Bar Fly

Every hour the doormen switch from the back gate to the front door. The majority of patrons come in through the front entrance on Shattuck while the waiters, runners, and bartenders go for their cigarette breaks out towards the back alley of Allston. While the Jupiters employees neurotically inhale coffin nails, I play solatiare on my Ipod. I shuffle through most of the deals, only accepting a quarter. An ace or two with an even mix of black and red cards must show up before I start; if you're gonna play with yourself you better have a good hand.

At 1:30 Matt, or one of the other black shirted bartenders, will emerge from the bar, step out to the patio, and shout, "Last call for alcohol!" The other doorman and I lock the gates, close the windows, and pick up random pint glasses. By quarter of two, most of the patrons have left. Those that haven't get a second warning, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

My twin brother closes the bar down a couple nights a week, and Monday night, after I'd turned off the patio lights, he poured me a Racer 5 while he finished stacking the glasses.

"I'll be graduating in the spring Matt, with an Economics and Business Management degree. After that, I'm gonna have to get a job, a house, a car. I'll be slaving away to repay my student loans, my medical bills, and a fucking mortgage. I'll gain twenty pounds and won't ever climb again."

"No complaining at the bar," Matt started wiping down the wood counter.

"That old man sobbed earlier."

"The guy at the end of the bar? Phil, the human walrus? He's been coming here for years. You could wring a pint of Red Spot out of his mustache." The upstairs lights were shut off and the bar darkened. "I wasn't listening to him. He was ordering a beer and got teary cause the keg of Red Spot was dry. Besides, I'd cut my shoulder off before I'd let him cry on it."

"Oh. But what am I gonna do? I suck as a climber, and there's no way I could write for a living."

Matt snatched my glass, tilting his swollen nose down at me. Two days prior he'd been in a Muay Thai fight. Though he'd fought well, he'd received a TKO; he'd been bleeding profusely from a small cut on his nose. It was a bad decision by the referee. "Life's a disappointment," He placed two beers on the bar and drank with me. "And in the morning it's a hangover. Let's go see if the Pasand Lounge is still open.

Fortunately, the other bar hadn't closed yet. The bar stool swayed uncontrollably as I climbed on to it. There was a small karaoke stage and a pale thirty year old relived his glory days in the corner, singing the Cure. A head fell onto my shoulder, and an arm caressed my bicep.

"Looks like someone likes you James," Matt smiled. The Asian girl next to me was barely on her stool.

"Hey?" my mind shuffled through a series of bad pickup lines. "If I told you you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"

Matt's eyes rolled as the girl grabbed my arm tighter to keep from falling off the barstool. The bartender stared at her.

"I think you've had enough," he took her beer from her and placed it behind the bar.

Suddenly, there was serious Asian fury. "You, you can't take that!" The drunk girl grabbed an empty pint glass and threw it with Nolan Ryan speed at the mirror behind the bar. Glass sprayed across the room. The girl swiped her hand on the counter top, knocking a few more glasses over.

"Get the fuck out of my bar!" The bartender stared at the shards of glass strewn through the room. A bouncer ran up, grabbed the girl, and dragged her to the street. as the bartender picked up glass.

Matt plucked a piece of shrapnel from his beer, and downed the rest. "You couldn't afford a condom anyway. Let's go, there's a couple of pale ales back at the house." He tossed an extra bill to the bartender. "Be thankful this shit doesn't happy at Jupiters."

I stumbled behind, happy that, at least for a moment, life was exciting.



First Published with graphic in the Lattice Journal Novemeber 2007,

Panic At the Disco

“My favorite color is Shiny,” Ralph Wiggim

On the weekdays hummingbirds buzz between California fuchsias, pollinating the brightly colored flowers. A dozen turkey vultures circle the nearby jail, scanning for road kill. Small hawks and crows soar by, swarms of cliff swallows rush about, while osprey and blue herons fish in the waters of Tulloch Lake.

On the weekends, there are no birds. There is no beauty. The steep cave above Tulloch lake transforms from an aviary of the Sierra foothils into an outdoor disco of rock climbers. Dozens of manoxeric body builders, skinny little tough guys, swarm Jailhouse to tackle their climbing projects, random lines of basalt holds that dance up the wall. They bring electronic barometers to remind themselves that 62 degrees fahrenheit and 25% humidity means they have a 57% chance of success. They lug twenty pound car batteries to charge their portable vaporizers and fuel their marijuana addictions. They wear Ipods, t-shirts with curry stains, funny hats, and their favorite pair of underwear. They do anything to bring themselves luck as they prance about the base. Sometimes the spandex glad dancers even bring climbing gear.

