Read Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure for Free Online

Dierdre Wolownick, taught ESL, Spanish, and French at the college. Today she constitutes the entire French department for the school. She’s a gifted linguist, fluent in three foreign languages (French, Spanish, and Italian) and competent in German, Polish, Japanese, and a bit of American Sign Language.
    My dad, Charles Honnold, got a full-time job teaching ESL at American River College before my mom did. So I grew up in an intellectual, academic climate—for whatever good that did me.
    Mom likes to tell people that on the day I was born, August 17, 1985, I could stand up, holding onto her fingers. Like a lot of her stories about me as a kid, I tend to think she made that up—or at least stretched the truth pretty far. She’s told journalists that from the time I was two years old, she knew I’d become a climber. She also relates a story about taking me to a climbing gym when I was only five. According to Mom, she was talking to the supervisor, turned around, and found me thirty feet up in only a minute or two. She says she was scared to death I’d kill myself.
    My sister, Stasia, was born two years before me. From our infancy on, Mom spoke only French to us. Her idea was to make us bilingual. She still speaks only French to us when we visit. But Stasia and I rebelled from the start—we’d answer her in English. Even so, I’ll have to give Mom the credit for making me pretty fluent in French. My grasp of the language has come in handy on many trips to France and three to North Africa.
    Mom may be right about me being an uncontrollable, hyperlittle monster. At age five or six, I broke my arm for the first time. I’d decided it would be fun to run down the slide at Carl’s Jr.—my favorite restaurant. I went over the edge. The docs called it a green twig radius fracture, whatever that is.
    I broke my arm a second time at age seven or eight. This was a really pitiful accident—in fact, it’s hard to describe how I fucked up. There was a big rope that was part of a play structure in our backyard. It was meant be a rope swing, but I rigged it as a tightrope, then lay down on it as if it were a hammock. Fell off and broke my arm.
    Dad took me to the local climbing gym when I was ten. It was just a random stab at another kind of recreation, but it “took” from the first day. For years thereafter, he would drive me to the gym and spend the whole afternoon belaying me—he wasn’t interested in climbing himself. Later he even drove me to other gyms around California where I’d enter competitions.
    He was a man of very few words. We’d drive for hours with almost no conversation. He wasn’t comfortable expressing his emotions, but belaying me tirelessly and driving me all over the state was his own way of showing love.
    From childhood on, there was an elephant in the room. It was that my parents weren’t happily married. They didn’t fight openly—it was more just a kind of chilly silence that filled the house. For Stasia’s and my sake, they waited till after I graduated from high school to get a divorce. But we knew they were going to split up, because we occasionally read Mom’s e-mails. The real bummer for them was that they were so much happier after they got divorced, and they stayed friends.
    I’m sure a shrink would have a field day with the fact that, to this day, I have a hard time remembering the details of my childhood. In 2011, when Alex Lowther interviewed me for a profile for Alpinist, he started quizzing me about the early years. I told himthat my memories were fuzzy and unreliable. “Ask Ben about this stuff,” I said. Ben Smalley and I had been best friends since first grade.
     
    L OWTHER DID JUST AS Alex suggested, contacting Smalley, who by 2011 had become an air force lieutenant. Smalley’s sardonic portrait of Alex as a kid and teenager rounds out the picture of the dorky misfit Alex genuinely considered himself, even after he started to attract the notice of the climbing world.