The Cheese Grater. Or, How My Right Arm Came to be a Bit…Perforated

I cheese-gratered on a #1 C3 the other day, and it held my fall.  That is to say: I skidded 20 feet down a lichen-speckled granite slab, 700 feet above the ground.  A half-inch aluminum camming device that I had stuck inside a flake of rock caught me.  When I peeled off my lycra climbing top to change into pajamas that night, my legs felt a dusting of coarse, gritty lichen dust.

The thing with trad climbing is that there is not always a set route.  It’s not like leading sport, where you follow the bolt line and hope you can figure out the moves intended by whoever bolted the route[1].  With trad climbing, you choose your own adventure, based on the moves you imagine on the rock features before you.  It’s kind of awesome.

Except when it’s not.  Sometimes, it’s hard to read the rock.   Part of learning to lead trad is learning to look around and examine possibilities before charging forward.  Some of us have to learn this the cheese-grater way.

I was standing on a huge ledge, 4 pitches up, on what was supposed to be either a 5.5[2] or 4^th class[3] finish to a 5-pitch[4], 5.9, 5-star route in Yosemite’s Tuolomne Meadows.  I had made it past the “slick face moves[5],” “intimidating roof[6],” and “run-out offwidth[7]” that I had been warned about, and I had flowed through the sustained finger crack[8] that I was definitely not expecting (Ahhem…Voltaire!…Where was the beta on that little gem?!).

The short version of the story is that I let my guard down.  I looked to the right and saw some flakes and bulges that blocked my view of what was above.  I knew that to my left was the “4^th class” option, but I didn’t want to wuss out.  Directly above me the rock looked like featureless, unprotectable, but low-angle slab, and I knew that something around here was supposed to be 5.5.  Often features appear on a slab when you least expect them, so I pulled myself up on the only two knobs I saw and flagged my right toe out for balance.

After I had pulled a few moves, it looked unlikely that features were going to appear.  There was one tiny flake to my right that I could barely reach; it * sort of * had space for my smallest cam, so I jammed it in.  My toes were threatening to lose their grip on the eighth-inch edges that they were balancing on; I found some equally tiny edges to fit my fingernails behind and pulled up again, sticking my butt out to maximize surface contact between the wall and my sticky rubber shoe soles.  I noticed myself taking quick, shallow breaths as I lost traction on the flaky lichen.  Since there was nothing for it but to keep moving, I clawed my way towards  a shallow hollow, on which I hoped to mantel and throw my left foot up.

After 600 feet of climbing and 20 feet of clawing, I wasn’t as ready for push-ups as I might have liked.  My triceps gave out at about 60 degrees and I found myself skidding down the slab.  My chin bounced, and my fingers desperately grazed for something to catch.  I don’t think I made any noise on the way down, other than the scraping of skin and fabric on the rock.  My friend Genie says it was like watching a slow-motion movie.

The good news is, that tiny red cam caught my fall.  Even if it hadn’t, I was only 20 feet above the belay, where Genie was connected to a bomber anchor.  Thanks, Mr. Long.  I landed on a wobbly boulder and looked quizzically at Genie, wondering how it was possible that I had cheese-gratered on the easiest pitch of the route.

The other good news is that we had made friends with a couple of med students, Nate and Carl, who were climbing behind us.  Carl was leading the pitch below Genie and appeared below her just after I landed.  We told him he’d missed the excitement, and he assured us that medical attention would be available on the summit.

I shook my head at my perforated right arm, pinched my pants off of my gooey left knee, chose the 4^th class traverse left, and learned quite a bit about rope drag[9].

Nate and Carl finished the route just as Genie pulled her last move, and they bounded over to where I was awkwardly heaving the rope through my ATC.  The four of us chatted on the summit for about an hour, eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches, avocado and tortillas, salami and cheese, and trail mix.  We pondered how an enormous erratic boulder had come to be perched on the edge of the dome and argued about whether we would use it as an anchor.  We took jumping photos of ourselves before the backdrop of Fairview Dome, atop which I took my favorite jumping photo ever, last summer.

Eventually, we tied our ropes together and rapelled down the dome, sent Nate and Carl down into Yosemite Valley to be awed, and all camped together that evening.

The next morning, Genie and I awoke early to brave the crowds on another Tuolomne classic, Cathedral Peak, which I blame for addicting me irrevocably to rock climbing.  Last year, I followed my friends Voltaire and Pam up Cathedral, cleaning Volt’s gear placements and relishing the climb’s variety of features and movements.  This year, I led Genie up it, *avoiding lichen* and trying to flow with the rock to create a safe, fun route.  As I pulled the final moves, I hoped that Genie would be as stunned as I had been by the panorama.  Despite the chilly wind and the persnickety crowd, Genie’s eyes widened a bit after she gained her footing at the summit.  Gazing across Tuolomne Meadows into Yosemite Valley, with Half Dome looming below us in sunset’s haze, Genie and I wondered again: some people die without ever seeing this!

Six months ago, I didn’t think I would be leading trad anytime soon.  6 days ago, I didn’t think I’d be in Yosemite this summer.  Now, I am severely distressed about what I’m going to do in Michigan, where there are no mountains.

