History is Fiction

I have a short term goal: climb and write.

Simple enough?

How about a long term goal?

Long term goal: don't die.

Not specific enough? How about a photo dump:

The Cirque de Towers in the Wind River Range

El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite Valley

The Grand Tetons in Wyoming

Get the picture?

Big Walls.

Big Wall Climbing.

That took about a week to figure out.

Now, the hard part: how do I accomplish that long term goal? And still pay off my unpleasant college loans?

If I knew that I'd do it. But I'll figure it out. I'm not worried.

In other news, I've spent the last week climbing, working, playing Sheep's Head, and various other things. It's strange how the "tourist attractions" in the Red River Gorge are some of the most un-photogenic sights I've seen. There is  no real way to get a good angle or adequate lighting to take picture of the formations.

Yet, if you see it with your own eyes, it is still quite stunning. And there are plenty of places around here to visit and be stunned by the beauty.

Sorry of a lack of an interesting story. Sometime soon I may have one.

"When something gives you your bullet back, you need to get something bigger" - The Legend of Kentucky Joe

That was Kentucky Joe's reason for owning the largest pistol I have ever seen, in person, in my entire life.

I got off of work and arrived back to Miguel's at 11:30pm. A group of people were talking about their day's climbing at a picnic table behind Miguel's. It was pitch black out, and my eyes weren't adjusted to the darkness. I had a hard time making out who was around. But with the greeting of "hey it's big shoes" or "clown shoes" I took a seat, recognizing the reference. (The nickname, if you could call it that came after we discovered in a guess-your-weight game that my shoes weighed in at 2 pounds. I lost the game.) After about fifteen minutes a guy in a hunter-camo shirt and hat squeezed in between Melisa and I. Awkwardly, I began to lean away from him, almost falling off the bench. He made some strange comments, eluding to sex, and threw around some curses here and there. He set a bag of key limes on the table and began to cut them. He forced the lime wedges into his beer. He looked over at me and introduced himself as Joe.

Someone then asked Joe about whether or not he had caught the guy vandalizing cars in the Southern Region. For the next half hour, in an unrepeatable and unique narrative, Joe told us about how they almost caught the guy. A group of people were staking out in some bushes in the area, moving back and forth between parking lots, hoping to catch the thief in the act. They saw the guy driving a three-wheeler up and down the roads. Now they know who the thief was. But the guy never broke into the cars
Joe and the others were watching. The vandal drove by and was gone, then would drive by again, clearly scoping out the area. After nearly eleven hours, they called it quites and came back to Miguel's. Then they found out that almost ten minutes exactly after they left, someone's car got broken into.

This is merely a summary. I couldn't recreate that ephemeral atmosphere, the jesting back and forth between audience and storyteller. The long pauses Joe took as he gulped down another beer, the phrases, the unique cursing, the slightly sexist and homophobic comment - my memory isn't good enough to attempt to chronicle that part of the night. It was the first time I realized I should buy a sound recorder for such situations.

So, the crowd broke up, Shawn, came over from the basement. People went off to bed. I stood up, getting ready to leave, when someone threw a bottle atop the building, which came tumbling down with a loud crash. Joe exploded.

"Hey!" he shouted. "That's not your house! Don't fucking throw bottles on it. It's not your fucking house!"

"Settle down man," came the reply from the other picnic table at the far end of the pavilion. I couldn't make out who was at that table.

"No, don't tell him to 'settle down'," responded Shawn. I would not want to fuck with either of these guys. Joe just seemed like the kind of person always ready for a fight, and Shawn was a Marine. The animosity in the air was as palpable as the humidity was thick. I was getting ready to break up a fight. But nothing happened. Joe mumbled something about privileged kids riding on mommy and daddy's money. Joe then told us about how he was kicked out of Miguel's once for knocking out a guy (a story for another time).

That's when Phil came up and said something about having fired a gun for the first time only three days ago. Phil was asking Joe about shooting when Joe talked about his pistol. Joe was throwing around gun-talk lingo, which I didn't understand. He said that his pistol could take out an Elephant. I thought he was exaggerating. A pistol take down an Elephant? Then he said it could bury the bullet a few feet into the ground, or how far it could drill into a piece of concrete, etc. Okay. Tall tales, for sure. Right?

