I’m a horrible wife. I’m standing in the doorway, watching my husband suffer at the other end of the room, and I’m doing nothing. He’s in bed, his face flushed with fever. His hair is disheveled, his eyes glazed, his focus turned inward. A coughing fit doubles him over. I don’t go to him. I don’t wrap my arms around him and soothe him. I don’t tuck him in and rub his legs. I did on Day 1. But after bleaching the whole house and a dozen loads of laundry, now I just talk to him from the door jamb. And try not to crumple.
 
My son is upstairs doing his homework online. School is closed, of course. Hour by hour, things change. Universities and workplaces sent people home. Public schools closed for three weeks. Then, Shelter in Place was ordered. Now schools may not re-open…
 
So, maybe this is uniting us all, because that’s what shared stress does. We’re all home, our kids are home, we’re trying to work from home. Only, we’re separated. Our hugs come through texts and phone calls. These push-pull forces in our communities are like the opposing forces that make orbits: planets circling a star, electrons circling a nucleus. We're held together by the force of human social need, but pushed apart by our survival instinct.
 
                **
 
It started with a tickle in his throat, a lot of questions, and instant tension.
 
I’m risk-averse. He’s risk-cavalier. Suddenly, that tension defined us. It came from nowhere, slid through the mail slot in the front door, snuck up through the Argentine ant cracks, and took up residence in our house.  A hundred decisions to be made, a hundred different kinds of uncertainty, but two very different perspectives. Damn that tension.

If I focus in on just one decision, it might go like this:
 
“I have a jazz band practice this afternoon,” he said, after complaining that he didn't feel well.
“If you don’t feel 100%, don’t go,” I said.
“But I don’t have a fever.”
“The CDC doesn’t say anything about needing to have a fever. They say stay home if you don’t feel 100%.”

This Fact-war ping-pong continued until he said, “I’ll text Martha and see if its OK with her if I come.”
 
Huge red flags. I swear I could hear that tension gremlin giggling from behind the sofa. Human social behavior during risk. Group choices, for example, are the single largest cause of avalanche deaths when skiing in avalanche terrain. It’s so easy to surrender responsibility. But social etiquette can kill.
 
“So, you’re going to ask permission to come, even though you might be sick?” I asked. “Don’t you think you’re putting her in an impossible situation. What if she doesn’t want you to come, but she doesn’t want to say ‘No' either?”
 
I could see from his face that the harder I pushed, the more resistance I’d get.
 
“Listen, just make a decision and tell her," I said. "Go or don’t go. But don’t ask her.”
 
My husband is one of the most selfless people I know. So, when he changed gears, when he "owned" his decision, it tapped into that selflessness. He didn't go.

But the tension ogre - orange, naked and warty - rolled on the floor, laughing at us.
 
**
 
Now I’m upstairs watching a movie with my son. A text dings from my husband, downstairs. “Thanks for dinner [LOVE Emojis]!” An hour earlier I’d put on slippers, walked in to his bedside table while he averted his head so he wouldn’t cough on me, served dinner onto his very own plate, blew him a kiss, and exited, leaving the slippers at the door.
 
Love in the time of COVID-19.
 
He tried to get the COVID-19 test, but couldn’t. Tests are limited to people over 65, people who’ve visited China, Iran, South Korea or Italy in the last two weeks, or people with underlying health conditions. “Just assume its COVID-19,” the nurse had said. Why does the richest nation on the planet have so few tests?
 
The tension troll is grinning wickedly, doing hand-stands and sticking out its tongue. The blond comb-ever, the orange skin… they look strangely familiar.
 
She said, “Assume you have COVID-19”. It sounds so simple, but it completely changes our lives. Our friends are counting the days since they last hugged my husband, or gave him a ride in their car. They’re holding their breath, waiting for symptoms, wiping down everything they touch.  My son and I don’t have symptoms, but we’re housebound until two weeks after my husband recovers, three weeks total. We’re persona non grata outside our front door, we’re the Darth Vader of COVID-19. We joke about taking over the planet, using our “evil powers” to make people do what we want:  “OK, Safeway, give us all your ice cream, or we’ll cough on you…”
 
Boredom, interspersed with moments of melt-down. Loneliness under duress, decisions in a vacuum, the tension dude, my only constant companion, now gnawing on me. Yes, I melt down. I mean, full-on sobbing into my hands melt-down. Then, of course, I wash them.
 
