Shadows and Crags

For my first entry I thought it would be appropriate to start with a moment of realization in my life and it just so happens that I have a poem for just such a moment. I wrote Climbing With Shadow this last summer while struggling with a mental block that developed after I took a rediculously silly but scary fall off a wicked fun flake in Leavenworth. The route, The Javelin 5.10-, was well within my abilities and was a blast until I started fumbling around with a #3 that I didn't even need to place and got pumped. My foot slipped as I went to make the clip and whoosh. Lets just say, I'm glad I was wearing the helmet that I don't usually pack. I was suprisingly wacked-out after the incident. Though I shook it off and climbed two or three more pitches that day (probably while in a mild state of shock), when I got home I found myself dreading the call from Nick, who no doubt would be wanting to meet for beers at the Tav to plan our next outing. Something in me didn't want to climb. Part of me just wanted to stay home and enjoy my false feelings of safety and my misplaced sense of security. But thankfully, I have the best kind of partner. Not only did he catch me when I fell, without hesitation or the ball-breaking haste of the novice, but he also made sure that I got back out to climb asap and encouraged that part of me, which lives to climb, to dominate the other. And I was back on the rock, on the Serpentine Arete of Dragontail Peak, maybe six pitches in, when I realized that since the fall I had been carrying something new with me, an unwelcome passenger. Writing the piece was therapeutic to say the least. I'm still climbing. 

Climbing With Shadow

By Loren Bayles

I climb calmly, confidently, dragging shadow;

dead-weight, drenched in dread, anxious, insecure.

From the foot of the crag, onto the route, pitch

after pitch, to the summit through the crux,

stuffed in a haul-bag at the end of a seventy-meter

line, tied with a girth hitch and a locking carabineer,

shadow weighs me down.

He is weak, wanting to summit without sweat,

feel pride without pain, enjoy the confidence

of accomplishment without commitment,

and reckless, shaking and cursing, heedless of the peril.

Hauled where he’d rather not go, toward thin mountain air

he’d rather not breathe, onto exposed arêtes that steal his breath

accentuating his panic, up tight chimneys that compress

his horror, over overhangs that compound his fear.

Refusing to drink in the danger, or inhale the adventure

thick and potent in every sight, smell and sound, his eyes

stay clinched tight by the same adrenalin that has mine wide,

mind keen, spirit in-tune, embracing the awesome

alone

at the anchor, pulling in slack.

Shadow is heavy. The ascent is long.

My pocketknife is light and sharp.

***
I'll be posting more of my climbing/ mountaineering geared poems on this blog and hope to write more in the future. Jeannie and I are planning on making it to Mount Erie this Sunday to climb if the rock isn't too wet and so should have something to write about next week. If we get dumped on, I'm sure I can think of something else. Stay tuned and climb on.

A mountaineer is always free- Tim O'Brien