Phil called over Alan, who was on his way to bed, to hear about the gun. Then Joe said, "shit let's go look at it, I got it with me."

We got to his pick-up truck where he folds down the center of the car seat. He pulls out the revolver, unloads it and shows it to us. The barrel was the size of my forearm. We laughed in disbelief. It was such an absurd thing, the fact that there were pistols that large was just a foolish notion.

"Why would you ever need a pistol that large?" I asked Joe.

"Well," he said, "when something gives you your bullet back, you need to get something bigger."

We all kind of giggled suspiciously. I looked at Joe quizzically.

"What do you mean?"

Joe smiled in a way that said he had told this story a hundred times before, and it was by far one of his tallest, most difficult to believe.

"This is what happened to me - verbatim:"

One night Joe was out on the town. His wife was alone in a primitive cabin that Joe owned. There was no electricity, heating, lights, or plumbing. When Joe returned home he found her sitting on their bed with a shotgun in her hands. He asked her what's wrong, and she said that there was some noise outside behind the cabin. It sounded as though there was someone creeping around. Then a noise, like a handful of gravel was tossed onto the roof of the cabin. There are no trees around the cabin, so nothing could have fallen from above the roof. It had to be thrown.

Joe took the shotgun, a twenty gauge filled with bird-shot, and when out the back door and unloaded the shotgun into the woods behind the cabin.

The cabin itself was seated in rural Kentucky. There was a barn next door, but it's owner didn't live there in the summer time, and the building remained vacant. It was highly unlikely that anyone would be around the cabin.
(At this point in the narrative, Joe said that the noises sounded like something 12 year-olds would do. I was a little irked that he thought so and then decided to unloaded a shotgun on potential 12 year-olds.)

Joe and his wife went to bed.

Then in the middle of the night Joe woke and went to take a piss. He stepped out of the cabin to do his business. He was completely naked save for a holster at his hip that contained a .45. He heard some noise, and said "fuck it," un-holstered his pistol, and emptied out the six rounds into the woods. Then he reloaded six more and emptied his pistol again.

Nothing stirred. Joe went back to bed.

In the morning Joe went down to the shower, a small rectangular out-house like set-up maybe 50 yards from his cabin. He threw his towel over the door, and set a bar of soap in the soap dish. He raised his hand over himself to turn on the solar powered shower, when his bowed head noticed something between his feet.

It was one of the bullet from his .45 sitting perfectly upright, center on the tiled floor of his primitive shower.

The rifling was bored around it, but other than that, there wasn't a scratch. not a single scathe on it. It hadn't been deformed in any way, it wasn't mushroomed as though it had plowed through something. It was perfect as if it had gone through the pistol and landed less than a foot away. How the hell could that happen? How the hell could that happen, and then how the hell could it arrive up-right in the center of Joe's shower? Joe knew all of his rounds went off correctly.

There are three possible answers:

1) It ricocheted off the ground and landed, with very unlikely probability, on the shower floor.

-There were no markings or deformities on it to suggest that it hit the ground.

2) The bullet hit something, and that something took out the bullet and placed it on the floor.

-The bullet would have mushroomed or been deformed some, and there would have been blood on it.

3) Something caught it and placed it there.

-Strangely enough, there is no reason to cast out this answer. But what would have caught it? What could?

That's where Joe's story ended. We shot around ideas based on that bit of superstitious reasoning(is that an oxymoron?). Mothman, aliens, superman?

Joe then suggested cautiously, to not seem like a quack, Bigfoot.

I'm not going to say "yes, it was Bigfoot," but I'm also not in the kind of position to deny such a claim. Either way, the only answer for the phenomena would appeal to superstitions.

So, Joe bought a bigger pistol. A BFR 480 Marlin.

His justification seemed better than "because I can." I don't peg Joe as the kind of person to just take advantage of something without sufficient cause.

"I'd love to fire this," Phil said. Alan nodded in agreement.