The blocky, overhanging rock of the cliff, the Jailhouse demands that the sport climbing afficiando wear sticky rubber thigh pads, commonly known as Colorado etriers. Rectangles of sticky rubber are adhered to neoprene pads to help the sport climbers stick their knees to the rock so that they can rest on their abdominal muscles and rest their tired fore arms. While some of the climbers use adhesive spray to keep their pads in place, the majority of the sport climbers wrap the top of the pad with duct tape. After each attempt, the tape is peeled off the leg, wadded, and carried out of the crag at the end of the day. With an average of seven pitches climbed during the day and a wrap for each leg on every pitch, the duct tape adds up quickly. I sentenced myself to forty three days at Jailhouse, which translated into a large amount of duct tape to carry out. In an effort to consolidate my trash, I started to make a ball. Eventually, the tiny bits of duct tape snowballed into something bigger, something to cheer up the crag, something to reflect a little light into the dreary bits of the obsessive work of Jailhouse. The duct tape ball transformed into something else, something like a disco ball.

“We need to wrap it tighter,” Rob Miller laid his strips on the basalt talus, then placed them over the ball, pulling the mass of tape into a spherical shape. “We do not need fluff. We need density.”

I nodded. The blonde tough guy belayed me half of the time I went to the crag. As a good friend, and climbing mentor, he saw the fun I was having bringing the ball together and wanted to join in. Rob wove a cradle for the ball out of the cut end from my climbing rope, and strapped more tape around the ball, suddenly turning the ball of trash into a mace.

With a cord now attached, we were able to attach the ball to our harnessed and climb Soap on a Rope, a popular testpiece in the center of the cave. It was fun. We guessed about the weight of the ball at the base.

“Twenty pounds!” said, Matt Pound.

“Maybe more like ten,” responded Steph Ko.

“It’s at least fifteen,” scoffed Rob.

The climbers passed the ball around the base, each person tugging on it a little, giving it a weighted look, and imagining a scale in their minds
Pete Chasse hefted the ball into the air.

“It is a little heavy,” he said. “You both climbed it with the duct tape ball?”
Rob nodded.

“Even I did it Pete,” I pointed at myself and gave a crooked smile.

“Okay. I’ll try it,” he clipped the ball onto his harness and started up Soap on a Rope. The crowd giggled as the ball pendulumed.

“Oh god! It’s gonna hit someone,” said Matt, worrying about the safety of the others around him. “Watch out Lidija!”
Pete’s belayer carefully stepped out of the way.

“Oh my gawd!” she yelled. “Peete! Peeete! Be careful Peete!”

“It’ll stay on,” responded Rob. “I climbed it twice with the ball.”

“This is classic,” Matt pulled out his phone camera and snapped away as the Jailhouse hardman danced his way up the steep route with the grey disco ball.

With every passing visit, the duct tape ball grew. We stopped fixated on sending our climbing routes. Instead we thought about the steady growth of the duct tape ball. Visiting the crag became less about successful ascents and more about the continual growth of the ball. The ball gained historical value. After Tommy Caldwell completed the second ascent of Tower of Power, the cliff’s hardest rock climb, he contributed to the duct tape ball. Ethan Pringle added his tape after doing some crazy toe hooking bat hangs. The duct tape ball helped Jailhouse become a fun and silly place. I pranced around the crag showing off the enormity of the duct tape ball, swinging it over my head, and hoping that everyone was contributing. The ball was almost ready for the sequins and glitter.

“We need to hang it,” Rob, the blonde tough guy, grabbed a bit of thin cord and some nuts from Coiler’s tiny wood shop at the farm we stayed at in nearby on Chinese Camp.

“We should make it a disco ball,” I said.

“Let’s hang it while we have the time.” The veins in Rob’s forehead protruded.

“I am not sure when I am coming back.”

. For the duct tape ball to be more than a pile of trash hanging from the cliff, there would have to be a little more creativity and a little more effort. Sparkles, sequins, and glue needed to be brought to the crag and a small mess needed to be made and cleaned. For it to be truly worthy, would require effort. With some self doubt, I acquiesced and gave up my project to a more demanding man.

