Momma

"So you want to go bouldering?" I shivered. The sun still hadn't hit Yosemite's Birdalveil parking lot. Sweeney smoked a cigarette by his pick up and shook his head.

I shouldered a pack full of ropes and gear and trudged towards the Wall of Ages, the yellow expanse of granite to the right of Bridalveil falls. Sweat dripped down my shirt, and the cotton stuck to my chest when we got to the base.

"You never sweat like this when you're bouldering." I told Sweeney.

Sweeney nodded. He rolled a cigarette, ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then rolled another coffin nail. From the base, the 5.12 bombay chimney pitch loomed over us. The route looked wide, dirty, and heinous.

"Lucho onisghted the route. Then said it was awesome. You know what that means?" I asked. Sweeney coughed a cloud of smoke and peanut butter. "It means its totally scrappy, covered in lichen, and not worth doing. So you want to go bouldering?" I didn't wait for an answer. I shouldered my pack and stared heading back down to the car.

"Lucas!" Sweeney shouted. His eyes were wide, and his body coiled, ready to spring and tackle me to keep me from leaving. "I'll link the first two pitches. You won't have to lead the offwidth."

I dropped my pack, and set up to belay. Sweeney quickly dispatched the first pitch, which the topo claimed as solid 5.10 but felt more like 5.9. I followed, arriving at the belay to find that Sweeney hadn't linked the pitches.

"I thought there might be too much rope drag," he handed me a dozen over sized cams. "Looks wet too."

I climbed into the maw of the 5.10+ offwidth and thrashed inside of the eight inch crack for ten then twenty then thirty minutes. The sharp calcite deposits on the side of the granite wore enormous holes in the knees of my best pants. Strawberries sprung up around my kneecaps, and my skin shined a bright pink. I'd progressed five feet off the belay when I decided to retreat.

"You wanna go bouldering?" I handed Sweeney the rack, praying that he would get stuck inside the beast of the crack and want to retreat to an afternoon of cranking hard moves close to the ground. I had visions of sending V sickness and while working on tanning.

Instead Sweeney grunted up the outside of the crack, stacking his fists and pulling through the bulge of the wide crack. Fifteen minutes later, I followed him up, repeating the fist stack, and making the holes in my pants a little bit bigger.

I led the next pitch, which follows a crack, into a roof, and then encounters a difficult lip boulder problem. I chimneyed and stemmed up the crack. At the lip, I jammed my hand in a small constriction, skated my feet on the lichen, and tried to pull through five or six times. Finally I pulled harder, and then fell. I slammed in a cam and french freed through, then headed to the anchor. Sweeney followed the pitch, claiming that the 12c crux felt more like easy 5.12. I shrugged. Could be.

Sweeney headed up into the bombay chimney of the next pitch. His feet pedaled on the dirty rock and granite flakes showered on my head. He jammed his hands vertically in the crack, traversed, then pulled over the roof, continuing to the belay. I followed. The 5.12 felt more like easy 5.11.

The next pitch found me wandering up a thin crack covered in bushes and flakey granite. The 5.11+ rating felt easier but I was wandering into no man's land, wondering what the topo said, and hoping I went the right way.

"Where do I go?" I shouted down to Sweeney but I couldn't hear his directions over the roar of the falls. I stared at him while he pointed up then left and then right.

"We could still go bouldering," I screamed.

Sweeney lead the next two pitches, linking the two short bits with a lot of rope drag. Surprisingly, these two 5.11 pitches were hard. They had difficult boulder problems protected by bolts.

We summitted and rappelled the route. The topo we had said to leave the tag line anchored to the belay at the second pitch and rap from the fourth to it. We barely made the rap to the fourth pitch, employing some shenanigans.

The pitches on the route were short. The climbing was dirty and a little bit easier than the rating Jones had. A couple days later Honnold and Gleason made the fourth ascent. Alex said the route was probably 11+. That sounds about right.

At the base, I rubbed my worn knees, and brushed off the gray flakes of granite. This was adventure climbing. "We could have gone bouldering," I told Sweeney.

He lit another cigarette, smoked it. Then rolled and lit another one. He'd onsighted the route, climbing it casually.

"Yeah," he blew out a ring of smoke as a mass of dirt fell out of his hair, "we should have gone bouldering."

Miss Diagnosis

"Where I come from men do not just take musical instruments off the wall and play them." The grey haired woman shifted in her bar seat, sipped her lager, and glared at the old man who hobbled away.