"Well, I'm leaving tomorrow, we could do it when I get back in a few weeks," Joe replied.

Joe paused.

"Fuck it," Joe said, "let's do it now."

We laughed while Joe started to pack up the pistol.

"Seriously?" I asked.

"Yeah, get in!"

Phil and I jumped in the bed of the pick-up. Alan rode shotgun.

It was 1:30am. Joe flew down route 11. After we got away from the campgrounds, the sky cleared up. The haze of light from overpriced RVs faded away. The sky was perfect. No cloud, no moon. The Milky Way was streaked across the night. I had my glasses on, and it was the first time in years that I had seen so clear a night that the galaxy was visible.

Driving down Rt.11, Joe straddled the double line. The thump of the truck rolling over the reflectors on the road made Joe's swerving evident. I wondered how many beers he had that night.

We came to a stop in the middle of the road. Joe kicked the truck into reverse. He had missed the turn. We headed up a steep gravel hill. We arrived at a gate blocking our way. Joe hopped out and tried to open it.

"It's locked," he said. "Let's just shoot it here!"

We laughed our asses off. We jumped out of the truck, and huddled around Joe as he gave us the run-down on the revolver. Alan began video taping.

(As of right now I have the video, but not enough bandwidth to upload it.)

Joe fired the first round at a red and white reflector hanging on the gate.

Then I was up. He explained how to hold my hand on the pistol, to line up the bones in my wrist and arm.

"Like this?"

"NOOOOOOOOO" he exclaimed in a small decrescendo.

He repositioned my hand.

"You better hold on to this thing as if your fucking life depended on it," he added. "I'll catch it!" Joe said, laughing as he put his palm in front of my fore head. I chuckled. That probably made me more nervous.

I cocked the revolver. Aimed down the sights. Stiff-armed, I held my breath. I was ready to piss myself.

The gun exploded with the most violent force that I have ever handled. My ears rang. I'm surprised I didn't go temporarily deaf.
"Fuck . . . yeah!" was my response. It was relieving. I felt most of the kick in my shoulder and chest. My hand didn't hurt.

Phil was up, he took a shot. Then Joe again, and then Alan. Alan was the only one to hit the reflector - or any part of the gate for that matter. We then jumped in the truck and sped off back to Miguel's.

Phil offered us beer. Joe gave us some key limes to stuff down the bottle necks, and we shot the shit the rest of the night.

It was 2:30 am when I went to bed.

"Sports Porn"

This is a video made by Spencer a while back for Deadpoint Magazine.  It's basically a montage of climbers falling. All of these climbs are right here in the Red River Gorge (and all very well outside my abilities). Check it out.

Combating Pillow Mold

It was raining fairly hard this morning. I'm on my second consecutive rest day, in part because of the puncture wounds in my left hand, and also because the majority of people decided likewise. The rain isn't enough of an excuse to not climb, there are plenty of over-hanging route to ascend, it's just that tomorrow's promise of nice temperatures is a treat one would be foolish not to take advantage of in one's prime. Thus, everyone rests.

Car break-ins have started to reoccur at the crag parking lots in the southern region of the gorge. There is some idea who is behind it (a local with a reputation for doing as such), but no proof. The idea of staking outside a parking area to capture the vandal has been tossed around, but as of yet no one has followed up on the thought. What has been happening is that one would return from a day of climbing to find their car's window shattered, and anything left in bags (duffel bags, laptop bags, etc.) were stolen. However, though the only thing being taken are those nicely packaged for a cowards escape, now the locks on the trunks of people's cars are being is using a chisel and hammer to dislodge the mechanism.

But I don't know, I'm not a doctor.

All that can be done is to keep valuables out of one's car, and keep the car unlocked (people have had their cars rummaged through, but had nothing stolen).

Anyways, this is just a random thought that is not very well constructed, I think. I'd suggest taking it with a heap of salt.

