Everyone strap in, sit down, and listen up- I've got a lot to catch you guys up on. I've been on the road going on a month, and (I know) it's been pretty complete radio silence. The saga started as always over a rainy memorial day week in the Black Hills, with the ever-present Aleasha McKickass. Baldy and the surrounding boulders delivered as always, leaving our tips ragged, egos bruised, and hair greasy. We took what felt like a deeper dive than ever into South Dakotan bouldering, using countless blocks of chalk to put up lines that felt just a hair short of first ascents. We suffered through rain, cold, and strange altitude sickness- as any climbers worth their salt should. When Aleasha had to head back to the midwest, quiver of sends in hand, I drove into Tensleep canyon with blue-streaked limestone in mind. Soon (and brace yourself, I know it's shocking) I even ended up with a long term, everyday, hell or high water partner (emphasis on high and water). Enter Alexander "ftf" Mestler. He's all but five climbers packed into one. It's like belaying a curious pit bull puppy with an endless supply of otherworldly endurance and performance metaphors ("This is the front line. I'm digging the trenches, laying out the artillery. My fingers are tiny soldiers recruited for battle"- in reference to the beginning sequence of his project). His climbing is something near flawless, and capacity to remember beta (and watch it endlessly on an iPhone screen) is almost godly. We've realized our approaches to climbing are polar opposites; his being mental, focused, and painstakingly analytical. Mine being powerful, ill-advised, and generally quite explicit. Even so, and perhaps as a result, we both punched into the office everyday, filed our spreadsheets, and left with bosses more than pleased with the resulting expense reports (-Alex). I was able to climb what is one of the most incredible (and difficult) routes I've ever touched; Galactic Emperor, leading eighty feet up a striking streak of orange dolomite amidst seas of regally blue-sheathed stone. Alex teched his way through the opening section, known as Sky Pilot, as well as a slew of other vert-tastic lines in the area. The time here ended with my long awaited send of a project I initially tried a couple years ago, called (unfortunately) The Incredible Horsecock. Poor name choices aside, it was a humbling battle through an absolutely brutal opening sequence, which felt like it went down fighting a vengeful war of attrition (alright, that battle metaphor was my own, he's rubbing off on me). Now, the war party moves south to Lander (-Alex), where I've had a certain chunk of dolomite waiting for me nearly a year. Time to do this thing.
Anyhow, here's something I've been penning down while on the road, between deep conversations about the best ways to climb a couple grades harder, and proper cooking hygiene techniques. 'Till next time, when we find out if Lander is still the same mono pulling, finger tweaking, creme de la creme paradise I remember.
Anyhow, here's something I've been penning down while on the road, between deep conversations about the best ways to climb a couple grades harder, and proper cooking hygiene techniques. 'Till next time, when we find out if Lander is still the same mono pulling, finger tweaking, creme de la creme paradise I remember.
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Had, since the beginning, been strung around her neck that gleaming ring of red and white beads? The child clutched weakly at each orb colored like bone or coral, wondering cloudily for how many breaths their presence had remained unnoticed. Her consciousness crept forwards to engulf that ring like a kitten which had heard but stories of the rain; to grasp and arrange countless fragments of reality with a hungry swipe. She was rushed, still warm and wet, through a flickering world to a place where the air was still and sweet; a place of muffled noises and crowded movement. While the people, borderless smudges of tall white coats, flashed across her vision with calls and cries, she recognized herself to be something different. Something silent; still. Perhaps all too early, something finite.
Her brother was not sure whether he felt more scared of his own ignorance, or that very nameless thing he could not understand. He had come to realize, over the taught and piled minutes, that he grasped fully neither birth nor death, even as he sensed the impending dichotomy of each concept the way a blind man will ask to run his fingers over the face of a stranger. He tried to run away within himself as his mother arched and screamed, tried not to cry as she grasped his hand in an organic vice of love and pain. He tried to feel relief when she finally relaxed, amidst the analytical panic of endless doctors swarming around a being which drove home the heartless meaning of that mysterious word; “premature”.
The ring finger of his right hand throbbed, and he tried absently to remove the embedded hangnail broadcasting such pain.