Rob climbed high onto the wall, clipped into a bolt, then reached over and girth hitched the ball to a 3/8” stud between Alcatraz and Cell Block. The ball dangled ominously in a small alcove of steep basalt.

“It does look like a piece of trash” Karl, a clowning local asked. “Are you sure it’s well placed?”

“Well,” I responded, “there’s a better chance of the start to a popular 5.13- falling off then the ball hitting someone. Plus there’s history.”

“If the ball is well attached and not just shoestring that is cool. We want the basalt ballast ball to be solid if it’s going to keystone the wall together.”

I smiled and reiterated the diligence Rob had applied in fixing it to the wall.

“Okay,” Karl said. “I guess I do like the idea of Rob climbing up there to hang his duct tape.”

“What’s that?” A group of hikers came to the cliff and noticed the ball right away.

To the casual observer, the duct tape ball obviously had a purpose, or at the least a story. The hanging grey spore, appeared more like a trashy trophy then a sparkling disco ball. Obviously, there was history there but it was not the best kind. In the whirlwind of the creation, I had neglected my own needs and desires. I neglected to stay true to myself, I neglected to remember that my favorite color is shiny, and I had to give up reality for my imagination.

Eventually, Mikey Chaffin, a Bay area nurse, climbed to the upper reaches of the cave, swung over, and unclipped the ball. I ran into him in the darkness of Camp 4 after he removed the ball.

“I almost died!” he said. “I swung around and clipped into the ball. I almost took myself down with it,” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I hope you do not mind that it was taken down but some random hikers asked about it.”

Removing the ball helped some of the obsessed climbers at the crag. For them it swung about ominously, hanging over their heads, and preventing them from sending their projects. They gave the duct tape ball a power over them so the ball’s removal was cathartic, they were able to do a little better on their projects because the curse was removed. Rob felt angry to see the symbol of his hard work removed. The ball had given him purpose a reason to return when he could climb no better, it gave him a reason to return to the Jailhouse when he saw no progress on his climbing projects. The idea to keystone the crag worked initially but then it all fell apart.



For a few days, as the herons fished, as the swallows rushed by, as the vultures lurked above the jail, and as the hummingbirds buzzed, the duct tape ball swung in that high corner. Whenever the light hit it, I saw a disco ball.

My Dancing Shoes

Enjoy!

Life of A 23 Year Old Baby

Imagine a world where others fulfill all your desires. They feed you. They dress you. They even wipe your ass. I was there and let me tell you- it was miserable.

I laid prone as the world took care of me. I slept at the Desert Springs Memorial Hospital, the closest medical facility to Joshua Tree National Park, where I fell a hundred feet climbing without a rope. I spent the first few weeks in a semi-comatose state, sedated by drugs. The hallucinations of my subconscious entertained me. A sequin suited ice skater sashayed towards me delivering me my dinner of crackers, my aunt sat in a casino wooing Sammy Davis Jr., and my immobile body rested on a dock, watching the boats come into harbor, and waiting for someone to move me with the other cargo.

When I finally came to, I wanted to go back. The ice skater never put a tube in my penis, but the doctors did. They spoke stoically when they discussed the operations- the damage to my occipital lobe, the vena cavity filter, the compound fracture of my ulna- I never understood what they had done. Arthur Clarke wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I was Frankenstein’s monster, confused, alone, and sewn back together wrong. I tore the IV out of my arms. I did not want to be there. What did the doctors do to me? Why was I there? I wanted to get out of bed, pull on my jeans, and crawl to the base of El Cap. My identical twin brother held me down and a nurse sedated me while I called her a cunt.

Eventually, I calmed. The thick calluses of my hand were peeling away, I was losing what identified me as a climber. I had shed twenty pounds off my thin, fit body. The nerves in my right foot had been destroyed and my foot hung sadly. Long rods held my back and ankle together. Pins cemented my elbow. My body was a jigsaw puzzle of welded metal. It hurt.

A constant stream of friends, family, and climbers visited; they wanted to make me feel better. I did my best not to spill my urinal on the bed. An ex-girlfriend held my hand, and watched me puke in a napkin. John Long, the climbing legend, visited. A notable encounter only in that he was a regular guy who wanted to talk about his family. He gave me some meditation tapes that helped him recover from some of his injuries. A Yosemite climbing friend, Sanam, brought Lisa Rand's climbing movie Hit List. Before she left, she did the sweetest thing. She brought her lips close to my cheek and kissed me. I did not wash my face for a week. I was immobile in a bed; I could not clean my face if I wanted to. Other visitors came and sat awkwardly. They never knew what to say or do so I put the twenty minute Hit List on repeat. Eventually, my twin- my most consistent visitor- complained.

“I have never been to Black Mountain. I have never been to Bishop. I have never even been to Yosemite,” Matt told me. “And I still know all the moves to that dumb Thriller problem.” For him, there was nothing different about me.

At a stroke and spinal care facility, my roommate was a former Los Gatos school district super-indent named John. His wife came in to take care of him after his stroke. Most of the time she was nice but sometimes she yelled. He was a sixty-year-old infant, a former man who had become helpless overnight. His wife struggled with John’s transformation to infancy more than he did. He wore a diaper and the room often smelt like shit. One night, John left his bed and wandered around the room, mumbling about the bathroom. Unable to find the door to the toilet, he came closer and closer to my bed. My biggest fear in life is that someone is going to shit on me and I will not be able to do anything about it.

“John, the bathroom’s over in the corner,” I wanted to help him. Give him some direction. He ignored me.

I stabbed the red button on the white caller, trying desperately to call the nurse. My nightmares were coming true. I was paralyzed, I could not get out of bed, and John was going to crap on me. The nurse came in as John stood at the foot of my bed. Later, I learned to laugh about it.

After a few more weeks of laying in bed, worrying that John was going to shit on my chest, I was transported to a physical rehabilitation center where I would learn to walk. My first physical therapy session, I stood. Seven seconds passed on the watch. It was awesome. I wanted to put it on my 8a card. I sat, rested, and then tried again. My legs wobbled precariously at five seconds. I felt uncertain at six. Was I going to fall? I bore down and fought through the crux of it, watching the clock tick off a long fifteen seconds. I onsighted the extension. The technology of the fusions was magic. Later, I tried to brag to my twin. Matt sat in my hospital room playing Fable on my Xbox-a gift from my oldest brother, Chris, a dorky guy who loves video games. As I sprayed about how hard it was, how exciting it was, how it made me feel like I was climbing again, he looked at me and asked, "How do I get the combat multiplier up for my hero?"

My parents had six children. Their first came when they were barely old enough to take care of themselves. They divorced when my youngest brother was 10. My father needed a break from the overwhelming amount of work. He needed to work on himself. He still barely had enough money to fly out and visit. My mother spent a majority of her savings on the transportations costs of moving me from a hospital near Joshua Tree to a stroke center near my home of Santa Cruz. She sat by my bedside praying for me fanatically. I had spent my last bit of savings to go climbing in Joshua Tree for winter break. The majority of the hospital bills were being paid for through the mandatory insurance I had as a University of California. I could barely stand up, working was out of the question. Going back to school in Santa Cruz was my only option for fiscal support; I needed the financial aid.

My occupational therapist explained the importance of maintaining neutral spine precautions to me. "You have to keep your back straight at all times. Your knee can not bend to ninety degrees. That means no stairs."

So what? I could never scramble around in the boulders. I shrugged. Lifting my feet high over the talus always annoyed me anyway. He droned on about the correct way to move my body and how to deal with my physical handicaps.
"I do not know how you are going to ride the bus," he said.

What was he telling me? How would I get to campus?

"I have to go to school," I said. For the first time since I fell, I cried. How could I take care of myself without financial aid? He kicked my only crutch.

"You know, you can still have sex." He said meekly. "I can explain how to do it while maintaining neutral spin precautions."

I shuffled my ass to the side of the hospital bed, tentatively swiveled my hips, and fell into my wheel chair. I wheeled my way back to my hospital room and stared out the window, dreaming I was climbing.

I stood on the sidewalk of Highway 1 on Mission Street in Santa Cruz. A few days earlier I had been walking along the same road wearing a new t-shirt. A friend had ironed on a picture of a walker and a caption reading, “Walkers are Irresistible.” A random girl drove by and waved at me. I felt tough. So I stood on the sidewalk again. Both the northbound and southbound cars sat at a stop light a quarter of a mile away. I had two minutes. I prayed that the magic in my body would make me move like lightning. I put my walker down off the curb, shuffled my right foot forward, weighted it, and matched it to my left. Then I advanced the walker again, shuffling, and matching feet a thousand times. As the cars barreled towards me, I focused on the repetitive motion, and climbed El Cap in a day.