I've had some time to think recently. I'm in such a fortunate state. I have a college degree, grew up in a fairly middle class family, and have been given a car to live out of. On a drive to Lexington, I thought how strange it is that I'm doing this little adventure of mine, if you could even call it something so compact as an adventure. I've seen my father essentially work at a job, that as far as I've been able to deduce, is not something he enjoys. Yet he's made a good living from it, and it's benefited my siblings and I greatly. Then, after twenty-one years, I've pretty much rejected that in favor of something significantly more simple: living out of a tent - out of a car. But it's strange: it's more likely that someone from a middle-class/upper-class background would choose to live in such a way, whereas I don't think most people born into poverty would be as thrilled about the idea (this is probably more true for "western" nations than others).

How did this happen? Too much punk rock in high school? Too much science fiction? Probably. Then what in college catalyzed and adhered my scattered thoughts into such an amalgamation that only Frankenstein's monster could recognize it as beautiful? Simplicity seems to be the name of the game, but the only way I'm able to achieve that was by biting that had that gave me a "comfortable life." Or maybe I'm wrong. It just appears that things like punk and scifi have no business together, purely is purely anti-establishment (debatable) and scifi is geared to middle-class individuals where the things held in high esteem are those which punk wants to dismember.

Hell, do I even see that much of an appeal in those around me now who have careers and are being weekend (or summer) warriors? Not particularly. As it turns out, I could live in this sort of set up working a part-time minimum wage job. I'm curious as to why people think they need what they spend a lot of their time working for. Fun? Forty hours a week to earn something you get to enjoy only on the weekend or for a isolated week in the year seems like, well, a lot of work.

I'm probably generalizing.

I don't mean to suggest that people should sell all of their stuff and live out of their tents. I'm not so foolish to think that simplicity means anything more than living without a great rate of consumption. You can keep your house, TV, elaborate cars and hipster coffee shops (assuming you aren't over-consuming). I'd just question whether or not it's worth working so much for. If you think so, by all means have a ball.

But I, I am not a work-a-holic. I'm a lazy bum. Thus, I live in a tent.

Have You Experienced Madness?

The last week or so has been full of climbing and meeting new people. I decided to start my first project, a 5.12a called Ro Sham Po. I flashed my first 5.11b, and celebrated with some beer and pizza. I spent the fourth of July in Lexington. I made my way back to Miguel's and hung about for the last half of the day. At about 10pm someone (Spencer) started launching off fireworks on the back-end of Miguel's property. A large group of us made our way back to the scum-pond where the fireworks were being sent off. After some blind nighttime-hiking, we emerged from tall underbrush to a small field where a van full of fireworks. spencer was slowly unloading the van and lighting the sky. Other pick-up trucks full of other Miguel locals were lined around the small field. Everyone drinking beer, whiskey, moonshine, and/or smoking cigarettes.

Spencer would narrate each and every firework. He'd read out the name of the explosives, and describe the pictures on them. Most of the narration had to do with "titties" and bulldogs, or monster trucks. At times he would shout "this one is for Americans, so all foreigners should look away" which would be followed by people shouting "'merica!" The banter among the spectators revolved around how Spencer seemed to get off on the crowds jeers and jests, but mostly from setting of mini-explosions. After the fireworks were gone there was some small cardboard-tank fireworks that went off like tiny sparklers. An American and a foreigner would battle their tanks, and the one with the most damaged tank was the loser. A group of people gathered around a small piece of plywood seated on the ground. The tanks were ignited, and after the fray someone's foot would just stomp down on the foreigner's tank, and then quickly toss the flattened char it into the fire pit a few feet away. America won every time.

Slowly the crowd dissipated and the few of us remaining found ourselves jumping into the scum-pond in a drunken stupor. The remaining minivan had it's headlights blaring on us in the pond. The layer of algae on the water's surface was broken by the first person to dive in. Then the two more people dove in and slowly there were about eight of us in luke warm pond.

