The Reflecting Pool

It’s morning.  I sit down into my swivel chair, tilt to one side and wait for my computer to warm up.  A picture of a dead girl pops up on my screen.  Young, vibrant.  She sits cross legged in an office chair wearing netted stockings and a short metallic blue and black dress.  Black pumps.  Her hair parted, blonde, shimmering, falling down around her shoulders.  The background is uninspiring, an office setting with striped dull carpeting and off-white file cabinets with corners so pointy they appear to be piercing time and space.  She wears a smile that says ‘I’ve learned how to smile for pictures like this one ever since I was two years old’.  One eye is squinted and the other open, staring right into the camera lens.  Her hands clasped across her lap, a silver pendant hanging statically from her neck it’ silvery brightness in sharp contrast with the front of her blue-black dress.  She looks young, and happy in an uncomfortable way.  She appears to be at a cross roads; one path says tradition, conformity, expectation, the burdensome pressure of religion stripping her of all personality and uniqueness.  The other path, unknown, exotic, enticing, dangerous.  But nothing was more dangerous than the decision she made to get into that car.  I’m sure it happened quickly.  It must have been one hell of a hit to take her life.  But then again I don’t know the details, I don’t know car accident statistics, and I didn’t really know her.  Although the sound of her bubbly voice on the other end of the telephone causes me to become quite emotional.  The sadness and fear associated with death crawls into the already cramped space in my head and I sit on a pile of overwhelming sadness for a fleeting  minute.  My emotions are all co-opted though, and mingle with real emotions, and the thought of it all being over before I least expect it grips me. 

What do you see when you look at me?  Do you see yourself?  The worst things about yourself?  Do you want to tell me how badly you hate the things you see in yourself in me, and push me away?  Run away?  Where do your priorities lie and why do you have them?  What are we doing this for?

My expectation: a balloon.  Excitement: the air I pump into that balloon.  Disappointment: the shriveled limp body of that balloon falling to the ground after it was popped by too much excitement turned to disappointment by reality.

 The wall was a sweaty mess.  Moisture clung to all good surfaces turning the existing chalk to sludge and already slick footholds to impossibly frictionless.  The lines were long and people kept coming.  My irritation grew to an unbearable weight and I finally had to face myself.  I wanted to be mad at everyone there, I wanted to be mad at the wall, at the conditions, the sun, the heat.  But it didn’t matter how mad I got, it would change nothing.  It didn’t matter how annoyed I was with the person struggling on the only route at the wall that was dry that I wanted to do, it wasn’t going to get him up the route and out of MY way anymore quickly.  So I thought to myself ‘is my climbing any more important than someone else’s’?’.  The answer as obvious as the heat baking the top of the wall.  I had two choices: be an asshole, an angry idiotic asshole, complain, be obviously upset, make people uncomfortable; or, relax, accept, and choose to be kind and helpful.  Extend yourself to others in a time when choosing to be angry and obtuse is so easy.  The real crux is choosing to be positive and caring at times like these.  What is my relationship to climbing and the people within that community?  It is all at once teacher and student. 

I’m wearing bracelets of bug bites, my skin is red and swollen, and I feel like I’ve done a lifetime of crimping.  These are all signs that point to a weekend spent at Equinox.  With a predicted weekend heat wave we retreated to a small oasis in the hillsides that watch over Mt. Vernon.  The cold air from the cavernous spaces created by large boulders leaning against this one fractured dome in the middle of nowhere escaped into the atmosphere and fueled our anticipation of good climbing temps.   It also transformed the bottom 30ft of almost every route into a horribly slimy mess.  It gave me an opportunity to work on many things, but for one I had a chance to try a few routes I had never given any thought about.  Climbing into the abyss was so much fun.  Onsight climbing can be incredibly frustrating or rewarding or both.  It’s a style of climbing that intimidates me because of the built in pressure of having just one opportunity to get everything right (or wrong).  It is the supreme test of your skills and gives you such a good perspective on the picture of climbing as a whole.  I love it.  Turning to the now dry’ish project I dove in head first (I actually did hit my head against the wall at one point, I’m not sure if this is because I was looking at my feet too much or if I don’t have hair??).  I love hard climbing.  Having to keep reserves of power and stay focused mentally through several trying sections on a route is the crescendo of why we train so hard.   And when it all comes together it creates such a stunning moment in time.  I was not lucky enough to have one of these moments this past weekend but I did get really psyched on a new project and at one point I thought I was actually going to do it.  I thrutched a little too hard at one point and lost all composure from the bottom half of the route I had strived to maintain.  I grabbed a greasy rail and tried strenuously to keep my core tight.  I watched in desperation as my foot ripped off a hold and I kept my body tight for a couple of seconds as I tried to get back on the wall but I failed and fell into the darkness.  It was a good tantrum.  I was pretty jacked up from waiting to get on this thing and at the beginning I thought ‘Hell, I’ll just put this rig down right now!’, but in retrospect I wasn’t really that close.  When you don’t have at least a small amount of respect for the route you’re climbing, this tends to be the outcome.  I’m looking forward to coming back and sending this route in good style and with respect.  It truly is one of the most fun hard climbs I’ve tried, maybe ever?