"He probably wanted to impress you," I responded, "Taking the guitar may have been inappropriate but it is sweet and romantic too." I imagined him as a thief who borrowed the guitar to steal her heart. I stood next to the door of Bar Clay, a pub on the Berkeley Oakland border, waiting for my friends to grab their jackets so we could head down the street to another bar.

"Actually," she brushed her hair back exposing the handsome lines around her eyes that spoke of her wisdom. "he's a professor. He has assburgers."

"Did you just say assburgers?" I shuddered picturing a heinous venereal disease afflicting geriatrics. I wanted to bolt from the room.

"No. I said Aspergers." Her cheeks turned crimson. "Google it. It's a form of autism that explains why they are so intelligent but so socially inept." She smiled. "Will you hang the guitar back up on the wall?"

I grabbed the instrument by its neck and hung it on the wall, annoyed that she had ignored the professor and then flirted with me. I pulled on the door to catch up with my friends who had passed me during our brief conversation. As I headed to the sidewalk I turned and said, "I will look it up. Thank you."

A few weeks later, I stood below a pink tower of rainbow holds, watching a chunky twelve year old struggle up the wall of the Berkeley Ironworks climbing gym. Leo skated his feet higher, aiming to for a ledge ten feet off the ground.

"That's good. I want to come down." He hung on the rope half way to the cave. Stretching, his toes dabbed the ground.

"Are you sure?" I asked. I wanted him to climb a little higher. He had pushed well past his previous high point of laying on the ground. I liked Leo. He said funny things at random times. When I was a kid, I did the same thing and had even been chunky like Leo. My mother told me I had broad shoulders and then we would buy my pants from the husky department of J.C. Penny's. I wanted Leo to succeed. He just needed to try a little.

"Yeah, that is okay. I am all done." Leo pointed to the ground and I lowered him.

"Maybe we can time ourselves running up to the cave instead?" He said.

I smiled, grabbed my stopwatch, and said, "Sure, Leo. Is that okay with you Adam?"

Adam, the other twelve year old in our small group, nodded and we passed my stopwatch around. Leo clocked 1 minute 54 seconds round trip. Adam whittled his time down from a little over 1 minute to a reasonable 45 seconds. I did it in 7 seconds. Everyone was pleased. At the end of the session, I took Leo to his nanny.

"Thanks-you are so good to him." She smiled at me.

"No problem." I shrugged. "He is fun to be around."

"Yeah," she sighed. "He's lucky to have someone like you. A lot of kids think he is a bit strange..."

I thought about the relationship Leo had with Adam, and then how he acted around me. Neither Adam nor I noticed anything wrong with him. I tilted my head.

"He does have Aspergers you know?" Her commented made me angry. Suddenly, I noticed the nanny had an odd pear shape to her body.

Leo seemed like a normal kid. Smart, awkward, fine. I turned out alright and I had been the same way. I watched him pull his sweat pants up to his breasts, look down at his exposed shoes, and awkwardly try to tie his laces, unable to quite bend over and reach his toes. I remembered being clumsy when I was his age and not being able to reach my feet. I had struggled to be normal and felt like a stranger in my body. Most people called it adolescence.

"Well," I grinned at Leo. "He's a good kid. I don't know what Aspergers is, but he seems alright to me." I suddenly wondered if everyone that was just alright really had Asperger's.

"Okay Leo," the pear shaped nanny said. "Let's go. Goodbye James and thank you."

"Bye James," Leo said. I waved back to Leo, gathered my belongings, and headed home.

I dodged land mines on the walk to the front door of my room in Berkeley. The anarchists I lived with organized book fairs, leftist protests, and group meetings on gender politics and theories on society as a spectacle. but they acted like true anarchists when it came to cleaning the dog shit off the walk way-no one did anything but let it rot.

In my adjustment from my former life as a dirtbag rock climber, to one of a normal functioning member of society, I felt confused. I was a deer in head lights in the city of Berkeley. And then on the walk to the porch, I would slip on dog shit. The sliding around made me feel unnaturally clumsy. Further, I had been acting awkwardly, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people. While the phenomenon mainly occurred around people I did not know well, it concerned me greatly. Was I really having identity issues or did everyone else just not know what to make of me?

I tried talking about my problems to my close friend Mandi, she said "James, I wish you could see a therapist sometimes." Then she ended our conversation.

My identical twin brother emailed me from Thai Land, where he was training as a kick boxer. He told me, "Just talk to more people. Find a girlfriend." He was closest to the truth.

They both told me I was a little weird. How could I disagree with them? They knew me so well. Without adequate funding I did not know what to do, so I looked to internet gurus for advice. I Google searched a few words that described myself.

