The latest Saville Row offering- Goretex three season suit, Dri-fit buttondown shirt, and spectra climber’s tie:
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Posts Tagged handholds
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I could make a long story short, but then I’d never squeak this many chapters out of this story. So rather than just tell you that I did it- that I got onto a moving incline train- I need to tell you that I plonked by butt down firmly onto the I beam that jutted out away from my pylon (I can call it ‘mine’, there wasn’t anyone there to argue the point.) and though I didn’t actually have a suction fit to the beam, my butt did its best.
Did you know there isn’t a really good word for working your way out along I-beams over a drop with your legs dangling and your brain jangling? I’m using the word ‘scootch’. Sherpas might have a word that would fit the mood. I imagine that the guys in those old black and white photos of skyscrapers being built had a good word for it, maybe twenty. None of them have a word, though, that would shade it with the proper nuance to imply that you’re trying to catch a train on the other end of the I-beam. Odd.
Once the scootching is done, you have to clamber. ‘Clamber’ in this context, means to cross your body over a set of railroad tracks at a steep incline that are mounted to some trusses all of which are between you and a totally different other set of trusses and tracks that you need to get to without 1) falling through and 2) getting anything pinched off by a train being pulled up the track by big ol’ greasy cables.
Now that the clambering and scootching is all accomplished (without falling or severing) I still had a little time till the train got to me. The train, unburdened by passengers or anything, is taking its own sweet time. Obviously not a swiss train nor nothin’. Don’t think I’m complaining. If the thing had been chugging merrily uphill, I might have used more haste than speed and done something truly stupid. I’m good at stupid.
This story takes place a few years ago. At that time there was a Snickers bar commercial that said “Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers.” You may not immediately see why I bring this up, but me? I have, at this point in the story, not only scootched and clambered my way across all the trestles, tracks, trusses, ladder and cables to find myself on the teeny little bit of I-beam left on the far side of the whole mess, but I have heaved myself onto the creeping incline train, not even finding myself plastered to the outside of the train cagedoor, wondering how to get in. I got in! So, there in the top ‘seat’ of the train, grinning, I have taken a Snickers bar out of my PFD pocket and would now nourish myself. I also plot how I would tell this story to the Snickers people in a letter, and possibly get a box of free Snickers out of the ordeal. I wasn’t “going anywhere for a while!” I “grabbed a Snickers!” Just like the commercials told me to! Booyah! That’s gotta be good for a box of gratis candy any day. So I was tasting not only my melty Snickers of today, but all the snacky wonderfulness of those future Snickers to come.
Then the damn train stopped.
No kidding.
Anyone with questions as to whether this is a true story can now give them up. Nobody making this up would DARE to put in this many savage assaults on Human dignity. This is getting absurd.
It was, too. This was just nuts. I stood there, wondering. I was wondering if the train would start back up. Or worse, start back down. Or maybe hold still or… I don’t know. I just didn’t know any more. An hour earlier, Greg Raymond had said, “Go over there, and take the incline train to the top. We’ll meet you in the parking lot.” That sounded EASY.
But here I am, still not even half way up this hot, God-forsaken crack in the wall on a broken train with a half-eaten, totally melted candy bar. A minute earlier, I had the ending to this story all ready. “And when he got the truckload of free Snicker bars for being in the new commercial, he shared them all with everyone on the trip, and they all lived happily ever stinkin’ after.”
And NOW, I’m leaning out of the train, staring up at the place where there should be workmen and there aren’t. And I’m looking down out of the train at where I WISH there was still an I-beam to stand on. When I got ON the train, the I-beam had been truncated and slick, but it had been THERE. Now, the side of the train opened onto a considerable drop. I don’t want to drop.
Of course, I also don’t want to wedge my fingers into the steel cage of the train walls and swing myself out and around onto the footstep platform I know is on the end of the train (I had seen it on my way in, of course) and then lower myself under the train onto the ladder that’s bolted to the tracks’ underside.
But I do it anyhow. There was some cussing involved.
Now, all I have to do is climb to the top before the train starts up again and I go the way of a possum on the highway. But that’s for Part Eight.
I made a few more abortive attempts to get past the boulder and its attendant thorn bush. No go. So I started working my way up the Right Hand Wall again. I was kissing this stupid wall enough to think we’d have to marry. My skills were not up to getting up this thing, so I eventually found myself standing next to one of the pylons that supported the I-beams that supported the tracks. There was a little shade, and a little place to stand and time to reflect on what it would take to get onto the tracks from here.
The tracks, you remember, are easily got onto down at the train station. They touch the ground, there.