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[1] “Trad climbing:” Traditional climbing, which is rock climbing without permanent protection.  The leader carries camming devices and chocks used to wedge into cracks in the rock and clip the rope to catch a fall.  The follower cleans these pieces of protection on the way up.  “Sport climbing:” climbing on rock into which someone has drilled bolts and attached hangers.  The lead climber follows the line of bolts, clips quickdraws into the hangers and attaches the rope to the quickdraws, to catch a fall.  Enter again the stick figures, in case you missed them the first time.

[2] 5.5 is a difficulty rating in rock climbing.  The first “5” indicates that this is, more or less, a vertical wall.  The number after the decimal point indicates the relative difficulty of the route.  The higher the number, the more difficult the route.  5.5 is easy climbing.

[3] 4^th class is scrambling that is easier than 5.0.  It is considered easy enough that a climber doesn’t * really * need the protection of a rope.

[4] A pitch is essentially a rope length in climbing. If a climb is longer than a rope can reach, it is necessary to set up an intermediate anchor and belay somewhere in the middle, so that the leader and belayer can leap-frog up the cliff.  This climb was five pitches long, so we set up four intermediate anchor/belays to reach the summit.

[5] “Slick face moves” or, slab climbing: balance-intensive climbing on rock with only a few thin features to hold onto or step onto.

[6] A “roof” is just what it seems like it would be: a horizontal protrusion in an otherwise vertical face that the climber must pull around and above.

[7] “Runout” refers to a section with long distances between opportunities to place protection.  If there are 20 feet or more between points of protection, I consider the climb a bit runout.  There were 40-foot spans between pieces of pro on this route.  “Offwidth” refers to a crack that is too wide to jam a fist or foot into, but too narrow to squeeze your whole body into.  Offwidths are notoriously awkward.

[8] A finger crack is also just what it sounds like: a crack in the rock that you climb by jamming your fingers and toes into it.  For most of this crack, both sets of fingers and toes were jammed into the crack as I moved up the wall.  Crack climbing requires a unique combination of balance and technique.

[9] Rope drag is the term for the friction created by the rope dragging across the rock as the leader climbs a route.  A traversing or zig-zagging route can create serious rope drag, pulling down on the leader and threatening to peel her off the rock.  It’s quite nerve-wracking to climb against the friction of your own route.

Dude…where’s my car?

Tahoe, in a weird sort of way, seems to be the place I go to take care of life’s little challenges.  Last time, I had been on the hunt (for weeks) for a passport office that was open when I arrived.  I hadn’t taken a shower in four days, and those had been four very hot, sweaty, cycling-across-Nevada-in-July days.  If ever there were a passport photo that could make a grubby Peace Corps Volunteer look great in real life, that was it.  Thank God they invalidated that one when I closed my service.

This time, I will be contesting a parking ticket.  That’s because yesterday, when I walked out of my office with a box full of “for your personal files” papers, band-aids, running shorts, a bike pump, and other desk drawer sundries, my car was gone.  I spun around slowly to make sure I was on the correct corner of Constitution Avenue and that this was still the FTC building behind me.  Yep.  Then I kept walking towards the road hoping that maybe, somehow, my car was hidden behind that electric blue Saturn to my left (although I thought it had been parked behind me).  Nope.  I looked from right to left and wondered if perhaps I was nuts and had parked somewhere else.  Nope, unfortunately I had the full capacity of all my senses and my car was gone.  I stopped in the middle of the wide pebbled sidewalk, arched my back to rest the bottom edge of the box on my hip bones, and stared at the empty curb in front of me.  Really?!  Could it be that my car has been stolen?!  On this crisply warm and orange Friday, which I had definitively declared to be the perfect day for quitting my job[1], my eyes suddenly felt like beady, gooey jellyfish about to burst.

A man with an FTC badge was roaming around nearby, so I approached him: “Excuse me, sir, have you seen anybody drive away in a blue Jetta?” I asked, both chuckling from the absurdity and skipping over the words in panic.

“Nah,” he replied.  “Wait wait, where’d you park?”

“Right there!” I pointed, “Not fifteen minutes ago!”

“Ohhhh,” he said knowingly, “this happened to me once.  They probably relocated it.  You can’t park there during rush hour.”

“Aww man!  See, I wondered that!”  I responded excitedly, and he walked with me over to the curb, about 50 feet ahead of where I had parked.  “See look,” I began, pointing to a sign with green writing, above me.  “That sign says ‘2 hour parking, 9:30 AM-6:30 PM, Monday-Friday.  But then that sign,” I pointed to a red-lettered sign above the green one, “says ‘no parking 4:00 PM-6:30 PM, Monday-Friday.’  That’s confusing, right?  What are you supposed to believe?”  I had parked at 4:20 PM.

The man nodded sympathetically, “Yeah.  Oh yeah actually, yeah…that’s confusing.”

“But so what I did was, I backed up to where that car is,” pointing again to the Saturn.  “I figured I’d see what that sign says.  And that post only has the green sign on it.  ‘2 hour parking, 9:30-6:30,’ no red sign.  So I figured, I guess I can’t park up here, but I can park back there, so I did.”

The man nodded again; he was very nice to put up with my ranting.

“But I mean, what if I’d never driven up here?!  I never would have even seen the red sign!….I’m sorry, this is obviously not your problem….Wait, what do you mean ‘relocated?’”

“Oh.  Well, what they do is, since this is a major thoroughfare, they don’t let ya park here during rush hour.  So they come through and they move your car, but not very far.  It’s probably just parked on a side street somewhere.  So ya gotta call that number,” he pointed to the “if towed” number on the sign, “and give them your tag number, and then they tell you where your car is….But don’t call that number.  They’ll just give you the runaround and you won’t get through to anybody.  You know your tag number, right?”

“Oh shoot, no…”  I am a complete idiot in certain fundamental ways.

“Oh.  Well, ya gotta know your tag number.  Try and figure out your tag number, and then what I did was, I called 911, and they told me where my car was.”

I scoffed, and saw a DCDOT tow truck drive by on Constitution.

“But I didn’t find my car where they told me it was.  I actually found it on the way to go find it, parked on Indiana Avenue.”  Indiana Avenue is across the street from the FTC, on the other side of the building from where we were standing.

“Hah!  Ok…thanks!”  So I lugged my load back into the FTC building, where I had to put the box through security even though I had walked out of the building with it five minutes earlier.  While that was happening, I dialed the “if towed” number, navigated seven minutes’ worth of auto-menus, left a voice mail, called 911, and got put on hold when I finally got connected to a voice with a heartbeat.  I put the call on speakerphone while I waited, and shuffled back to my office.

I opened the door to find my boss Pablo seated at my office mate’s desk while a crisply dressed young professional stood over him and fed him papers to sign.  He looked up like he owned the place and said, “Oh!  Hi Parrish!  This is Greg.  He was an intern here last summer….”  We shook hands and before I could explain to them that my speakerphone was turned on, a voice came blasting through.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes, yes, did you find it?”  I fumbled around trying to wake up the screen on my Droid to turn off the speakerphone.

“Well I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t have any record of that car.”  I asked her how long it usually takes for a “relocated car” to be entered into the system and explained that for all I knew, my car had been stolen, not relocated!  I tried to keep the pitch of my voice from heading skyward.  “Well ma’am, usually it’s put in immediately, but let me refer you over to the folks at 311 and see if they can find your car for you.  If they can’t, then you can call back in 20 or 30 minutes, and if they still don’t find it, then I’d file a police report.”

“Ok yeah, that’d be great,” shaking my head and wondering if it would take filing a stolen car report to find my relocated car.  As Pablo and Greg continued to hand papers back and forth, I emailed my friends Sally and Sam to tell them that I was going to be a little late to happy hour; my car had disappeared.

After 311 couldn’t find my car either, I got a chance to explain the whole situation to Pablo.  An attorney to the core, he asked lots of seemingly (but not actually) irrelevant questions and posed a solution to the challenge.  “Wait, where are you going?”

“I’m going to Tahoe.”

“Right now?”

“Oh!  No, right now I’m just trying to go down to H Street, to meet some friends.  But tomorrow morning I’m going to Tahoe.”

“And are you going to drive there?”

“No, I’m flying…”

“And you can’t change your trip?”

“No.  Well I mean, I could, but…well no.”

“Hmm, know what you should do?  Before you leave town, write up a power of attorney to designate to someone the authority to pick up your car for you.”  I hadn’t even thought of the possibility that they wouldn’t find my car before I left town, but he was right; the last thing I wanted was for my car to get impounded.  A couple of weeks ago they found a dead body in the trunk of a car at the DC impound lot.  My poor little Jetta!  In that environment!

I started writing a power of attorney to designate to Sam the authority to go pick up my car, and Sally took to the streets to look for my car.  Just as I darted out of my office on the way to photocopy my driver license, Sam’s phone rang.

“Hey what’s up?…..Oh, you did?…..Where was it?…..Ok cool we’ll be over there in a bit.”

“Did she find my car?!”

“Yeah she said it’s parked in front of Au Bon Pain.”

There it was, on Indiana Avenue, with a $100 parking ticket on the windshield, right in the shadow of the federal agency that files suit over deceptive claims.

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[1] It’s not that I disliked my job, but there’s something exhilaratingly frightening about leaving one thing and moving onto the next, like jumping across a wide crevasse.

Another Back Entry: Lake Martin

7/7/2010 Wow, this chair’s still here.  It’s speckled with mildew, and a few of its plastic chords are dangling loose by my left knee. They open a slot just big enough to wedge my heels in, so I prop my knees up, rest my book on them, and stare across the satiny green water.  My mom used to read in this chair for hours, shifting it across the beach to follow the sun across the sky.

On a Friday afternoon a bit over a year ago, I got a jarring email from my dad.  He didn’t know how else to notify all four of us at once that our lake house had burned down.  I immediately called home, and my mom was in hysterics.  She couldn’t say much, other than wailing out a slow itemization of her precious artifacts.  Dolls that we had treasured as little girls, baby clothes that she had sewn for us and was saving for our kids, her wedding dress, family photos, Dad’s record collection.  Nothing reimbursable, nothing of particularly high monetary value.  It didn’t occur to me to think about the ski boat until I arrived at the house and saw the charred trailer with bits of melted fiberglass draped over it.

This is the second time I’ve been to the lake in the past three years.  Two years ago, on what turned out to be my last opportunity, I didn’t come because I wanted to “experience the 4^th of July in DC.”  Last May, my sister, younger brother, and I came down the day after we received my father’s shocking email.  Mom stumbled through the blackened doorframe in tears, arms outstretched, when we pulled into the driveway.  We helped her dig through the ashes like hounds searching for bones we’d hidden, pulling up soaked and charred remnants of her precious handmade dresses.

My parents have spent the better part of the past year winning against the insurance company, redesigning, and rebuilding.  The frame is basically the same, but they took this as an opportunity to improve and update.  Textured shades have replaced the sailboat curtains in my brothers’ old bedroom, and the sectioned red couch that we used to rearrange into forts has been downsized.  On the wall behind that couch, the serial watercolors of the twelve months have been replaced by black and white prints of the four seasons.  On the opposite wall hangs a charred green sundress with ice cream cones smocked onto the front.  It wouldn’t have fit my sister’s newborn for at least another couple of years anyway.  Mom, a realtor whose time has been liberated somewhat by the slow housing market, has been sewing furiously and lovingly, to ensure that baby Hannah is well-outfitted.

The lake’s water is still clear and green, which is why they came here in the first place.  I spent all of yesterday floating and chatting with my best friend Sarah, who spent countless hours in the house that burned down. Mom and Dad traded the propane stove for electric, changed the finish on the cabinetry, raised the ceilings, and installed crown moulding.  My sister’s and my dolls were mostly lost, and Dad’s records are gone forever. Mom’s fried eggs still taste amazing, but she still won’t eat breakfast before noon.

But this chair:  this chair, I have just now realized, is still here.  Dad gave it to Mom when he was still in the furniture business, and in twenty years, it has never left this beach.

Back entry: con vida despues de la buena noche

6/19/2010:  The ads on the bus stops in Columbia Heights always amuse me.  I passed one yesterday with three Heineken bottles lined up against a dark background beside the words “una buena noche se recuerda todo el dia.”  Nothing sells beer like paying homage to the hangover.  When I saw that ad, I was standing on a packed bus, trying to make myself as unobtrusive as possible while carrying three heavy bags (with which I was delusionally planning on hitch-hiking a few days later).  A woman had already lifted her toddler onto her lap, offering her seat to my smallest backpack, and I straddled a gym duffel full of ropes, cams, slings, nuts, and carabiners.  At the end of the day, I hauled all that stuff to Union Station and caught the Camden Line to Baltimore.  Making good use of an idle hour to practice tying climbing anchors, I frightened the train-riding public with my 21-foot length of cord noosed into a loop.

Fast forward to 24 hours and una buena noche later, when I awoke to the jolt of wheels touching down and felt my head tilting forward as the plane slowed down.  I looked out the window and…MOUNTAINS…felt almost alive again.  Now it’s a crisp 70 degrees with abundant sunshine in Spokane, and I’m on my way to see my grandparents.  And, con mis disculpas a Heinekin, la noche ya se me olvidó.

Navo, short for Navidad

This is basically a character sketch, the beginnings of a description of one of the most amazing women I know and the way her experiences interact with her personality.  I would love to write something longer about some of the women I knew in Honduras, but I don’t know exactly where to start.  I figured I should just get going though, sooooo…(thoughts welcome, as always).

Listening to Navo tell a story is like watching a movie.  Actually, it’s like crawling into a memory and curling up inside of it.  Somehow, even Navo’s most morbid memories are made comforting in the telling.

She won’t start without first bringing you coffee, in a tiny tea cup sloshing in a puddle in its saucer (Navo’s footsteps are none too smooth).  She’ll place the saucer gingerly in your hand and then back into the plastic patio chair that she has pulled up to face you.  Lean forward and lift your saucer to contain drips, and take a sip of coffee.

Navo will smooth her straight, thick skirt, smeared with corn meal and splashed with water, remnants of the day’s tortillas.  As she sits, she’ll nod at her mother Marcela, who sits vigilantly beside the open front door.  Marcela’s auburn hair seems to have roots at both ends; her glittering eyes squint from above sagging cheeks; and her pink tailored dress has defied all life expectancy predictions.

Navo will sit only briefly.  She’ll beam at you for a moment from behind her thick glasses that curve towards her eye sockets like telescope lenses.  And then, with a flourish of her tiny hand, she’ll begin.

If you’re lucky, Navo will tell you about something that happened in this very living room.  She’ll play all the parts, complete with props and blocking, and she’ll do all the voices.  Once she knows you well enough, she’ll tell you about the time she gallantly wrestled a shotgun away from her father, who had come home drunk again and loomed over Marcela, cowering in the bedroom.  She won’t tell this story while her mother is awake, but if Marcela has fallen asleep in her chair, Navo will incorporate her into the blocking.  She´ll also include Marcela in the story of her own birth, which occurred on December 24th (Navo is short for ¨Navidad¨).

Or, she might tell you about who got who pregnant, and how, and when.  She’ll lean in to explain the intimate details, using slow nods to emphasize the actions that cannot be spoken, sideways twitches of the lips to implicate the parties who cannot be named, and poetic euphemisms that make her memories seem mythical.

The day I went to say goodbye to Navo during my recent visit to San Nicolás, she greeted me with the usual routine.  Once I had received Marcela’s amazonian embrace and we all had sat down, Navo set in with, “Well you won’t believe that Karla had her baby today!”  Karla is the orphaned daughter of Navo’s daughter Graciela, who died of cancer several years ago.

“Ahh! That’s great!  Girl or boy?”  I was glad to see Navo’s celebratory attitude, since Karla’s pregnancy was not exactly pre-approved.

“A little girl,” Navo said, clasping her hands together at her chest.