COVID-19 stop-frame clarity:

• The feeling of Armageddon: the tension everywhere, the lack of traffic and people, it could be an earthquake or a fire … but then I hear the rattle of the garbage truck outside emptying our bins. Ok, an Armageddon with services. It messes with me, this cognitive dissonance.

 

• The email from a search-and-rescue colleague in Bishop, “Bishop is crammed with climbers. Tell your friends to stay home. We have 20 ventilators and TWO ICU beds TOTAL here in Bishop. We have a very elderly population and all the tourists are buying the grocery stores out.”

 

• I walk past Whole Foods and there’s a line to get in.

 

• Hours of Zoom meetings. When I tell folks we have COVID-19 in the house, they back away from their computer screens. Haha, very funny.

 

• Sitting in a chair in the door of the bedroom, chatting with my hubby as he gets better. Our new “quality time”.

 

• When I go online to my MMO RPG game, it’s packed with avatars. I mean, so crowded we’re on top of each other. This is where everyone is.

 

• The surge of connection when a friend leaves a bag of her garden bounty on the porch and talks to us from the bottom of the porch stairs. She’s so real, she’s so… so… so not a text.

 
There’s still a hundred decisions we’re making every day. The tension gremlin is like a shadow dogging every step. But my husband is almost better. In two days, he’ll be free to roam about the house. In these crazy days, that’s some kind of freedom.

This meadow would draw anyone off the road. Who wouldn’t lie back in the sun-baked grass and gaze up at one of the most beautiful and iconic monolithic faces on the planet?
 
I’d first come to Yosemite to climb 30 years ago, ticking off Half Dome’s NW regular route, DNB, and a host of other climbs that convinced me I had, finally, become a solid 5.10 climber. Every visit since then, dozens and dozens, always ended right here, staring up at this giant.
 
And now, thirty years later, El Cap still takes my breath away. It’s November, it’s sunny and cool and I see a steady train of teams climbing The Nose. Three cameras next to me follow one of the teams, and I wonder who’s lucky enough to get this kind of coverage.
 
“Are you Reel Rock?” I ask.
 
One of them laughs, a silver-haired man with lively, kind eyes. “We’re the anti- Reel Rock,” he says. And then tells me who they’re following.
 
Lynn Hill and Nina Caprez are free-climbing The Nose. Holy shit. I sit up.
 
Way back then…
 
Before I even knew what species of girl I was, I knew that none of the female role models around me fit. A varsity soccer player fresh out of college, recently back from an expedition to Denali, what the hell was I? I didn't see my kind of woman in movies. I wasn't in books. Then I started rock climbing. I found Lynn Hill. I found an article by Rosie Andrews in Mountain about rejecting the idea “She’s good for a woman” in favor of “She’s good, period”.
 
Badass. Ripped. Competitive. Great at things heretofore reserved for guys. That was Lynn Hill. And Arlene Blum. And, my first silver screen role model, Sarah Conner from Terminator 2. My three muses. I finally had an idea who I could be.
 
At the Gunks in 1985, I was a new climber gaping up at a 5.8 called Bonnie’s Roof. And there was Lynn Hill, walking past. She looked at me, she looked up at the climb. “That’s a great climb,” she said. “You’re going to love it.” Star-struck, I watched her continue on. My life was beginning to come alive, but I had no idea just how alive…
 
It goes, boys.
 