His father’s hand on his shoulder, the uniform press of its fingertips; hot and bloodless with a nameless emotion inspired by impending calamity. The waiting room, we can only wait, but her brother would not leave that clear box with a tube or wire replacing every one which did not function for the child within. Caught in the momentum of free association and harried logic, he knew he could not leave while so few knew of that girl with the shining necklace; that girl with the skin like milk. For the burden of memory was too heavy upon his soul, too much a responsibility for his years that barely exceeded the raised fingers of a single hand. In that moment, to forget was to extinguish; to have never been. To forget was death without funeral, it was fear without object. So the boy stayed, and watched, to safeguard memory. He watched as they pushed the needle into her leg; limp, no veins- only marrow. Watched the glass of her box fog in ever-fading clouds, watched until he felt but the faintest hind of magic short of manipulating the scene before him with a single thought.
His finger throbbed, and as it pulled his somber concentration he cried his first tears of raw futility.
The girl felt no pain, simply the searing pulse of a novel and unexpected existence. She felt no more than the naked alpine stone long accustomed to the bite of wind, no less than the trout pulled from comforts of a crystalline stream to an alien and breathless world above. With each breath; shallow, quaking, she braced for the unimaginable and sharp. She braced for reality to scream deafeningly to all five senses like a rabid wolf will call in terror to the moon. Her toes like marble, immobile, she could could not feel the needles nor blades. She was not even sure yet what such a phrase meant; “to feel,” sacrificed at the moment in favor of observation. Staring upwards, amongst minute blinks that contain eternities, to a man’s gaze, his white mask, where is her own? His white coat, gloves, contrasting a blurred backdrop as if to teach her the meaning of that which is void. Contrasting the cracked blue of flushed irises to betray a mortal fear of color. Behind everything, a roar like that of impatient earth echoing through her satin ears which struggled to discern even the most distinct speech of those milling around her. She thought again of that man’s white coat, and feared in some corner of her sluggish mind that it resembled a dreamt future; the thought like a robin’s call in winter; lonesome and unrequited, without even words to provide it substance.
Pain and fear were that roar which glazed the air and sharpened the light. It wasn’t that she could not feel them, but rather that she felt them so completely and without cease, felt them like her brother some yards away felt a metronomic urge to breath. Though her eyes, newborn and clear, confusion represented a condition hardly deserving report, inherent as it was. It was piqued no more by the stabbing and desperate draw of tepid air than by the crooked and worn glasses upon a doctor’s soft face, or the fantastical meanderings of a mobile upon the ceiling. She knew only that one roared, and the others did not, but she could not yet understand why. She could not translate the deluge of chemicals rushing through her brain, for she had not yet experienced their absence. She could not understand the gravity of a desperate cling to life, for she had not yet experienced the mundanity of a secure existence.
She could only listen to that roar as it dimmed the world.
Her brother could not forget a story their uncle had told him long ago in a tone of childlike solemnity, in which an otherwise long-forgotten man chose one night to sleep a few yards left of his usual resting place. When a tree fell upon that abandoned spot, he was found laying alongside; unscathed but irrefutably dead. This story angered the boy, as he placed desperate faith in his ability to refute and escape the clutches of destiny through sheer willpower. He believed in magic, prayer, and the healing powers of chicken soup. He believed, perhaps more than anything, in the bright hope cast within the shadows of his parents. But in the blinding glare of an indifferent universe he felt exposed; helpless. He stood audience to a world in which his mother could no longer protect nor shelter, and his father could not hide stuttered and dry sobs behind eyes like glass. A world where red and white necklaces worn in hopes of some measure of luck could prove ultimately so very inadequate. He broiled with hatred towards anything omniscient, omnibenevolent, and (perhaps most importantly), omnipotent. He did not believe their most perfect of all possible worlds contained no space for someone so young not even a setting at the dinner table existed to hold their memory. And should it be the case, well, her brother believed he could plan the whole thing so very much better himself. He believed, somewhere deep within, that goodness could be felt to radiate in the tips of one’s fingers when it shown brightly, and a single smile could prove to infect the entire world. He existed as a magician in a world of empiricism, yet ‘abracadabra’ and crisply snapped fingers now failed to elicit even a spark.
The boy’s finger throbbed, and some part of him wondered at what it meant to feel. Another wondered whether it represented privilege or burden, that sharp metallic tang of existence.
