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"Erratica maps deeper meaning onto the rocks we climb with lyric reflections, philosophical explorations, and campfire-caliber storytelling that kept me reading late into the night."—Maya Silver, editor-in-chief of Climbing Magazine
Part adventure narrative, part philosophical inquiry, and part love letter to climbing and natural spaces, Erratica is a radiant exploration of what happens when a human body meets the earth with full attention.
After Brian Laidlaw climbed El Capitan, Yosemite’s iconic stone monolith, he found himself facing a repeated question: “So, what was it like up there?” It isn’t enough, he knows, to just to describe the sensation of the rock beneath his hands and feet—a climb is so much more than physical movement.
This seemingly simple question initiates Brian’s poetic quest for the perfect metaphor, traveling from the erratics of his youth in California to the towers of his current home in Moab, Utah. He traces lines up moon-washed faces in Indian Creek and edits his body language under boulders in Joe’s Valley. He lives parallel lives and dies parallel deaths on free solos in Colorado, and eventually, back in his childhood stomping grounds in the Sierra Nevada, he writes and revises routes of his own.
Along the way, he beckons us into a community bound as much by narrative as by rope. They exchange gear, chalk, and advice as they test each foothold and fissure. Kindred strangers knit into traveling bands of belayers, swapping snacks and cautionary tales. Here, any passing climber holds the ability to shift “spontaneously into the best coach I’ve ever known.”
Exhilarating and lyrical, approachable yet profound, Erratica invites us to share a rope with this community of climbers, to measure our humanity against the expanse of stone.
"Philosopher Henry David Thoreau once dreamed of a literature that let Nature speak, and with Erratica, Brian Laidlaw continues his quest as he seeks to learn the language of rocks—exploring with existential verve and tenderness a poetics of shape and void, erosion and uplift, the sublimity of eons and the brevity of climbers’ hands."—Katie Ives, author of Imaginary Peaks
"Erratica maps deeper meaning onto the rocks we climb with lyric reflections, philosophical explorations, and campfire-caliber storytelling that kept me reading late into the night. Laidlaw speaks to the reader like a friend, while managing to be both witty and wise."—Maya Silver, editor-in-chief of Climbing Magazine
"Here is a poet and philosopher who draws from his intense, physical encounter with rock spire and cliff edge. In the written word and in the language of his body’s movement over stone, Laidlaw seeks epiphany and achieves a beautiful mastery; his ability to discern and describe our existential place in the natural world is a rare gift, hard-earned in the alpine realm."—Helen Whybrow, author of The Salt Stones
"I know very little about the art of climbing—in fact, it scares the bejeezus out of me. But I would follow any route, any pitch set by the talented and endearing Brian Laidlaw—poet, musician, and climber extraordinaire. His gorgeous, nimble nonfiction debut is precisely the kind of irreplicable, contact-based ascent that we need in these overly fabricated times."—Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch