After the Bible belt: Finding my true "third place" in the climbing community

The writer, climbing at the gym where she first discovered the climbing community and her first true third place.

If a strict upbringing in the Deep South taught me anything, it's this: Everyone desperately needs a third place, especially women from a particularly restrictive culture or environment. But what happens when your third place winds up being just as confining?

They call it a “third place.” 

In sociological terms, a third place is defined as a space beyond our primary social environments (which are typically home and school or work), where we can feel at ease, accepted, secure, and on equal footing with those around us. 

And, while pretty much everyone needs their own third place, few need one more than the young woman whose first and second places are oppressively constraining or regressive. 

Trust me. I know. 

The third place that wasn’t

To be a young girl in the Deep South during the 1980s meant porcelain toy tea sets for birthday gifts and Easy Bake Ovens at Christmas. Wearing tights under my Easter dress was mandatory, even on warm days. To be a “tomboy” was just shy of sinful, falling somewhere between wearing spaghetti straps on Easter Sunday and murder. 

As girly as it gets: a flowered hat at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Spring of 1994.

Soccer and softball were out of the question for my mother’s daughter. Attempts at acceptable “girl sports” (i.e., cheerleading and gymnastics) fell flat. Like it or not, I was a Bible Belt Barbie girl in a Bible Belt Barbie world, groomed to accept a lifetime of pink toiletries. 

I tried to rebel. I’d sneak tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts into my backpack so I could throw them on as soon as the middle school bus pulled away. I borrowed my friend’s Doc Martens. And, because it was still the nineties, I took up smoking (for which I was repeatedly caught and grounded), determined to look like the rebel my mother would never allow me to be. 

By high school, however, I had mostly relented. With the exception of a hard-won pair of hiking boots (purchased for me by my grandmother following a long, arduous, uphill battle for my mother’s consent), I resigned myself to dressing at least somewhat in line with my parents’ idea of femininity. 

Still, even with my adolescent mini-rebellion behind me, my household remained exceptionally strict. Parties? Staying out late? Getting my driver’s license? Forbidden. Ultimately, the only place I could get any semblance of a social life was church, so I attended every time the doors opened. 

Which is how, for better or worse, my third place became a Southern Baptist mega church — the same religious denomination whose members just this year overwhelmingly voted to ban women from serving as pastors. 

And then there was Katie and her kayak …

Every American highschooler (and probably every highschool) knows at least one, if not an entire group of them: the crunchy kids. The granola gang. The ones who prefer hemp over polyester, hackeysacks over soccer balls, and who almost certainly sneak out of school at lunch to smoke in their cars. (Though I guess smoking was more of a 1990s thing; apparently they vape now.) 

In my class, her name was Katie, and, for a while, she was my best friend. Throughout middle school and freshman year, we sat together at lunch, hung out on the weekends, and spent hours on the phone almost daily. But ultimately — like so many teenage friendships before — our paths in life diverged. 

In contrast to my parents, Katie’s parents were comparatively lax. Meanwhile, her older brother was well on his way to becoming a whitewater kayaking legend. And so, while my weekend social life was limited to mega churches and post-service lunches at Applebees, Katie tagged along with her brother and his friends, climbing and camping and kayaking. We no longer spent hours every night on the phone, but we always made time to chat if our paths crossed in the girls’ bathroom. 

In her eyes, I had probably become an uptight Bible thumper. In mine, Katie and her crew were a counterculture novelty. There were no hard feelings, just quiet bemusement and, on my end, a twinge of jealousy. 

Riding in the church van to a youth group outing at age 15.

I can admit now what I couldn’t then, if only because doing so would mean confessing that my motivations for attending church were less than christian: A big part of me envied Katie. She got to choose a third place where she could just be. 

But me? I was conscripted into a third place where bikinis were frowned upon. Girls who ventured past first base with their boyfriends were subject to harsh judgment and even harsher gossip. Double-pierced ears were like a gateway body modification (next stop, tattoo shop!). And even if climbing and whitewater kayaking hadn’t been counterculture activities, my parents — convinced that danger (both physical and spiritual) lurked around every corner —  would never allow it. 

Much like the home where I lived and the school where I learned, my third place came with limits. 

Finding my third place between a pandemic and a death

I was 40 years old when I finally found my true third place, totally by accident. 

It was several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and businesses were just starting to reopen to the public. Desperate to find activities for our kids that didn’t involve computer screens, my husband and I learned to belay so we could take our kids to a local climbing gym. And, for a few months, that’s all it was: a place to occupy (i.e., exhaust) my kids. 

But then, back in Birmingham, Alabama, my dad had a seizure. In the days to come, we learned he had cancer, that it had spread to his brain, and that he only had about six months to live. 

Stubborn ‘til the end, he made it seven. 

During the months in between his diagnosis and his death, the climbing gym became the one place where reality couldn’t touch me and limits didn’t exist. I made friends there. I found a community. And, above all, I discovered a third place that inspired me to believe I was capable of so much more than I ever gave myself credit for as a young girl in Alabama. 

Now, before I go any further, I should pause and acknowledge an important reality: Every day in Afghanistan, any woman who ventures out of her home unchaperoned by a male relative faces arrest, imprisonment, and public beatings. Climbing and kayaking and hiking are beyond off-limits. To them, my Bible Belt upbringing probably looks like an episode of Gossip Girl. 

But, whether a society explicitly forces a woman into invisibility beneath a veil or through more subtle actions — banning them from becoming pastors, for instance, or justifying sexual harassment by the length of her skirt — the outcome is largely the same: limited personal autonomy, a diluted sense of self, and a life defined by restrictions. And, whether governed by the Taliban or by societal norms, there will always be dreams she can’t realize and freedoms beyond her grasp. 

A big beautiful life … and a third place to live it

I graduated from high school 28 years ago, and, if I’m honest, there are few people with whom I still keep in touch. When college was over, I left Alabama and rarely looked back. 

All things considered, my life turned out lovely and bigger than I expected. I love the work I do, I love my family, and I have a level of freedom that boggles my previously teenaged mind. I’ve climbed mountains. I’ve swam in the Caribbean. I’ve gone sailing, run races, kayaked in white water, climbed some beautiful walls, backpacked for miles and miles, and covered crime as a reporter in Southwest Florida. And now, every Sunday night (and several days in between), I head to my third place, where a group of Ascend girls and I talk, laugh, and do hard things together on the walls at Sportrock, an Alexandria, Virginia-based climbing gym (the same one where I discovered climbing in the first place). 

Standing alongside a dear friend and adventure buddy at the top of Mount Baker in Washington State in July 2025.

But even now, so many years later and with so much life still ahead of me, I often still wonder what I might have been capable of had I grown up in Katie’s shoes. I suppose that’s why, so many decades later, Katie remains one of the few high school classmates I still check up on, if only through the distant filter of social media. 

I know that she beat colon cancer shortly after college. I know that she, like her brother, became an accomplished kayaker in her own right, sending incredible rapids from Colorado to Costa Rica. She got married, had kids and continues to travel around the world. We all know that Instagram only tells half the story, but based on her photos, Katie’s life looks big and beautiful and filled with achievements and adventures to places that most of our high school peers have never heard of.  

But it’s when I’m climbing that I think of Katie most. While I was still scraping my way out of the Bible Belt, she was living the kind of big, bold life that proves women can do hard and incredible things. 

I think she’d like this version of me. If I’m ever lucky enough to run into her again, I hope I have the good sense and the grace to thank her. Women like her made my third place possible.