They don’t touch the ground here, they’re suspended well over the ground. Heck, I’m way up on this stupid rock wall and they’re still above my head. So, from the look of things, if I decided to take my last option and climb the ladder bolted up under the incline train tracks, here’s what I’d have to do: Belly up onto the top of this pylon I’m in the shadow of now. Get my balance. Walk, run, crawl or scoot out along an I-beam. Work my way over the tracks. Get onto the ladder, avoiding the big greasy cables that run along with it. Climb all the way to the top of the gorge.
Both simple and complex. The simple part is climbing a ladder. We’ve all climbed a ladder. It’s easy! Why wouldn’t I climb a ladder? Well, this one’s at a hard angle. I’d have to support my weight on my arms and my legs. Still, I could stop and rest along the way. But I’d have to GET there, and that involves scootching out along an I-beam that’s well off the rocky, thorny, rotten, stupid, WHERE THE HELL IS MY BOAT, MY PADDLE AND MY FRIENDS? DAMMIT, THIS IS NOT FUNNY!
After calming down, I more calmly and carefully explained to God (The great cartoonist in the sky) that THIS isn’t funny. Badly written. I said all this out loud to Him, and why not? I said all this very calmly and carefully because you don’t want to upset Him, not here and not now. So. Having said my say, I did what most people in a hard spot do. I climbed up onto a pylon to get a better look at what kind of gag he’d written me into. Okay, not what most people do in a hard spot. I’m just pointing out how hard a spot this is.
From the top of the pylon, the fall off the I-beam was looking pretty inevitable. Plus, my luck wasn’t going so well. Plus, there was a hell of a lot of track to crab-walk up even if I scootched out to the ladder, which looked farther away than ever, anyhow.
On the other hand, I thought, I can see up along the crack a lot better up here, let’s pick a route and see… Ahhh, nuts. The climb up this crack on terra firma (terra sonofabitcha) looks bad. Really, really bad.
So. Vertigo and head injury, or twisted ankles and broken limbs?
I had nearly decided to take the slow, painful death by rock wall, when the unthinkable happened.
The train started to ascend the track.
Okay. Train is moving. If I quit pissing and moaning, crawl out onto this I-beam as fast as I can, I can meet the train going up, grab on, swing myself onto it, and ride in comfort all the way to the top. Heck, this may even be that someone at the top has seen me and they’re rescuing me! This is GREAT!
Does this sound too good to be true to you?
Yeah, we’ll discuss that in part 7.
From the bottom of the tracks again, I started up what I will call the Right Hand Wall. There wasn’t anything you would call a footpath along this wall, but there was uneven rock that had split away in the past, leaving “shelves” or “extended ledges” or some other word that people who hike and climb a lot would know. You can probably picture it- scrambling and inching and climbing and backing up and advancing up and along a rock wall.
Then, every so often, there’s another level-ish place to stand out in the middle of the crack. After all, workers had had to scramble all over this place when they were installing this incline train, dirty broken useless thing that it was. There were pylons holding up I-beams and cables and wheels and stuff making up the track. While all this stuff was being built, I imagine guys were up and down this crack all the time like billy goats, right?
So every few yards, I could step out onto a broader place, catch my breath and look up at the next obstacle.
The next obstacle I now saw was a boulder, just over head height. By grabbing the top and planting my feet on other protrusions, I could belly up and onto this thing. I thought. When I tried it, I found myself going face first into what we in the South call ‘Sticker Bushes’. There is, no doubt, some gratifyingly fancy scientific name that’s in Latin (A dead language, I’d like to point out) for this vicious plant, but I don’t know what it is, and don’t need it. I have said “Sticker Bush” and I bet that whatever that conjures up in your mind is precisely what I needed to conjure. It was a big, rolling, healthy, full, green bush. Full of thorns, or as Southern vernacular so aptly call them, “Stickers”.
Face first, as I say. So I tried some workarounds. The boulder just wasn’t that daunting, and the Right Hand Wall was getting particularly nerve wracking, so it seemed like there had to be a wall to roll sideways onto the boulder or inch up onto it or something that didn’t involve possible eye injury.
But let me tell you, that bush had no courtesy. It used up all the space available to it. I mean, seriously, what if a little bunny rabbit had wanted to burrow at the base of it? That’s a cute environmentally friendly thing, right? No, this bush wanted only blinded bunnies with scars living near it. It didn’t want anything larger than an insect burrowing in its grounds. So there. So no rabbit-sized space for me to aim my face into. Considering my clothes, I could have rammed my helmet into said bunny-sized space, but no.