Slowly, very, very slowly, I learned how to walk without assistance. After more surgeries and more physical therapy, I shrugged off most of my handicaps. 381 days after my fall, I climbed again. My life as a 23-year-old baby sucked. People always ask me what I learned. It annoys me because the experience merely reiterated things I already knew about myself.

I want my independence. I want to do things for myself. I have a hard time asking people for help. The hardest part of the whole experience was dealing with those basic things. This was a huge cry for help. Some days I feel like it is unanswered. On the better days it feels like I am answering it myself.

Cedar's Kiss

I am not much of a rock climber. If I have any notoriety in the climbing world it is because of my monstrous failures. But this is not a story about a failure. This is a story about Cedar’s kiss.

Thomasina and I met five years ago in Squamish. We did not talk much. I borrowed her Rubik’s cube for a few weeks and returned it with slightly peeled stickers. I offered to buy her a new one but she said she did not mind. I still feel bad about it.

A few summers later, I was back in Squamish. Thomasina was pregnant and was hanging out more than she was rock climbing. As I biked from the grocery store to the library, I saw Thomasina kicking the curb near the bus stop. I stopped to see how she was doing.
Thomasina was worried. She needed 600 hours to receive maternity benefits and had only 130. The baby’s father was not helpful. She kicked the dandelions that were growing through the concrete of the sidewalk.
“I tried to call him. The answering machine was in French. It takes so much courage just to call.”
I looked for the Greyhound. I did not want her to be late to meet with her midwife in Vancouver. I did not know what to say or do so I kept listening.
“Why do men stick their dicks in you and leave?” she asked.
Thomasina broke my heart. Was I an asshole man too? Had I done that to women? I wanted to cry. Instead, I kept listening. After half an hour her breathing relaxed, the stream of tears stopped, and Thomasina calmed. The bus arrived and I hugged her.
“Thanks, James,” she told me. I was not sure what I done but I smiled anyway.
“Anytime Thomo.” I watched her board the bus and waited until she had started down the road to Vancouver before I returned to my bike and headed to the library.

Two years later, Thomasina grabbed the perfect granite crimps of the Camp 4 classic Thriller. She bore down, pulling herself through the moves of the twenty-foot Yosemite boulder problem. I made a few meager attempts at the climb but I was barely able to get off the ground, I gave up and paid more attention to the little girl running around.

Cedar was bored. She had spent an enormous amount of time in the boulders during her two young years. She summered in Squamish, hanging out below the Chief. She had been to Hueco and just returned from a long trip to Bishop. Watching people climb was getting old already. I took her little hand, told Thomasina we were going for a walk, and we headed down the trail.
A hundred feet away was a puddle. Cedar wanted to throw the stick in the puddle. So we did. I tried to keep her pants from getting too wet and staying out of the water too much. It was fun. She was really independent and at times hard to direct. I followed her moves and kept playing her game until she got tired of throwing the stick in the water.

Eventually we wandered over towards the trail. She wanted to throw some more sticks. I chased after them walking like Charlie Chaplain, the little tramp. I would get the stick, try and pick it up, and then kick it. Whoops! How could I ever pick up the stick? Cedar loved it. Her face cracked open and she screamed with laughter. I had never made a girl so happy before.
We started to her to her home, the minivan she shared with Thomasina. As we walked back and forth from the car Cedar looked at me. She waved her hand back and forth. This was her sign language telling me she needed to use the bathroom. I did not know what to do. This little girl needed me to take her pants off and hold her while she peed. Fuck. I started epicing.

“Let’s go back to your mom,” I said.

Cedar ignored me and grabbed the strap to her overalls, trying to take them off.

“Let’s go back to your mom,” I repeated. I did not want to force her and bring her but it was not working.
That’s when she peed herself. I fucked up.

I desperately wanted to make things right with Cedar. When she needed me, I failed her. I was just another irresponsible man.

“Do you want to go back to your mom now?” I asked her.

Cedar’s deep brown eyes stared at me. I picked her up and carried her towards Thriller.

