The Summer Train

      One of the sensations that I can conjure if I concentrate, with which I also become reacquainted a few times a year or so, is the vaguely electric warm potential of summer nights in the still streets of my hometown. It is a crystal clear remnant of years of repeated circumstance piled into my memory, not connected with any particular scent or event or person (I find that many of my memories are attached in this way). The feeling of being out and about, actively bored, tracing familiar paths walked hundreds of times through silent block after silent block, is an unbroken thread that winds itself through the tapestry of my adolescence, connecting familiar faces and phases and tracing the terrifying transitions that came with growing up. 

     At 14 and 15, we darted through yards and shadowed parks playing man hunt, a game where most of the allotted playing time was spent walking alone through the night searching for movement in your peripheral vision. When the enemy was spotted, a chase might unfold through the neighborhood the raw exhilaration of which wouldn't be matched for months of high school. My first kiss took place after a long walk around town late at night, stretching my curfew, finding shadows to wrap ourselves in between the pale orange beams of streetlamps. If nothing else, my friends and I would wait until after midnight and stream out of basements or off of porches into the night just to buy half gallons of cheap iced tea and walk the railroad tracks that cut through town until we got too sleepy to balance.        

     In my adult life I remain assured and am regularly reminded that I will always be in love with the sound of that train's distant dependable whistle cutting through the thick warm air of small town nights in the summer. It seemed during the slow procession of my childhood and adolescence that a short time into summer vacation, a night would come when I would find myself lying awake in bed listening to the train fly by, and mentally mark the close of another year added to my body and mind. The train's rumbling progress brought with it cascades of emotion, long imagined adventures with juvenile crushes, sorrow and confusion over expiring friendships, fear and excitement of witnessing my own body and identity fluctuate and develop. As the bizarre whispering tendrils of sleep crept into my sensory landscape, I would float out into the still orange night and do battle with the monsters of youth.

      The hurdles of small town boredom, ever increasing in height as we grew up, led us not only into the tumbling, socially charged catharsis of drugs & alcohol in parents' basements but also out and up, in the middle of the night, onto the roofs of school buildings, where I found my first personal niche. After midnight, we circled the high school, spotting possible weaknesses that would allow us to explore new sections of the huge expanse of roof under which we spent overstimulated, half-awake hours during the mornings and afternoons. We chose school buildings for their general sturdiness and strange, blocky geometries that allowed us to wander the roofs without worrying about being seen from the ground. I was most often the first to scout a new way up, the most daring climber, and the quickest with encouragement when one of my friends got spooked or claimed to be too tired to take a lap around the roof at 2am on a Friday night. When the corners, gaps and shadows of the high school roof had been exposed to us, and we had ridden the waves of adrenaline that carried us through those first expeditions into the unknown, we spread out onto other roofs around town because it just seemed like the natural thing to do - we cherished those close calls with janitors, the slinking through darkness to seize our chance to climb, but above all, the heart-pounding pleasure in getting away with something so innocuous but delightfully against the rules. Thus was my appetite for adventure forged in the tepid coals of small town adolescence - excitement had to be cultivated, not encountered, so the burden of finding an outlet for our pent-up angst and energy resided entirely in our imaginations.

      On visits to my home town nowadays, I'll often pick a night to stay up a bit later, until the traffic of errand-runners disperses, leaving silent streets in a near-vacuum waiting to be filled by the rusty echoing howl of the train's whistle. I amble over the cool floors of the house I grew up in, grasping onto the excitement for the known-but-unknown that I grew up with, reduced now to a faint unsettling deja vu that my mind manipulates and rearranges the older I get. My hand turns the lock and slides the chain in its housing, a ritual made reflexive by hundreds of nights of quiet practice. I step out, or rather my trusty legs carry me, every step and movement printed in muscle memory, the cracks in the sidewalk looking just right, the night enfolding me reliably. I am far removed in time, and I walk in the middle of the empty road, and the tangerine street lamps evince silhouettes of past lives, when it seemed like everyone I loved was within arms' reach and we had perpetual plans to meet at midnight just to be near each other. On a night like this I will walk and think and feel until my soul is reacquainted, however briefly, with the billowing sense of possibility that caused the summer nights of my boyhood to nearly vibrate, and I will breathe in the still blackness, retracing my younger self's steps I'm sure, remembering pieces of me and wondering how they fit together.

About a rock climb, told sloppily in the second person

From a mile out it looks bizarre, more than improbable, a stout lump of sweeping lines and pillars erupting out of the plains for no discernible reason, God's 8th grade art project. It was a distant silhouette the night before that could just be made out from the lawn where tents were sloppily erected by the light of headlamps, but it didn't need to make sense then, in the heavy darkness, separated from you by a night of dense melatonin dreams.