We got out, dressed, and piled into the minivan. Those of us who couldn't fit into the van found ourselves standing on the bumper, desprately hanging onto the racks bolted to the roof. The entire ride back to around the road that lead to the pizza shop, I was barely hanging on to the rack. Twice I was almost flung from the bumper. Looking straight ahead it seemed that we were only going five miles an hour. But when I turned my head to the side I realized we were  going a lot faster. The gravel road offered the jostling of a lifetime. Someone had then jumped onto the roof of the car and slowly crawled his way down the windshield, at which point a hand came up out of the passenger side window and started shoeing him away. Then the passenger door opened and the bust of someone rose out of the vehicle. We had a bit of a conversation, yelling and such, cursing one another, all-the-while holding on for dear life. We hit the main road and the van sped up, but no sooner were we at the parking lot. We hopped off and hung around the rest of the night. I went to bed at about 230am. By that time I had met some more people, and the next morning I found myself lending out books to various climbers introduced from the previous night. For some reason I'm more likely to lend out books to these people, knowing full well I'll get them back dirty and destroyed.

Since then, I have only climbed and worked at the gas station. Some days in between I had a bit of a reclusive mood, and I stopped going out of my way to interact with people. But now I'm back. Most likely because Cathy returned a few days ago, and she just sort of has a way with making other people gregarious.

I can't quite recall much else. I've so far climbed with people who had crag-dogs, which is always awesome. The company of dogs at a climb increases the positive vibes of the people around the cliff.

This is Cassie.

I am not McCandless

(Note: I know that some of this can be expanded upon, but as far as this blog is concerned, this will suffice. This is more surface thought than anything else.)

Before I left Syracuse to go on this little adventure at least three different people, all of which are strangers to one another, recommended that I read Into the Wild. They that I was about to do something similar to what Chris McCandless had done. Well, I suppose in that I was going to leave my home and bum around the country, Chris and I are similar. But we differ in that he was only interested in wandering around the country, for whatever reason, whereas I'm wandering to rock climb. I'm not interested in what Jack London or Thoreau has to say about nature and what it can tell us about society.

The strange thing is, that even though I make the claim that I am not Chris McCandless (in the sense that we share a similar vagabond project), I can only make that claim from that one book. While reading Into the Wild, through Krakauer's words, I was getting merely a glimpse of a human being that actually existed, yet I only get it through the authorship of one who didn't actually like what Chris had done. I never got to flip through McCandless's notebooks, or shuffle through the notes he made in the books he carried with him. I am at least thrice removed from knowing who he truly was. Krakauer thought Chris was a burden on those who knew him, but I don't think that's accurate. If anything, it appeared more that Chris cared about everyone in a similar way, yet remaining emotionally distant from them at the same time; like an indifferent humanist.

Still, I can only make that claim through my interpretation of the text of Krakauer's interpretation of others' stories and interpretations of who Chris was, and through his notebooks.

What I do worry about is that in the same way the Chris was susceptible to elegant prose, I am also in danger of being over-influenced by well written works. The words of Thoreau, Emerson, Tolstoy, and London are powerful and motivating. But I remember that the words they wrote, they did not live by. Thoreau wrote about his experience in the wilderness at Walden, where his cabin was less than two miles away from town, and frequently walked into town and interacted with those he was undoubtedly disgusted with. London went to Alaska once in his life, then died, as I believe Krakauer put it, an obese "fatuous drunk" in his Californian estate.

Even Emerson's claims in Nature are difficult to decipher, his motivations, how he thought people should live in the world is still a debatable topic among scholars. Even more so, the relevance of it seems to dwindle as more and more people become accustomed to experience the world with the augmentation of technological innovations.

Kierkegaard makes an interesting point in that as more and more of the world become accessible to the modern human, the ability to strike wonder and amazement into one's being become so diminished that soon the seven wonders of the world will be nothing more than those seven things people thought were amazing at one time in a primitive history. Every few years those seven wonders change, and it wouldn't surprise me if it had something to do with how many people have visited those wonders. What will we soon be left to do? Travel "from star to star," as Soren would imply until we are bored with that?

With Chris, as I am worried I'll fall victim to it, without realizing that, though there is a grain of truth within the writings of those I've listed, there are questions of whether or not it was merely poetic romanticism. If Thoreau or London or Emerson or Tolstoy truly wanted people to live in a certain way in the world, as expressed by their writings, why did they not attempt to do likewise? It's easier to be a professor and lecture about being in the world, yet another thing to be the student who attempts to live in the world in that way. It's almost a shame that Chris (as far as I know), didn't attempt to sift through the lines of those books and make something more of coherent philosophy of being, displaced from the preacher status that so many of his idolized authors held.

