WARREN HARDING (June 18, 1924—February 27, 2002)

It had been nearly ten years since I’d seen him and the decade showed in his face and body and the way he moved. After all, it was the early 1990s and he was nearly 70 years old, alcoholic and with more difficult miles and adventures in that body than you could find in a climber’s library of hard-core adventure books. Some of his more hedonistic, non-climbing adventures wouldn’t make it into the American Alpine Club Library, of course, but Warren Harding lived for the experience, enjoyment and the adventure of the moment, not the solemnity of the library or the approval of the librarians. Still, he was among the greatest of American climbers and no matter what his intentions in the matter he is in all the climbing libraries, an irony neither lost on nor without relish for he whose wit and perspicacity were acute, even legendary.
I was climbing around Moab and there were rumors that Harding had moved from California to town but I couldn’t confirm them. But he heard I was around and came looking for me and left a phone number at the climbing store and a friend of a friend got the number to me and the next morning I phoned and soon found myself at the kitchen table of an unremarkable suburban Moab house in the company of Warren and his companion Alice Flomp. It never became clear to me why they had forsaken their beloved California for Moab, Utah, but in any case their sojourn in the desert didn’t last long. Perhaps a new start in life? Despite the decade’s wear and the distended belly on the shrinking frame of a hard drinking man nearing 70, he was easily recognizable. No one looked like Warren Harding. It was me who was tough for Warren to recognize. In the years since we’d last tipped wine glasses together I’d shorn a 13 year growth of beard and hair and retired from the drinking/drugging life and even had a full-time job half the year, though that would last only another half a year.
“Dick, you look like a fucking insurance salesman,” he commented.
“Warren, you look like an old, broken down climber,” I replied.
With those observations of the passage of time and its consequent changes duly noted, we picked up where we had left off without a missed beat. Warren missed very little and though he once famously wrote that he “….didn’t give a rat’s ass,” he did, though not enough to give his integrity to it.
Alice, twice Warren’s size on the horizontal plane, doted on him in a charming manner and the three of us sat at their table talking for a couple of hours, Alice and Warren sipping watered down white wine, me sipping watered down water. It was a delightful morning of conversation. We talked about mutual friends, climbing (of course), living in the desert, a not particularly difficult but thoroughly enjoyable snow climb we once did in winter up Castle Peak above Donner Summit, writing, writers, the vagaries of life, the follies of men and the pretentious pomposities of a select few of the self-important ones. As I had remembered, Warren’s humor, insight, wit and fierce independence of thought was more fun and enlightening than the more rigid and predictable views of some of his fundamentalist critics. True, a conversation with Warren, especially when the wine flowed, which was often, could be as unorthodox and unpredictable as the slide show/lecture on Yosemite big wall climbing he once gave at The Passage Bar and Restaurant in Truckee. He had put the slides together hurriedly and had not rehearsed his talk. It was a raucous full house that gathered in the Passage that early 1980s night and by the time Warren was ready to perform both audience and lecturer were primed, so to speak. The lights dimmed, the audience quieted, the first slide appeared on the screen, appropriately enough a beautiful shot of El Capitan, the Nose in profile. But the vertical slide had been inserted in the carousel horizontally and El Cap was lying on its side. “Whoops,” said Warren, “you’ll have to tilt your head to the side and you can see just as well.” Both Warren and the entire audience laughed, tilted their heads to the side while he led them through the first ascent of El Cap and more, much of it out of sequence. Many of the slides were shown backwards and others horizontal when they should have been vertical and vice-versa. His stories and photos jumped from climb to climb and era to era and back again with a seamless improvisational narrative that could only be pulled off by a master story-teller with a farcical bent. And, the thing was, in the end, after sufficient laughter, hooting, sidetracks and non sequiturs the audience had learned as much about Yosemite big wall climbing and climbers, the motivations that impelled them and the values they truly lived by as they would have gleaned from more traditional and stern accounts of the same climbs. But Harding’s audiences had a lot more fun and had to do a lot more thinking, though their necks and heads might be a bit stiff in the morning. That’s something of how a conversation at a kitchen table over watered down wine and watered down water could be with Warren Harding, and for the first couple of hours I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then the wine drowned the water and Warren began to repeat himself and lose track and not make even farcical sense any longer, and, you know, there’s nothing worse for an ex-drinker than trying to talk with an old drinking buddy who’s rounded the corner (usually around the third or fourth glass of wine) to irrelevant repetition and the meandering sidetrack of indefinite certainty, indecipherable allusions and elliptical elocution, especially when the ex-drinker is aware of the vast karmic debt of indecipherable allusions and elliptical elocution he does not remember but somehow knows he has incurred. Fortunately, Warren was generous of heart and not mean-spirited and often funny as hell even in the bag. I liked him very much and wanted to spend more time with the Warren of the first part of the day.
