Well, of course Mr. Cranky would be pleased to see his old friend Gladys! And like a true old gentleman, he knows that ladies don’t use ladders- it’s unseemly.
And of course, he didn’t MEAN for Bob to be standing on top of the lift when it sprung. It’s hard to remember where those things are buried when the kids have moved all the dirt around.
It’s fine though. All’s well that ends well, right?
Those harnesses… they bunch up whatever you’re wearing, you know.
And sorta squish and squash things into… shapes.
Not something you want to inspect closely, I reckon.
You’ve met them- those people that are far more concerned with getting that tiny little angle on things that someone else has than they are with whether or not that thing will do them any good.
Like the neighbor lady who used to boast that she got her bread for 39 cents a loaf by going way out of town to a little store she found. She spent a buck on gas, not to mention her valuable time, to save fifty cents on a loaf of bread.
Because of the stupidification of the United States, we no longer use the word ‘protagonist’ much. Unless you’re an English Lit major or just want to be made fun of for knowing words, I guess. Anyhow, it is completely useless to call me the ‘hero’ of this story, even if the general population now calls any main character of any story the ‘hero’.
So our intrepid PROTAGONIST is now climbing out of an incline train, clinging like an insect (a sweaty, nervous, panicky, non-hero insect) to the cage walls with a grip that could have cracked walnuts. I didn’t want to swing out all gracefully, miss my footing, and fall twelve feet or whatever it was that looked suspiciously like fifty feet at the time. So I clung like one of those slow-motion stickbugs the kids find in the yard and call their friends and parents over to see. You know the ones. They spend hours laboriously navigating some hosta while the kids “Oooh” and “Aaahh.” Then the kids move them right back where they started and they begin thinking of suicide just for the relief of it.
I digress, but now you get the feeling of the situation. There was a footstep mounted on the rear of the train. I got a foot on it. I reached my hand around and found firm grip. I went around the end of the train and found myself standing on that wire-grate foot tread, looking down through the tracks, past the cables and past the ladder I’d now have to climb. I would, once I started, be staring down at a drop below me for the whole climb. Or I could crank my head back and look up the ladder, risking neck strain.
I chose the neck strain, perfectly happy in that decision.
Now we all must digress for a moment to discuss Dry Tops. Mine was new. I got it because I don’t usually paddle in Colorado. I had always made do with a few layers surmounted by a splash jacket. For this trip, though, I whipped out the plastic borrow-money-from-the-evil-corp card and got me a Dry Top. It was (and is) a Stohlquist jacket in the godawfullest purple and teal colors. The colors I assume they don’t make any more because everyone finally wised up and realized that the Eighties were, at the time, a decade past and we should retire those colors forever. That’s not important to our story, though. What’s important is that
1) The top was, as stated, a dry one. Meaning it has rubber gaskets for the neck and wrist holes. The upshot of this is that you stay dry on splashy rivers, even when upside down. The downside is that you must hold your breath while struggling out of it at the end of the day, because the insides of the top smell like the insides of a marmot that have been outside the marmot for too long.
B) The top also sported a natty collar lined with fluffy polartech. This has come in handy since, but only in the water. Never climbing up a ladder in full sunlight on a warmish day.
III) It was expensive.
The drytop in question, still extant, though gorilla tape is currently holding the neck gasket in place.
I hadn’t wanted to tie the top around my waist or anything for fear that it’d work itself loose and fall where I couldn’t retrieve it.
Now, I didn’t want to keep dragging the sleeve along a gritty, greasy cable and mess it all up, while simultaneously straining myself to the point where I was probably sweating a prehistoric ocean into the thing. Primordial Soup and the inevitable results were cooking up inside this thing, while on the outside the Primordial Goop that resulted were smearing on and piling up. I was a history of biology lecture in action.
No way Colorado Kayak Supply was taking this thing in as a return, y’know wha’m sayin’?
My exertions partly came from the fact that I was hurrying. Gollum’s voice echoed in my cooking brain, “Less haste, more speed, my precious.” I had to get some distance between me and that damned train in case it fired up again. There was plenty of distance to be had, if I could only make use of it. There was a long climb to go, and it wasn’t the kind of climb you can make with your head cranked back to watch for helpful faces at the top of the gorge, as it turns out.
Looking down at the track (“Look at the track, not at the drop. Look at the track, not at the drop”) I couldn’t help but notice that there were, every so often, missing bolts. The first time I noticed, it was a little funny. “Oh, there’s a bolt missing there. Glad they didn’t miss any more. The ladder might not be sa… oh, there’s another missing bolt. Three… four. %$#@>” After a bit, it was easy to see that the ladder didn’t actually NEED all its bolts at the moment. Even with my two-hundred-plus weight on it, it wasn’t moving around or sagging or anything alarming at all. Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t INTERESTED in the missing bolts. What kind of penny pinching misers had made the decisions on this ladder? Enquiring minds want to know.
I’ve read that there are a great many activities you can do while counting. Counting is a job that our brains can carry on while our bodies do any number of familiar tasks. You can, for instance, climb a ladder while counting. And if, while counting missing bolts in a very important ladder, you reach 36, and find that you’re growing tired of limb, and no longer climbing over a drop, but are very close to a rock shelf, you stop and rest.
Which is what we’ll do here. I did, and you can too. We’re a little over halfway to the top. We’re standing on a handy boulder right beside the tracks, we’ve counted 36 holes where bolts should have been that some accountant somewhere was glad to have provided me, and we’ve wrecked the right sleeve of my formerly very nice dry top. I’m keeping a wary eye on both the top of the gorge above and the immobile train below, knowing that I’ll soon have to get back on the ladder where it leads up and away from my boulder while outpacing that train if it starts moving again.
And so, I’ll meet you here for part 9.
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.
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