It's a difficult space to occupy, I think. Being a student trying to live the philosopher's life as though you were their thought experiment. In the end, I can't say I'm trying to do something completely different, because I too am influenced by those I've read, but I'm doing my best to keep in mind that their words could merely be poetic dribble.

Pro-plugging Adventures

A few days ago I met Cody from Arizona, who is currently working on his dissertation in History at some university whose name I cannot recall (his dissertation is on ecological conservation organizations, but the specifics I've also forgotten). We went climbing Saturday morning before I had to go into work at 4pm. He had never been climbing in the Red, despite being around Nashville, TN fairly often. We hit up Phantasia wall. I had the intention to lead the 5.10d that Jon and Jason let Chris and I top rope over a week ago. I failed. Cody, however, got up it with some wild moves. I followed. I felt slightly crushed not being able to lead it, but we moved on, and I lead some 5.9 around the corner then a classic 10a.

Then Cody lead a trad route called Land Shark (5.9-). I followed, and after a brief discussion I rapped down, and I was tying into the sharp end with roughly a rack and a half of trad gear strapped to my harness. Yeah, I was going to try to lead my first trad route on a 5.9-.  Ambitious or arrogant? More the latter than the former.

I plugged a total of 9 pieces in the span of seventy feet. All of the cams and nuts going up this two-part hand crack looked like the stitching work of a surgeon (more like a surgeon who probably would have been involved in a malpractice suite).

I may as well have bee free-soloing the entire climb. I got to a fairly large ledge before the second hand-crack started up again. I inserted a large nut, which was pretty well placed, in my opinion. I climbed up, and every time I was able to remove my hands entirely from the climb, with my feet stemmed out on either side of the crack, I placed a Cam. About ten feet from the top I struggled for at least five minutes to shove an orange Metolious Cam into a flaring crack, and when I finally got it in, I couldn't clip the rope. I was sure I was going to fall, and  I was scared shit-less. I grabbed the placed cam with my left hand, thinking I'd clip it like it was a normal quick draw. But I thought twice. In my mind, I told myself that it was probably a poor placement, and if I weighted it, it would blow and I would die.

So, I down-climbed to a jug and tried again. I clipped it, and kept moving. I placed what Cody referred to as a "head piece:" something that's needed just to keep my head on strait as I climb.

After I finished and was lowered, Cody followed and critiqued my placements. Maybe 2 out of the nine would have been okay to fall on.

Mind blowing. I felt like was free-soloing the entire time; that if I fell I would probably deck on the ledge below me and then tumble down to the base of the cliff.

Anyways. I survived. I didn't fall, and I got quite the scare. I dig it. I am already thinking about starting to purchase some SLCDS of my own. Who knows? This time next year I may be pushing through an 8 pitch trad-climb. I hope so.

The next day Cody and I hit up Roadside, where we were out climbed by twelve-year-olds on harder routes than the one we were trying. They flew up 10d's like they were nothing, and we were struggling with a 10a, sweating ourselves dry. Yes, that is jealousy you're picking up.

"Add ten years of experience that instills fear, and gain a hundred pounds, then come talk to us" was something along the lines of what Cody said to jokingly.

We then found ourselves flailing on a 5.12a, Ro Sham Po. Cody clipped the first two bolts before being forced to stop on account of knee troubles. I followed. I walked through the first two bolts, and got to the second, thinking I had the moves down pretty well. Last time I tried that route, I barely got to the second bolt.

Still, we gave up and left a bail-biner at the second bolt. Maybe next time.

On another note, I 'scended my first 11a. It was only 45 feet, the first half or so was a 5.7, then an 11a roof which I pulled through with many barbaric grunts and yelps. But I got it. I then went on almost immediately after to do another 11a, then a 10d. It was a good day, and there was a lot of beer that night because of it.