The mammoth retelling of an epic journey: a tale told in installments

View through the keyhole between the two Spires

The morning started the best way a morning knows how–climbing.  We had left unclimbed one route that we had been talking about all week:  The Spires.  The Spires are accurately named, so I won’t waste breath describing them here.  My climbing partner Voltaire and I had stayed up chatting about the Meaning of Life, or some subset therein, until about 2:00 AM, at which point somehow it began to seem like a good idea to wake up at sunrise and climb The Spires before heading home.  I don’t think that either of us fully believed that we would drag ourselves out of bed three and a half hours later, but we told ourselves we’d set an alarm and make a decision in the morning.

When the alarm went off at 5:30, I gave a scoffing laugh.  I rolled over so that I was facing Voltaire in the tent, and just lay there for a minute.  I pulled my sleeping bag tighter around my shoulders and closed my eyes, but they popped right back open.  The Spires loomed over me like a party that I was too tired for but that I knew I would regret not going to.

“Waddayathink, Volt?  We doing this?”

“I dunno…what do you think?”

“I think we should shake Ryan’s tent,” I stalled.  Ryan had banged his knee up pretty badly yesterday, but he told us to rustle his tent when we got up in the morning, just in case the knee was feeling better.  Voltaire opened the tent door and I could hear shuffling around outside and muffled voices.

Then I heard Ryan’s voice, raspy and with a twang of wishful encouragement:  “Aight, have fun dude.”  I sat up in my sleeping bag, and reached for my headlamp in the side pocket of the tent.  The morning air felt cold and clammy, like a sick puppy’s nose.  We were doing this.

At first, hiking up the winding trail of loose gravel and dirt and searching for blue blazes in the misty darkness, we were trying to elude time.  We raced the sun to the base of the cliff, since Volt and I had given ourselves until 8 AM to climb as far as we could up the three-pitch route (a pitch, in climbing, is as far as you can climb on one rope length, before setting up a new belay and proceeding higher from there).  We promised each other we would come down at 8, no matter where we were on the route, so as not to hold the group up.  After we finally reached the base of the cliff and flaked our rope out, it was as if we were chasing the sunrise to the top of the Spire.  We could see sun-warmed patches in the valley opposite the spire, but the chilly shadows on our side made me eager for the moment when I would mantle onto the pinnacle.  All week, I had looked forward to standing on that narrow peak with the sun washing over me and the whole valley, like Moses overlooking Canaan.

But, like Moses, we never got there.  When I reached the top of the first pitch, Volt was belaying me up from a wide ledge, back against the limestone wall, legs dangling over the edge.  As I pulled up onto the ledge, he welcomed me with a warm but resolute grin. For once, he didn’t have his camera out, and his dark eyes had a look of reluctant resignation.  We exchanged tranquil glances and both knew that we wouldn’t be climbing further.  It was 7:30 now, and it would be past 8 by the time we reached the top of the second pitch.  It had taken us a while to find the start of the route, so while the first pitch was phenomenal, that was it.

Voltaire, me, Ryan, and Johnny, on Snott Girlz

Sitting side by side on the ledge for several minutes, we looked across the road at some of the routes we had climbed throughout the week.  We could barely pick out climbers starting up Snott Girlz, the seven-pitch wonder that we had climbed two days earlier.  “Dave!” we yelled across the road, wondering if the climber we saw was a friend who’d told us he would be climbing Snott Girlz today.  The sun was finally peeking over the cliff above us; I could tell it was going to be a gorgeous day.

“I’m glad we did this, Volt,” I said.

“Yeah, me too.  Might be a while before we climb any multi-pitch again.”

“Yep.”  We gazed down on what we had just climbed up, and compared strategies on the flakes in the middle of the pitch.  Like everything we had climbed this week, this route had been super fun.  I was sorry we didn’t have time to climb all three pitches to the top, but it felt triumphant to have gotten out of bed and done what we could.  I looked down at my battered hands and laughed at the tape wrapping my index finger, a slice of which I’d left on Snott Girlz.

“We would have had to climb the first pitch in the dark, to make it to the top,” Volt reflected.