“I am sorry, Cedar. I am so sorry.” I did not know what to say. I was a complete fuck-up. I needed affirmation that things would be all right. “Can I have a kiss Cedar? Please?”

Cedar stared ahead, looking towards the boulders for Thomasina. When we reached the base, a dozen other people had shown up below to watch. I handed the wet Cedar to Thomasina. As the little girl moved from my arms to her mother’s, she turned her head, looked at me, and pressed her lips on my cheek. I melted. It was the sweetest kiss ever.

And that’s the story of Cedar’s kiss.

My Favorite Scar

I have a lot of scars. There are suture marks on my left ankle. My shins are dotted with old wounds from falling above the crux on overhanging routes. A small line runs along my groin from a vena cavity filter. There are two scars layered on my left elbow from a compound fracture. Like the twelve-inch line on my back, most of my scars have to do with rock climbing. My favorite scar happened when I fell off my bike.

I pedaled down the Squamish Chief’s parking lot, feeling good. I had just sent my boulder problem project and I could rest a day before heading back to California. I balanced on my bike, taking my hands off the handlebars, and adjusting my backpack. That is when I hit a speed bump. I flew over the handlebars. My face met the pavement in a very intense kiss. The North Face sunglasses I wore smashed into my cheek and split my face open. When I stood, there was a hole in the shoulder of my shirt, and ta bleeding gash on my face. People approached me.

“I am okay,” I said. I thought of Monty Python, “It’s only a flesh wound.”
Someone handed me a roll of climbing tape and a bit of tissue. I bandaged my face together.

“You are going to need stitches for sure.” Another passerby good Samitarian said. I groaned. I knew that Canada had universal health care but I was an American and dealing with the bureaucracy of the hospital in a foreign country worried me. I wondered if I could get some help from climbers.

Noah had just finished his residency in emergency medicine and wanted to go bouldering before he got board certified. Siemay was working temporarily in an internal medicine office. She had climbed well in Squamish the summer after her residency ta few years earlier, so the two packed their dog and crash pads. They drove their fifth wheel trailer to Squamish and parked it for a few weeks. Holding my hand to my cheek, I found the couple in the granite boulders below the Chief.

“Uh…” I watched Noah walk down from the top of a difficult boulder problem. “Umm…”

Fuck, I have never known what to say when I need help.

“What happened to your cheek James?” Siemay asked.

“I fell off my bike.” I pulled the gooey bandage off and showed the big wound. “Check it out.”

Noah walked up, and examined it. “Hmm. Looks like you might need a couple of stitches. We are going to finish bouldering then you can come by the trailer. We will stitch you up.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, stop by around seven. As long as the wound does not sit for more than twelve hours, I can stitch it up.” I smiled and Noah went back to bouldering.

I bounced down from the boulders elated to be getting stitches from a climbing doctor. I grabbed my bike, straightened the handlebars, and rode back to my camp, a small tent I had set up in the woods behind the recreational center.


At seven o’clock, I stood at the door to Noah and Siemay’s fifth wheel trailer. I gave a tentative and wimpy knock.

“Come in,” Siemay said. I opened the door, letting the warm smell of rice drift into the summer air. “I am just cooking dinner. Noah is in the bedroom.”

“Noah. Noah!” She called. “James needs stitches.”

Noah stumbled out of the bedroom. His pants were covered in chalk.
“Let me wash my hands.” Noah stepped around Siemay to the sink. He scrubbed his hands with soap for thirty seconds, rinsed them, and dried them on paper towels. Moving to the dining room table he pulled put on a pair of latex gloves, and examined a set of syringes on the table. After squirting fluid out of one of the syringes, he told me to lay down on the floor.

“This is for the pain. I am going to make your cheek numb so that you will not feel the stitches.” Noah bent over me and slid the needle into my face, slowly releasing the fluid. “Now, we wait for a minute.”

I felt a tingling sensation in my cheek. Arthur Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s what happened in the little RV. Magic.

“How’s the rice coming?” Noah asked.

“Fine,” Siemay stirred the pot and continued chopping vegetables. “What sort of thread do we have to stitch him up with?”

“I can’t open the closet door,” Noah held his hands in the air and waved his gloves. “Can you get it?”

Siemay walked over, sorted through the closet, and grabbed some thread. “This is all we got.”

Noah groaned and looked at me. “This thread is bigger than what I would normally use. You are going to have a scar.”

