Читать книгу Quarterlifers - Kyle Fitzgerald - Страница 3

The Thumb: It, being opposable, enabled us to rise up the evolutionary ladder and gave us the ability to eat ants with a stick.

It was late in the summer of 2001 that I conquered the Rock.

You may have jumped to the conclusion that I somehow managed to vanquish perhaps the most fearsome pro wrestler-turned-action-slash-children’s movie-star of all time…a fellow whose shoe could accommodate my entire body with plenty of room to spare. While I’ll admit that I wouldn’t mind having the ability to pull off such a herculean feat, my own conquest did not involve picking a fight with a gigantic mound of chiseled man-muscle. The rock that I’m talking about is a six-hundred-ton granite behemoth that juts some four hundred feet from the western flank of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, a jagged range that on average thrusts nine thousand feet above sea level. The rock that I’m talking about is called Moro Rock, and the morning that I spent on its towering slopes marked a pivotal turning point in my personal evolution.

I was fifteen years old at the time, already well into that period in any guy’s life when voices descend an octave or two, hair appears in the most awkward places, and girls don’t seem so icky after all. But hormonal excess is not the only element of a healthy adolescence. A big part of the teen experience, you’ll often hear, is finding out who you are as a person…a process that inevitably involves confronting your childhood fears and either engaging them in hand-to-hand combat or running away squealing like a baby chipmunk.

Everyone’s afraid of something. Whether it be snakes, spiders, lizards, birds, big places, small places, dark places, or public restrooms, fear can show up anywhere. It showed up in a lot of places for me, and I’m not going to go into detail about every one of them. (Otherwise people might send me packages in the mail filled with centipedes. No, I’m not afraid of centipedes; I was just using them as an example. I swear.) One of the first places where fear and I bumped into each other would at first mention seem to be a typical spawning ground for childhood trauma — the bed. You know, bad dreams, monsters under the bed, monsters under the covers, etc. Sure, I dealt with all of that nonsense and wet my sheets more times than I can count, but my proverbial Greatest Fear wasn’t sparked by anything under the bed; rather, by something on top of it. Me, to be precise.

Everyone knows how little kids have the peculiar tendency to be found standing on top of things where they don’t belong, such as sofas, tables, bookshelves, and yes, beds. An ordinary child would relish the thrill of raising himself several feet from the earth’s surface, but not me. Though I did stand on beds as a kid, it was never for more than a few seconds at a time. Those two or three feet between the floor and me were enough to conjure a week’s worth of nightmares and bed-wetting incidents.

Flash forward a decade. I’m standing with my family in a parking lot in Sequoia National Park. In the back of my mind, Franklin D. Roosevelt is reassuring his troubled listeners that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Behold: fear itself loomed four hundred feet above my head. But wait a minute. I was fifteen years old. What would all the cute girls at school say if they saw me shaking in my hiking boots because I had to walk up some staircase carved into the back of a big, ugly rock? To tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking about them right then — the only time that happened in my teenage years. The Rock had completely swallowed my mind, heart, and soul, not to mention my nascent manhood. Mother Nature herself had thrown the gauntlet down in front of my quivering toes. I had no choice but to pick it up. Little did I know that I was about to write the most significant chapter yet in the ever-unfolding saga of The Life and Times of Me.

My duel with the Rock started out easy enough. After strolling my way up the first dozen or so hand-carved granite steps, I thought, This can’t be worse than walking up the stairs at the mall. The warm glow of the sun beamed down from a crisp, cloudless alpine sky. The majestic snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada emerged from a blanket of green draped across the slowly-rising landscape to the east. I was sure that the sight would be even more impressive once I reached the top of the Rock. Momentarily overcome by the grandeur of the spectacle, I continued to trudge heavenward, glancing off to my left and admiring the scores of giant sequoia and comparatively delicate pine trees that fled down into the valley below the parking lot and the Rock itself. Of course, it’s one thing when you’re gazing up at a giant sequoia and you’re dwarfed by its massive girth and dizzying height. It’s another thing when you find yourself looking down on one.