“Yeah, and there were a couple of stiff moves on that route.  It’s ok.  Next year.”

We gazed into the canyon again, drinking in the fresh morning for one last moment.  “Well, should we rap?” Voltaire started to hop up.

“Yeah, let’s rap.”

Almost without speaking, we set up our rappel system, tossed the rope off the ledge, and turned around to lean off against the cliff.  Looking back between Volt’s and and my shoulders at the ground below, I asked, “Ok, ready to weight this?”

“Yep,” Volt nodded.  We carefully weighted our rope, disconnected our direct anchors, and lowered ourselves to the base of the Spire.

Shortly, we arrived back at the campground, showered, packed our bags, and broke down our tent.  With Ryan and Johnny, we made our way to the campground restaurant for one last breakfast burrito con panqueques y cafe.  One last time, I ordered breakfast at the end of the line (somehow the language barrier made those boys forget all their manners).  For the first time, we all received exactly what we ordered, and the coffee came out in record time.

Hiking back from the Fitness Cave

As we finished breakfast, I scurried outside to catch Dane Bass, the author of our El Potrero Chico guidebook, to grab a business card from him.  We had made an epic journey to a little-known climbing area the day before, and we wanted to send him pictures for inclusion in the next addition of the guide.  We chatted for a few minutes, and I recounted yesterday’s adventure of desert bushwhacking and trailblazing.

“Oh yehhh,” Dane drawled.  “That trail’s all screwed up from when I wrote the book.  Ya know, ’cause it’s by the quarry and all that, trail’s always movin’ around…”

Hmm, this would have been good to know yesterday.  Soon the conversation led to when we were leaving, and how we were going, and that Dane’s wife had been sitting in traffic at the border for 6 hours already that morning.

“Oh yehhh, might as well just stick around and climb some more today.  Yerr not gettin’ out anytime soon.  My wife got up at four this mornin’…no no wait, she was at the border at four, tryin’ to beat traffic, and then she ended up goin’ to…”  By this time Voltaire and Ryan had joined us, and my eyes widened as I searched their faces for answers.  “Ya know, ’cause everybody’s gone home for the holidays, and they’re all tryin’ to get back in today, sunday after New Year’s, ya know…”  Then I remembered that we had told ourselves a week ago that we should ask around about the driving permit situation.

“So Dane, here’s another question,” I interjected.  “What happens if we’re driving without a permit?”  After passing through customs, we had somehow missed the place where we should have picked up a permit to drive into Mexico.  Impatient to get on some limestone, we had decided not to turn around and find it, but rather to budget a bit of extra time on the return trip, to allow for any complications this omission might spark.

“Oh well that depends on how good are you at cryin’ on command?” he looked at me with glittering eyes.

“Heh!  I mean, I guess that depends on what the stakes are…I mean, I can cry…”

“Well just ’cause, there was this one time, me and my wife got pulled over, and the police tried to impound the car.  ‘Cause that’s what they can do, ya know…you get caught drivin without a permit, they can take yerr car on the spot,” he snapped his finger in the air.  “So they tried that this time, and my wife was gettin’ all werked up, and then they said they’d take eight-hundred dollars, until she jus’ ’bout near lost it, burst into tears and wailin’ and all that, and finally the dude just,” here Dane flipped his hand in the air dismissively, “let us go.”

Johnny, cereal with coffee, and his 47-tooth grin

“Huh,” I balked.  “Ok.”  And I looked around at Volt and Ryan and Johnny, who had just come back from the bathroom and was looking on with wide eyes and a wider, disbelieving grin.

“Well guys, I guess we’d better get on the road,” he said cheerily.  We all stared at each other, baffled, but desperately optimistic that maybe Dane was wrong.

“Like I said, might as well just stick around and get another good day o’ climbin’ in,” he repeated, but the only thing to do was pile into our little Altima and try our luck with catching our flight out of Laredo.

4: In which I live every middle-aged man’s dream…sort of

My friend Voltaire asked me recently why I ride a fixed gear bike.  My feelings on this issue are strong but varied, and the question elicits a garbled mess of a response from me.  I’m like Cupid shooting arrows in all different directions, leaving the listener befuddled about who he’s supposed to fall in love with, but certain that he should fall in love.

