January 2006 ISSUE
book review
 |
Welcome to his World |
words on the wall
What fuels a man to risk his life by climbing a crumbling limestone wall in the Rockies? Steve De Maio, P.Eng., answers that question and many others in a new book that’s part poetry, part drama, part personal revelation.
BY BILL CORBETT
Freelance Writer
The Rage: Reflections on Risk
$19.95 Cdn
By Steve De Maio, P.Eng.
Published by
Rocky Mountain Books
www.rmbooks.com
During the late 1980s Steve De Maio, P.Eng., was one of the top rock climbers in the Canadian Rockies, pioneering bold routes up big, often loose limestone walls. What allowed him to excel in this high-risk arena was strength, experience, focus, rational analysis — and something he calls “the rage.”
Mr. De Maio, a 41-year-old consulting engineer with Calgary’s Deer Creek Energy, has just pub-lished a book about his climb-ing experiences, aptly titled The Rage: Reflections on Risk (Rocky Mountain Books). It’s a collection of stories and poems spanning two decades, during which his passion waxed and subsequently waned, at least for those daring big-wall ascents.
Mr. De Maio likens many of the cool calculations a climber must make to well-considered engineering decisions. Walking up to a rock or ice climb, there’s a civil assessment: is anything likely to fall or break off in the next 10 hours, or will the warming sun pose an avalanche threat in the bowl above?
Mechanical engineering considerations embrace everything from belay systems and weight distribution to hauling bags and calculating pendulums.
Over an intense five-year period when he was at the peak of his physical and psychological game, Mr. De Maio pioneered leading-edge routes on the high walls of Bow Valley — peaks such as Yamnuska and Windtower. Usually he went with a like-minded partner, but several times he went on self-belayed solo ascents.
The 1989 death of a climbing companion, however, and a coinciding decision to return to university signaled the end of Mr. De Maio’s hard climbing days.
While he has periodically returned to climbing, and sometimes at a fairly high level, the passion that drove him up formidable, untested routes with little margin for error was gone. Instead, he poured that passion into various other channels — mechanical engineering and MBA degrees, work, writing and family; he now has a wife and two young children.
“I want to weave a rich tapestry, with all the strands that now make up my life in balance,” he says. “I’m an eclectic person, and one of the reasons I stopped climbing so intensively is I was starting to get bored.”
A few years ago, his intensity and need for adventure focused on starting and building a company that generated and distributed power from stranded and flared natural gas. Squeezed by soaring natural gas prices and falling power prices, the company was forced into bankruptcy about a year ago.
“It was baptism by napalm,” he says. “But I learned a lot of things you never learn in school.”
Though the corporation experienced some atrocious climbing conditions of its own, through the vagaries of the commodity price environment, Mr. De Maio is by no means conceding defeat. “I have always wanted to start a company. And I did. So now I have the T-shirt, even if it is full of bullet holes.
“At the time, while avalanches washed over my head, I lamented on this to a friend and mentor. He advised, ‘You need to respond as a successful CEO in a failing company. Many great climbers in history required several attempts before they succeeded — you need to frame it that way.’ ”
It all adds up to “another company or two in me. But that’s a mountain I’m not ready to climb right now — to tackle it personally, emotionally or from a family perspective.
“I can feel it happening between the ages of 45 and 50. But I probably need to climb a few real mountains first.”
Book Excerpts
On the rage behind the climb:
In my youth and all through the years of my limestone apprenticeship, it
was never a question of wanting or not wanting to battle. It was a question of
having to. The allure was the honesty …required by self and the challenge
of confronting the brutality that was inherent in the game. You had to develop
tools to deal with such conditions: Two being experience and fitness, and the
other “The Rage” — a valuable tool if you can harness it, deadly
if you can not. The Rage allows a climber to tap into his innermost primal energy.
Beyond sexual or quest drive, it is the fire that allows for human life and evolution,
and provides the driving force for survival.
On the need for calm, rational thought:
While climbing you must evaluate your own physical and mental capabilities
and then accurately balance them against the difficulties and dangers of your
position. This analysis must determine if, indeed, you are capable of dealing
with the given situation or decide to retreat.
On finding a route:
Both Jeff and I understood the nature of the game. It was part of the allure:
The focus, the accuracy and the control. We joyed in the strife of championing
these pitches, of mastering poise in the face of poor protection and suspect
rock, not
because we were crazy, but because we wanted to deal with these situations.
We wanted to test ourselves, to see if our creative and analytical minds could
piece together a route up this wall, a route that could be climbed not only safely
but also in complete control.
One poem:
The Gladiator
The gates are open.
Lions enter my domain.
There is a clatter of
Chariots on cobbles
that further distracts me.
Horses’ hooves click
on the hard stone.
But I am alone
— a gladiator —
at the mercy
of the arena.