Archive for April, 2008

I have this little porch on the front of my house, and with the weather getting really warm those days, I find myself sitting out there with a beer in hand and watch the sun go down behind the mountains.

I didn’t feel like focusing for some reason.  So blurry pics are what you gonna get!

Like the sun that drifts down behind the mountains, drawing the day to a close, I become ever more acutely aware that my time here in Bishop is coming to an end.  In less than two weeks I’ll be coming back to where I started this whole trip.  Back to Minneapolis.

And it fills me with a profound sadness for the moment.  I sit there in my chair, the evening wind rocking the trees that line my yard and I look out to the Buttermilks and wonder what could have been.  I came out here in January, all ready to climb, and to bring my climbing up to a whole new level.

And I sure did.  I knocked off some long standing projects and made huge progress on some others.  I was starting to hit my stride.  My confidence level was increasing every week and I felt ready to take on everything that Bishop had to offer.  I was ready to demolish everything I set my eyes on.

Like the saying, “pride goes before a fall” – I stormed out to the Pollen Grains, with little prior beta or knowledge, with not enough crash pads to completely protect the landing area, with just one friend, and tried to make short work of Jedi Mind Tricks – and thus, I fell.

It was a humbling experience in more ways than one.  It opened my eyes to the fact that no matter how easy a problem might be rated relative to the other problems you’ve already finished, every single problem on every single boulder out there deserves your full attention and respect.  Every problem is different.  Every problem presents an unique challenge and risks.  And it is no one’s fault, but your own if you fail to consider all those when you attempt it.

Also humbling was the fact that I suddenly only had one good foot.   Things that I hardly gave any thought about, like walking four blocks to get coffee, or driving to the food store to get some chow, or walking up some steps, all of a sudden became real challenges.  I know that this is only temporary, but I think about all those people who go through their lives having lost a leg (or both) permanently – and I look at those people with a whole new level of respect.

My thoughts drift to what I’ll do next.  I’ll be heading to San Francisco after my short stay in Minneapolis.  I’ll be hard at work rehabbing my foot.  I’ll be discovering a whole new city and friends.  There will be many more photographs coming.  I smile to think about all those.  It will be wonderful.

And one day, I’ll start climbing again.  And I’ll be a different, better climber for it.   And I will return to Bishop.  I will come back to Jedi Mind Tricks, on that one day when I am physically, and most importantly, mentally ready.  To climb.

I was clipping my nails earlier today.  After I finished clipping my finger nails, I moved on to my toes, and it was (not so suprisingly?) interesting to note that while the nails on my left toes were getting long, the nails on my right toes had barely grown out, if any.

I guess that either means my right foot is too busy patching up the heel bone to push out toenail material…. or my toes have died and are going to fall off one of those days.

I picked up my first DSLR in 2002 and started taking pictures – now six years later, I’ll on occasion pick some old album of photos and just browse though them.  Because I never delete any photo I take, I can look through the rolls, in the order I took the pictures and not only see what I was shooting, but also guess at the specific frame of mind I had at the moment, was I experimenting with 50 shots of the same subject?  Or was it some random one-off-shot?  What did I shoot before that picture, or after?  Did the previous picture influence the next?

I was browsing through my album of photos I shot at the Assateague Beach in Maryland, late summer 2004.  It was one of those “last summer weekend fling before the fall” things.

A two shot-sequence caught my eye.  The first one, I shot of a seagull flying overhead.  Then the very next picture, I shoot my feet in the shallow water.  And I’m sitting here thinking about what particular thought was going through my head, that I would shoot a bird in the sky, then just shoot a pic of my feet.  Was I trying to explore some creative juxatposition of being free of the ground like a bird… and then me firmly rooted in the ground,  the water and sand swallowing up my feet?

Or was I shooting the seagull when my attention was pulled downwards when the warm, summer ocean wave rushed up and over my feet?

I can’t remember.