The day after Voltaire posed this question to me, I found a new answer.  It was around 2 PM on a Thursday.  I had just gotten something of a “zip it, and get the job done,” from my boss, in response to my overly detailed explanation of a rather odd interfacing challenge I was having.  Now, I was riding west on Pennsylvania Avenue, en route to a doctor’s appointment.  I was not very excited about it.

My doctor’s office is in Foggy Bottom, (orange line of the Metro), meaning the most direct way to get there from my office (green line) is on a bicycle.  (This illustrates the first and most lucid point in my explanation of why I love bikes).  The route takes me west on Pennsylvania Avenue, which suffers from one of my least favorite aspects of biking in the city: the erratic behavior of taxi drivers.  Still, cabs are easily swerved around by an agile and alert cyclist, so even they can’t ruin the experience.

I was pulling one of my favorite city moves:  to suazoo* between stationary taxis and slowing traffic while approaching a red light.  I like this maneuver on Pennsylvania Avenue especially, because those cabbies try so hard to get anywhere in the city faster than anybody else, especially the other cabbies.  While I can’t say I’m stealing their customers, I can almost always say that I’d get wherever they’re going faster than they could.  This gives me sick satisfaction.  Sometimes, riding through gas fumes, squealing brakes, and the buzz of motors, my only solace is knowing that, at least in the city, my legs get me there faster than your engine.

So I was pulling one of these moves and approaching the crosswalk when I heard a low, soft voice utter, “Wow that might be the sweetest fixie I’ve seen around,” and another cyclist pulled up next to me in the crosswalk.

I looked left and saw glacial blue eyes, a half-grin of perfect teeth, and amber wisps barely feathering from underneath an orange helmet. “Thanks!” I stammered, “I mean, I guess if you like rusty old Schwinns with no paint left on them.”  My bike is a 1970-something flat gray steel frame with chrome mustache handlebars and a new set of cheap’ish wheels.  Just that morning I had been dreaming up a kelly green and black color scheme and calling around for estimates on powder coating.

“No way!  It’s totally awesome—got the minimalist thing goin, ya know?  Although from behind I thought it was titanium at first.”  I do love the minimalist look of my bike, especially since the fixed gear has come to symbolize more of a fashion statement and a subculture than elegance, efficiency, and durability.  But with the rust spots on it, I know that if I want it to do what I got it to do, it needs some paint to protect it from the weather.

But now, briefly, I reconsidered this conclusion.  We continued to talk for a few minutes, and I think I felt, for just a moment, something akin to what middle-aged men who buy sports cars are looking for at stoplights.  I totally failed to capitalize on this situation in any respectable manner, and I must admit that I didn’t really notice his bike.  Still, although I don’t ride it for this reason (I promise!), if my bike gets me flirted with by a cute boy at a stoplight, well I guess I’ll take it.

*I don’t know how the human species has made it so long without this word, but because I am not a plagiarist, I have to give credit to my friend Ryan for its addition into the English language.  There are words that should be used liberally: this is one of them.

3: Going Home

Thanksgiving of 2008 was a little bit spooky.  It wasn´t unhappy, far from it. There were none of the quarrels that have plagued certain Thanksgivings of yore. No, we all somehow managed to ignore provocations so that they rolled off smoothly, like water droplets on Gore Tex.

Still, Thanksgiving was spooky, beginning when the flat light of a gas station parking lot awoke me at 2 A.M. on Wednesday.  My sister, brother-in-law, and I had driven from Washington, D.C., through Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, and now, curled up in the back seat of my sister´s car, I sensed that we must be, finally, in Alabama. ¨Where are we?¨ I asked groggily. ¨Scottsboro,¨ my sister answered.