“Say,” I interrupted him in mid-sentence, “why don’t we go climbing?”
He stopped speaking and regarded me with a wild-ass look that was half incomprehension and half meeting a challenge. “No, no, I couldn’t do that. I don’t climb any more,” he said, his eyes drifting away from mine.
“Sure you could,” I insisted with a smile. “I know a spot right on the road where we can set up a top rope and the climbs are not hard and we’ll have a great time. We can do a few laps and have a workout. You’ll love it.”
“No no no, I’m doing good to climb out of bed in the morning,” he said, but I could see his interest was aroused.
Alice saw it too. “Warren, you should go climbing with Dick,” she encouraged. “That‘s a great idea. Yes, Warren, go climbing.”
“Wellll-l-l-l-l-llllll……….”
An hour later we were at the School Room of Wall Street along the Colorado River, after a full 20 foot approach from my car parked just off Potash Road a few miles north of town. I set up top ropes on two routes in the 5.7—5.8 range. Warren had resurrected from his basement a ratty old harness and a tired looking pair of climbing shoes and he tied in and leapt upon the lovely sandstone of Utah with an impressive if initially shaky fervor. He struggled on the first lap and when he got down he wanted a break and a drink of water, which he got. He belayed me and then he took another lap on the same route and the improvement was notable. He began to move with the practiced if rusty grace of a battered 70 year old body that has spent its life climbing rock. As the memory of physical movement returned to a sobering brain, a different Warren Harding gradually emerged on the stone. The soul of the soul of the golden age of Yosemite big wall climbing of the 50s and 60s appeared with the merriment of having broken free from the concrete prison of time’s passage. It is hard to explain in words, though understandable without words to any climber, but the act of climbing transformed the man, a process that was obvious to the attentive observer. By the time he came down from the second lap Warren’s famous satanic visage was radiant. Warren Harding was a happy man.
“That was really fun,” he said. After a rest and some water we climbed some more. Over the next couple of hours we each did three or four laps on the top ropes. The first time he tried the 5.8 moves Warren fell off and hung a few times before getting up the route. The last time he went up he climbed the entire route without a slip, a hesitation or any observable undue strain or effort. He had the demeanor of just what he was, but definitely not so old or broken down as he had been a few hours earlier. After, as we pulled and coiled the ropes and packed up our gear he told me that it had been an “inspiring” afternoon and that he was going to start hiking and get back in shape. He was fired up at the prospect and I believed him and told him of some of the hikes I knew around Moab, like Negro Bill Canyon which I particularly liked. He commented that if he started hiking some he should be able to do some easy climbing around the area. I told him there were undoubtedly some local climbers who would be happy to show him around and do some climbing with him. All he had to do was go to the local climbing store and let it be known that he wanted to climb. We talked about getting together to climb the 5.6 route on South Six Shooter Peak in Indian Creek, an hour south of Moab. I told him that if he got himself in shape I’d love to drive over from Aspen where I was living at the time and do that climb with him. He said he was going to do just that, but in the way of old friends whose lives are on different trajectories, I never saw Warren again after that day. We spoke by phone a few times over those years but I don’t know that he hiked himself back into shape or ever climbed again. I hope he did.
When I drove Warren back to his house in Moab he was calm, even contemplative (he was also probably really fatigued), and I had the thought that he was a man who had been dragged out of retirement for an afternoon to do the work that he was meant to do, the work that defined his life and was in many ways the best part of that life, the work that gave him the deepest satisfaction and best insight into himself. Alice was happy to see him and Warren to see her, and my last view and memory of Warren Harding is that of a complex man who had beaten back his demons for an afternoon by nothing more complicated than battering them against a slab of sandstone above the Colorado River by Potash Road. He was calm, content and happy the last time I saw him.
I don’t know that Warren Harding could be described as ‘serene,’ but he definitely had a streak of the Tao running through his heart and mind.
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
Tao-te-ching