Action is more interesting than inaction. - 11/19: the fall.

In comments to my last post, desperance mentioned that he'd seen me write about the pea gravel, and about life after the fall, but not about the fall itself. I did write about it as part of my final grad-school packet, but I didn't post it here. It's very much first draft, and the last few paragraphs are more placeholders for actual content, since I plan on working more on it. If anyone's interested, this is what I wrote.

I stand in front of one of the tall walls, the vertical fourteen-foot corner. I’m used to this wall. It was the first tall wall I free-climbed to the top. That was almost two years ago, a V-B, the easiest level of bouldering. Fourteen feet was six feet higher than the ceiling of my apartment. At the top, it was eight feet from the tips of my toes to the pea gravel.

I made it. I was taking a bouldering class from Nic, the philosophy student and carpenter, about a month after I started . “Look down,” he called.

Flushed with accomplishment, already focused on the descent, I tend to forget this. This might be a little like the people who climb Everest and spend spend five minutes at the summit, barely long enough to take the photos, before they head back down. I got there, that’s great. Now how do I get back down?

I looked. It seemed a lot farther than fourteen feet, the pea gravel no longer individual rocks but a coarse frozen lake, rippled with the impact craters of ten thousand descents. Too far to fall, definitely. I downclimbed as far as I could, and then dropped the rest of the way.

Since then, I’ve fallen from the top of this wall scores or maybe hundreds times, the full fourteen feet. I’ve fallen from a lot of things: from overhangs, down slabs. I’ve fallen flat on my back from a ten-foot ceiling before this, knocked the wind out of myself. That was a V-3. There was no real damage, though my entire back was pale lilac for a week. The gravel always took me in gently.

I haven’t climbed a V-B in almost a year. V-Bs aren’t even much good for warming up. I use V-1s, two climbing grades harder, for that. There’s no challenge in a V-B: the enormous hand holds, the fat ledges for my feet. The moves are small and often straight up, at my skill level as easy as climbing a ladder. I’ve climbed V-Bs with one hand. There are a handful of stuffed monkeys on a bench by the front door, all dusty but smiling endlessly, waiting for someone to take them climbing. Sometimes I do, one hand for the route and one for the monkey. I leave them at the top of a route, tucked onto the finish hold for the next climber. This is the only way to make a V-B challenging.

I warmed up on the silver-tape traverse, but this V-B is my first real climb of the evening. I’m terrified, afraid in a way I’ve never felt while climbing: fast breathing, racing pulse, sweating hands, the works. I’m shaking enough to be visible to my partner. I want to cry, scared and humiliated by this fear. This isn’t the flutter of nerves that comes from a tricky route, a longshot V-4. It was never this bad, not even at the very beginning.

The gym has replaced the pea gravel. This is what is frightening me.

The floor is now compressed foam eight or ten inches deep. There are also portable pads of the same material, ten inches thick, six feet by eight feet. I have dragged one over here. Eighteen inches of pad to fall on, and it’s still harder than gravel.

Stone Gardens has been old-school about keeping its gravel, but for the last year the manager has talked about switching. There’s been a fair amount of bitching and moaning about it from staff and climbers both. It had been so long since he last mentioned it and there had been so much resistance that I assumed the idea had died. The notices went up a month ago. Closed for five days. It’s taken the week since they reopened for me to get up the guts to come in and try this.

When I fall or jump into pea gravel, it redirects the shock out and down in a broad cone that spreads into the sliding gravel. The shock of impact is gravity’s penalty for failure; pea gravel is the diplomat who sweet-talks me into trusting that gravity can’t really hurt me, that I may not be able to trust it but at least I can work with it.

I'm used to trying aggressive moves in the gym because I'm basically safe. I know how to fall in gravel; unless I face-plant, which doesn't happen often, I'm not going to do worse than jar a joint a little. I trusted the gravel, and made careless assumptions about my power over gravity. Fall; stand up. There's no courage to falling when you don't believe it's going to hurt you.

Mats defuse the momentum of a fall differently. Instead of a broad cone of slithering rocks, the shock of impact runs vertically, down into the resisting foam and straight up through my ankles and legs, into the hinges of my knees. If I fall on my back on mats, I could give myself whiplash when my head snaps back and hits the foam. It's a terrible decision on their part: not just for me, for everyone.