"Intelligent, socially inept, clumsy." I hit the search key. A number of descriptions about nerds, and dorks popped up. And then in the middle of the page was a description of Asperger's Syndrome.

"Well," I said to myself. "I already know I am a nerd and act like a dork. There's nothing wrong with that but there seems to be something wrong with me. Maybe that's why I am really smart but say weird things all the time. Maybe that' why I feel like I have so much in common with the professor and Leo. Maybe that's why my friends think I am so weird." Confronted with so many maybes, I continued searching the internet. Suddenly, I realized the truth of it all. I had contracted a severe case of Asperger's.

In 1944, Hans Aspereger, an Austrian pediatrician, noticed a pattern among his young patients. The adolescents displayed abnormalities including verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations, and mis comprehension of nuance. They used metaphors meaningful only to themselves, they had formal or idiosyncratic speech, and they had oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, and rhythm. Further they showed audio or visual abnormalities. They had an enhanced perception of small changes in patterns such as arrangements of objects or well-known images.

Whenever I tried to meet new people, I displayed symptoms of Asperger's. Though sometimes shy and reserved, I could be loud. I used idiosyncratic speech; I used expressions that only I understood. I talked about rock climbing with strangers and said phrases like "gnarly", "burly", and "jedi-enhanced drop knees". I noticed small changes in people, especially women I saw on a regular basis. When they wore different clothes, cut their hair, or just about anything, I could tell. I had visual abnormalities.

I stayed up late, pacing my room, rolling in the chair in front of my desk. What was wrong with me? Did I really honestly, have Asperger's? I read discussions about the syndrome, searching through internet forums. I had an uncanny ability to relate to other people with this problem. This suggested that I was part of the group.

I worked my fingers to the cuticle, pounding at the keyboard, searching the internet for answers, I found gurus like R. Kaan Ozbayrak, a doctor who had received his degreee in Turkey, worked in psychiatric wards for Massachusetts children, and had published volumes on Asperger's. The academic work sounded definitive, correct, and in many cases applicable to myself. I scrolled through stories of diagnosed children, like Elizabeth Andress, who had large vocabularies but lacked social skills. In elementary school, I was known for my large lexicon and total lack of friends. I related to the stories.

I stomped through my room, sat down in my chair, and then abruptly stood again. In a moment of panic, I shouted," Oh god! That's me. I do have Asperger's!"

"Shut up James!" An anarchist screamed through the thin walls.

"I can hear you talking to yourself." my house mate Lee yelled. "And it's three in the morning!"

Suddenly, she stood in my room. "And just to let you know, you do not have Asperger's. You are being an egotistical jackass, thinking you can diagnose yourself."

She stopped huffing, looked at me, and said, "Now, relax and go to bed."

The clock read 3.am.

"God," I thought, "she was right."

I was delusional, thinking I could diagnosis myself by reading about it on the internet. I calmly laid in my bed, slowing my thoughts. Why did I believe I could answer my own questions? I inhaled. Why did I constantly think I was right? I exhaled. Was I a self centered asshole? I breathed. I was. I sometimes told girls that I was kind of a big deal and then acted like a jerk to impress them. I rose from my bed, walked to my chair in front of my desk, and I typed a few words about my enormous ego. I wanted help. I hit the search button on Google. Suddenly, I realized the truth of it all. I was a perfectly normal single male. I was a megalomaniac.

The Zodiac

I sat on a plank of rock high on the right side of Yosemite's El Capitan, letting my heels dangle and kick the granite wall. My climbing partner, Jamie, handed me half of a sandwhich. I spread the bread and examined the contents. There was chicken, lettuce, and cheese. I began folding it all back together when I noticed one important detail. Jamie and I rested on Peanut Ledge; sixteen hundred feet of sheer rock, and twenty hours of non-stop work sat below us. My focus shifted back to the side of El Capitan and the meal in my lap. Delirious from climbing through the night, I suddenly had a moment of clarity. The sandwhich had mayonaisse. I hate mayonaisse.

My climbing career began at Vermont Academy. After a fall of riding the bench on the football team, and a winter slogging through the snow on a pair of cross-country skis, I joined the students and partipated in the climbing club.

The club spent half of our time behind the gym in a small room filled with mattreses, dust, and a ceiling of climbing holds. We fought to swing around on the holds in the room, excitedly taking turns. A third of the time, we climbed the wall of plastic holds in the gym. Occasionally, on our best days, we got to take trips to the Keene Bridge, Rumney, and the other local crags to climb outside.

