Elegance

Arapiles: I met the most inspiring woman yesterday. 

She must have been near her seventies, still climbing AUS 22/YDS 5.11a (for the non-climbers out there: sound skill and strength are both required). 

She seconded her leader up to a shaded nook aptly called Oasis, 215 ft up the wall, where my partner and I ate lunch mid-route under a massive boulder perched on the cliff. We were moving slowly: I'm coming off injury and my partner was on his first traditional multipitch, still learning to clean gear.

As she finished climbing and joined us on the ledge, I noticed her fingers fold into claws. Paper-like, translucent skin stretched over joints twisted and gnarled with age, and perhaps something else as well. 

She changed over belays and pulled on gloves with deliberate, measured movements. Golden earrings glinted from below her blue helmet as we relaxed, looking south through clear blue skies to the Grampians' silhouette. 

Her demeanor reminded me of Jane Goodall. 

As she cleared her belay, she turned to me. "Thank you for letting us pass," she told me. "Thirty five years ago, I was climbing on the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral in Yosemite, and a party passed me even though I asked them not to. They knocked down a rock. It hit my head, and then my hand. This is what happened:"

She extended her left hand for me to inspect, fingers crushed, twisted and bent, one folded backward, one completely gone. 

"The right side of my body was also paralyzed. But I still climb..."

Almost as an afterthought, she added: "...because I love to."

Then she moved up from the ledge and danced to the top of the route. 

I never learned her name. 

Deep Water Solo in the Desert

“Really Gavi, you should just leave and never come back.”

I’ve been to Mt. Arapiles twice now, a squat quartzite dome rising from the plains a few hours’ drive northwest of Melbourne, famed for fair weather year-round. Both times the place has greeted me with torrential rain and wind.

My first visit proves one of the biggest teases of my life, arriving in an area straight out of climbing lore with a gaggle of high school boys in tow. The Mount’s deep orange and brown rock rises in a maze of pillars and nooks and gullies from plains glowing gold with canola blossoms against an azure sky. Stubby-tailed lizards crouch beneath a world of lush green spring shrubbery, blossoms spraying the mountain’s surrounds in vibrant pink, white and violet. Deep green moss and flaky lichen blanket rocks, fed by runoff and seepage from spring storms. Rock wallabies blend into the bushes and kangaroos emerge in force by dusk to graze next to the bathrooms, whose walls bleed graffiti ranging from classic dirtbag vulgarity to downright hilarious.

Okay. I confess

No, happy to call it out

I LOVE YOU

You take me from down to up

From low to high

The colour of your skin:

            tanned and dark

Even the simple smell of your

            beautiful essence

Makes me claw for more

Your taste quickens my heart beat

Oh, dear coffee

I LOVE YOU!           

                            (~anon. dirtbag)

_____________________________________________________________________

We squeeze in a day and a half climbing on dry rock before weather moves in, radar glowing red, forcing a change in tactics. For the rest of our stay we turn to bouldering, playing on rock reminding me of Bishop’s Happies (read: pretty much the best jungle gym EVER), although with walls rising to glory behind us I’m told on good authority that bouldering at Arapiles is akin to masturbating in a brothel.

On rainy days we climb winding stone steps to the mount’s summit and gaze out over a landscape of quilted green and gold to the Grampians, thrusting upward behind bands of gray as storms advance across the plains. Our guide points out the classics, the cracks, the caves, access points, unclimbed walls, most-rescued routes and less-known tidbits of information as we return to camp.

Dinner operations shift to a sheltered area as the group’s Chinese and Indian boys give each other good-natured shit in equal parts (“Hey, go cook the noodles, that’s all you know how to do!” “Chickatarian, seriously what are you doing???”). At some point all 13 boys take it upon themselves to set headlamps on strobe mode, serenading camp to a rather novel mix of Biebs, Taylor Swift and Adele at the top of their lungs as pasta gurgles happily in our monster pot and rain pummels our tarps. To the dirtbag in the corner who borrowed my guitar and jammed out some serious tunes: I apologize.

__________

We spend our last days of program in the Grampians, playing cat and mouse with torrential rain. Some combination of good fortune and good will allows us to bunk in a shed owned by a local native flower farm, adjacent to a warehouse bursting with sprays of flowers, vats of dye and the amplified aroma of springtime in the bush.

Our guide, Simon, turns out to be “the guy who wrote the guidebooks,” a walking encyclopedia with a classically wry sense of humor, stoked to chat about current developments and routes he established, offering a wealth of knowledge and an easy window into the local climbing scene. It’s one of the things in my short experience I’ve found so remarkable about climbing in Australia in a smaller population: the legends seem so much an integral part of the community as a whole, happy to mix in with the local dirtbags on the daily.