“Oh and what have they named her?” I asked, wishing I could catch the words as they flew out of my mouth.  I consider this to be a futile question within two weeks of a Honduran baby’s birth.

Navo surprised me with a quick reply:  “Graciela,” she said, elongating the penultimate syllable and beaming proudly.  I followed Navo´s glance to the photo on the wall beside us.  In it were Navo’s daughter and son in law, clad in early ’90s attire and smiling stiffly at the camera.  “It’s that,” she paused, “Today makes 11 years since she died,” and we both fell silent for a moment.

“Oh wow…Well what a blessing, the baby,” I said, at a loss for what to say.

“Yes,” said Navo.  “What a coincidence, right?”

“What a coincidence…”

“But is it a coincidence?” Navo mused, her eyes glassy.  My eye lit on the photo on the wall behind her, of her 28 year old nephew René.  His clear skin, sideways grin, and piercing eyes shocked me, just as they always had.

¨Poor René,¨ Marcela groggled, in her earthy timbre.  ¨Three kids he left behind…”  René had died exactly a year earlier, of complications from a motorcycle accident.

Via San José

This is not going to be a post about rock climbing.  Or bikes. I’m sitting in a random chair at a random gate in National Airport, head resting against the wall, eyes unfocused on the ceiling.  This chair jumped out and rescued me from the CNBC store (WHY?!) and the agony of Michelle Obama mugs (too political?), cherry blossom t-shirts (too kitchy?), cherry blossom mouse pads (too ugly?), and I (heart) DC keychains (too trinkety?).  I think I’ve gotten something for everybody, including the three Costa Rican colleagues who I completely forgot about yesterday as I searched frantically for gifts for Honduran friends.  My eyes feel like they’re full of TV static, and I just remembered the morning I left Honduras.  I was carrying a lot of gifts then too.

That morning, my eyes were itchy and dry, which I blamed on the fact that I hadn’t gotten more than 4 hours of sleep a night in 3 weeks.  Then as now, I had been rendered insomniac by the anxious reality that every day was one day closer to leaving.  When I got to the airport, I lugged two full suitcases, a backpack, and a couple of shopping bags to the check-in counter, hoping.  Then too, I had frantically shopped for the heavy, fragile, inconveniently-shaped artisanry that filled my bags as Christmas gifts.  I had not spent enough time taking care of basic life tasks, like getting rid of the stuff I’d accumulated over two years.  As I hauled bag after bag onto the scale, the ticket agent’s eyes widened.  He said flatly, in Spanish, “You have too many bags,” and all I could do was stare at him blankly.  It was the “I have no solution to this problem” approach to problem solving.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered pitifully.  “I’m moving home after two years, and I did everything I could to make them smaller, left most of my stuff here; I don’t know what to do!” I almost cried.  This would have been much less dramatic without the sleep deprivation.

My Peace Corps site mate, Eli, stepped in from the left:  “Do you have any of those big bags, so we can try to consolidate?”  The ticket agent pointed his index finger up, stooped behind the counter, and produced two huge, quasi-disposable blue duffel bags with the American Airlines emblem on the side.

As Eli helped me repack my stuff into the new bags, the ticket agent busied himself at his computer.  A few minutes later, he peered over the counter at me: “Wait wait wait–I can help you!  There is an empty seat in first-class.  I can upgrade you, and then you have no bag limit.”  I looked up and saw yet another guardian angel; Honduras had been full of those.

“Really?” I muttered.  “Oh, that would be great. Wow, really?”  Never underestimate the no-solution solution.

When I got on the plane, my eyes felt both chalky and gooey.  Gooey seemed inappropriate in first class.  The flight attendant brought out a hot hand towel at the beginning of the flight, and I had to spy out of the corner of my eye to figure out what to do with it.  I drank the first glass of half-decent white wine I’d had in months.  But mostly I stretched out my legs, sank into my huge leather chair, and let my mushy brain relax.

Scrolling through the photos from last night’s opening of the Nacimiento, I smiled at the one with Kique wearing his Alabama sweatshirt.  I tried to forget about Mario’s searing note and his watery eyes.  I wrote a reminder on my hand to email Carla for her recipe for chuletas ahumadas a la Coca-Cola.

My eyes got gooeyer and itchier the closer I got to home, and they didn’t get better until two days later, when I woke up in the morning to an empty house.  I wandered around looking for my family and, finding nobody, collapsed in the stairwell and burst into tears, washing the goo out.

That was two years ago, and now I’m finally on my way back to Honduras (via San José).  There’s been a coup and a new government elected; my friend Osiris and host brother Carlos both have new babies.  Doña Ada, who made my favorite rosquillas, passed away of cancer, and Professor Vega, who built the Nacimiento, was killed while walking to his school one morning.  They paved the road to my host mother Nena´s house.

Even though there´s a new mayor, Sobeyda still works at the Municipality, where I shared an office with her for two years.  I´m hoping that when I walk into Navidad and Marcela´s kitchen, they´ll hug me like they used to, and perhaps, if my timing is right, they´ll send me home with rosquillas that nobody at home will eat except for me.

Decking?

I learned first-hand what two little bits of climbing jargon mean when I was at the Red River Gorge a couple of weeks ago: “decking,” and “hanging the draws.” I already knew what these words mean, but at the Red, I learned what they mean.