So after trying a few options (there are always options… ever-narrowing, worse and worse, options) I was stuck with what my best choice could be. The left wall looked impossible, the boulder was getting frustratingly out of bounds, and the Right Hand Wall was looking better. All things being relative “Better” still wasn’t “Good”, but meant, “Better than standing here starving and dying of thirst.”
I peeked up over the boulder. I hadn’t covered nearly as much ground as I’d hoped. Frankly I was still very much in the bottom third, if not the bottom fourth of the slot. And day was getting on. I didn’t know how much of the run on the river was left for my friends, but if I kept getting delayed, they might come to the parking lot above before I did. If they didn’t find me there, would they assume I’d gotten a ride out an hour ago and head themselves for the campground?
Flustered, hot, thirsty, baffled, losing time, and now starting to see scenarios in which I don’t get out of here before nightfall, I start looking at the other option which has always been there, but I’ve been avoiding.
I could wrangle my way up one of the pylons I mentioned earlier, do a tightrope walk out along an I-beam to the train tracks that were fifteen or twenty feet above my head, and start climbing the ladder up the tracks themselves.
Oh, man. When I tell you that THAT was starting to look like the best option… what does that say?
Where was I? I was at the bottom of a crack in a gorge wall. I shared the crack with an incline train… quietly sitting in its little station. Traitorous damned train. Anyhow, what’s a guy to do but climb? So I started off on the direct route and got a pretty good way along.
The natural world is an inconveniently arranged place. I mean, occasionally it works out- the way that wind and weather caused the heads of four presidents to erode right out of a mountainside in South Dakota. And a parking lot to form on the other side of ice cream vendors from the heads. Now that’s miraculous. The pyramids, forming right where the Egyptians needed them. Lucky chance, there. But normally, the Earth and all its forces are out to get us. Like, say, Winter. Or in this case.
I don’t know how to climb. I’ve been to climbing walls since this happened, as if that was going to help retroactively. But while I was down in this huge crack in the rock, I discovered that comparatively smaller rocks were wedged between the walls. Now, when I say “comparatively” I’m saying that this was a 1200 foot tall crack. “Comparatively small” can mean a rock the size of a storage building. And in this case, does. I couldn’t climb past it. Didn’t have the skills. Going to climbing walls in a few months wasn’t going to suddenly teach me to get over this boulder right now. Something to do with time and space. I dunno. %$#@.
I turned around and looked back down the way I came. I could go back and start all over, as there seemed to be a high ledge that’d get me past this boulder. Did I mention that I was hot, sweating like a potato in tinfoil and that my head was cooking? In that condition the idea that I was going all the way back down to the train station and starting over didn’t sound like a great option. There was a tiny little ledge going up from where I was, though, It angled back down the crack, but up toward the ledge that I wanted. Cool!
So I started inching my way up this little ledge, belly pressed to the wall, toes tight in my little river shoes. ‘Bout halfway up, the little ledge was playing out quick. I was trying to recall anything I could about climbing, which is a natural thing to do when you’re sticking like a treefrog to a massive rockface and you’re out of handholds, toeholds and skills. I got a memory of a panel in a Huey, Dewey and Louie comic book about toeholds and not relying on your hands and arms. I got a memory of my brother talking about climbing and how you could lock your thumb over your fingers in a hold to strengthen it. I got a memory of that dumb-assed Sylvester Stallone movie where he loses his grip on an actress and she falls about a bazillion miles to her messy death. I got nothing about being halfway up an actual ledge on an actual rock wall and what to do about it. Comic books, movies and my brother’s inexplicable failure to teach me everything I would ever need to know in an emergency had let me down.
Back to the bottom for ol’ Greg. I inched back down the little ledge and returned to the spot where I could have, should have, decided to start all over, and I started all over. I shlepped back down to the bottom of the crack, giving a dirty look at the dead train and another hopeful glance to the top. I was up there a year ago, and dammit, it was crawling with tourists. Crawling with themepark employees and all. Was there REALLY no one up there? The heat and the distance was still keeping me from making out anything particular up there, and looking straight up was only going to give me a view of the bottom of the Royal Gorge bridge- not a view of a helpful face looking downward, locking distant eyes with mine and mouthing “They’re sending a helicopter… wait where you are!” Nope. Nothing. There could be a circus going on up there, and down here I was getting lonely, overheated and possibly trapped.
Trapped. Well, there’s a happy thought.
More on that next time.
My brother was a park ranger. Used to tell stories of what the raccoons at a North Carolina park got up to. My prediction is that when they discover fire, they’re gonna burn us out and take our kitchens.
