Chimney Rock

(This story was originally a dedication in a foreword to a book of poetry that I gave my Dad, Robert S. Sanford, for his birthday.)

I can only think of one thing I can give you on your 70th birthday that might be adequate. Yesterday I went hiking in the mountains with friends and we had a conversation about courage. We were delighted by our discovery that we like to be scared. We found ourselves describing to each other the instant just before the leap into danger, and we described to each other what happens in the mind at that instant. We all agreed that one has to stop thinking at that crucial instant in order to able go forward into the danger.

That was when I realized that it was you who taught me about courage, and so I told my friends a story about you and a place called Chimney Rock:

My love of adventure has a beginning place in my memory— A place in the eastern mountains where a great platform of rock juts out over a valley brimming with trees, and two turkey vultures circle in the summer haze.

This was a place where nature reserves a lesson for those who pay attention: a place where a deep, cold, dark crevice too wide to cross runs all the way across the path. There is no bridge, or any way around it. On the other side the trail ends in an eminence of stone, where one can sit in the sun and gaze out over the whole valley.

As a child I saw my father and mother leap across into the sun and climb up to admire the view, leaving me on the other side. I was afraid to jump. I looked down into the dark crack at my feet, and the bottom looked cold and far away, and I imagined falling into it and cringed. My father said that if I wanted to get to the other side I had to jump it myself. I didn’t jump because I was afraid. My mother came back, and I contented myself with exploring the rocks on my side and envied my father perched out there in the sun. I tried to convince him to carry me across, but he refused.

I can’t remember how many times we hiked to Chimney Rock before I summoned the courage to leap the four foot gap and come out into the sun and join my father on the highest rock. I do remember the thrill of triumph, and how my heart pounded, and how exalted I felt, stationed on that tower of stone next to my father, while two great black birds slid through the air so near I could hear the ruffle of the wind in their wings.

There is no measure that can assess the value of that moment, or what it cost my father to refuse to help me, and to let me choose when I would try to jump the crevice. I think the price must have been very high, because I have gone back to Chimney Rock as a grown woman, and leaping that gap still frightens me. It’s a long way to the other side, and a long way down, and my heart still pounds. I imagine my father watching me as a child try to find the courage to leap. I see him seeing my fear, and my desperate longing to be up on the top, out in the sun where the birds flew. I can sense how hard it must have been for him to see me choose not to jump, and how he suffered my disappointment with me. It would have been even harder, I think, to watch me, at eight years of age, make a leap that could have ended in disaster.

(My mother later told me that it frightened her to watch me jump it as a child.)

And the hardest risk of all: the fear that I would not find the courage at all, and never leap to join him. The character trait in my father that led him to encourage me to take such risks is a rare and precious thing. What a terrible chance a father takes to encourage a child to test herself against real dangers. How much safer it would be to protect the child.

What does it matter if the child grows up unable to leap out across fearful chasms?

What does it matter if the child grows up believing fear is a good reason not to attempt something?

What does it matter whether a timid child finds courage, or not?

I don’t know, I only know I would not have the courage to do what I do now if I had not found it as a child.

I only know my life would not be as full of joy and pain.

I only know my life would be less than it is.

Thank you, Daddy.