Gardening on Los Banditos
From second pitch bolts I am ten white pins at the end of a bowling alley. Dixie leads above me up a water streak of black moss, leaves, dirt, and breaking rock. 5.7 run out climbing with the optional knob slung here and there. I hold the printout of the route description in one hand, holding down the cam of the grigri with the same hand’s wrist while I pay out more and more of the rapidly disappearing rope. “Ten feet!” I yell up at her. The printout in front of me says 195’ for the third pitch. I am doing metric conversion to feet for 60 meters of rope when Dixie responds to my yell of the remaining rope.
“ROCK!” I hear the familiar helicopter whomp whomp of rocks coming from above me. This one has a deeper tone than I’ve been hearing. I have moments of inaction before my mind stops converting metric to standard and instead converts pitch to size. I flatten myself to the wall as a rock that was once the size of a grapefruit bounces tot he right of me, shattering into smaller golf balls and continuing its crashing helicopter imitation towards the ground. Dixie yells again and I get comfortable as more rocks tumble past, these smaller and hitting me as dust by the time they reach me. I think of Ash Wednesday. Dixie yells again, “Did you say something?”
“Five feet!”
“I’m at the bolts!”
Once I begin to climb, I feel like a scuba diver. The rock is alive with pancaked fungus and blackened flakes that look like leaves. Orange piecrust that looks no different from the epoxy spilling out in a halo of security around all of the bolts. I am at odds as to whether the ease of flicking the orange mold off the rock affects my faith in glue reinforcement.
I am instituting a new style of climbing: windshield wipers of rubber with my feet. Every step slides back and forth to clear the step. Still they crinkle like the unwrapping of a present as I step on the holds. My hands are tentative with each new hold that flexes and cracks in my hand. I can no longer see the meadow below me and now must worry about who might be below us. I am in a minefield that’s more like a mine garden. I wish for a leaf blower.
At the belay Dixie asks me if I noticed a specific loose rock that she had to avoid. “I left it there because it wouldn’t fit in my pocket.” When I was at that point in the climb, I had counted six different protruding rocks that were standing on a ledge, threatening to jump at any time. I had made stemming moves far above the grade of the pitch to avoid weighting them, all the while converting the distance Dixie would have been above the last bolt when making the same moves then doubling the distance, as any lead fall would require. Forty feet.
“Good lead.”
“It was like climbing through a pile of leaves.” She was smiling and looking at the next pitch. “It reminded me of when we used to rake leaves up back in North Carolina and jump into the pile. People used to leave piles in front of their house for the county to pick up and we would jump into those too.
“That sounds a bit more fun that this pitch was.” She crinkled her nose when she smiled
“But then they had to stop putting their leaves like that because the piles would be partly in the road and someone would put cinder blocks under the leaves. Then, if a car drove through the pile, they would hit the cinder blocks.” Now my nose crinkled. “I think I may have missed a bolt.”
“There’s supposed to be knobs you can sling.” I thought of the various chicken heads, attached to the rock by piecrust epoxy.
“I didn’t even think of that. I guess there were some big breadboxed sized ones that would have worked.” She had instinctively taken out a sling and was practicing girth hitching it to her fist. “The bigger the better, right?”
“Solid as cinder blocks.”