Fourteen feet. Twelve moves. Ten breaths. My pulse is not slowing. My knees don’t stop shaking. When is something courage, and when it is foolhardiness? Climbing on mats is which of these?

***

Betrayals happen in a thousand ways. Holds spin, hands slip. Jobs disappoint, friends move out of town, lovers leave, bodies fail. And then we die, the final betrayal, the world slapped out of our hands for no apparent reason, as if we were three and life were a dangerous toy. We trust something, someone; and it, he, she, fails us. Gyms change from gravel to mats.

Betrayals never happen in isolation. Two or more parties are required, the betrayer and the betrayed. The potential for betrayal is tacitly understood by all involved parties. I couldn’t be betrayed if I weren’t there in the first time, making assumptions about myself and the gym.

The wall doesn’t betray me, or not often. We have an understanding that any route is doable somehow by someone, even if that’s not me. If I don’t see a solution, that’s my failure, not the wall’s. It’s not a betrayal when someone asks for something impossible and I can’t do it. Sometimes, the wall does break promises, but generally I can trust that holds will not spin when my weight is on them, or pull altogether off in my hand -- as happened once, memorably, the heavy resin flake falling faster than gravity would seem to explain. My balance thrown off, I followed the flake down into the gravel, laughing as I landed uninjured. It’s also not much of a betrayal if no harm’s done.

Gravity never betrays me because the only promise it makes is hostile, and it never, ever disappoints. In the end, gravity wins it all.

Muscle is the variable in the wall/muscle/gravity equation, and of the three elements, muscle -- my flesh and courage and intelligence – is the one that’s going to betray me most often. I am used to this; testing the boundaries that gravity and the wall set for me is really the point of climbing. Where are the edges of my ability, the place where I break? Farther than I ever imagined, but I like to prove this to myself a couple of times a week.

I’m mostly comfortable with muscle disappointing me, here, at least. It’s possible I don’t worry much because, evidence to the contrary, I don't really believe it will. Look at all my data points: I walk without incident, falling forward and catching myself at the last moment on a collection of decaying rods and hinges. I breathe, and only notice it when my apnea jerks me awake from a dream of suffocation. Even though I fall from walls all the time, my body has made it up this wall before; what the hell, it could do so this time, as well. It’s not a betrayal if you don’t expect much.

But I’ve made some basic assumptions, and assumptions based on ignorance or fear or hope are exactly where betrayals come from. I understand and accept the shifting alliances and sudden changes as wall, muscle and gravity stake their claims. But there are other pieces to the equation, elements that I have erroneously assumed are constants.

It turns out that it’s not actually gravity that’s the enemy. It’s the ground. With no ground below me, I could fall forever without injury. The promise of pea gravel wasn’t that I wouldn’t fall. It was that, when I did fall, I wouldn’t hit too hard. I could fall – my body’s betrayal -- and it would forgive me, like the perfect boyfriend.


***

Everything is manageable at the gym. I am never angry or stressed or pissed off because everything else stops. The universe is two hours long, fourteen feet tall. My job is to get up the wall; I’m never laid off. My relationships are simple: the guy behind the front desk will say hi; the Hispanic boy with the Marines tattoo will spot me if I ask him; the slim redhead with the pageboy bob will smile, wordless and shy. I’ll fall or bark my shins against a hold, but these are temporary failures and involve my body only, not my mind or my courage.

And always, the forgiving ground under my feet, the last safe thing. Stand or climb: there’s no way to fall any farther, and the pea gravel forgives everything. I trust the gravel. It is always there, a unremembered constant in the wall/muscle/gravity equation. It is the place that takes me in when I fail to solve the problem and fall off or miss a hold or ditch, rescues me before I can hurt myself. The gravel is always there, not harsh but soft; forgiving rock wrapped in dust as sweet and thick as baby powder. The ground is forgiving. I return to the dust again. And again. Gravity will drag the wall down, and that's were we join, muscle and wall, in the soil, the ground, earth.

The floor here is now harsh red outdoor carpet laid over eight inches of foam. Pads hurt. Pads don’t forgive. But what’s the option? Climbing saved my life, and trusting it to continue to do so is a habit now, a fundamental assumption I no longer think about.

***

Two weeks from now I will fall.

I'll be working on a new V-2.