The word conjured to mind a yellowed photograph of “The Scottsboro Boys” and the shadowy recollection of a terrible injustice that had befallen nine African American teenagers here, in the 1930s.  I had driven through this town tens of times, visited it for high school track meets, and had friends who grew up here. When I graduated from high school, I would have considered it an unremarkable place, like a banal wall hanging in the dentist’s office that I had passed so many times as to stop noticing. Now, after spending a lot of time in college studying the Civil Rights Movement, it was as though history´s memory of Scottsboro had gradually, tacitly, usurped my own, for better or worse.  Even as my Southern Accent had slowly neutralized while I was gone, so too my memory had faded and, as I peered around the lonely, dimly lit parking lot, the horrific events memorialized in that image shocked me with their palpable proximity.

An hour and a half later, our tires crunched into my grandparents´ pebbled driveway. We tumbled out of the car and lumbered up the walkway towards their riverside cottage. Peering through the glass door at the back of the house, we could barely make out a standing figure in the corner of the bedroom.  Since it was now 3 A.M., we didn´t expect anyone to be awake.  Warily, we pulled the door open, trundled through with our bags, and flipped the light switch.  When I saw that there was, in fact, somebody standing in the corner, I stumbled back a step in my sleepy stupor. Still, it only took a moment to notice that the figure was none other than our new President-elect Barack Obama, welcoming but somehow less venerable in this cardboard likeness, holding Teddy Roosevelt glasses. We burst into hysterics, soon to be joined by my mother, bursting through the door to revel in her joke.

The most haunting image from that Thanksgiving is that of my grandmother Bebe, crumpled on the bathroom floor and listlessly pleading for help just after midnight on Thanksgiving Day.  Moments earlier, my grandfather had appeared in the doorway to the living room, with resolution in his gait but alarm in his eyes. ¨I need help,¨ he evenly informed my younger brother David and I, and we sprung up to follow him into the bedroom. Our stomachs tightened as we hurried through the hallway, then turned when we saw my grandmother lying helplessly on the bathroom floor, blood seeping from beneath her. ¨Help me,¨ she croaked weakly, then protested as my grandfather lifted her right arm to help her up. ¨No! Please don´t pull on my arm! It hurts! David! Where is David?¨ she moaned desperately.  My brother stood ashen-faced at her feet. ¨I´m right here, Bebe,¨ he assured her, and the two of us knelt with my grandfather to heave her limp heft into the chair nearby. Once we got her upright, we saw the spattering of blood that had soaked her nightgown from a lacerated shin and wrist, purple and turgid like an overripe plum. As I rubbed her back to soothe and reassure her, I felt bludgeoned by the frailty of my once-vivacious grandmother´s body and the delicateness of her evanescent skin. The bathroom began to spin and colors flashed and faded, almost as if I´d been the one to take a blow to the head. I had to lean back against the sink to keep from toppling over. Glancing at my brother, I noticed his wan face as he left to wake  our mother and call an ambulance.

The paramedics came and lifted Bebe onto a stretcher to take her to the hospital. By that time, she had recovered her wits: as the two burly paramedics ran through some innocuous medical questions, we felt reassured by her consternation when they asked her how old she was.  As a true Southern lady, she parried, ¨Well that is a VERY ugly thing to ask me!¨  My mother and grandfather, following the ambulance, reported that she jabbered to the paramedics the whole way.  Still, whenever anybody mentioned the incident, I lost my appetite to the memory of that piquant scene in my grandmother´s bathroom.

2: In which our heroine and her bicycle tackle the snowy world together

A lot of things happened in Washington, DC, when over 40 inches of snow befell it over one week in February.  I saw a cross-country skier cruising through Dupont Circle, bepelted by snowballs.  Then I saw a tow-truck barrelling around the Circle behind him, mocking the snowball warriors who had laughed as he spun his wheels in New Hampshire Avenue an hour earlier.  I saw a video of an Escalade doing donuts at 13th and U Sts., cars waiting to pass from both directions.  But I, oh I decided to pursue my usual mode of beating the city at its own game: on my bicycle.

I needed to get downtown around lunch time on Sunday, to meet up with my friend Pam, who was visiting from San Francisco on exactly the wrong weekend.  She called me, exasperated, from L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station and pleaded with me to come meet her downtown, so that she wouldn’t have to endure the second half of what sounded like an intolerable Metro ride up to Columbia Heights.  I stood in my foyer, hands on my hips, eyes on my front door, mind on the fustercluck awaiting me at the Columbia Heights Metro Station.