Let’s start with decking.  If you’re not a climber: “decking” is the term used for falling to the ground when lead climbing.  So now you know how this story is going to end. (You also might want to read my last post, the one with the stick figures).

Then again, here I am telling the story, so you know it wasn’t too bad.  So really?  Decking?  Yeah, I guess that’s the point.

Looking up the rock face I was about to climb, I saw a heavily chalked area full of little pockets, right around the second bolt.  At the Red, we learned that you can’t necessarily “follow the chalk highway:”  chalky hands often slap all over an area without finding a good hold.  The remaining white dust is easily mistaken for crumbs marking a trail.  When I reached into this particular chalk mark of doom, I fiddled around for a couple of minutes, feeling for a solid stance to hang my quickdraw on the bolt to the right.  I found a sharp pocket to squeeze 2 left fingers into, and a desperately tiny rift to edge onto with my right toe.  I wagged my left foot around, but found nothing solid to jam it onto.  “Breathe, Parrish!” my belayer Amber reminded me, and I did: in…

…and whwhwhwhwhfffff…

Finally I flagged my left foot out tentatively, balancing long enough to hang the draw.  Clawing the pocket with my left fingers, I reached down with my right hand and pulled the rope, eyes squinting at the draw I had just hung.  

Then, once I’d pulled an arm’s length of rope out, something blew, and I went down.  20 or 30 feet.  I brushed Amber’s helmet with my hip and landed squarely on a boulder.

Amber and I looked at each other, wide-eyed.  “Whoa,” I said flatly, cutting the still air between us.  “So, that was not a solid clipping stance,” and sat down on the rock.

“Dude, are you ok?” Amber asked, alarm masked behind a thick west Texas accent.

“Yeah, I’m fine.  Good catch!”

“Ha! Thanks!  I mean, you sure you’re ok?  You just decked.”

I waited a second before responding.  “No I didn’t!  I didn’t deck…I just landed on the ground.  On my feet. That’s not decking!” I had always imagined decking to be a much messier situation, with lots of crunching and cracking and screaming and sirens.  “Dude, you kept me from decking!” And I reached out my hand to meet Amber’s in a fist bump.  (Amber and I both have a lot of guy friends, and big brothers).

“I mean, I could tell you were coming down.  You were totally shaking.  I ducked.  I kinda broke your fall too…” She tapped her helmet with the palm of her hand, and I remembered brushing it with my hip.

“Ha! You totally did!  Dude, are you ok?!  I just landed on your head!”

“Yeah, I’m fine!” she laughed.  “Wow.  Girl, you just decked.”

I sat down on the rock, and draped my elbows over my knees.  Turning my palms up, I shook my head at my flaking, caloused hands, and watched them quiver a bit.  Then I looked up at Amber.  I remembered that moment when I was standing at the bolt, fingers clutching a pocket, right toe edging on a hairline, left foot poised precariously.  Looking at her face now, I could imagine her at that same instant, head and eyebrows raised at attention, knees bent like a tennis player awaiting a serve.  With quick hands she had fed out slack as I was pulling, but not so much that she couldn’t back up, duck, and pull to keep me from crunching and cracking.

“Yeah, I guess I did deck.  But girl, good catch.  That could have been really bad…”

I don’t remember if I even said “thank you.”

Unpacking the Jargon

I suspected this, but it has been brought to my attention that if you don’t climb rocks, my latest post may not have made much sense.  Ergo, a loose summary of some climbing terminology, complete with silly little diagrams that, hopefully, will help illustrate all this:

Lead climbing vs. top-rope climbing:  If you’ve ever rock-climbed in a gym, you probably top-rope climbed.  In top-rope climbing, the climber’s rope is slung through an anchor at the top of the wall.  As the climber ascends, a belayer takes up slack in the rope, so that if the climber slips off the rock, you don’t fall very far.  In lead climbing, the climber clips the rope into points of protection spaced periodically along the route.  If you fall while below the last point of protection you clipped into, the fall will be similar to a top-rope fall.  However, if you fall from above the last point of protection, you will fall twice the distance that you have climbed above the protection.  The take-home point here is that falls can be longer and scarier on lead than on top-rope.

Anchors:  Protection points at the top of the route, through which the rope runs.  In top-rope climbing, the rope is slung through the anchors before the climber climbs.  In lead climbing, the climber clips the rope into the anchors upon completing the route, and then lowers off while hanging from them.

Bolts:  Sport-leading is a particular style of lead climbing wherein the climber uses quickdraws (basically carabiners) to clip the rope into metal hangers drilled into the rock.  These hangers are often called “bolts,” referring to the bolts used to attach the hangers to the rock.

Whipper:  A long lead fall, taken from above your last clipped bolt.  Different people have different criteria for what qualifies as a whipper, but my general definition is that if the bolt that you last clipped the rope into is at or below your feet, it’s a whipper.  To me, a fall of 20 feet or farther counts as a whipper.

Leading vs. top-roping. You might want to click on the image or zoom in on your browser to read the text. MS Paint=not my favorite.

Crimp, sloper, side-pull, pocket: These are all common words used to describe the holds on a rock face.  A crimp is a small edge that you hold with only your finger-tips.  They can be awesome or crappy.  A sloper (or “slopey hold”) is a smooth, rounded downward-sloping feature.  They’re not my favorites.  A side-pull is anything you must weight from the side rather than from below.  A pocket is an in-cut in the rock, which can be slopey or crimpey.

