Emulous

By

Ray Purcell

Vatchi and I stood like window washers at the belay stance sorting out the double-ropes. There wasn’t so much as a puffy little Winnie-The-Pooh cloud anywhere in sight and I was beginning to wonder if the double-ropes were worth the bother. Half Dome had been soaked by monsoonal weather for the entire preceding week. In fact, the ground was seriously moist on the approach hike, while Vernal and Nevada Falls were gushing with the runoff; at least, gushing by July standards. Still, crappy weather can build out of nowhere in no time, and I wasn’t about to screw-the-pooch by getting caught in a lightening storm on the flanks of one of the most prominent anodes in Yosemite.

Despite the ropes, our turn-around time at the belay was more delayed by our distraction with the incomparable views than the technical demands of the climb. I mean- God! Illilouette Falls, Glacier Point, the entire majesty of Yosemite Valley, and the High Country all the way to Tuolumne and beyond. And best yet, we were far enough away to exceed the resolution of the human eye to discern streets, cars, and even the seemingly ever present green tour trams. The panorama was dizzying!  

There we stood at the base of why we had actually come, a distinctive band of rock, no more than two feet wide at most, but noticeably higher than the surrounding stone. A band formed of minerals higher on the Mohs Scale of Hardness than the surrounding granite. A Dike in geologic speak. A term that describes how, like the name implies, a vertical intrusion of minerally distinct magma had divided the surrounding granite in what would become one of the most intriguing geographic features on the planet, the cleaved solitary dome that is the signature of Yosemite. But, at that moment, it only reminded me of one thing...monkey bars.

Bigger, as might be expected, on a geologic scale, but monkey bars never the less. Not just any monkey bars mind you, but a particular set of great arching monkey bars. Monkey bars that could just as easily have been Half Dome as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old. These inhabited a playground not far from my house. A park set on the edge of the cliffs that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.

I’d stood in the chill of a Daly City morning layered in the tee shirts and sweat shirts that my mom would insist on to ward off the damp ocean cold. My hands were thrust deep into the pockets of the baggy J.C. Penny’s blue jeans that otherwise could have only stayed up over my cracker butt by static cling. My feet would shift, in the fidgety way that only kids and meth abusers do, oscillating back and forth, and slowly digging a pit into the tan bark that was supposed to suck up the shock from a kid BASE jumping off of the monkey bars or vaulting off a swing a full apogee.

Other kids might run around like lemurs on bars like these, fearlessly twirling and leaping with equal parts grace and boldness, but not me, no siree bob. On encountering any new piece of playground equipment I’d be found surveying for potential risk, assessing for peril. I’d watch the other kids as they careened about like swallows catching bugs. Then if there was no emerging pattern of carnage I’d wade in, tentatively testing each rung and rope. I’d ease my way to the very top, get myself a solid perch, and carefully widen my perspective on the heady exposure. I’d look across to the surrounding summits on the slides and swings, and then down over the sand boxes, merry go rounds, and concrete pipe tunnels.

My fondest playground memory happened on a clear early Saturday morning in Fall. I had the whole park to myself, not another kid in sight. After sizing up the route of ascent on the gracefully arching bars and rungs, I purposefully placed one of my PF Flyers on the first smooth rung. The rung was covered with a patina of rust and the remains of bright yellow paint worn by hundreds of seekers, then I stepped up to the next. The cold metal drew the heat from my hands like an open faucet.

At the very most absolute top most part I carefully and awkwardly lowered my legs over the rungs to face the ocean. I could feel the mass of my legs pull a little at my scrawny knees. Absentmindedly my legs began to swing like juxtaposed pendulums as I watched long white lines of surf march toward their breaks just before the beach below. At the farthest most distant line on the horizon I was sure that I could just almost maybe make out Japan.

My solitude and reverie was demolished when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an interloper trespassing on my private playground. He strode tentatively over to my perch, looked up at me silently, and then, unbidden, started up. I tried to project a sphere of territorial possession, a demeanor of take-a-hike-your not-welcome that fell just short of “hey you wana fight.” But it didn’t work and the kid just kept climbing like he didn’t really see me sitting right there in front of him on top of my very own eminent domain, with my own personal view of Japan.

