Partners from faraway places, walmart muffins, and moments of intense gastro-intestinal distress

After a much briefer hiatus, here comes a brand spankin' new life update. Although I'm still in the Salt Lake City vicinity, American Fork is old news. It was fun, historic, and humbling, but partners weren't plentiful (anyone sensing a theme of this trip?), and the climbing all ended in a masochistic layback roof crack. So the van was packed up on a whim, and pointed south to the promised land, otherwise known as Maple Canyon. Yeah, that's right, the place with the cobbles. Cliffs made out of millions of smaller rocks. No friction whatsoever. Routes with twenty plus draws, and more kneebars than even the laziest of sport climbers could find in Rifle. I'm terrible at this stuff. No power required, nothing tweaky in any sense of the word, just straight overhung endurance. Though the first week or so was somewhat frustrating, things have begun to look up as I've started to learn the style, and gotten used to being constantly (and I mean constantly) pumped.
Most importantly, however- reinforcements have been flown out from Minneapolis. Representing the flat frozen tundra is 8'3'' of lanky, potato eliminating, freshly graduated try hard known as Charlie (aka The Charmeister). I've been making this dude think twice since day one, and relocation to the mountains of Utah hasn't changed a thing. It's a hell of a dynamic- I bring the energy, Charlie the silent and vaguely ominous concentration. I've got the veggies, he's got the onions. I start the conversation, he prevents it from veering of into strange waters. Dream team, if you haven't realized that yourself by now. We've determined how much money is likely to be wasted on dropped eggs throughout the course of a lifetime ($42), and ventured plenty of guesses as to the price of a cow ($600-$1000), as well as one's likely reaction to an unexpected slackline (an annoyed, if somewhat threatening moo, and the likely stampeding over Charlie's tent). On top of all that we've been sending while the sending is good, embarrassing the locals, and reserving the throne spot at Pipe Dream as often as possible. Not only that, we've been through trauma together. I'm talking the kind of thing that bonds people closer than brothers (sorry Danny). This entry wouldn't be complete without a description of the events of that fateful day, which will certainly live on in Minnesota climber's lore. A quick note- the following story contains graphic and disgusting detail which has not been omitted. If you would prefer a clean version (perhaps you're reading with children, or are Charlie's mother), there is not one available on our website or any other. Enjoy.

The day started like all days destined to change history- with rest. Adhering to our staunch mormon ideals, myself and charming sidekick Charlie chose to honor this particular sabbath with a lack of climbing, and the relaxation offered by park, diner, and library. This, in retrospect, was a poor decision, as two of those three venues were closed, as well as the local (and wonderful) grocery store. Undeterred, and starved for sustenance (him more than me), we made the dangerous foray through the aisles of Walmart, emerging victorious with nothing even remotely healthy, all of which was promptly devoured. My poison of choice? Three large and tangy lemon poppyseed muffins. Right in a row, with no thought as to consequence. To be fair, Charlie ate hot wings and mashed potatoes at 11:00 am, the walking stick of burnt calories he is. The day was uneventful. We read, we (ham)mocked, we didn't really talk. As it does, the night brought with its inky blackness misfortune and terror. We had been invited to a neighbor's campfire, and sat there in those pleasant moments one spends attempting to forge new human connections, talking about climbing, life, and mistakes in the art of drug smuggling. The first warning came from a strange queasiness in my stomach, which quickly solidified to a rock dropping with icy indifference to the depths of my bowels. Suddenly concerned, and facing considerable discomfort, I stood to make my way back to camp and the calming caress of toilet paper. This was a mistake- after making it all of about twenty feet, the pain grew intense, so much so that I blacked out and collapsed on the ground. Coming to, I lay there feeling as if the second crucifixion had taken place upon my GI tract. It was terrible, the worst abdominal pain I've ever felt. Charlie and the neighbors clustered over me, echoing sentiments of panic and mild confusion. I heard voices state no one had cell phone service, and resigned myself to my terrible fate, wondering what appropriate last words could be. Could a "Calvin and Hobbes" quote strike those who would survive me as meaningful? Suddenly, a thought cut through my mind like a bolt of lightning- I had to poop, perhaps with greater vehemence than I had ever felt before. Muttering that I had to get to the woods, I crawled for what felt like hours to a dip in full view of all deeply concerned spectators. There I proceeded to pull down my pants, and release a greater volume of waste from my body than I could ever imagine it to have held. It felt as if my rear end was the spout for a cement mixer, laying the foundation for some great architectural wonder. The muffins had somehow multiplied in mass within my intestine, numbering in the sickening dozens, desperate for release. The relief and embarrassment arrived simultaneously, as I realized my shirt was soaked with cold sweat. I remained squatting there while sufficient bolts of toilet paper were fetched. I've heard that every real climber needs a good poop story and, well...this is mine. Moral of the story- never trust Walmart.

