You can climb as slow as you want
There was a point when it felt like all the air went from the truck.
We were both at that delirious precipice of laughter, breath shot and no sound left, waiting for the next heave. Jenner’s pickup hit the peak of that particular hill, the snow had picked up, full on white-out out just past the glass and the song, ‘Gloria’, hit its zenith. We honestly could have gone careening off the road, a winding, two lane stretch of narrow mountain highway, down into the frozen glacial lake on the driver’s side. We pantomimed it a couple times right before, with every song I was putting on in succession of the last, off a playlist I just called ‘big ones’.
Flushed and sweating, our coats half off, the feeling finally back in our fingers and feet from the hike up to a place called Troll Falls with Branigan screaming about nobody calling I looked over at Jenner, her eyes squeezed shut, hands gripping the wheel, and felt that small, exhilarated shrug that comes from deep inside your body when you bottom out in these blissful moments that decides for you if this is it, it wouldn’t be so bad.
My first night in Calgary I slept for 12 hours. Maybe it’s sleeping under mountains, with the snow drifting silent in from them and the Calgary Tower in the distance pulsing through colours. Maybe it was being trundled around like a child in my friends gigantic cars, rolling slow through streets that seem bigger for how wide the sky. I started to make a joke, a bad one, that there were “two babies in town now”, me and the real one.
It could also be the air, cold, bright, completely open. I had never visited in winter, am used to the golden hour light there that lasts for four. When it came up, when anyone asked where I was from—often, given how friendly people are out there—I tell them Toronto, how it was my first snow of the winter, how it hadn’t hit us yet. They’d quickly and politely correct me—“This isn’t winter”—before they told me to enjoy myself.
I went out west to meet the baby. But at two weeks he eats as much as it takes to fill his tiny stomach and then passes out for long stretches, so I went out west to see people I love test the new, expanded parameters of their lives. We all do this, around life or death or milestones, because there are so few instances where you get to make a decision that will affect your life directly, rather than all the things that will be pressed upon it randomly, without discretion or consent. When there is something beautiful or awful that will shape the lives of who we love we want to see them, as best we can, into that next part. At its core ceremony is community, and even the act of sitting at a table in Brett’s shop over coffee with Emily, their sleeping baby tucked a couple feet away in a corner in his carseat between the door of his dad’s office and a display of Maldon salt can feel commemorative.
For me, I know travel, like the ceremony of it, of packing, getting to the airport, boarding, the small rituals of getting myself set up in my seat and then the motion over distance, is a mix of meditative and a private, probably way too smug pleasure. Sometimes it is anonymity, time alone, other times it is just time, like the feeling of lurching through it, hitting the target elevation and staying there, suspended, for a few hours where the act of where and how to spend time has been taken completely out of your hands. I was at the start of a week off between old job and new when I took the trip to Calgary, and while the visit was for the baby, for my friends, its timing bookended me a breather.
And I took one, stepped fully back and started huffing high elevation air, felt almost happily out of the loop by the time I got back and one of the first things I did was Sean’s podcast. You can hear it in my voice, when we get to talking about load management and the complaints around why it should be necessary for Kawhi Leonard, now, this early, everything I had tapped out from over the course of a few days blinking at mountain snow like I had seasonal memory loss and letting a baby gnaw my knuckle, all of it come rushing back. And the disdain. The disdain because, let’s face it, the conversation is dumb.
Load management, in essence, exists because of the kind of basketball we all like to watch now. And because players themselves are sentient, competitive people at peak physical condition, it is the kind of basketball they like to play now, too. But the demands of that kind of basketball, of pace ramped up from even five years ago, of the need to shoot from way the hell out or else get in, right in, really fast (conversely, to take charges), to jump height or distance from standing, to block, to steal, to run, basically, forever, on a body, even one primed and ready, is a battering every night.
Watching my friends stare at their two week old son, dazed on him, hormones, each other, also probably zoning out a little from sleep deprivation, I can feel the weight of their love pressing like an early storm does, and I know I would do anything to help them carry it now. While this little creature pulling faces from gas, from the gradual discovery that his face moves, grows up with the knit of our lives around him.
Living away from mountains you forget, you can climb as slow as you want.
Rest is crucial. Look at all the fluke injuries that can happen when a guy lands the same way he has a dozen times, but maybe his ankle curves slightly on the last half of the way down. At best a sprain, at worst an ACL, exploding. Flukes are freaks by nature but there is no way there would not be an uptick in them without regular, mandated rest, especially in players who are prone to intensely specific injuries that are widely public knowledge. That is one gross thing about the Clippers releasing the specifics around Kawhi’s chronic injury, the other springs from the same proprietary sense. This complaint that people who pay to watch specific games, with specific players, are somehow personally slighted when that player puts their physical well-being first.
I know people who are against this love to use the example of a little kid being absolutely shattered that they didn’t get to see Kawhi, any player, due to a game time decision to sit him, but I also can’t picture a kid, if you explained to them why, not getting it. Kids are mostly balanced and perceptive, they are also generally better at dealing with disappointment because they get on with their lives. Who I 100% can picture, and am picturing, and do see this getting the biggest rise out of are grown adults with an unhealthy sense of entitlement and proprietorship over a stranger. Even professionals, broadcasters like Doris Burke who I cannot believe I am about to write about just to disagree with, are calling Kawhi out for the sake of their colleagues, that they won’t get to work alongside or I guess have access to Kawhi on a night he’s off. Like, we have all worked with people who make the day go by faster, who offer to pay for our coffee on occasion, who roll their eyes at exactly the right time in a boring meeting, but when they take a sick day we don’t burn their homes to the ground because Dave botched the numbers in the presentation and they weren’t there to see us make a pretend puking face.
Load management is going to be a new, regular reality very soon for many more players than Kawhi in the league, because he’s setting an example sure but mostly because it works! And as long as basketball continues to accelerate in the physicality necessary to play it then there need to be regulatory checks and balances like it. Breathers. Habit is a kind of ceremony too, and harder to bust out from, but if a stranger’s seemingly endless availability is part of our habits as fans then that is something that has formed out of assumption, that is, without any kind of thought bothering to shape the whys of it. It is, for all the exasperation around it, possibly the least urgent thing.
On the way to the mountains, after the city had dropped away and prairie unfolded, before the foothills started to lift, there were three giant coyotes on the other side of a cow fence, completely ignoring the highway. The first thing my brain gave me was "groundhogs”, because it couldn’t comprehend something this wild, that big, being so close. One stands, one sits, one is lying down. I screamed. The mountains came closer, the snow picked up, the quiet out there comes down around your ears.