A Desert Rite of Passage: An Excerpt from Turn to Stone

Editor's note: Escaping an abusive relationship and leaving behind her punk rock–adjacent, irreligiously-Jewish upbringing in New York City, Emily moves West. To become a climber. There, she falls in with Rock Monkeys and van-dwellers for a crash course in climbing and character building.

This memoir of sex, angst, and rocks is a generous and clear-eyed reflection of the adventures and misadventures of coming into your own, on the wall and off. Emily’s story doesn’t shy away from the messy parts of life, but it also shows the power of commitment, love, friendship… and of course, getting benighted in places like Yosemite and Joshua Tree.

We all have stones we carry, but sometimes it’s better to climb them.

 

————

 

The following chapter is excerpted from Turn to Stone by Emily Meg Weinstein (released in September 2025). Published by Simon & Schuster/Simon Element. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. All photos courtesy of the author.

 

Chapter 8: Rope

By Emily Meg Weinstein

 

This was real liberation, the kind that didn’t hurt anybody—the kind that truly set you free.

 

Part of me wanted desperately to back off, to lower down—not even lower on the rope and trust the marginal cam, but just climb down. And yet as soon as I imagined it, I rejected the idea. I couldn’t do it in front of the crusher kid. I just couldn’t.

So I stopped thinking about going down. I started thinking about going up. I peered out of the pod, then climbed back up to the holds from which I’d placed the marginal cam.

“Yeah, Em!” cheered the crowd encouragingly.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t climb past it. Not without knowing that I would definitely not deck, definitely not die. I would probably not die, but I might deck. Break things. I crawled back into the pod, the cave of fear and shame.

“Breathe,” said Fred. “Oxygen.”

I made my heart slow down like I’d done the night before. No part of me was shaking, but I wanted to be completely still before I tried to move. Oxygen really is good, I thought to myself. Oxygen is great.

I thought about another route I’d climbed, with Glenn, only on toprope, something harder, maybe 5.10a or b. I’d been trying to do the hard part, but I kept slipping off. Glenn, always an impatient toprope belayer, had said, “You’re wasting your one good go.”

That came to me now. Every time I crawled out of the pod, only to crawl back in, I wasted energy. It took energy away from a good go. Next time I went, I had to make it a good go. 

Fuck it, I thought.

Don’t think about falling, think about climbing, I muttered internally. Show that crusher kid you’re not a pussy, or a weenie, or a wuss, or a loser, or a coward.

Don’t fuck this up, Weinstein.

 

Emily Meg Weinstein on The Flue, placing the marginal 0.75. Photo courtesy of the author

 

And I didn’t. I crawled out of the pod and got back to my high, cam-placing position. I yanked on the marginal 0.75 one more time, knowing that I could not apply one-hundred-plus pounds of falling force with one hand. But that didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to fall. I felt the urge to crawl back into the safety-shame-fear cave/pod, and knew it was now or never. I started climbing, for real, climbing up, not thinking about falling, but thinking about climbing.

I fell.

It happened so quickly there was no time to fear it. I had fallen so short a distance that it was over before it began. The cam had held. I was hanging from it.

“Bomber,” said Glenn.

“Nice whip,” said Fred.

“There goes the onsight,” I said.

“See?” said Glenn. “The system works.”

I took so many whippers on that marginal green 0.75 that they had to change belayers from Fred to Glenn. I couldn’t work it out, this one little bulge, couldn’t get past it. It was probably mental. I kept slipping and falling and hanging on my one stupid cam, which caught me and held me and never budged. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Glenn’s girlfriend serving guacamole to the peanut gallery from a tray. I had been too nervous to eat much all day and was suddenly acutely aware of my hunger in addition to my mortality. Leila looked bored. The crusher kid looked to be either totally fascinated or completely zoned out. I wanted a beer. I wanted a joint. I wanted a snack. I wanted a hug. I wanted a bandana with a map of the park printed on it. I wanted out of here, out of this loop of trying and failing and trying again. I wanted to send this thing, or get to the top, or whatever the technical term was for getting to the top after you’d already fallen and blown the onsight.

I remembered Rosie, on Spider Line, just a few months ago, in a similar situation on a much prouder climb. She hadn’t given up just because she’d blown the onsight. I remembered how hard she had tried, how hard she had charged. She hadn’t given up just because she’d fallen. Kye, neither. Glenn and Fred and James never fell, not on the climbs that I could do with them. The whole summer in the Valley, I hadn’t seen Harold or Will or Ian or Scott fall, either. It probably wasn’t even allowed, in Britain. But I had two examples of what to do if you did blow the onsight, how to keep trying even after you’d already kind of failed. And I had that good oxygen. I took a few slow breaths, then a few fast ones.

