All Things Old Get New Again (We Hope)

All Things Old Get New Again (We Hope)

The summer of 1983 I turned 17 and spent my last summer at “camp.” My parents used to send my brother and me away in order to enjoy the New England island where we lived and others came to for summer vacations. Climbing was not yet wide spread, but I spent a summer, in a van climbing rocks and mountains discovering I did not like heights; it was a glorious trip.

I went west for college, in no small part, to the glories I experienced in the North Cascades and Yosemite (and ok, yes, there was a girl involved, too). My college had a break in October, and I had enough cash to buy a rope, climbing shoes, and a harness. My new friend Eric and I were headed for the mountains to climb.

But my tendonitis came back with a vengeance. Even the thousands and thousands of milligrams of ibuprofen that had gotten me through much of high school wouldn’t put out the fire. I went to a specialist, and he put me in a brace, I’d be on crutches for months. I sold Eric the rope so he could go, and the next spring my still unused shoes were someone else’s great deal.

I went through two bouts with my knees in college, the struggle to be mobile, the struggle to let the inflammation subside, and the inevitable fight to regain strength after months of immobility. I broke my leg telemarking at age 24, and got most of my strength and stamina back after that fall as well.

Then I went to grad school and got a professional job. I’m nearly 50 (ok, I’ll be 49 in a month), and for most of the last decade I spent both the principal and interest a jocks youth deposited in my body, and I went into debt. I worked two professional jobs, one to earn a living, to provide health care for my wife and for me; and one as a leader of a social justice movement. Every time I didn’t go to the gym I thought, “next time”, and called on my reserves.

I left leading the movement. The toll five years of 60-80 hour weeks was too much. And then I left my marriage. Some folk would be driven to the gym. I struggled through an epic divorce, and though I often took long walks to drain the anger from my body, I haven’t lifted weights or worked my body to exhaustion in too long to remember.

Two days ago at dinner my friend Risa told me I had to go to the climbing gym with her. I said sure, confident that it was a date for the “future.” Yesterday she told me we were going today.

I hate doing things I’m not good at. I’m a gone soft nearly 50 year old man, who once stood on top of a glacier, one of the Needles in South Dakota, a rock face in Yosemite, and on top of an arch in Utah. But who now prides himself on taking two or three flights of stairs rather than the elevator.

The idea of trying to press, pull, and lift myself up a wall of artificial rocks alongside lean and lithe young men and women felt uncomfortable. 

I signed the waiver, then Risa said, “at our age we ALWAYS start with stretching,” and we did.

Then she put herself up on the multicolored holds and did a traverse across twelve or fifteen feet of wall. Then I followed her. And again. And then up a wall.

Risa was applauding a gorgeous lithe, toned woman who was practicing a cartwheel without hands on the soft pads beneath the walls. We ended up talking, and when she went back to her practice I saw her focus was on where she wanted her head NOT to end up, rather than on her feet which needed to shot skyward in order to make the maneuver strong. 

I tentatively offered her the observation, and Liz’s next attempt was much stronger. I explained what my Kung Fu teacher has explained to me about a kick thirty years ago, proud that I remembered, proud that I could see what Liz wasn’t doing.

As we all moved about the gym we bumped into one another and kept talking. I resisted (as much as I could) being deprecating, and Liz was very encouraging. 

Much of how to move on the rock came back to me. But when Risa explained why one particular route was laid out the way it was, it was as if she were speaking Sanskrit. I don’t think we knew those things in 1984.

Risa and I are not young; she has been keeping herself fit on the rock for a while now, and though she is like me a bit wider than we might like, less strong than we once were she seems smoother and more fluid on the “rock” than I am.

Liz, is long and lithe, and moves with a confidence and grace I never achieved as I climbed rock faces in mountaineering boots in the 80s. But even Liz seemed clunky next to a 8 year old girl who moved up the walls as smoothly as an octopus gliding through the sea. Her four limbs,  small hands, tiny feet lifted, pushed, and balanced her from floor to roof as if the only work her body did was to breathe.

It took two days for my muscles to remind me that the work I had done at the Rock Gym was new and difficult. But I have a vision of being like the little girl, or at least a bit more more like Liz, or maybe Risa.

I haven’t bought a new pair of climbing shoes, it’s only been a few hours since I left the gym. But I think I might.