And then my eye lighted on my mountain bike, leaning against the stairs underneath three of my roommates’ bicycles and my own road bike, which I was not even about to bust out in the snow.  But my mountain bike, my knobby tires: the night before, I had seen some guys riding up 14th Street without too much trouble.  Back in December, during Snowmageddon 2009, I had seen some other guys careening down Federal Hill on their mountain bikes.  This would be a throwback to days spent on muddy trails, only better because I wouldn’t have to worry about getting out of my clipless pedals if I fell.  I grabbed my bike, and my helmet, and headed out the door.

Abandoning all my usual routes through the city, I decided to take 14th Street all the way downtown, since it was the road most likely to be plowed.  I told myself I would try my wheels and take the bike home if it seemed like a terrible idea to ride it.  It wasn’t.  I slid around a little in the slush, but I was fine.  Remembering the time I’d ridden my mountain bike home from work in the rain, I kept a vigilant eye on the front of my favorite fleece, to make sure that it didn’t meet the same grease-splotched fate as the H&M button-down I’d been wearing that day.  The front tire’s spray seemed to be under control, but about a mile down the road, I noticed that the seat of my pants was getting a little soggy.  Before my butt could get completely soaked, I stopped at a BP Station to see what I could find with which to jerry-rig a fender.

I’d seen this done before; a strip of cardboard could be stuffed into some nook above the rear wheel, to act as a fender.  I perched my bike in a snow bank, locked it to a bus stop sign, and scrutinized it to see what I could attach a piece of cardboard to.  Although it didn’t seem quite right, the most obvious thing would be to put it on top of the saddle, protruding backwards, and then sit on it to keep it in place.  But I would definitely need to stand up to maneuver down the icy hills, and I couldn’t have the “fender” falling out; I needed an affixing mechanism.  Plan B would be a plastic bag, which I could use to cover the back of my pants.

Immediately upon entering the gas station, I saw a stack of Washington Posts, complete with plastic-bagged middle sections.  Plans A and B, all in one 35-cent package.  There would even be enough newspaper to replace any fenders that might get lost in transit.  I looked around for medical tape, masking tape, band-aids, bungee chords, rubber bands, shoelaces, anything that I could use to tie my fender to my saddle.  All I saw were some cell phone chargers and a lot of snacks.  I made a quick stop in the bathroom to check the damage on the back of my pants and, upon exiting the bathroom, there it was: pantyhose.  I grabbed a pair quickly and headed up the aisle to the counter.

So the short version of the story is: I tied a piece of folded newspaper to the saddle of my bike with a pair of black pantyhose and rode all the way through Washington, DC, in this manner.  The slightly longer version of the story is: my first “fender” fell out, which was pointed out to me by a car riding my tail as I weaved between the slushy ice, packed snow, and wet road.  Conditioned to city riding, I interpreted the incessant honking as indignation that I was so presumptuous as to use the road today.  “You lost your newspaper!” the honker yelled out her window after I pulled over, and she pointed to the pile of slush behind her.  “Yeah, I realized that!” I shouted back with a wave.  I did NOT trudge into oncoming traffic to retrieve the soggy “fender” from the brownish slush.

Pulling out a few new pages of newspaper, I reflected that this couldn’t be the system that the pros used.  Re-examining my saddle, I decided to try stuffing a new piece of newspaper between the seat stays underneath the saddle.  I attached another “fender” above the saddle for good measure and busted out the plastic-wrapped insert.  I tucked the plastic wrapping into the back of my jeans, to wear as a kind of splash guard just in case.  Please note that I was making all these arrangements at the intersection of 14th and U Streets, which might just be the focal point of my Washington, DC, universe.