Now to change gears entirely- I've been working on this piece (not that last one- the good one that comes next) for awhile, finishing it a week or so after my last post. It's a pretty notable shift from the previous writings I've posted, and I'm a little nervous to share something that deals with this serious of stuff. It worries me that I've cheapened it somehow, but I've done my best not to give that impression. Still, I really think this is one of the better things I've ever written, and if you've made it this far into the post, might as well give it a try. Thanks for reading this much, everyone. It's amazing to me how many views this blog gets, and pretty special to be able to share this stuff. I promise the next post won't be as much of a marathon.

They displayed reactions of near polar opposition to the oncoming hull of rain, framed in dying pink by the sun’s dramatic farewell. The woman, gazing over a swath of browned garden seeming to mimic her faded and tired floral dress, cracked a disparaging window to breath in the faint scents of electricity, crisp moisture, and lost birds who could only imagine the world to have acquired a permanent hue of stormy grey. She imagined, hands propped atop a cracked and dusty countertop with false aspirations to stone, the burst of blinding color if lightning were to strike her roof in an effort at exaggerated resuscitation, and the rebellious laughter of rivers if the rain deemed it necessary to forego its transience, and shower her city until the memories of its inhabitants grew wrinkled and murky.

The man, heeding the bite of a cautionary wind which had snuck towards him around a cold and cracked corner, began to search for cover in a land of shelter. The hushed street before him, sadistically lengthening in the rays of a setting sun, was unfamiliar- adhering to pattern, but not the specifics of dry doorways along quiet alleys, nor the stern warmth of certain shopkeepers who could be looked to hopefully for a cup of warm soup, or heel of unsold bread. He wondered, for a moment, at the possibility of his continued stroll under the anonymity of rain. Was it not Bukowski, after all, who questioned why we run from storms yet jump into bathtubs with eager greediness? Then again, perhaps Bukowski had never felt the seeping cold of a tattered jacket’s soaked and weighty coup against its gaunt inhabitant, or wondered if God had deemed it necessary to drain the last breath of warmth from a crumbled and jagged concrete bed.

The man was a wanderer of strange but common type; for each mile he pressed from swollen and indolent feet, his unconsidered destination receded by an equal distance. He imagined if his journey was viewed from above with rapt (if misplaced) interest, the wanderings would trace symbols over the template of endless streets- a broken heart, striking arrow, the shaky and independent “love” written preceding the conclusion of a child’s letter. Public secrets he could tuck away to a velvety corner within him and, on occasion, wink towards the sky with a glow of shared knowledge. Sometimes the man wondered if passerby found his presence unnerving, like that of a tiger pacing its cage simply because the motion seemed somehow more productive than laying idle. The corridors of his city were lined with worn faces hoping to earn an evening meal calling from nests of dead clothing, so in this regard he was not unique, but his eyes rang hollow to anyone caught in their gaze, as if simply tired tunnels receding endlessly to hopelessness. Hopelessness, he thought, was perhaps the lurking causation of discomfort sending shadows over the faces of those who shared his stretch of sidewalk, or passed with hurried gaits the secluded park bench cradling that night’s rest. They could sense it somehow, as if his soul strode ahead and tapped the shoulders of oncoming pedestrians in silent warning- somewhere deep inside, in a corner of the mind where cloudy observations join to yield emotion, they realized the man approaching was one who lived each day simply to flip a smooth coin and decide whether the next was worth such pleasantry.

The woman’s house was quiet, small, smelling of tired dust and screaming memories. With the three of them its hallways had served as a maze of childlike discovery, twisting to reveal tucked away hiding spots (which could just be accessed by the curled form of a young girl), and the yelled, raucous laughter upon their discovery. With the muted presence of only two, the hallways ceased their impic writhing to to provide simple passage from room to room filled with backbreaking silence, and when that number subtracted to a lonely one, she sometimes wondered if they even continued to exist, or if the house was simply a box of unattainable sunlight, and rays of dust swirling in deafening emptiness.

