On the Road: Rock Climbing 2
September 15
Climbing in the cave at Sinks Canyon today, another climber, Dan, suddenly exclaimed, “Look – an airplane!”
We all stopped and watched the jet soar above us, its sound ripping through the quiet canyon after it was already out of sight.
Brilliant sunlight kept us climbing until dark, when we headed back to Ally’s for the real celebration of my birthday – a raucous gathering of about 15 friends. After playing the craziest game of Scrabble in my life – climbing terms only – we had an all-out jam session in Ally’s living room to the tunes of Eek-A-Mouse and Sublime. Beating on drums, bottles, cans and even barbells, we played late into the night.
“It’s nice to see this room this way,” shouted Dave to me at one point, working to be heard over the cacophony. He was thinking back to Tuesday, when we’d watched the destruction of the WTC in the same place. “It’ll help me to remember it in a better way than how I’ve thought of it since earlier this week.”
Iowa
September 19
Exhausted from our 15-hour drive from Wyoming to Matt’s parents’ place in Iowa, I picked up my email – and read a harrowing first-person account from a friend in high school who was on the scene at the WTC attack. Her former sense of safety and security was yanked away without warning, probably for the rest of her life. Reading her vivid account, I felt almost as if I was with her as she wandered around the streets in a bloodstained lab coat after aiding victims, early in the morning after the attack, unable to get home as the ferries were full of dead bodies.
September 20
Today’s scenery brought with it a startling contrast Wyoming’s windswept, natural landscape, as we drove through cornfields and past silos, bumping down dirt roads until we reached Iowa’s premiere climbing area – Wild Iowa, where Matt learned to climb about four years ago. Short, pocketed limestone cliffs about 30 feet in height with wet finishes and lush vegetation proved entertaining for a couple hours of climbing.
Since we’ve been on the road so much, we’ve missed out on much of the constant media coverage of the WTC attack. After a real dinner – with grilled meats and a ton of fresh salad – we watched television with Matt’s parents. Scenes of daily living in Afghanistan splashed across the scene, and a former aid worker described how mothers feed their children with moldy crusts of bread mushed up with dried, crushed locusts. Sitting there with my full belly, topped off with a shared pint of rich ice cream, I realized that I could never even begin to comprehend what it’s like to live in such a country, under such a regime and in such abject poverty. I hope and pray that whatever the United States decides to do in response to the WTC attack that we won’t respond to evil with greater evil.
Kentucky
September 21
Driving today to the Red River Gorge through the heartland of America, I noticed the abundance of American flags flying – all at half-mast, of course. Here and there, a car drove by with an American flag flapping from its window. At a truck stop, I caught a glimpse of a newspaper headline – “We will meet violence with patient justice.” But will we? What is “patient justice,” anyway?
September 22
Home for the next two weeks or so is Miguel’s Pizza, alongside Kentucky Route 11, which snakes its way through numerous small, southern towns. This roadside restaurant, with ample flat space around it for tents, has become the climber’s campground for the Red River Gorge. Since we arrived on a weekend, the parking lot was packed with cars from all over the place, from Colorado to Ontario.
For our first day in the Red, we decided to check out Torrent Falls, one of the place’s many destination crags. Awesome, steep and pocketed routes soon sent our muscles into severely pumped mode. It will take a few days to get accustomed to the different style of climbing here, not to mention the different climate – hot and humid. I feel soaked, or at least damp, all of the time.
Driving to and from the cliff today, we passed a number of small local stores – one with a Confederate flag hanging outside with the slogan “The South Will Rise Again” printed in its center. In my liberal nai”vete’, I often forget the wide rifts in opinions and beliefs within our own nation, not to mention the rest of the world. There are so very many churches here, too – all Christian, of course – at least two to a block in many of the towns. I think about “patient justice” again, about what this can possibly mean when justice and the right course of action in one person’s eyes so often represents the utmost of evils in another’s.
September 24-26
On Monday, it poured nonstop, so we visited Stanton for the first time, the closest “big” town to the Red River Gorge. Thankfully, we found a library with Internet access, although the connection there is so very slow that it makes checking email seem like a meditative activity. The remnants of the rain remained all day yesterday, despite our desire to rock climb. Never one to enjoy the cold, I spent most of my day shivering instead of climbing.
Today, however, the sun’s rays finally soaked up the last of the clouds, leaving us with brilliantly crisp fall weather that is slowly causing a color change in the jungle-like tangle of deciduous trees that chokes all of the cliffs here. We went to Roadside, a sun-blasted cliff with a number of 5.10’s and 5.12’s.
Late in the day I hopped onto one of the area’s classic routes, despite feeling tired and sore. Digging two fingers into the small, eroded pockets and pulling on those for several moves proved taxing to me. Thankfully they gave way to bigger pockets – easier on the hands and easier to hang on to as well. After another committing section with smaller holds, I clambered up the final few feet of the route to clip the anchors.
After today, I need a couple days off from climbing. My skin hurts, scraped raw from the Red’s rough sandstone, and my tired muscles could use a break as well.
September 27-28
Two days of much-needed rest. In an effort to avoid further dampness in the event of more rain, we shifted our tents to “Tarp-land,” a series of permanently fixed tarps created originally by Christopher, a heavyset, twenty-something climber from Detroit who arrived Thursday. Christopher, along with his buddy Mike, a.k.a. Tunaboy (called thus due to his predilection to eating tuna straight from the can), spend many, many months at Miguel’s every year, in between stints of earning money. A former Jehovah’s Witness, Christopher (not Chris, unless you ask his permission to call him that), set up camp near us in Tarp-land, welcomed us to his food, and pulled up his chair to converse with us about everything from fundamentalist religions to the latest news from the electronica music scene in Detroit.
Yesterday I sniffed out a local newspaper to find out the latest information, but found instead that reading it gave me a bizarre feeling of the role reversal this whole affair has brought – it no longer feels like I live in one of the safest places in the world. Though out here in the middle of Kentucky I feel an odd sense of detachment at times, the assortment of climbers passing through tend not to shy away from discussing world issues with one another. It’s inescapable; it’s on everyone’s minds. Nonetheless in so many ways the disaster and its aftermath take on an aura of unreality – what, if anything, has changed in our daily lives, besides something inside of us or our concept of our nation’s place in the world? Thursday night I dream about World War III.
Today, the 28th, I find a place to plug my laptop in – in the Monastery, a small cedar-sided one-room shack behind Miguel’s Pizza. It’s cold and dark, but private. The showers and toilet share the same back wall as the shack, and I can hear the constant running of the toilet as I write. Paws, the six-toed campground cat, pokes her head around the door, looking in to see if I have any food for her. Things are quiet around camp right now, but only temporarily, I know – soon the place will be transformed by the weekend crowd into a colorful village of tents as another transient group of climbers from everywhere moves through.
September 29
Destination: the Motherlode, perhaps the Red River Gorge’s most famous wall. This dramatically overhanging sandstone amphitheatre almost defies imagination. With routes ranging from ultra-overhanging to moderately overhanging, the pocket-riddled cliff rises some 100 feet up from the tangle of trees around it. Such steepness and continuously overhanging rock lends itself to routes no easier than 5.12, with few exceptions. Hanging on is the key to succeeding on these routes. It’s a continuous struggle to fight the pump, and I finished or fell off of every route with aching arms.