In the rock I trust

Last year I gave away my trad climbing gear, some of it new, some of it by then almost 25 years old. Not the end of the world: I would still be able to go sport climbing, where the bolts are all already installed, and of course continue in the climbing gym. And yet … I told Shelley and KP, climbers themselves, “there goes half my identity”.

Of all that I can relive in memory and imagination, what dominates is my sense of the rock. My rock paradigm: cool, smooth, hard, solid, something to trust with your life. Many a rock that does not instantiate this ideal. I’ve climbed on crumbling rock, exfoliation, with bits breaking off. I’ve sometimes stuck my pro in little cracks with edges like eggshells. I’ve slipped on basalt, God’s answer to stealth rubber. And still, pervasive in all my memory, is this sense of the rock I can trust, trust to bear me, to hold me, to offer me safety, to hold my feet on scarcely perceptible unevennesses, to carry me up.

There is lots to remember, gratefully or ruefully, certainly fondly. When Ric Otte introduced me to Yosemite, I got hooked at once. But I did not lead during the first two years, just followed and belayed Ric and his friends … quaking in my climbing shoes as often as not. At the beginning of the third summer there, coming down from something harrowing –on Middle Cathedral, I think — I said “I don’t ever want to lead”.

They all understood it as a comment on how I had felt. Early the next morning they took me to the easiest climb in the Valley, Swan Slab Gully, and said “Lead!”.

Later, toward the end of that summer, Ric told me, “look, you can follow 10a, so let’s go up Crest Jewel, you can lead the easy parts.” It was a good climb, lots of face and friction, but steep and rather dubious looking bolts. At some point, when he was leading a 10a pitch, he yelled down to me, “look, Bas, look at that helicopter flying down below us!”. I didn’t. I was swearing, “damn it, Ric! I don’t want to look down!”

The first time I climbed Revival, in Church Bowl, I had the impression it was hardly ever climbed. About three-quarters on the way up, looking for protection, I found the remains of a bolt, not much more than a nail sticking out. I took an old wire-threaded nut, scrunched the wire around that rusty nail, prayed … Much later, on Hobbit Book in Tuolumne, I hung first a water bottle, and then one of my approach shoes, on bits of rock sticking out (‘dinner plates’ and ‘chicken heads’), to improvise some parody of bolt protection. These were not moments colored by fear, they stick in my memory with the felt satisfaction of cooperating with the rock, accepting what it let me have.

There is much else to climbing, of course. The easy together feeling of people who rely on each other; laughing over things that could have gone so badly … like when Baylor and I vowed never again to rappel without adding a prusik safety ( a vow neither of us kept very faithfully).

And the minor miracles. Leading a pretty steep but not really difficult route in the Pinnacles, I suddenly found I could not move my left foot up. The little loop at the back of my climbing shoe had gotten caught in the carabiner clipped on the last bolt. Something, everyone said later, that had never before happened in the history of climbing.

And now I was not in a good position, right foot on a small hold, right hand stretched out above me — bending down was just not on. A controlled fall? No, I would pivot down from my caught left foot, slam into the rock, no way to fall free. Someone below told me to wait until they could go up farther on, and lower a rope to me. But could I stay in this awkward position so long?

A little miracle — I managed to worm my foot out of the shoe. Then I climbed up to the next bolt, on one shoe and one foot, secured myself, climbed down again to get the shoe. After climbing that day, I cut the loops on both shoes.

And once again, the rock I trust had held me in its loving arms, carried its tough love only as far as a warning.