She did not know where her husband wandered to over the stretched and creaking days, nor where he slept those countless nights when the place he once called home became too unbearably cold and still, but she did sense the void between them failing to decrease even when both bowed heads graced the dinner table scarred with slips of markers and dropped scissors. It was mutually understood that the silence there was absolute, unbreakable. That no conversation could alleviate the weight crushing them both to the unswept floor below, only cheapen it like a plastic trinket displayed behind velvet railings of the Louvre. And so they avoided each other’s gazes like magnets cursed with identical polarities, and tried so very hard to forget the unforgettable, to proceed with lives that had ground to a resounding halt. Even worse, on the off chance she slipped a glance over his fallen face, she fought to suppress sobs at their daughter’s hazelnut eyes gazing with such vivacity and grace from dark and tear-stained craters. Holding tight to the fleeting tail of sorrow was anger, burning in the dark place where logic goes to die, that his gaze dared imitate the one illuminated that terrible night in cold moonlight, that they rode on a strand of absurd fate with only room for one such pair of warm eyes. She remembered when smiles and laughter lifted their gaze upwards, elevated with mirth at the world embracing their happy trio in comfort and safety. That warm summer’s night, with hints of ice cream and fresh puddles carried on the breeze, when she could hold the Earth in the palm of her hand and cradle its beauty close to her heart. Before the scream of tires, crunch of metal. Before her daughter’s skipping turned to an impossible otherworldly soar, and her husband’s arms pushed her away, away from the end of her world, even as she watched his soul ripped out through those black and shiny pupils.

She wanted nothing more than to forget. To block the snarling memories of that night, and lose herself in routine, the mundane. Perhaps it’s why she kept that now-vacant room in a morgue’s state of cleanliness, tricking her mind to the notion that the incessant dusting and organization was for another’s benefit, injecting deep inside herself minute flashes of false hope. She tried so hard, perhaps selfishly, to forget that red shock of hair against unforgiving black asphalt, the anonymous faces of policemen furrowed in sympathy, and the twelve years of rising laughter and warm tears preceding that night’s walk. Perhaps most of all she tried to forget her daughter’s name, those two syllables that tore like the teeth of injustice at something soft and pliable deep within her. She stripped it from the bedroom door, and her tongue avoided arching backwards towards its first letters like some deeply held secret. It was suffering enough to bear each day with a hollow and cold heart, but worse to fill it with a name, a face, a knotted sense of irreparable guilt. In the tossing tides of sleepless nights, however, memory reared its head like a shark’s fin and displayed that name upon an internal ticker tape, oblivious to tears and feeding off insomnia. Leaving dark tattoos under the woman’s murky eyes, and lurking in wait of sunset each day that followed.

It was in the groggy aftermath of one such night she considered the keyboard duster she held with fresh and desperate eyes, and, with shaking but determined fingers, turned it on herself. She felt blue daggers pierce her lungs, and forge icy tracks to her brain, exploding there in curtains of hazy mist. For a short, blissful period, burning thoughts were stopped in their tracks as her mind slowed to a sluggish halt. And, by the irony of some sick god, her unspoken prayers were answered, and she began to forget. Unused words, sprung from storage, went first; “agnostic” disappearing with a bow and wave, with “vehicle”, “streetlight”, and “boyfriend” following close behind. People too were enveloped in the mist as she stocked cans of aerosol in an unused drawer beneath the television. Tom Bridges, her elderly neighbor, faded to a faint silhouette, and there was but a pleasant void when she attempted to recall her daughter’s first grade teacher. And as the world, day after day, deflated to a mute grey, the woman began to sleep through dreamless black nights.

The man could not pretend that night to be solely responsible for his unwilling transience, but he could also not fail to consider it the shocking final blow with which the last shreds of normalcy flew from his clenched fingers. He had lost his job that day, and wife the month before. The former replaced his once diligent presence with a machine incapable of errors nor conversation, and the latter with the firm jawline and waved olive back of a marathon runner named Matt. It was a cold and terrible feeling, he thought, to be exiled from the comfortable niches one carves for themselves throughout life, and caught on the swift breeze of an indifferent universe. He was not a man prone to starting over, nor one possessing resources to do so with ease. He was lost in an endless cavern of the future without a lamp, and felt any blind passage forward could lead only to inkier blackness.

