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Sometimes I do silly things. Actually it would be more accurate to say I do very silly things all the time. This paricular adventure involved myself and a rope and a barnacle encrusted cliff that went straight up. And I climbed. Spiderman himself couldn't do as good as me - provided he were blindfolded and had no arms, mind you. It's quite difficult to relay my thrill at this electronically, but you must understand that 1.) climbing is a difficult thing to do, 2.) especially when you've never done it before, 3.) everyone else has already done it, so you have the wonderous duty of being either the one who falls or the one who boosts the ego of the instructor in that everyone made it safely up, and 4.) "up" is not a direction I like to go. I'll go forward, backward, spin around and circles and I've been known to eat dirt on one or more occasions. But "up" is not a direction I prefer to go unless I'm being propelled by some device other than my arms and legs, i.e. a chairlift or escalator (and some of you know I have deathly fears of even those!). So mustering every ounce of courage I had, I put my little rock climbing booties on the cliff and just climbed - finding places to hold onto, sometimes, and places to anchor my feet, sometimes, and you just didn't look down. And I made it to the top. It was only 50 feet or so, not the empire state building or anything, but this is quite an acheivement when you rely on your undertoned biceps and a knot you pray you tied correctly in a rope that is only the thickness of your little finger. Then once you get up there , you have the lovely chore of getting down. This is about twice as scary, because you no longer get to hold onto the barnacle encrusted cliff face, you just lean back and really pray that whoever is holding the other end is not fixing their hair or talking on their mobile or something, they let you down slowly and surely and you have to guess how close you are to the bottom so that you don't go crashing down on your bum. The next time I tried this, on a cliff around the corner, there was another rock face jutting out onto the one I had to scale and there were far fewer footholds. About ten feet from the top, you had to move from one face to the other, and to do so, you had to basically hang on with just your hands for a split second and swing onto the others. When I got here I froze. Frantically trying to figure out what to do, slipping all the while, I couldn't find a good grip, and I didn't have the confidence to just push off and let my feet flail about in the wind Harrison Ford style and hope that I found a jutting rock. I called to get down and the two girls (bless their little hearts) who were holding my ropes wouldn't let me down. And with tears streaming down my face in horror of realizing that I was now slipping from a perilous point of 50 feet on this rock, I murmured a little prayer and just did it and scrambled the last ten feet to the most beautiful and rewarding view in the entire universe. I was slowly let down, fell flat into the sand below and told the earth I would never do such a silly thing as to leave it again willingly. Every limb just shaking and probably silently hating me , and this overwhelming surge of "wow, I just did that!" swarming through my skull. I win. |
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