Long Live the King

[Photos: by Jonathan Copp. Taken during his climb in Ladakh during dawn with the wild horses. Below: Jonny and Micah Dash hanging out together.]

I’m going to take a walk on a side-path for a moment since something happened to me in the early morning. I had a dream with my friend Jonny Copp, who had passed away last May 2009 while climbing a mountain in China.

Jonny was a member of an elite class of rock climbers, the kind that would book it to towers in Pakistan, Patagonia and France from one season to the next as easily as a leaping tiger. Every time I heard of his accomplishments and saw the accompanying photos of breathtaking peaks and crags, I’d be knocked on the side of the head, wondering why I was shriveling away at my desk job. From being witness to such unparalleled earthly beauty, he had a sweet philosophical embrace of life, a chuckle that finished each passing thought, and the presence of mind to be unencumbered by the trivial. He had made his choices carefully in life, choosing so carefully as to reflect who he was and what brought happiness, that he was one of the most complete human beings I had known.

We had a thread that had woven itself in and out of each other’s lives since childhood. I first met him when I was nine or so because our moms became good friends with their mutual love of Asian furniture, and saw him with his group of handsome climbing buddies every Christmas at their home in Fullerton. The gathering would always end with a drum circle and Jonny’s dad strumming sweetly on the guitar with his rendition of “Champs Elysee.” And each year I had a crush on him like every other woman in the room. When he was a teen, and me a pre-teen, his hair had grown long and was very blond. He was going through a tough-guy stage, and I couldn’t even approach him, I was so intimated by his burgeoning sense of being a man. Throughout his twenties, his fingers grew enormously strong and his shoulders seemed to grow outward and upward each year. He would have a therapeutic habit of cracking everyone’s backbone by hugging them and arching back, aside from greeting them with an strong hug. Passing thirty, his face became prematurely weathered and his cheeks had thinned out from the high altitudes and the harsh conditions on the face of these rocky towers. His hair sprayed out in all directions and he had a tuft of a little beard like a forest fawn. Still, with each greeting, his eyes grew brighter with what he had witnessed and no one else had seen, since he was truly living out his life. All the waters of the world seemed to run through his veins, all the winds of the world had thickened his hair with dust. Most of all, he was kind.

When I hung out with Jonny in the deserts of Josh Tree in California while climbing the burnt warm boulders, he’d approach climbing with the logic of a scientist and the intuition of an artist. These two mental states could exist in his mind in balance, and balance was about everything he did. If not this way, than that. If not that way, then another. Step by step, the path on the rock would open up. It was not unlike those fairy tales where the hero is in the labyrinth, and with a simple shift in perspective, the wall blocking the path is opened up with a magic key or a secret password. That’s why all of us loved him. He was astronaut on the rocks, a borderless individual.

When his family got the call from China that they had found the body buried among the rubble and snow, along with two accompanying climbers, his mother screamed out a lasting cry of sorrow. From one who has a young son, there is no pain more searing and deep, aside from war, from losing the child who has come through you, that has become your friend and your soul mate, that you have made choices so carefully for day after day. The Chinese authorities at first weren’t entirely sure they had gotten it right, but a day later, they did get it right. His closest friends that the family called his “brothers” flew to China to retrieve his body from the unstable slabs of ice and rock, and cremate him wrapped within a faithful Tibetan prayer shroud. Although we had never gotten to know each other every day, I had known him enough that his absence tore my time asunder for three days. I sat like a voiceless, static lump at my work desk, thinking that every action and piece of concern in my life was nothing but bits of sand. Jonny was 34 years old. He and his fellow climber Micah, who also perished and was never found, had attended our wedding in Ladakh. For those small moments I was given with both of them, like joking with Micah about the concerns of his very Jewish mother over his rock-climbing exploits with a cup of chai and Kashmiri meat, are the last real memories I hold.

Sometimes dreams whisper your inner voices outloud, resounding like an echo from deep within a cave. There are others where you are the Architect of the Dream. The old Tibetan masters apparently can do this, so honed are their minds they can meditate and create their own conditions while dreaming. And sometimes dreams weigh more than reality. This dream was like that.

I was on a crest on a long winding, dusty pathway in the middle of the Ladakh mountains. The air was very bright, with an inner light that seemed to exude from the land itself rather than the sky. Jonny was hiking up the road, approaching me. A wind went past our faces, and we were high above the gray waters of the Indus River. Micah and Wade, his fellow climbers, were with him. They were walking to reach a destination, and were taking pause. They weren’t quite sure where to go.

Jonny said that he knew the spirits of some mountains up the road that could tell him right path. But he didn’t know exactly which of these mountains could tell him correctly. “So the problem is," I heard myself talking to Jonny,”…is that these mountains will speak to you, you can hear them, but you just don’t know which mountain is telling the truth.”

The dream shifted. Jonny was sitting on the pass surrounded by several drums. Drums he had made. (When he was alive, he carved out these wood drums that were constructed tightly with string and neatly taut. These would make up the drum circle at the holiday parties.) In the dream, his fingers rapped across their faces, the beats reaching into the inner lungs of the valley, resounding across all the walls of rock, and creating a universal rhythm of the unspoken.

Then the final moment of the dream, I witnessed all three of them walking with sureness down the dusty path again. As if, after Jonny’s drumming, they knew exactly where they wanted to go, knew that a destination was waiting for them, safely. There were four lines of Tibetan prayer flags extending infinitely from the peak where Jonny was formerly sitting with his drums, now gone. The flags, fluttering in the winds and carrying the Buddhist prayers written on them, extended beyond the eye, beyond the depths of the horizon. I felt they carried my breath and spirit far out into the reaches of the entire world. Here was a view beyond all views. They were on their way.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they say that an individual’s mind goes through the Bardo before reaching the next incarnation of who they are, who they will become. The Bardo is the Dark Lands, a kind of netherworld where the Mind goes searching and desiring and feeling anger before it manifests in the world again in the karmic cycle of existence. I suppose it’s where a lot of our ghost folklore comes from. Jonny wrote about the Borderlands in his journal before his death, a nether-geography where he was in the shadow of the mountain, not the light, before the mountain consumed him.

But the dream showed he and his fellows had figured it out. They had long passed out of the world in which they were trapped. Everything was okay. I woke up, feeling the cold morning air against my cheek, and Aamir’s warm skin of his leg against my thigh. I stared out into the dry air for a while as the dream’s terrain slowly dissolved from my mind like water dissolving from the ground as the morning light hits it.

Jonny had given me a gift after we worked together on the Adventure Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado. It is my favorite photograph of his, taken when climbing near the source of the Ganges River in the Indian Himalaya. A climber faces out towards a beautiful mountain face enveloped by clouds. The image is saturated in a deep, cobalt blue. I love it so much, but for an odd reason, not because it makes me think of the mountains. It reminds me of the ocean. There is a depth to it that goes beyond the mountains it shows. On the bottom of the frame, he took a used teabag that has the words “To remain calm is the highest form of the self” printed on the paper label. Ha ha Jonny. As those who live in the Alps or the Himalayas or the Andes already know so well, mountains are more than just mountains. They are gods. And frankly, when you live next to them long enough, your eyes stroking the monumental faces of the rock, watching the light and darkness envelop them through each passing moment of time, they are alive.

I’ll see you in the next life buddy. Your thread is still with me, even after your absence. Something lives in me and I haven’t let it go. Long live the King.

Jonnycoppfoundation.org