In 1993 Lynn Hill rocked the world by freeing The Nose. “It goes, boys.” was her femme equivalent of “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
 
Yes! I fist pumped. I happy danced.  No guy had ever climbed The Nose free. “She’s good, period!” I shouted at my male world. At Smith Rock, clinging to the 5.11’s, my climbing partners got it. A hundred times I’d invoked her name as I tried to repeat a move a taller friend had sent. I’m short. Lynn Hill is short. If I couldn’t reach the hold they did, I scoured the blank face for the smallest chink I could use. My mantra: If Lynn Hill can do it, I can do it too. But climbers were a small fraction of my male-dominated world. In my lab at grad school, among the test tubes and toluene, well... never mind. I'm sure you see how that played out.
 
And then I panicked. At 32 Lynn Hill had done this thing. Yes, I was inspired. But I also felt a strange mix of jealousy, pressure, anxiety and sudden worthlessness. A role model is the other side of a coin that includes you. At 31 what did I have to show for myself? The pressure was on. Lynn Hill had fought, she’d suffered, she’d succeeded at something huge. What about me?  
 
Makalu and motherhood
 
Lynn Hill’s cameramen Bryan and Jeff are talking with me. I’m sitting up, intent on their story. Bryan is explaining their idea for Lynn Hill’s film. It will be about climbing, yes, but also a 25-year retrospective about her life and motherhood, her kid, everything that has happened since she’d freed The Nose in ‘93. Now 59, she has a 16-year old son.  A woman’s story. The anti- Reel Rock.
 
There are the parallels again. Now at 58, I also have a 16 year-old. And suddenly a whole world of life between Lynn’s freeing The Nose and this day, watching her free-climb it again, lands in my lap. Those younger ambitions, what I set out to do after Lynn Hill rocked the world, I see from this distance. The innocence, the fucking naivety I had in daring to dream... Tears come to my eyes.
 
A career in a male-dominated field. Climbing higher and harder, an 8,000m peak. Those were my dreams. I set my sights on academic research and on the Himalaya.
 
In science I fought hard, I reveled in and overcame challenges, I did field research in Yosemite for years, I was undermined and marginalized by men and institutions, but I pushed on. I gave it so much energy, that I slammed into that glass ceiling really hard.
 
An 8,000m peak was a stretch goal. I climbed and ski-mountaineered all over the world. I was finally invited on the Polish-American Expedition to Makalu. We didn’t summit. The autumn jet-stream descended early that year and blew us off the mountain. But I came back to the Himalaya the next year and led a team up Ama Dablam, the only woman-led expedition in Nepal in the fall of 1999.
 
Motherhood was never a dream. But it’s what changed my world-view. In this small act, I became ordinary. It allowed me to be inclusive and empathetic rather than badass and elitist. I reveled in giving instead of striving. For the first time, I embraced being a woman. I mean I really saw women for the miracles they are in everyday life.
 
So, as I said, twenty-six years of life fell into my lap, there in El Cap meadow. The exhaustion from all the fighting for my dreams, the regret at the dreams I eventually gave up, but acceptance of who I am now was there too, and tears came to my eyes. 
 
The meaning of tears.
 
Bryan and Jeff see those tears and ask, “So what did it mean for you that Lynn Hill freed the Nose?”
 
I watch Nina finish the lead under the Great Roof. I see the haul bag swing free, then inch upward. I see Lynn climbing the crack up to the Roof. I see the train of teams behind them, aid-climbing in classic ponderous style, probably not even knowing that history is being repeated above their heads. I think of Lynn’s son, I wonder if – like me – she was changed by motherhood. What else has happened during the years between her 1993 ascent and this 2019 ascent? 
 
So, what did it mean for me that Lynn Hill freed the Nose? Such a simple question. Such a complicated answer. “I was inspired,” I say.
 
But now I know I have to see this film. I feel like I might know some of that story. Now, my heart sings for Lynn Hill at her return to this amazing accomplishment. I don’t feel like happy-dancing or fist-pumping. And I don’t feel inadequate either.  I feel a warmth inside, an appreciation of Lynn that is broad and inclusive, and empathy for the pain she must have endured and is… I laugh, looking up… enduring even now.

And by the way, she's in the El Cap photo above. She's that tiny badass dot under the Great Roof.