The Whipper

I stood with my toes planted on a wide ledge, about 60 feet up.  My last bolt was at my feet, so I couldn’t sit on the rope, but I could rest both hands in a deep pocket at chest level.  With my left hand, I clutched a vertical chunk splitting the pocket like a column—it felt a bit clammy but textured and solid.  I dropped my right arm and shook it out, looking over my shoulder to the ground below.  Then I scanned the vertical face above me, shouting to Ryan and Dave: “So this is the run-out you were talking about, right?”  It was indeed a long stretch to the next bolt.

“Yeah, but you just got one crimpy move and then the rest is jugs.  Big jug to clip from,” Ryan reassured me.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through pursed lips.  “Yep!” I whispered, trying to convince myself.

I jammed my right hand into the pocket and shook out my left.  Right.  Left.  Chalk.  Chalk.  Breathe.

Palming the pocket with both hands, I looked up again.

I could visualize only hazily a path to the bolt.  There was a flakey side-pull in the center, a bit thinner than a legal pad, and an eight-inch horizontal pocket to the left above that.  The pocket looked a bit slopey, but it was even with the bolt and could make a decent clipping hold. Like a child easing into a cold swimming pool, I reached for the side-pull.

I flipped my right hand around a few times, trying for a perfect grip on the hold.  Finally I pulled across it with my fingers, reaching for the pocket with my left hand.  My fingers found the pocket and desperately clawed their way in, like a dying spider’s legs.  I pulled my right hand up to match and gripped hard with all of my fingers.  This pocket was knobby and sharp but slightly downward-sloping, and here too I felt the filmy remnants of a wet winter. I took short, shallow breaths across my parched tongue and looked down to my last point of protection ten feet below.  My left leg shook like a sewing machine’s needle.  There was nothing to do but go for it.  I weighted my left hand and tentatively reached out with my right.  And then “pop!” my left hand blew.

“Whooaaaaaaaaahhhh!”  On the ground later, Ryan laughed that you know it’s a long fall when you lose control of your scream.  I twisted around a bit when I fell and tagged a tree limb with my ankle, but I landed with my feet in front of me, cushioning the fall with my knees.

Catching my breath, I felt surprisingly calm as I hung, arms dangling limply at my sides, feet propped against the wall.  I looked over my shoulder at my friends on the ground.  “Well, that was a whipper!” I chirped, with the fatigued relief of a movie director declaring, “That’s a wrap!”  I didn’t remember the conversation we’d had in the car that morning:  “I’m just worried that when I take a whipper—and I know I’ll have to eventually—but I’m afraid that when I do, it’ll put me out of leading for like…a long time.”  No, I didn’t remember that conversation until later.  Now, I just stared down the holds in front of me.  I remembered fumbling and struggling on each of them, but I could see now that they were bomber, if I had trusted my hands and feet on them.

I took a few deep breaths and scanned the wall above me.  Squinting slightly, I focused on each hold, where I would put my hands and feet, in which direction I would apply pressure through those last couple of moves.  I would press across the side-pull with my right hand, pivot on my left foot and plant my left hand in the pocket I had popped out of.  Trust my fingers, quickly pull the rope to the clip on the right; smooth, confident movements.  Breathe.  Unconsciously, I pantomimed the motions in miniature with my hands.

I shook out both hands, rolled my head back and forth, bounced my shoulders once or twice, and stood up.  I placed each hand and foot precisely and decisively, moving fluidly up the rock.  No hold felt perfect, but I pulled smoothly through them all, trusting each in its moment to propel me upwards.  I clipped the bolt I’d missed the first time and continued past it to the anchors.  I circumvented a wet spot below the anchors and clipped them from the left.  “Alright, in two!” I shouted towards the ground.  “Ready to lower!”

I may or may not have been glowing as I descended, hanging from the rope like a spider spinning its web.  Ryan and Dave’s upturned heads awaited me with huge smiles and beaming eyes.  I met Ryan’s fist bump with a “Whew!” and proclaimed, “Okay well that was…productive” before loosening my figure-eight knot and peeling off my harness to hike down the trail to the car.

Installment 2: Re-entry

I don’t remember much about the drive from Hidalgo to the border.  I remember driving too fast, and that made the boys nervous since we were driving without a permit.

I must have been driving fast because I wanted us to make our flight, but mostly it was because I could.  The road was flat and straight, cutting through a wide desert.  Driving fast just seemed like the right thing to do.

I also remember passing the station where we would have returned our permit, had we purchased it in the first place.  “Just stay left Parrish.  Go go go!” the boys spurred me on, and I blew past it.

When we neared Nuevo Laredo, a long line of parked cars appeared ahead of us.  The four of us exchanged a quick “Oh sh*t,” but we also noticed that the right lane was empty.  I continued in it, desperately hoping that the cars I was passing were like the people who stand in the first line at the grocery store, while the last register stands empty.  Unfortunately, that trick doesn’t work with border traffic.  Eventually I came to a police car parked perpendicular to my lane.  The cop waved us through a break in the median with a shake of the head and some terse words about waiting in line with everybody else.

