing with one of them?
Norman: Well, I knew her pretty well before we ever belayed each other on a rock buttress. But the mountains have a way of clarifying things, like a hot skillet does butter. And I certainly saw her character in much plainer relief the higher we got. And, unsurprisingly, I liked what I saw.
Sure I was intimidated by the thought of daughters. But as the fathers of daughters for generation unto generation will tell you — they make it easy. The cliché of the doting dad, willing to do anything for his precious daughter didn't just get made up out of air. Women get their guile and their ability to manipulate men from all that practice on their fathers. But I didn't say that.
Lopez: Were you surprised she was as good of a climber as you? I mean, a girl!
Norman: Yes, I was. And not just because she's a girl. There is a lot of pure drudgery in climbing and that is something the adult temperament handles. Better, anyway, than the overstimulated, easily bored psyche of adolescents. But Brooke has focus.
Lopez: You are the father of two daughters so it might be hard to say, but would the experience been different had Brooke been your son climbing with you?
Norman: Absolutely. And anyone who thinks otherwise either doesn't have children or can't see them clearly through the ideological cataracts. Every parent I know has remarked, early in the game, on the obviousness of the difference between boys and girls. Put some little boys in a room with a stick and see what happens. Then try the same experiment with some girls. I got involved with lots of different kid-type things while mine were young — coached softball, taught Sunday school, etc. — and I get into this in the book. I never started thinking that there was no difference between boys and girls because the evidence to the contrary was so undeniable. In fact, it isn't even interesting to sit around and argue the point. A lot better to take whatever flavor of kid you've been blessed with and head for the mountains. Just don't do it to “bond.” Because if that's how you think, then it is probably too late.
Lopez: What made you write the book?
Norman: My agent suggested it and I do everything she tells me to do. Actually, I wanted to write it because the climbing of a mountain solves a whole lot of problems for a writer. I mean, you have your narrative device. Huck and Jim went down the river. Dad and Brooke went up the mountain. It's nice to work off good blueprints. Also — and trying to avoid cant, here — it seemed inevitable that, sooner or later, I'd write something about being a father. Writers tend to write about the things that have most emphatically gotten their attention — baseball seems to be that thing for a lot of writers. My girls made a big impression on me.
Girls Are Irresistible
Lopez: Have you done any climbing since the big one with your daughter?
Norman: Little stuff. We both thought we had it out of our system after Aconcagua. That was a tough climb. But about two weeks after we were home, we started talking about doing another one. It bores into you that way and stays there like a cyst. When some film guy trolled the possibility of flying us to Europe so he could film us climbing, we went after it like hungry bluefish. Hasn't amounted to anything yet, so we may have to put something together on our own.
Lopez: Any plans for future collaborations? Either on a mountain or a book?
Norman: Well, my younger daughter, Hadley (we stole the name from Hemingway's first wife) has no interest in the mountains. She is a more conventional young woman with an interest in the same things that are attractive to the Bush daughters. She came up with a scheme for us to buy an old, sublimely American car — a GTO or something like that — from a junkyard and spend a few months fixing it up. Drop a new engine into it. Give it an assertive new paint job. Then we would start out on a road trip, hitting all the American stations of the cross along the way: Graceland, Bourbon Street, a NASCAR race somewhere. The Grand Canyon. Then when, we get to the coast, I'll give her the car and fly home while she figures out her next move.
“And, listen Dad, I've got the perfect title for a book if you want to write about it,” she said, when she was pitching the idea.
“What's that?”
“You can call it, Two for the Road.”
Girls are, no question, irresistible.