That’s when the fun began.

The moment I realized that we were now “above the tree line,” a swarm of hyperactive butterflies took up residence in my stomach, and my adrenaline gland was kind enough to rise from its slumber and begin its morning exercises. The Rock had thrown its first defense at me.

I didn’t let anyone notice my sudden rush of the willies, however. I had told my parents that I would have no problem with this hike. It’s just a lousy staircase, I’d told them. Things certainly look different on a map (one of the most important lessons of my formative years). You moron, I thought — and not for the last time in my life, either — as I stared up at the seemingly stratospheric summit of the Rock and then down at the rapidly shrinking parking lot. You should’ve known that climbing the most monstrous observation deck you’ve ever laid eyes on would be nothing like taking the escalator at Macy’s. There’s no turning back now, boy. So I grabbed myself — body, butterflies, and all — and forced myself to keep walking toward the sky, trying nonchalantly to remain as far away from the sheer drop to my left as I could.

“Are you doing all right?” my mom would occasionally ask, and I would respond with an automatic “Yes.” No sense advertising my inner disequilibrium to the world. Speaking of my mom, we would sometimes have to stop and rest for a few minutes because she’d get winded — something I’m sure had to do with the intimidating altitude, for my mom is a remarkably tough person for someone so small.

During these brief respites, my eyes would always be directed at the stairs beneath my feet. They were quite boring to look at, but they were a much more comforting sight than the distant valley floor or the top of the Rock, which inexplicably seemed to retreat farther and farther upward with each step. I wished I could be like my older brother, the too-cool-for-you-your family-and-all-your-friends Stanford University undergrad who was marching up the stairs as if he were strolling into an Abercrombie & Fitch. But wishes don’t win wars, and the Rock was still perfectly capable of hurling me back down to the parking lot in a spasm of terror at any moment.

In the meantime, as I recall, the following exchange played itself out in my mind:

ME: You tricked me, Rock. I didn’t think you’d be this nasty.

ROCK: What did you think I was, an anthill? You’ve gotta have guts to pick a fight with me, pipsqueak. Some little worm who’s afraid of heights like you…it’s amusing watching you crawl your way up my back. You won’t last another fifty steps, you quivering bunny rabbit.

ME: My parents wouldn’t let me turn around, Rock. We’ve come too far.

ROCK: Uh-huh. Go another hundred feet and we’ll see if you’re singing the same tune. You’ll be begging them on your hands and knees to carry you back down like a sack of rotten potatoes.

ME: You know what, Rock?

ROCK: What? That you’re a wuss? Look, if I don’t make you lose all bladder control and send you running for mommy, then I’ll kill you. I’m tricky indeed…one false move is all it takes…you think that guard rail is gonna stop me?

My heart roared like a jet engine for a couple of seconds. Maybe the Rock was right. Maybe I should give up.

Hold on, I thought, logic creeping into my brain for the first time since I decided to wear hiking boots that morning. It’s far more likely that you would’ve died in a car crash on your way here. The Rock’s just trying to scare you. It always does that to people. It’s kind of like my parents, only with no money and a prettier neighborhood. The thing is, it’s NOT my parents, so it CAN’T send me to my room. Ha!

The Rock was silent.

Encouraged, I continued up the winding steps, being extra careful not to approach the guard rails. They were made of metal and looked to be firmly anchored in the granite, but the Rock’s taunt still lingered in my mind. Although I may have only weighed a flimsy one hundred and five pounds at the time, I wasn’t taking any chances. The last thing I needed was a bumpy free-fall ending with me smashing my pimply face into the windshield of my mom’s station wagon, with the Rock cackling and screaming “I told you so!” throughout the entire ordeal. But then something happened that I am certain robbed the Rock of a startling percentage of its confidence.

We’d halted again, and I was nervously looking up to see how much farther we had to go (the Rock’s most stalwart defense mechanism was the illusion of height) when my dad decided to leave the safety of the steps and venture onto an outcropping that hung from the side of the Rock like a huge granite diving board. He proceeded to stand there and survey the mountains before him like Zeus from the top of Mount Olympus. My mom urged him back to the steps in a hurry, you can imagine (he had the car keys, after all), and we got moving again before my strutting peacock of an older brother decided to find out if he actually did have wings.

