She's Laughing by Elizabeth Whitcher
“COME ON, ELIZABETH!”
I’m carefully edging along an all too slopey, sopping wet crack a hundred feet up in the air. It’s just another step on this beautifully gray staircase of granite. As I drink in the height all my nerves shake themselves awake: I’m happier than I’ve been in weeks, expanding with excitement as I look out at the misted green and blinding gray New Hampshire landscape, laid softly below my soaking red climbing shoes.
Through trees and red barns rolls a strip of black road, along which, just half an hour ago, a pair of pink fuzzy dice bobbled dangerously behind the rearview mirror of a familiar silver van. We zoomed past boulders, curtained by swaths of forest finally turned green after a long icy winter of snow and crampons. But no one in this van planned on asking to get out and find some new problems. This was a van load of trad climbers, and after months of wussy gym climbing they had one thing on their minds: MULTIPITCH. As for my part, hey, boulders are nice: low to the ground, easy to get to. But to say that in this van would be like screaming “I LOVE THE YANKEES!”, in Kenmore Square, on opening day.
I have never done a multipitch climb before: the highest I have been off the ground was on a 5.3 scramble up a mountain in Colorado. I get nervous on high topropes. As such, I spent last night envisioning myself tumbling off of steep faces of my imagination, to the sharp branches of trees and rock thrusted up to break my falling body. This morning I tried to swallow thick, sick, sweet mouthfuls of what I figured might be the last cinnamon raisin bagel I’d ever eat.
However, as far as I was concerned, there was more than my life on the line. A far greater fear was that I might finish this climb and discover that I’m just not cut out for The Real Mountains. After spending nine months (215 hours worth of class) listening to the climbing stories the guys on my team, Alpina, tell: about Yosemite, nights spent on ledges, and close scrapes with poor anchors, I know most of the tales well enough to tell myself. In this situation, it’s easy to forget to separate the experiences of my friends from what I have actually lived through. In my mind I was already a trad climber. But as Aleksey began to plan a multipitch trip, I discovered this was very far from the truth. And so to me this first climb had become a trial upon which my entire trad climbing future rested. That, of course, is ridiculous. My mom made that quite clear to me when we were waiting in the Boston Rock Gym parking lot at seven for the van to roll up. But it still stuck in the back of my mind: a nagging fear waiting to pull me off the wall.
In the van, watching those fuzzy pink dice prepare to fly out the window, I tried to assuage my fears by asking about what the climb we would be doing is like. “We’ll probably do Thin Air.” (Shrugs of agreement.) “It’s scary because of the traverse,” Mike drew me a picture in the condensation on the van’s window. “You start here,” he pointed, “and climb out, and the ground is sloped, so that if you fall you’ll swing way down to here.” He stuck his finger on a spot an inch off the line indicating the ground. Cars flew past, spraying up water drops with a soft kishhhh as he continued: “You only have one crack for your hands and your feet,” He drew out a cramped looking stick figure, bent painfully over the crack. “And it’s real slippery when it’s wet.” Wonderful. By the end of the van ride, I was begging Aleksey to let us climb Funhouse to Upper Refuse instead. “Once you climb Thin Air in the rain you are a true member of Alpina.” he said with a smile.
“CLIMBING, ALEKSEY!”
I began the first pitch: one foot up, carefully placed in a puddle of leaf littered granite. I committed my weight to it as I pushed off and the next foot came up, grasping cold, dripping rock with fingers that grabbed instinctively babies do at their mother’s hands. My eyes scanned the smooth face for edges as I moved up again, following Joe’s thick green pants as he cleaned gear up ahead of me.
“TRY NOT TO FALL ON THIS PART,” The words from below turned my limbs into glass.
“OK.” Grinning nervously in a determined attempt to quench my fear, I reached the first clip on a tiny piece of gear set to stop pendulums. I have almost as much trouble trusting those tiny metal “friends” to catch my full body weight as I do trusting screws to hold in frozen water. But now was not the time for questioning, it was the time for plain-stupid-faith. I unclipped my rope, and clipped in the rope I’m dragging up for Sergey.
And now, without realizing, I’m on that thin traverse, a hundred feet or so above Mike and the others. I realize, as my feet slide smoothly into the crack, that the guys weren’t kidding when they admitted later in the van that they tend to exaggerate. With two feet solidly underneath my body weight, and delicate soaking handholds staring out at me from the face, I am able to do this. I carefully cross over each foot steadily and cleanly, and prepare to unclip from an upcoming piece of protection.
“How are you, Elizabet?” Aleksey asks.
“Doing good!”
Belayed on either side by a rope, I feel remarkably secure. I realize what Joe has always told me about trad climbing is true. All those times in the gym when I shook my head in disbelief at how you could be brave enough to run out the rope or place tiny pieces, he always said the same thing: you don’t get scared, just really really focused. And so I risk a glance down to the earth below my feet. Looking down at the small figures of my friends waiting on the ground isn’t scary at all. I see five heads, adorned with Burger King Crowns, sport taped carefully onto helmets. Back on the ground, before beginning the pitch, the tips were already drooping in the rain, curled like jesters hats. The people who wore them casually flaked their ropes, laughing and betting each other they couldn’t talk in Yoda speak for the whole day. The picture seems to scream against the weather: “IF ALL DAY YOU POUR, CARE WE NOT! CLIMBERS WE ARE! RAIN WE NO FEAR!” (Anyone who looked into the webcam aimed at Thin Air today would be amused.)
Now, a hundred feet up in the air, with pure comedy below me and green trees for my “hippie” soul as far as the eye can see, I know I love climbing.
As I finish the traverse and the first pitch, Aleksey’s words fly past me:
“She was SMILING! I am proud of you, Elizabeth. Most people get so scared there! Crying and complaining." “
Somewhere in New Hampshire, a sixteen passenger van floats East down a blackened, winding strip of backroad. Pink fuzzy dice sway gently above the dash, mimicking the sleepy mood of the group. Aleksey’s crown sits proudly on his head as he scans the road for “magic number” license plates. After a slippery walk down from the top, everyone is ready to be home. Lulled by the humming of the engine and the discussion on woodworking, I love everyone here, I am home already. (Even if uninformed on what a “lathe” is.) Nothing is more uniting than a climbing trip. And now that I’ve made it through this milemarker, the world is open to many more.