Once we repositioned ourselves, I looked around, mostly searching for somewhere to go to the restroom.  Low houses and everything shops lined the right side of the road; we joked about darting through an alleyway to find a secret spot behind those.  I could also ask one of the shop owners if I could use their restroom; they probably get that a lot.  Or, somewhere along the line there must be someone with a booth and a toilet and a fee and some papel higiénico; I mentally prepped for the adventure in sanitation that this would probably entail.

Then, a bit ahead of us on the opposite side of the highway, I saw a cluster of toothpaste blue: port-o-johns.  Initially my eye skipped off them and landed on the American flag fluttering lightly in the distance.  But that flag was dwarfed by the enormous Mexican bandera billowing in the foreground; I thought it prudent to open the door to one of those port-o-potties and take stock of the situation.  Ryan switched into the driver’s seat; I grabbed some toilet paper and darted across the road.  After opening the door with an apprehensive half-breath, I smiled at the odorless fragrance inside.  I gave a quick shrug to the boys in the car, stepped inside, and closed the door.

Returning to the car, I felt much more present in the situation.  Ryan stayed in the driver’s seat, sunglasses perched on his forehead, ipod resting on his knee, legs stretched out from the reclined seat back.  Voltaire was scrunched down behind him, nearly hidden between a pile of backpacks and the door, cell phone held against his ear.

Johnny sat upright behind me, rocking a pair of aviators and perching his arm on the backpacks wedged between him from Voltaire.

“So Volt’s got service here?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s on the phone with Continental,” Ryan answered.

“Ok so the problem is that we’re still in Mexico,” Voltaire began.  “We’re stuck in line at the border and it’s probably gonna be a while.  We’re just wondering whether there’s a later flight out of Laredo,” he explained politely, “and whether we can get on that flight, and whether there’s any fee for changing our tickets.”

We waited silently, trying to ignore a leather-skinned woman pacing the shoulder and selling miniature altars of Mary Magdalen holding Christ’s body.

“Oookay.  Ok good.  Thanks.”  And Voltaire snapped his phone shut.  “Well she says there’s a $150 change fee if we miss our flight, but she also says that our flight is delayed by an hour.”

I looked at the clock.  It was 3:00 PM, and our flight was at 7.  Maybe we could make it.

“Hey can you put this in?” Johnny asked, and reached between the front seats with his ipod.

“Sure,” Ryan responded, and unplugged Voltaire’s ipod to replace it with Johnny’s.  Music had been a funny theme on this trip.  Before leaving home, I had made a mix cd of upbeat indie favorites of mine, partly as a challenge to myself to find something in my music collection that someone would like.  We listened to my cd a few times at the beginning of the week, before switching to Voltaire’s ipod full of hip hop and top 40 favorites from the ‘70s to now.  I was fine with that, as long as I wasn’t asked to drive the ipod.

But Johnny fell in love with country music on a road trip through Pennsylvania once, and country songs are sticky.  A few minutes into his playlist, I couldn’t hold back a half-grin.  My eyes went out of focus, as I stared through the low buildings lining the road to summer moments in the Alabama foothills.

“So ya know how certain songs are connected to really specific memories?” I said to Ryan, who nodded slightly while continuing to sing softly.  “This song reminds me of really specific moments from the summer camp I grew up going to,” I continued, knowing that what I was saying was going to sound trite, “But I never would have thought I’d be belting ‘Strawberry Wine’ out the car window with three dudes, waiting in line at the Mexican border.”

“Ha!” Ryan replied, chuckling a bit while everybody continued to sing with Deana Carter.

The minutes chipped away at the likelihood of us catching our flight.  Eventually we decided to call the airline again, to find out what our alternatives were for catching another flight home and how much it would cost us. Voltaire got on the phone with Continental.

“Hmm, nothing out of Laredo until Tuesday?  What about anywhere else?  What other cities could we fly out of sometime tonight or tomorrow morning?”

I turned my head towards Ryan and raised my eyebrows slightly; his clear eyes were as wide as mine.

“Hmm, ok, nothing out of Dallas.  What about Houston?”

“Oookay…San Antonio?”

“No.  Uhh…okay, is there anywhere else we could fly out of?” Voltaire’s voice took on the jovial, almost-sarcastic tone that means he’s close as he gets to exasperation.  “El Paso.  Oh yeah, check El Paso.”

“Huh.  Nothing.  Okay.  Thank you.”

“So what’s the situation?” I asked.

“Well every flight to DC out of anywhere in Texas is booked until Tuesday, but we can fly standby and they won’t charge us the change fee” Voltaire replied flatly.  I called Enterprise and found out that it would cost us $150 to drop the car off somewhere else in Texas (but we didn’t like the idea of trying to fly standby and maybe not getting on a flight until Tuesday).  Or $450 to drop the car off in Washington, if worse came to worst.

On and on we waited, creeping towards the border, listening to music, laughing at each other’s memories from growing up.  When we finally pulled into the border patrol booth, Ryan put on his best manners to greet the border agent as he handed him our passports.  I crossed my fingers that he didn’t ask for a driving permit.  He didn’t.

Crossing over the Rio Grande, the clock was dangerously close to betraying us.  Equipped only with some vague directions that the border agent had given us, we felt our way through Laredo to the airport.

We hurried to the rental car counter to check our flight’s status, return the car before Enterprise closed at 8, and check the monitors to see if the plane had left yet.  It had.  We turned towards each other, the sky turning the color of dry shale behind us.  With a blunt energy spurred by inevitability, someone said, “Ok, well I guess we’re driving home.”