 

 

Some other day, Glenn had told me some theory about breathing fast, to force more oxygen into your blood. It sounded like one of the many supposed childbirth breathing techniques that my now-childbearing friend group were telling me were all bullshit. Hypnobirthing? Bullshit. Lamaze? Bullshit. I wasn’t going to take any stupid birthing classes if I actually got to do it. My intention was to scream my babies forth like I was in the upper deck of a Mets game or the mosh pit of a punk show in a basement club in Germany. That was my whole, secret future birth plan. Screaming at the top of my lungs.

I thought breathing techniques were bullshit, too, but now I did Glenn’s thing. It sort of happened naturally. It was kind of like “breath of fire” in yoga, or some other culturally-appropriated method by which San Francisco tech douches tried to force more money into their blood and more blood into their money. This was all mental, anyway. This really was mental. Totally mental.

I didn’t plan to start yelling, it just came out of me. At first I didn’t even realize that it was me. But then I heard the others, down below, yelling with me. We were all yelling.

It worked. I got past the stuck part. I found a new place to stand on and a new thing to hold on to. And then another, and another. It wasn’t impossible, not at all. It was possible. It was easy. It had all been mental.

I was charging so hard that I forgot to stop and place a piece and had to be reminded. The next placement was bomber, and the next after that, and I was up on the top in no time.

It was the same time of day as it had been when I’d first topped out the Thin Wall, on toprope, two years before. The golden hour, just before sunset. I wasn’t even all the way on top of Chimney Rock, just at the top of this one route, The Flue. But I could still see how tiny we all were, how silly this all was. I clipped myself in to the bolted anchor and felt something orders of magnitude beyond anything I’d ever experienced on a toprope, or even leading the easier climbs. It wasn’t just a rush but a flood, an influx of relief, power, freedom, and joy. I had faltered, but I had not failed. I had fallen, but I had not given up, given in, turned back, or backed down.

“I made it to the top,” I whispered. That was all I had to say to myself, as I half wept, half laughed, at the top of a two-star 5.8 any Stonemaster, Rock Monkey, or crusher kid would surely free solo.

Glenn lowered me down and gave me a high five and a burning doob. Fred tied in to check and clean my gear and pronounced all my placements “good,” even the marginal one.

“Marginal, but good,” he said, beaming with pride I could feel, washing away all of my doubt like water.

…

I was never bat mitzvahed. My vocally irreligious family believed in nothing but natural childbirth, vitamin supplements, and the New York Mets. I was glad for this, because I have always believed that all organized religion is violently and immorally patriarchal, and much of

it murderous, or genuinely perverted in the worst ways. But, lacking for faith, my family lacked for rites of passage. There was no clear event to mark the transition to adulthood, and even if there were, my parents would never have truly let me go.

It was Passover, I realized, though no one else in the campground was Jewish. I hated that holiday, always had and still do. The believers said it was all about freedom, but if you actually read the story, it was about praying to God to free you by killing other people’s children.

But this—this was a truly tribal rite. What the Jews were meant to do in the desert. Not pray to some fake God for a real brown child to die and then pretend their murder was our freedom and God’s love, as the Passover horror story annually celebrated in cheerful song, but to take matters into our own hands, to save our own lives, to set our own damned selves free.

That night around Glenn’s fire, the dirtbag mafia raised their ever-present Sierra Nevada Pale Ales to me.

 

Emily Meg Weinstein in the back of SubyRuby, the car she took on her climbing adventures. Photo courtesy of the author

 

“Hip, hip, hooray!” Glenn led them in cheering, three times. And that was it. There was no diploma, no medal, no trophy, no certificate. All I got was a beer and a cheer, and the chance to do it all again the next day, when Leila finally told her secret.

“I’m pregnant!” she announced breathlessly to Glenn, as she styled her way to the top of another one of my early leads.

“Mazel tov,” said Glenn, looking at me for confirmation. “That’s what I say, right?”

He handed her his water bottle. “In that case,” he said, “you should hydrate.”

Then Leila went back to New York, and I dragged the mattress back into SubyRuby. On the nights I led, I slept like the dead, as if the danger and thrill of it finally exhausted my demons, and they rested, too.

The night of my first lead—my climbing bat mitzvah—before I passed out, I had the clear and present thought that I’d never before achieved anything so cool by fucking up so much. This was better than religion, better than Judaism, better than Passover, better than a bat mitzvah. 

This was real liberation, the kind that didn’t hurt anybody—the kind that truly set you free.

 

Emily Meg Weinstein is the author of Turn to Stone, her debut memoir. An essayist and activist, Weinstein was born in New York and raised in Queens and Long Island. She lives, writes, and teaches on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Longreads, Climbing, Rock and Ice, and other publications. She roams in her second home, the Free Ford Freestar, and roots for the New York Mets. You can follow her on Instagram @emilymweinstein.

 

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can buy Emily's book at Simon and Schuster.