To get to those perfect, soaring cracks, that will today chew you up and spit you out slowly and methodically, you have to humbly scramble up sharp talus and brush for a few hundred yards that probably feels like much further, and it's like you're tiny worshippers swarming towards a temple, laboring up its slopes in a shadow of otherwordly nature. Which you are in a sense, your fingers and knuckles ready to spill sacrificial blood, packs full of ceremonial trinkets and attire well worn by ritual.

The different sizes have been covered, you've tried and finished a few. Hundreds of feet of unreal, perfect straight-in hands. Insecure fingers and ring locks. Steep, unforgiving fists and wider that make you sweat and swear and nearly weep. Here, stamina and pure grit are rewarded rather than flashy, technical movement; you have to dig deep. The line whose proud length you now nervously examine as you rack up and tie in in the beating afternoon heat is the most coveted in the guidebook. A grim, perfectly symmetrical chute of grey-brown igneous rock split by a continuous thin crack on its inside left corner. The chimney starts on a gentle slope and curves quickly upward, steepening to just shy of vertical for 130 feet and change. The crack is steep and discontinuous, undistinguished on its own, but this line isn't just another crack is it, no, it stands out because of a sobering geological coincidence the consequence of which you're about to know intimately: the width of the chute happens to match an average human being's wingspan all but perfectly. The idea is to spread out arms and legs and reach, push, scratch, heave, worship friction, up and up as the walls inch closer together mercifully and you're finally allowed holds and a stance atop a pillar.

This is a bit above your limit, you know. Just a bit. You could be stronger. Fitter. You could have done wall sits and lunges over the past few weeks to prepare - damn, that would have been a good idea. It probably won't go. It's too hard. Too sustained. You begin.

Inside the chimney as you move up the start, what you didn't realize from the base becomes searingly apparent - this thing has been baking in the sun all day, you've elected to climb in a microwave. Dumbass. It's a little after 4. The low sun hammers your back. The rack is leaden, augmenting gravity.

The first moves comprise shaky laybacking as you resist the dreaded full stretch. Submitting, you turn and reach, palming the opposite wall, then extending your legs outrageously. Your calves engage, feet pressing out and down, and a dull burn sets in. Tourists point and murmur, gawking from the distant walking path. It's comically, tangibly hot. Push out, scoot the feet up, do it again. And again. Claw and desperately try to jam in the crack when you can. Anything to take a fraction of your weight off of your screaming legs. You've made some progress up the chute, but it stretches up and away and you can't see the top, it's too far, you're moving so slowly. Each added second spent to hastily slot a nut in the crack yields precious ground to the advancing pain.

The moves are rhythmic, regimented; the back of the chimney moves slowly but steadily down through your aching vertical world as your progress accumulates. You taste bitter, dirty sweat. The climbing is singularly physical but you've nearly left your body, it's not helping, the legs quiver when they're planted for too long, calves rock solid lumps of pain. But the platform is there, and leading up to it are holds, precious holds, if you can reach them and rest your lower half for even a second, you know you'd have it in the bag. Growling, desperate groans and animal barks escape your teeth. Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten. It hurts. You reach down to place a cam, you haven't done so in too long, fifteen, twenty feet, it takes eons, it's sloppy, but it will do, a few desperate seconds and the rope is clipped, you look up, wince, your left foot slips, hip rotates out, weight comes entirely onto your shoulder and arm, you're done, you can fall, take, no, a noisy exhalation and the foot is back wedged into the corner.

Up. Up, because it's the only direction that has ever made sense. Up, while your body is young, while time allows it, while the sense of urgency that chased you to the desert and the Rockies and jagged canyons and shitty slabs and bird shit-covered ledges and smelly cars with strangers hurtling through the night to suffer and sweat and fester in tents for a three day weekend remains unexpired. Up, because the pain is heartbreakingly worth it, more clearly, acutely worth it than you can ever remember until it's in you and through you and out of you in gasps and hoarse, croaking yells through peeling lips as your hands find the holds and you crawl onto the platform and collapse, your partner exhaling, the tourists on the road offering faint whoops and clapping, your muscles and skin a sad wreckage, the route done on sight, the accomplishment spectacularly meaningless in the grand scheme of the sport and in the world in general, the solitary satisfaction of which tears a gaping grin into your arid mouth as you lay on dusty rocks and breathe.

Image is from Mountain Project. Not me.