His father sat hunched in a chair etched along the taught curve of his body, trying vainly to trap air in cupped and wrung hands, trying to ball and compress it into diamonds and hope. His face creased curiously, the boy thought, those eyes lined with furrows of heart wrenching grief; brow creased in puzzlement and faintly recollected shock. He pressed his forehead to that of the boy’s mother, still glistening from exertion, hand trembling against the nape of her neck like a summertime bird nestled beneath snow. He kissed it airily as something of an afterthought, rising to walk absently down the hall. An endlessly revolving door, conspicuously spacious to accommodate a stream of wheelchairs and walkers. The world outside; its crisp air, insidious sun. The boy watched from a window as his father, a man who worshipped organic kale and daily calisthenics as some would a deity, bummed a cigarette from an off-duty janitor, lighting it with a hand like fallen leaves in the autumn. He watched him press first his fists, then face into the coarse gray stone of the hospital’s outer wall. He listened to the breeze as it carried his father’s scream through the window; brutal and visceral, a sound like mountains falling off the edge of the world. The boy shook as he grasped the meaning of those indistinguishable words ripping through his father’s throat, felt the same well somewhere primal within his own heart. He realized then his tears had run out, and sat dry eyed in the cutting light of that window, dotted with dust and hopeless dreams.
The boy’s finger throbbed, and he tore numbly the shattered nail from its bed, watching from oblivion as a point of blood welled in its place.
The ring of alarms cut through the roar in her ears like a jet through storm clouds, and a numb pressure spread from her toes to her knees, through her rattling chest with an icy malevolence and purpose. She retreated behind half-lidded eyes, found a pocket of warmth there in which to tuck her consciousness while its surroundings flashed from gray to black.
The practiced rush of doctors, their expressions grim in the face of logic; get the family out, we need to operate.
She can’t get air.
That red and white necklace against a body suddenly blue.
Her heart, her lungs.
In the back of everyone’s mind; her soul.
The double doors as they fly open for a gurney too large, her brother and father huddled together outside.
The meaning of the word, ‘alone’, trailing upon the slipstream of ‘helpless’.
If they touch her she’ll break, if they leave her she’ll die.
When can they breathe again?
The doctor with the strawberry hair speaking in a soft monotone, that all possible has been done, dancing around the words ‘wait’ and ‘hope’.
Sensing it appropriate to neglect the word ‘pray’.
Perhaps it was the roar to which she finally woke, or perhaps the air; crisp and savory like summer snow above the tree line. The box was gone, and it was no longer a numbness which prevented her voluntary movement but rather the warm swaddling of a blanket. The beads clinked softly around her neck, and her brother looked down with eyes still wet and unbelieving. It may later have broken tradition for him to be the first to hold her, but there she lay, a dense mass of warmth and life huddled in his arms. He thought she smelled like the breath of a forest in summer; heavy and sweet with possibility. His arms around her whispered like only love can, whispered in a language she had never yet heard but grasped viscerally. The roar began to take shape in the wake of that whisper, to settle like points of fire in her chest and legs. And there, nestled among her family released suddenly from loss and trauma, she wailed for the first time in joyous pain.
She grew rapidly, shooting up like a flower to gaze inches above her elementary school classmates. Though she tended to tire quickly, and was generally excused from the sports and games of gym class, the roar remained deadened and mute, spiking only occasionally in shooting daggers and stars. When the first love of her life, Bryce Philips, was discovered in the embrace of Suzanne from the senior class beneath some old and rusted bleachers, the roar raised emphatically for nearly a week. When she dropped out of college, before returning a year later, and was forced to sleep on the couch of her brother’s apartment, the roar echoed from those narrow walls even more loudly, and she pushed it to the back of her mind in order to converse and convalesce. She thought, at times, that perhaps even he could hear it on quiet and still nights like faint thunder that would not cease. She began to understand the roar better as life went on; began to channel it when she laid again in a hospital, ready to lead her first child towards the light of the world. She grasped fistfuls of that ululating roar and tucked them deep inside herself, away from her son as he emerged pink and wailing, a gleaming necklace quickly affixed around his neck. She believed all those non-sequiturs a mother must; that she could hold all pain away from her child, could lead him through a rose-colored nirvana in order to flourish. And as her son grew, though he did not realize it, she held that roar away from him as best she could, held it in wide reserves beneath her heart. She knew, on some subconscious level, that she could contain there a quantity sufficient to knock crowds of people off their feet, that she always had been able to, and in doing so sought to bring her son into a beautifully silent world where anything was possible.
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Until next time, at least the dinosaurs have been waiting for so long just under the surface, they wont realize the delay in the gentle touch of Alex's brushing, and the pressure of my undying adoration.
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