Читать книгу The Sharp End of Life - Dierdre Wolownick - Страница 18

EVERY TUESDAY AND THURSDAY afternoon, completely spent after teaching a full day of classes at the college, I threw material for the next day’s classes into several briefcases, cleaned up my office after another day of whizzing in and out, and dashed into the restroom to change into my climbing clothes.

I didn’t dare give myself time to think. Too dangerous. That would have allowed me to think about how tired I was. Two solid class hours in the morning, an office hour, and four nonstop class hours in the afternoon is enough to max out any teacher’s exhaustion level.

Once I’d changed my clothes, I’d rush back to my office so no one would see me in my climbing pants or T-shirt. The more formal attitudes in Japan and New York City, where I’d taught in Brooklyn and the Bronx, had made me wary of letting my students see my nonprofessional side. When I’d started teaching, in the ’70s, women teachers at our high school weren’t even allowed to wear pants to work. Things were different now, and I knew those old rules didn’t apply in California. But habits tend to linger, even after forty years.

After I was out of the office, I’d put my brain on autopilot as I drove a half hour across Sacramento to the climbing gym in the heart of downtown. Walking into the gym was like flipping a switch. Once I met my partner, or partners, we often started by catching up about our work day. But that would quickly fade into chatter about our project—the route we were working on climbing, clean, without falling. Or our climbing shoes. Or our gear. Ropes. Whether our cracked fingers had healed. Our elbow issue. Nothing existed inside the climbing gym but climbing.

“Did you see the new 10b they put up? It’s really fun!”

“Yeah. I sent it last time. Too easy for a 10b. Can you give me a catch on my proj?”

“You didn’t send your project yet?”

“Came off right before the last clip Tuesday. It’s really thin. You have to drop your knee and reach high behind you for this little sloper. Put all your weight on it. I flew right off.”

“Bummer.”

Teaching was another world. No matter how demanding or exhausting the day had been, no matter what condition I was in, mentally or physically, when I got to the gym, it was instantly gone. There was simply no room for both; climbing demanded all my concentration. Each time I got on the wall, I stepped up into my zone, where all of life was completely focused, distilled down to the next hold.

At the beginning, I was reminded of Alex as a toddler. Each time he flew off the little Sit ’n Spin, landing on the floor or against a piece of furniture, he’d bounce back up with a big grin. He knew he’d succeeded at another bit of training. He knew his balance was getting better with each fall, that his tenacity was improving, as well as his capabilities in general. When I started climbing, Alex told me that if I wasn’t falling, I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I’d been going to the climbing gym for a few months and occasionally climbing outdoors, when my climber buddies decided to teach me to rappel.

If you climb outdoors, at some point you’re going to have to rappel. Sometimes you can walk off the back of a mountain or wall, but often you have to lower yourself back down the way you went up. Mark had already showed me, at the gym, everything I’d need to know: how to thread the rope through my belay device to rappel, attach the backup, and tie a Prusik knot. Easy—while standing on the ground.

So back we went to Cosumnes River Gorge one weekend. Mark was going to show two of us newbies how to rappel on real rock. We’d been here many times over the last few months, and each time I had a little more success as a climber, eventually finishing that sloping wall that had stymied me the very first day. Since then, I’d followed my gang up several of the short, but more vertical, walls that rose up from the river canyon. I’d heard them talk about rappelling off this or that piece of rock, but I’d never tried it. This would be a new skill to add to my ever-expanding set.

It was late spring, and the river had transformed from a raging bully into a well-behaved, gray ribbon, adorned here and there with nearly black pools that shone like mirrors. On the far side of the water rose Gutenberger Wall, a slab of granite several stories tall, sprinkled with shrubs, several climbing routes, and an occasional goat straying down from the houses at the top. On the side we walked in on, the rocks were only one pitch, or rope-length, tall.

The half-hour hike down to the gorge flew by. My stomach was jittery as I thought about how I was going to try rappelling. I’d heard my son and other real climbers talk about rapping down off some wall—it always sounded dramatic and impressive. I was about to join that club. I could already see myself easily gliding down a big wall, one hand controlling my rope, the other waving to the camera.

We picked our way carefully between boulders and slippery grades covered in grit, holding saplings or rocks for balance. At a flat, rocky outcropping, we stopped and put our packs on the ground. Mark selected a small pile of gear from his bag and quickly carried it down the slab toward the edge of the cliff.

The overhang. The abyss. Those were some of the words that battered my mind as I watched him disappear. He was walking casually, so I knew he was safe and secure. That didn’t stop my stomach from twisting.

When I talked about climbing at the college, my colleagues often said they could never climb because they were afraid of heights. But whenever I went up anything really high, like a skyscraper, and looked over the edge, I felt it too. Right in the pit of my stomach. Now, the intensity of this moment grabbed me out of nowhere, anchoring me to that spot high on the granite.

My fellow newbie climber, Betty, followed Mark down the slab, all the way to a sort of rock railing right before the drop-off. They both leaned over the edge to attach gear to the anchor bolts that were almost at the top of the wall we would be rappelling down.

It was no higher than the walls at the gym. I could see the bottom, even from way back where I stood, motionless. Frozen.