I wish I read A Youth Wasted Climbing sooner.

It’s a memoir by David Smart, who you probably remember primarily for the award winning books Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss and Emilio Comici: Angel of the Dolomites, and for creating and shepherding the underrated magazine Gripped. His memoir was short-listed at the Banff Mountain Book Competition in 2015.

I am fortunate to have been acquainted with David Smart since 2015. I think we met through Katie Ives or the Climbing Writers Group on Facebook, which Katie established. But David and I didn’t really correspond until Paul Preuss was published in 2019 and I was writing a review, for Rocky Mountain Books, the publisher. I saw that he had written another book, but my focus was all on Preuss at the time.

Smart is a climber and author who has published and had by-lines under the name David Chaundy-Smart, prior to his divorce. He’s now just, as he was before, David Smart, and the story of his younger years and discovering a singular passion for climbing in A Youth Wasted Climbing is beautiful and relatable, well for some readers especially.

A Youth Wasted Climbing is about Smart’s years in grade school. Actually, it’s about Smart’s years during grade school where he skipped class to train or actually climb. He was labeled a truant, often misclassified as a troublemaker who got into fights, because of his scratched hands from crack climbing, and his long hair like both drug and alcohol abusers and, in a whole other category, the climbers he saw in the magazine Mountain. He went from climbing underpasses around Toronto to Yosemite, and tells his stories of many people that would take him on the branches of the river of his climbing life.

This memoir is now my footnote to clear something up: The age-old criticism that climbing is a selfish activity is wrong, but there are plenty of instances where people in Smart’s life asked him to do something other than climb. His parents asked him to actually attend school, not be a truant, and get good grades. A vice principal made a similar request. A girlfriend asked him to take up hockey instead. In all of these cases, Smart was prioritizing climbing — racing to learn climbing from scraps of knowledge and climb better and more often to improve — but his vice principal, parents, and girlfriends (there were multiple like this one) that wanted Smart to use his time and develop skill the way they wanted.

(Smart says when he was put into detention by the vice principal that Smart would imagine that he was more than a troublemaker with “an obscure skill,” and he would daydream that “climbing threatened the VP’s thousand-year Reich of televised golf, swimming pools, tranquillizer-numbed housewives and TV-dinners.”)

Smart demonstrated grit through holding hard and dirty jobs all to support his pursuit of climbing. If he had pursued hockey, at the elite level he reached in rock climbing, where he might have underperformed in school anyway, and maybe girls would have stuck with him longer, would elite hockey have been less selfish because he would be playing for a crowd?

Throughout reading Smart’s memoir, I wondered how he went from being an uninterested student to being the magazine editor and award winning author he is now known as. I found it in these pages. Although he didn’t apply himself in school, he inherited the writing gene from his father. His father wrote technical pieces for his work, and David Smart had a desire to write as well. Smart received writing guides from the late climber Gerry Banning.

I share this somewhat gratuitously, but it was one of my favorite lines about his older brother Reg:

He said I should have spent the time getting ready for Yosemite, as if skipping a workout to see a girl defied some tenant of our religion.

Smart writes his memoir as a stream of consciousness, which is how I like to write. It’s authentic and honest. I have received feedback about my own pieces like this that it can seem disjointed, or that it lacks context and orientation for the reader, especially if I am writing about climbing or golf and the reader doesn’t know about either one. Smart writes down what happened, not how he feels. It’s Hemmingway-esque, with words of action and reporting, not explanation or extraneous exclamation points. A Youth Wasted Climbing is a show-us, not an explain-to-us story. Those are always better. I imagine if you haven’t fallen in love with climbing, or relate to his struggles of being misunderstood, then this book wouldn’t be for you. If it is, buy it and re-read it.

Smart’s memoir is about passion, human potential, being scrappy, and how life is rarely a straight line. My wife looked at the book on the dining room table one evening, where I was typing some notes and said: “Can a youth be wasted on any activity you’re serious about?”

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