The twelve passenger van filled with an assortment of helmets, ropes, harnesses, and students. We bounced over the hills east to New Hampshire. The bluffs of granite seemed unnaturally large when I climbed them. I was terrified whenever I set foot on the rock during these trips. While I shook like an autumn leaf on the grey stone, the other students sat below eating their sandwhiches and talking casually about their classes. When I finished and began eating my lunch, they smoothly ascended the rock.

The naturally talented Grayson Holden showed the rest of us how to climb. He flowed up the rock, confident, and relaxed. He exmplified the ideal student of Vermont Academy-intelligent, modest, and an outstanding athlete in snowboarding, and rock climbing.

While the academic aspect of high school came easily to me, the social aspect did not. I held students like Grayson in high regard for their ability to mold both. They held their ideals close to them, and then made smart and cool descision when under pressure. I graduated from Vermont Academy and made a half-hearted attempt to attend the University of Vermont. I felt lost in college, out of place, and not ready despite my high school preparation. I left Vermont and headed to Yosemite California, hoping to find the same confidence that Grayson and the other Vermont Academy students had.

In Yosemite, I worked a menial job making beds at a tourist lodge. I climbed the granite walls, learning to be comfortable with who I was. I climbed before work. I climbed after work. I climbed on my days off. Soon, the nervous shaking I had experienced while a student disappeared. The small crags turned into larger cliffs and then into entire walls. While the physical challenges of rock climbing were hard, I approached the climbing with the academic rigor I had been taught at Vermont Academy. I tackled the smallest and easiest subjects first and progressively learned how to deal with the harder bits until a fall day in the late afternoon, I found myself at the base of the Zodiac, an 1800 hundred foot route up the side of El Capitan.

I led the first section, hanging the rope for the initial eight hundred feet. I yarded my way up the rock, clipping pitons, and placing gear into the rock. Jamie followed behind me, climbing the rope. When the sun fell, when we were 800 feet off the ground, Jamie took over and began leading. I followed him through the dark. After midnight my head fell against the granite wall, bouncing against the rock as I fell asleep then woke from the thunk of my skull hitting the rock. With a late afternoon start the majority of our climbing was done in the night; we had little sense of exposure.

Then the sun rose and a sea of granite swept up below us. Jamie hung beneath a large roof, his feet kicked in space as he reached up and placed a camming device into the rock clipped into it and stepped a little higher. He placed another piece three feet higher and continued the crawl. This was we had moved all night, like caterpillars ascending a few feet at a time. When Jamie reached a ledge, he established an anchor and clipped in our climbing rope.

I fixed my jumars to the rope and ascended the line. I found Jamie laying on his back and muttering when I joined him at Peanut Ledge. I nodded to him. I understood. He could barely move from exhausation. We exchanged gear so that I could led us through the next hundred feet. I sat down for a moment of rest and Jamie opened our small daypack, handing me the sandwhich.

The Yosemite deli had coated the bread with a pink cranberry goo. Delirious, I fixated on the mayonnaise. Should I or shouldn't I? The question drove my mind from the cliff towards something more real and more important on a daily basis. It was an important moment. I hated mayonaisse and was on the verge of freaking out on the side of El Capitan. I recalled Grayson and the other students at Vermont Academy, how they remained poised and true to themselves. With my blackened hands, I grabbed a piton from our rack, and scrapped the sandwhich clean, leaving a trail of metal, but removing all the mayonaise. I decided to keep my ideals and stay away from mayo. I ate the sandwhich, iron and all. We headed to the summit and topped out the noramlly five day adventure in a 21 1/2 hour sprint.

Double-Double

I have a question for you. I do not want you to tell me the truth. I want you to tell me what you think I want to hear. Here is the question: Am I fat?

Rob Miller and I stood on the top of Private Property, a crag outside of the Tioga Pass gate to Yosemite National Park. From nine that morning until five that evening, we climbed at the steep granite sport cliff. The routes featured some of the best rock in the Sierras. We stuffed ourselves first with the quality of the climbing and then we over loaded on quantity. At the parking lot, I sat with the sliding door open in Rob's mini-van, packing my face full of junk food, trying to satiate my appetite. I was tired, hungry, and I desperately needed to stuff myself.

Rob's calves are hearts, his biceps bulge through his shirt, and when he is not establishing new hard free routes in Yosemite, he works as a personal trainer at his own Crossfit gym in Santa Cruz. Rob is a dictionary; he has definition. He carefully cracked a 16 ounce can of imported Japanese beer, grabbed two pieces of low-fat string cheese, and tore open a bag of organic nuts.