He was walking that night with a pillar of gravity bearing upon the nape of his neck. He climbed the shadowed hill slowly, en route to the overlook atop, in hope that the carpet of conversating lights below could make him feel small, small enough to float upwards and live amongst the comforts of gluttonous stars. Small enough to slip under the oppression of that humid summer’s night, and huddle rent-free in a tiny burrow of straw and dreams. As he climbed slowly uphill, attempting to shrink with each heavy step, the family opposite him appeared as a symbol of what could have been. The couple, arms linked in mindless and loving contact, their daughter skipping ahead with the abandon of a smiling nymph. He was jealous, in a sense, and wondered at what point his path had forked away from such a reality, crashed upon the shallows of debt, sorrow, and loneliness. The man imagined himself a fantastical aspect of the scene before him, inserted as a chuckling uncle, or elderly brother- anything to attain that illusion of support, and warmth of connection. It was a happy fantasy to play in, a dream to save for those lonely and void nights, until the peace was broken by a pair of headlights narrowed to malicious eyes. Until the girl was thrown, in an imitation of the weightlessness he so desired, to the rough and buckled asphalt before him. When, finally, her empty gaze and unnatural angles brought the world upon his aching back with a rocky crash, and he ran as if he were the true culprit, who had torn away in the malevolent red glow of tail lights. He ran from the uncomprehending tears falling from his eyes, to the empty comfort of his home, and the brimming silence of whiskey hidden atop a wooden shelf in the pantry.

The man drank that night until a shiny black orb grew in his head, blocking that family, that girl, the way her pale arm angled above her in order to shake hands with the pulsating moonlight. The way the flowers on her mother’s vibrant dress seemed to wilt away from the horror on the street before them. The way he ran, simply because he could not think of what else to do, what else to say. He drank while that orb grew like a cancer, until it blocked everything but the curved reflection of his own bedraggled and tear-stained face. And when it receded, leaving in its wake the pounding headache of a mournful sunrise, he had lost everything. Perhaps not in terms of legality, as house and car were still temporarily his possessions, but without will to fight for them, such symbols of status seemed only useless abstractions. It was then he began to walk, slowly recording the contrived paths of the city as he traversed them, border to border, carrying a pit within him that seemed determined to grow only deeper.

And so the man found himself walking towards the first icy mists of rain, fighting the logic to shelter, to search out the second hand warmth a crafty vagrant might encounter in the lawless alleys behind concrete giants. A strange determination welled within him, to feel the numbing drops on his weathered cheeks, to breathe that moist chill in desperate disregard of possible consequence. He walked into the first sheet of pounding rain with brave eyes and indignant frown, and by the second he could feel his tired joints catch and freeze, feeling fleeing from bloodless appendages. He realized, with a rushing sense of freedom, that he may well be walking towards his own shivering death, behind a dumpster or huddled beneath an inadequate awning, but with the resolve of one left with nothing to lose, he pressed onwards toward infinity, with squared shoulders and brave gait.

The woman discovered soon that she could no longer stare out over the landscape of shadowy rain. Perhaps a matter of inevitability, perhaps of barometric pressure, the storm triggered something within her, or perhaps simply tore an existing hole wider. Gazing through both the curtain settled upon her lawn, and that sucked into her own mind, she reached with a clammy hand to stifle a broken sob and brush away familiar tears. The grey monotony outside seemed somehow inviting, invisible. A place to walk in infinite anonymity, and discover some measure of mundane peace. A place to wait in soft silence while alive, and rest in heavy eternity when dead.

In a strange and purposeful daze, she collected her three remaining cans of mist, and carried them to her own bedroom, huddling in a breathless world beneath heavy quilts. After finishing the first, she could not recall for a moment where she was, and following the second her mind grew murky, and she could feel the shadow of her former life slipping away- she forgot the way flowers smelled after a fresh spring rain, how roaming winds sifted through loose grass in search of earthly treasure, and the rising chorus of her daughter’s laughter as it sounded from a neighboring room. The third can stole what was left of the world from the folds of her mind, and an entire dictionary worth of words was ripped from her tongue, her thoughts plunging into a murky and rippled well. She stumbled down the hallway, past her daughter’s room whose significance now lay only in lost memory, through empty hallways, the dull kitchen. Out into the pounding rain, where she faintly registered the dagger-like strikes of vehement drops. Slowly across the shining yellow lines of her street, feet dragging, head lolling, partially fixed in this world, in the act of stepping towards another. Numbly into the shivering arms of a man who had recognized the flowers of her dress like a screaming lighthouse in the tumultuous storm. There she leaned against his bony chest, staring into water-slicked hair, eyes that failed to fully grasp the moment before them, and whispered the forbidden word she could not push from the white plains of her mind, the one unfurled across her psyche like a banner over the main street of a ghost town- “Charlotte, my Charlotte.” And as rain mixed with tears like rivers with the sea, he lowered his face to her trembling head and breathed in the scent of loss so profound his lungs hummed with sympathy, and eyes welled with sorrow, and he clung to her frail body as if it was the last token of goodness in a life created simply to be torn apart. And there, for a breathless moment split into a thousand shards of shattered glass, the world was whole again.