The gym has multiples of a lot of holds, and reuses them all the time, combining familiar elements to make new patterns, like letters forming new words. In two years, I’ve seen the same holds used so many times that I can identify certain individuals from ten feet down – that’s the red resin flake with a crack at the top; that’s the two-finger pocket with the missing chunk. But the gym buys new holds from time to time, and the holds in this V-2 will be entirely unfamiliar, their colors still unmuddied and bright as children’s toys, pockmarked and so coarsely textured that my hands will long to touch them.

Until this point I will not have climbed anything harder than a V-1 over the mats. But I’ll have done a couple of those, and a dozen or so V-Bs and V-0s. Mostly I will have ended routes by downclimbing, but I will have fallen twice, once from a foot and once from two.

The V-2 will be so intriguing that I forget I haven’t done one yet, and I will forget about the mats. The holds will feel as sweet as they look. The moves will be all about clever balance, perfectly tailored to my strengths. I will solve the problem. I will reach for the finish hold.

My foot will slip. I will shout as I fall. I will land on my right foot first, and I will hear things break in my leg and my ankle, noises like sticks breaking. The sensation that is not pain but my body’s metaphor for it will flood me as I fall forward onto my hands and knees.

I will try to stand and collapse again. A rangy blond man in a aqua-blue teeshirt will be kneeling by me. He’ll shake my hand and this will seem comforting and ordinary, as I will assume it’s supposed to. “What’s your name?” he’ll say: “I’m Josh, I work here. Is it okay if I touch your leg?”

He and Peter – who will be here, finishing up his night just as I begin mine – will carry me into the little shop where shoes and harnesses and climbing magazines are sold. The pain will mutate again, until it is simultaneously metaphor and fact. I will be crying, but not from the pain – it’s the worst I’ve ever felt, but it’s just pain – instead, from anger and betrayal and loss.

In the hospital I will find out I have a displaced fracture of my fibula and a high-ankle sprain. Three weeks from now, after the second set of X-rays, I will learn about the other two breaks, a fracture lower on the fibula and a hairline crack in my talus, a bone will never have heard of before this. Talus is also the slope of fallen scree from a cliff, which will strike me so ironic as to be ridiculous. Five weeks from now, I will learn about the broken bone in my foot. Six weeks from now, a month after the fall, I will notice that my right thigh is smaller than my left as the leg withers with disuse.

But right now, two weeks before I will fall, standing in front of this V-B, I don’t know any of this. My fear is certainly concrete – my palms are still sweating, my hands are still shaking – but what I fear is not. I am worrying about my knees because they’ve let me down before, and so injury seems most likely from that direction. Bones usually atone for their treason by healing stronger, but ligaments and tendons are sneaky. They fail and then fail again, and the promises they make last only long enough for me to trust them again and be betrayed again. My knee lets me down so often that I wouldn’t trust it if I didn’t need to, to climb.

All I can think of is the cold numb ache in my knees that first year, the queasiness that comes from chronic pain. I handled it because I needed to climb more than I needed not to hurt. But that was a year ago now. I don’t think I can face that endless grinding ache again, now that I know how it would feel, day after day after day. Can I fall even a foot or two without damage? I don’t know. I hate the fact that I‘m going to have to find out.

***

A betrayal can be an instant failure of everything I believe about myself or others or the world. Or it can be a slow erosion, and this is worse because it’s so much harder to pinpoint....

Betrayals don’t happen in isolation: My body trusts my mind to determine acceptable risks; my mind trusts my body to meet its expectations. Sooner or later everyone is betrayed by someone, but the option is to stay down here forever, give up on walls, take no risks, try not to fall.

This trust is the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson said about second marriages. It’s hard not to hope. The alternative seems to be despair. But there’s another option. Just do it. Climb the wall again. Fall in love. Move in together. See what happens.

We live in the future and the past. Wait-and-see is unstable, a transition state between experience and hope, or despair. Schrodinger’s cat: we don’t know in which state we will find ourselves until we open that box. Hope, despair, and wait-and-see have their own agreements and betrayals, which I am no part of, except as collateral damage....


***

Fourteen feet: this moment, this V-b. Two weeks until I fall and break my leg. Hope triumphs over dread. I’ve climbed this far before, and succeeded or failed, and they’ve both been okay. Even if I fall, even if I break something, I’m here, now; and here’s the route. It’s worth it, I suppose. I swing up onto the first holds.
My hands sweat all the way to the top and my legs shake, but I make it. Sometimes – most of the time -- there are no betrayals at all.