I shrugged. I was happy just to get stitches. Who care’s about scars?

“That’s okay,“ I said.

Noah put a needle through my face, pulled the thread, and stitched me back together. There were six stitches when he was done. My eye was black and blue. I looked like I had just gotten in a bar fight; the pavement had been pretty mean to me.

“Okay,” there you go.

“Thank you so much,” I smiled. I was nervous. They had already given me a lot and I did not have any money or really anything to give in return. “I do not know how to repay you.”

“Dinner’s ready,” Siemay finished the meal. “Here’s a plate James. You can sit down over there.”

“Pull the stitches out in two weeks,” Noah filled his plate with rice and corn and peppers and chicken. “It will be easy. Just give them a little tug while you look in the bathroom mirror.”

And then I ate. Noah, the emergency room doctor, had dealt with my wound and then Siemay, the internal medicine doctor, fed me dinner. I have met hundreds of doctors because of my reckless climbing: neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, physicians, trauma doctors…but these two were the best.



Years later, I was sitting in the house behind the Yosemite medical clinic playing poker with Noah, Siemay, and a few other boulderers. Noah was staring at me. I thought he was trying to figure out how many aces I had in my sleeve. He opened his mouth and said, “That scar is a little big.”

I kept my poker face and never told him that the half moon below my eye is my favorite scar.

The Pains of the Quaint Life

------I should revisit this topic as it has been an interesting one to me lately check out this story-----

For my mother, religion was the only escape from alcoholic parents, a shotgun wedding, and a banal life. She searched feverishly for her lottery ticket to heaven in between Genesis and Revelations but Christianity merely cemented my mother, thoroughly mixing her up and permanently setting her in Pentecostal beliefs. She herded my siblings and I into a small Vermont church to have us learn the value of Jesus’ teachings.

The parishioners of Living Water Assembly of God congregated in the Addison County town hall every Sunday morning. The weathered colonial building sat in the middle of the metropolis of Orwell, a village of a thousand inhabitants and a small country store. Services were held upstairs amid rows of metal folding chairs and oversized windows, which allowed the humming fluorescent lights to be kept off during the long days of summer. The seats were filled with farmers wearing worn jeans and oversized belt buckles while the wives wore soft flowered dresses and wrapped thin arms around their men. They stood when the preacher began the service with a prayer and fell back to their seats when he began his sermon.

“Salvation.” The preacher was a slight man with a copper beard and a balding head. He spoke softly into a microphone so that the congregation could barely hear him above the shuffle of church bulletins and crying babies. “Salvation is our reward for attending to the will of God. When we accept the Lord into our lives, when Jesus becomes our savior, our guiding light, we are granted true wealth. Please open your Bibles to Romans 6:23.”

Chairs scraped against the wooden floors as husbands whispered silent questions to their wives regarding the location of the family Bible. In the back row, Nick, my youngest brother ripped the church bulletin in half and began making a paper crane. The fields behind the windows held little interest and I was forced to listen to the preacher.

“Let us read. ‘The Wage of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Romans 6:23. This is the gift granted to us when we accept Jesus; we will have everlasting life and glory in God. Now, by no means is salvation easily obtained. Great gifts require great sacrifice. The Lord will test you at times.”

Heads nodded among the congregation. The farmers were no strangers to floods, droughts, and poverty. Fall’s early rain had caused much of the alfalfa to be baled wet. The hay grew mold over the winter and the warm days of spring caused many of the bales to smolder. It was ruined for feed. A dry summer was anticipated and many families had already eaten through their stores of frozen corn and peas. Though many were hungry, the coffers of the church were never fallow. Generosity is not a plight of the poor.

“Just as the Lord tested Job, He will surely test you, but recall Psalm 37:24; ‘Though he stumbles, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.’ During our times of famine and pain we must be steadfast in our faith in Jesus. Only through Him will we receive salvation.

The sound of spit hitting the microphone echoed through the room as he stuttered out the word salvation. My brother flapped the wings of his paper crane. A lighthouse decorated the tiny bird. My mother looked at us, hoping that we were listening. Her own salvation depended on that of her children. She lived through us. This would be one of many sermons.

Outside a honey truck passed, its side coated with manure. The truck headed for a nearby field to fertilize the soil. Some of the farmers were still planting even this late in the season. In Vermont, everyone sows barren ground.