I kept giving the other kid the hairy eye as he climbed. Then I noticed that the other kid didn’t just vault up the rungs the way the other yard apes did, he was cautious, the way I was, he seemed to respect if not fear the consequences of misstep, the way that I did. Then almost at the top he awkwardly straddled the rungs and bars with the same sideways crab like grace that I did. As he settled in and started his legs swinging, then the kid did the most engraciating and humble thing a kid can do, he said, “My names David, what’s yours?”

David and I just sat and talked as I recall, and we spoke of grand things. We exchanged the sum of our venerable ten-something year old knowledge, which when put together amounted to an even greater twenty years of collective data. He and I talked about Matchbox Cars, California, and New York, to the exclusion of any other states that we weren’t yet aware of. The we moved on to what we knew about the world, and that one time our dads, or some other big kid we knew did something enormous, at least in our estimation- you know, bullshit. And of course we got to the subject of Japan which, just after I mentioned it, David was sure he saw just over the horizon too.

Just before lunch time I took the conversation the direction of tidal waves, which I understood washed Japan away frequently. David said that he had heard that tidal waves started because of earthquakes. Growing up near San Francisco I was frequently bounced and rattled by small temblors that seldom even made the news. I had become blase about the little quakes until... until David made the connection between earthquakes and tidal waves, and hadn’t there been an earthquake the other day, and couldn’t that big grey line on the horizon just be a mile-high tidal wave, and maybe that’s why we couldn’t see Japan anymore. Well there probably wasn’t any danger or we’d have heard the Civil Defense Siren that they always tested down at the fire station at noon, we assured ourselves. Still, just then going home for lunch sounded like a good idea.

It was Vatche’s lead and he began what we had both come here expecting would be a long run out, the first of many, if the many trip reports posted on the internet held any truth. The dike, Snake Dike’s namesake, as you might expect weaves a gracefully serpentine line up the southwest flank of Half Dome following the most continuous of these features. This 5.7 route is predominantly 5.2 to 5.5 owing to the highly featured nubbins, horns, cleats, and pommels that form the abundant hand and footholds of the dike proper. But to wander away from the main dike will quickly abandon the wayward climber to slick and featureless glacier polished granite over parallel routes rated 5. improbable to 5. impossible.

I guess it was the way Vatche thoughtfully progressed up the dike that reminded me even more of that morning spent with David on that jungle gym. Vatche and I hadn’t known each other very long either, but as it is with the simplicity of youth, where all one kid really cares about in a playmate is that they’re a kid, all we cared about was that we were both climbers. That was when I wondered if kids in Beirut had Monkey Bars, or parks for that matter.

Vatche is an Arminian born in Lebanon some 27 years ago. He doesn’t remember much about Beirut since his father, an engineer by profession, moved his family, Vatche, a younger brother, and his mother, to Qatar when construction began on a large military base in Doha. Which is probably just as well since a rather nasty civil war was about to divide Lebanon in a particularly bloody sixteen-year street battle between Christians and Muslims. If anything Vatche’s childhood in Beirut was, by comparison, the antitheses of mine in the early Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area, where unrest and dissidence between generations and over Viet Nam were generally only taunting and loud.

It was this kind of information, and the stuff of our lives other little generalities that made up our conversation as we drove up toward Oakhurst after work one Friday. Vatche is in his first year of residence at the same hospital where I work. In fact that’s where we meet, while he was completing a rotation on Orthopedics. He is in a transitional year, a term that describes a first year resident, or intern, who is waiting to enter a speciality program. In this case Vatche would be going to New York next Fall to begin a residency in Anesthesia.