I made it the rest of the way to Chinatown without incident.  Heading south, it took me until about K Street to stop hating the slush and start embracing this as an adventure.  Also at K Street I reveled in the fact that my least favorite street in the city could be all mine, today.  When I started heading east, I was actually outrunning a snow plow.  Crossing 12th Street on G, an Up in the Air billboard featuring George Clooney’s backside beckoned me towards the Verizon Center.  Nearing 7th Street, I cursed my decision to ride all the way south on 14th; 7th Street was completely cleared, save some thick slush flanking the traffic lanes.

I arrived at my destination–Jaleo Restaurant at 7th and G–and surveyed the bike parking situation for only a moment before locking my bike to the most accessible of the snow-banked “no parking” signs.  Congratulating myself for the decision to don the rubber boots again today, I removed my plastic skirt just in time to get sloshed by not one but two SUV’s, drivers mirthfully oblivious of the pedestrian victims of their crunchy spray.  I shook my head, scooped some frozen crystals from the tops of my boots, and headed inside to hear Pam’s tales from the night before.

1: In which our heroine starts a blog

My friend Lisa said something to me the other day that I felt like I should listen to.  We were sitting at one of my favorite bars (only on the right day, and at the right time), having basically imbibed our way through the 20+ inches of snow that had been dumped on Washington, DC.  We were talking about art, after I had been telling Lisa about the creative writing class I had taken at the Bethesda Writer’s Center.  I always feel a pang when I talk about this class.  Writing feels like my messy basement, that I started straightening out once but haven’t gotten back to, even though I know I could turn it into an awesome workout room.

I asked Lisa whether she did any art.  “I really don’t,” she said, with a whisp of regret, “Only photography, but I don’t really do enough of that in the city.”  She went on to say that her camera is film only, that she really wants to get a digital SLR, and that it’s sad that she doesn’t spend enough time taking pictures around the city.  “It’s always been mostly a travel thing for me,” she said.  “And it’s hard because work is really demanding on my time these days, so when it comes down to either spending time on art, or seeing friends that I haven’t seen in a week and a half…”  I nodded and took a sip of my beer, remembering why I still hadn’t cleaned out that basement.

A bit later Lisa asked me what my art was, and I said that if I had an art, it would be writing, but that I didn’t spend enough time doing that either.  That’s when she asked me if I blogged.  “I feel like you’d be a good blogger,” she said.  I cocked my head back for an instant and squinted, but mostly just shifted my eyes around and said something about how I didn’t really think I had enough interesting things to say on a blog.  “I’ve always felt like it would be a little presumptuous, publishing things on the internet and assuming that people would be interested in reading my dribbly ramblings.”  But even as I said it, the statement burned my ears, and I interrupted myself with, “But what do you mean?  Why do you think I’d be a good blogger?”  “I don’t know,” she said, “I just feel like you have good stories, and you’re good at telling them…I’d read your blog,” she shrugged.

Now I’m not sure I agree with Lisa that I have good stories, or that I’m a good story-teller.  I think my stories tend to be too long, too detailed, and often anti-climactic.  I can see it occasionally in the glaze of the eyes of the listener.  Then again, Lisa’s not the first person who’s told me I’m a good writer or that I have good stories.  I’ve always kept travel journals, and I sent periodic stories home while I was in the Peace Corps.  My writing class colleagues praised my work, and another friend told me I should write a book about a recent rock climbing epic.  In 8th grade, my English teacher encouraged me to enter a poetry contest held by the Birmingham News.  I didn’t win.

So maybe all these people are right, but actually, the beauty of the interwebs is, it doesn’t even matter.  Because the great thing about things published on the internet is that I’m not presuming anything by telling my stories.  If you want to read them, you can.  If you think they’re interesting or entertaining, please keep reading them.  If you think they could be told better, please critique them.  If you find them to be a waste of your time, please don’t read them.  The only way I want you to read them is if you consider that to be a worthy use of your time, and if you do make that decision, I will consider it a great honor.

What I know is that I have this basement that I need to clean out, and I would appreciate your input.  The writer’s first rule is to write from experience, and the second rule is to write daily.  Those things I can do on my own.  The reason to put this on the Internet is that the next rule is to seek input.  So if you’re interested in this, please comment and critique and, if you also have a basement to clean out, maybe we could work on that together.  I would love to read your stories too.