But what had happened to the Rock’s big threat? My crazy father had dared the Rock to come in for the kill; he’d practically bared his chest in defiance of the Rock (the sight of which would have finally coaxed the vomit out of my stomach), and still the Rock did nothing. Was this all a colossal joke? Was the Rock the real wuss? Was I a fool for listening to it? Were prancing man-children with god complexes like my dad and older brother smarter than me? Well, that last one couldn’t be true, otherwise I’d have been more than willing to test my weight against the guard rail. But what about the rest? The seed of doubt had been planted. Now it just needed water.

Yet the Rock was not totally finished. Believe it or not, we were nearing the summit…and yes, the ground was dismally far away by then. I felt as if I’d trudged up four hundred miles of steps instead of a mere four hundred feet. Those butterflies — and their children — began to thunder back into my gut.

For this reason, I must admit that my victory that day would not have been possible without my younger brother. Twelve years old, pugnacious, temperamental, and the resident Mr. Tough Guy, he conducted himself with all the tender sweetness of a Tasmanian devil on crack. A god complex wasn’t good enough for him. I’ve never officially confirmed this, but I suspect he believes that if god(s) did indeed create all life on Earth, then someone must have created that/those god(s), and that someone was him.

But now there he was, faced with one of Mother Nature’s most imposing creations, and the God of Gods Himself — Master of All and Fearer of None — was reduced to a whimpering little boy, literally hugging the granite wall as he crept up the stairs. Loud, hysterical complaints about the terrifying vertical distance between himself and the ground echoed throughout the Sierras, and I daresay I heard several blue jays giggling amongst themselves as they soared overhead. Now I know that my younger brother is by no means afraid of heights. It took me years to learn how to walk up a single flight of stairs without a death grip on the railing, but he would always charge up ahead with my older brother. Why would this kid — excuse me, this celestial superbeing — suddenly be transformed into a knee-knocking wreck by one of those very staircases?

Why not? Kids like him, who act tough to hide the fact that they really want to pee their pants, are easy targets for the Rock. It’s why there are so few good kid actors; most of us can tell when they’re pretending. Even inanimate objects, apparently. The Rock had given up picking on me, so it had found a new victim. The Rock had given up! And I hadn’t even realized it!

For the first time in my young life, the fear that accompanied increases in elevation began to fade away. The butterflies in my innards settled to flapping around lazily. My adrenaline gland started to drift back to sleep, tossing and turning every once in a while but leaving the rest of my body undisturbed.

A little girl, no more than five years old, and her mother passed us on the trail. The girl passed us first, and to my utter amusement she was actually running as fast as her tiny legs could take her without tripping, her mother in hot pursuit. The girl was obviously oblivious to the heart-stopping drop beneath her. Meanwhile, the God of Gods Himself mewed like a panicked kitty-cat, clinging to the granite for dear life and burbling that the abyss of the Sierras would surely eat him for lunch. Yet up that little girl went, running and laughing, up up up like one of Santa’s reindeer. The Rock had defeated the God of Gods Himself, but not that little girl. For all she knew, the Rock didn’t even exist.

A dozen or so steps later, I strode out onto the railed-in slab of granite that formed the summit of the mighty Moro Rock. The clear blue sky swept around me in every direction like it had no end. The staircase I’d just ascended trickled down the back of the Rock to the parking lot, where the cars resembled the Hot Wheels I used to play with as a child. But most of all, my eyes feasted on the land, which I’d been frightened to leave ever since I stood on my bed during toddler-dom and which now lay sprawled out hundreds of feet below me. The tree-studded Sierra Nevada to the east and the shimmering Central Valley to the west…it could have been the entire world and it wouldn’t have made a difference to me. What exploded in my mind on that perfect summer morning was simply this: I had conquered the Rock.

Now all I have to do is find Dwayne Johnson and tell him that. And then run the other way.