We walk into the park through vibrant orange sand roads utterly demolished by the rain, continuing up over black slabs, past splotchy green and gray cliffs, and down around beneath a formidable, overhung black and orange-streaked expanse known as Taipan Wall. Our path swings up over slick slabs and drops to a cave nestled beneath Mt. Stapylton’s peak, where clouds and mist sock us in as we eat. Small pools rimmed in weather-worn rock frame our view, pointed undulating ridges seemingly transplanted to our present eerie world straight from a dinosaur’s back.

Our last day finds us winding up the walls’ front faces, exploring twisting chambers filled with pockets and whorls as we find our way to a rather famous, obscenely difficult boulder problem tucked into a long, low cave toward the top of the cliff called Wheel of Life. And because the problem never really rises more than a meter from the ground it’s easy for Simon to break out the camera to capture “photo proof” I can climb V15… in approach shoes and gaiters, obviously.

And yes, I promise we cleaned off the holds.

__________

I return to Arapiles two weeks later, outside work, theoretically for a highline festival. Thousands of low crimson flowers line the road as I step back into the world I left when I moved to Vietnam, returning— finally— to my safe place, of sorts: a community where life slows down and relationships grow fast and strong, built on a foundation of support, passion, trust and communication, literally holding each others’ lives in our hands on a daily basis.

It rains. A lot.

That red down right? Headed straight for our faces.

I sneak in a mellow, pressure-free morning climbing classics with my guide from a couple weeks prior, working my head around placing gear on new rock with new geometry. Wind whips over the mount and down through gullies as we climb, ripping tape from highlines in a screaming, oscillating roar ahead of the afternoon’s forecasted storm as I set anchors at the top of the day’s final pitch.

Back at camp in The Pines, just in time for the rain to arrive, we construct a runoff diversion trench through our monster cook tent. Affectionately referred to as the Panama Canal, we seriously contemplate holding paper boat races on the waterway as torrential rain fills the ditch to brimming. Bridges and banter centered on water privatization may have also made cameo appearances.

Lamb and barley stew finishes cooking over the campfire and finds its way into our modgepodge mix of pots and bowls as lightning clears the sky behind the mount, thunder rolling and reverberating though the earth. Sometime later as the rain begins to ebb a borrowed guitar appears, someone breaks out the world’s most appropriate song for our current predicament, and a dozen people bring Kurt Cobain to life around the fire:

Where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines

I shivered the whole night through…

Despite tempermental weather, the next few days are filled with good people, good music, and the comfort of shared mindset. It’s taken a solid day for my body to remember how to settle into a slower life again, without worry of paperwork and student oversight and things to do and days to come.

We connect.

Technology takes a back seat to human interaction as we lose access to power outlets and sun.

We teach each other, share perspectives and support each other. Not because we’re paid to do so, but simply because we share passions and find fulfillment from each others’ triumphs, helping each other learn and overcome challenges.

We play amongst camp’s slackline jungle gym. We drink unearthly fresh-brewed ginger beer and eat our way through monster pots of veggie curry. We break out guitars and ukuleles and pvc flutes around the campfire and simply forget the clouds as they lay blankets of mist upon us into the night.

I climb one of the classics, a chimney called Agamemnon, with a rad new friend and coworker who’s spent the better part of his climbing career at Arapiles.

We’re told it should be dry.

It’s not dry.

The guidebook advises we “step across the void and stem to glory.” I’m sure it would be glorious on a sunny day, without water raining down on our belays. Without sheets of water running down the walls as we rely on friction to move upward. Somehow, I realize at the top, my scariest pitches are never the hardest ones.

We reconnect. 

I find myself camping next to a friend from the states, first met in Chiang Mai. Another familiar face, and totally inspirational athlete, has flown in from home as well.  

In some bizarre fashion, several days of chance conversation about projects and dreams and plans with a new companion lead to a realization that the borrowed van I’ve been loitering next to all week belongs to a crazy badass mutual friend from my summers in Squamish, who happens to be working this term in a little town in the boonies less than an hour from where I’m based.

And at the end of the week I wrench myself away from Arapiles once again, hopping into a truck headed toward Melbourne. I belatedly realize the bus I’m counting on doesn’t actually exist on Sundays (blonde moment #4 and counting), miss two trains, just barely make a third to a little town where a friend waits and catch a final ride up through the winding, sunspattered Black Spur, back into the “real” world.