Rob poured some macadamias into his hand. He counted them, plucked three from his palm, and returned them to the bag.

"How many macadamias do you eat Rob?" I jammed a fistful of cheese poofs into my mouth.

"Well James," his eyes scanned me. "I eat ten but you, since you are a little," he paused and his cheeks ballooned, "you would only want to eat seven."

I spit out my Cheetos.

A year later, Rob and I stopped at Inn & Out burger in Manteca. We regularly stopped on the drive back from Jailhouse, the steep Sonora crag we climbed at. This was our twentieth time getting dinner there. Occasionally, I would buy Rob's burger or he would buy mine.

We walked in and behind the counter was Stacy, the beautiful Inn & Out girl. Flush with the pride of having sent my climbing project, I sauntered up to the counter.

"I have the Inn & Out urge." I told her. She tilted her head.

"I would like a double-double," I said. "I really like the two meat patties on the sandwhich."

She punched the keyboard.

"And can I have it animal style?" I smiled. Stacy tilted her head again. I turned to Rob and nodded, indicating that I would buy his meal. Stacy stared at me then looked at Rob, who began his order.

"We are together," Rob said, looking at the menu.

Suddenly, I became aware of what had just happened. I had told her that I had the in and out urge, that I wanted something with extra meat between the buns, that I liked it animal style, and then Rob told her we were together, like we were not climbing partners but partner partners. My mind stutterred. She probably thought I was a complete freak. I had just blown it with the fast food woman of my dreams. I needed to recover and so I blurted out, "We are not really together. He just tells me I am fat sometimes."

Rob and then Stacy both stared at me. Rob shook his head and ordered the protein burger, the double-double without the bun. Stacy batted her eyes at Rob and stared at his muscular frame. I inspected the color of my shoe laces, and thought that perhaps I should have gotten a protein burger. Maybe if I cut out the exrta buns, I would not be so fat.

Did I Kill Raleigh Collins?

In the winter of 2004, I escaped my duties as a student and headed down to Joshua Tree National Park, the long time haunt of many of my friends. They spent most of their time running around the blobs in the park, climbing ropelessly. That was the game in Joshua Tree and I followed suit. On December 18th, I stretched and headed around hidden Valley Campground, looking for routes to warm up on. My friend Dave and his buddy Raleigh booted up at the base of Double Cross, a moderate 5.7. I followed the pair up the climb and we talked and laughed about the day.

When we finished, I soloed Tabby Litter, a 5.8 on the other side of the formation. Raleigh suggested it. It was a good route albeit short. Dave went back to camp and Raleigh and I bouldered a little. We climbed up and down on the Pyramid Boulder. I was getting worked and wanted to solo more. Raleigh asked me if I wanted to go climb Baby Apes with him on the Bachar Toprope wall. I shook my head and said I would rather go off on my own.

I went to Intersection Rock and fell a hundred feet soloing the North Overhang. I laid in a pool of blood at the base. I felt destroyed. My friends came and helped me. My family flew from across the continent to be by my side.

I came out of the hospital and recovered substantially, going on to becoming a more successful man and climber. My story became well known in the climbing community. I am sure Raleigh heard it.

In March of 2006, Raleigh Collins ran off the top of Sports Challenge Rock and dove into the boulders below. He died taking a smaller fall than I.

I did not know Raleigh well but I often wonder if I set a bad precedence. If he thought that he too could stand up from a disaster, and have his friends, his family, and strangers rush to his side. I set an example. Now I sometimes think to myself, "Did I kill Raleigh Collins?"

I do not know. I only wish we had climbed Baby Apes that day. Maybe we could have helped each other. At the least we could have laughed about something.

Blammos

As a teenager in church, Arthur stood next to me. I hung out a lot with him and his younger brother Jordan when I lieved in Vermont. Arthur sold me his old pick-up which went to Rifle, and Vegas, and served as a dirtbag climbing rig for years. Anyway, Arthur Adams lives in San Francisco. When he is not busy playing as a robot in the Oakland based band the Phenomenonauts, he front mans a band called Blammos! This is by far Arthur's best musical work. Here's a little story about how he came up with the name as related to DJ Fog on Pirate radio.

Stand-Up Show At the Barn

Life has given me quite a few lemons in the past week or so. I have been trying to stay afloat. I watched this to make myself feel better. It's me performing Stand-up at the Barn Theater Santa Cruz. I am not sure whether to smile or to cringe.