Summers in Doha were uninhabitably hot and Vatche’s family would travel to Europe, or back to see family during lulls in the violence in Lebanon. But it was while visiting family in New York where they would travel to “up state” and camp that Vatche fell in love with the wilds. In Pre-Med Vatche tried climbing as a natural extension of his love for the outdoors, and has since climbed in the Cascades of Washington State, Peru, New Zealand, and Alaska. He is currently on a glutinous course seeking to climb as many of the Sierra’s peaks and classics as he can before having to move to New York, where he will be seasonally confined to climbing at the Gunks- poor boy. Yet in an odd twist it was climbing that contributed to his being accepted into that Anesthesia program in the first place.

I’m always fascinated by the reasons that people are attracted to medicine. Some are older, and come to medicine after feeling stagnated in other careers, or when they are at last able to pursue a long time goal. But most are relative young, and their reasons vary, from having to select a profession as preordained as their social stratum to the natural extension of having been innately facile in the sciences.

Vatche explained to me that he had always been gifted in the sciences, and that he had wanted to apply that knowledge to helping people. Perhaps I’m jaded after years of working with young physicians but that explanation seemed just a little too canned, you know prepared. I asked why he had selected Anesthesia over say Internal Medicine or Family Practice. He diplomatically acknowledged that both of these branches of medicine were worthy among the spectrum of medical specialties, and mentally challenging, but people, i.e. patients just didn’t do what you tell then to- not so in anesthesia.

Vatche and I swung leads up the dike, where at times we had up to sixty feet of air between our heels and the last protection that our ropes threaded through. Where the grade is not “relatively” difficult, the run out is thought provoking. It’s the kind of airy exposure that even with the easier grade can evoke the emotions and mental discipline that brings climbers back to climbing, trip after trip. Beyond the camaraderie, climbing offers a methodical technical process, problem solving that is frequently intellectually complex while demanding emotional focus, and offers an opportunity not often found in the day to day- to assume control and be completely accountable for the most consequential of risks.

In the essay that Vatche had to write as a part of the interview process for this particular anesthesia program he related how anesthesia was much like climbing for the same reasons. As Vatche continued he suddenly became impassioned and much more genuine. He marveled at the physiology of the human respiratory system, the elegance of acid-base balance, the wonder of drugs that... well disengage our senses, and that, I would argue seem to suspend our souls from our bodies. The Anesthesiologist is the person who, for a period of time, suspends the patient’s own chorus of physiology, and interposes, commanders, and assumes complete accountability for the most consequential of risks. Besides, Vatchi continued, you make great money and can have a schedule that allows you to get away for climbing trips.

The dike vanished and the slope of Half Dome rolled over like the back of a dolphin that’s breached for a breath. We stopped and stowed our ropes then plodded up the “endless” Class 3 slabs toward the summit. Our quads felt like they were on fire: if we were trucks we’d have smelled like burnt brake linings. Suddenly we were among the throng of hikers who had come up the cables to share this day. It was a warm and clear, and people from all over the world were on top of Half Dome. People from California, people from New York, and people from Japan, and many others, most notably at least one from Beirut and another from Daly City.

Vatchi and I sat with our legs dangling over the North Face of Half Dome, and they were swinging like metronomes. As I ate cheese and Avocado punctuated with the occasional cherry, I looked out over the universe. I felt the weight of my legs pleasantly pull at my knees. There had been a wonderful simplicity in the day that felt almost childlike. Considering the counterpoints I wondered: when did running madly around the playground for the pure joy of the wind in your face become a 5 Km, a 10 Km, or a marathon; when did flying your bike down the street become a criterion; when did climbing on monkey bars become a 5. this or V that.

Consider really young children’s art, like a preschooler’s, it’s so pure and refreshing because it’s unconfined. It soars because it knows no convention or bounds, it is unfettered creation without emulous. By the time kids reach elementary school, as early as Kindergarten now I suspect, they become possessed by some unseen force. A siren that lures them into shoals of conformational creativity and scripted play. Then before you know it they’re heading out the door to med school.

True, I’d have a hard time cutting loose enough now to go out and twirl around on my front lawn until I got so dizzy that I fell over, and then laugh so hard that my eyes teared up and my stomach ached. But call it what you will, I’ll never stop playing, even if it is between the lines.

We reached Happy Iles as the shadows began to lengthen and the muted rose sky marbled with swirling, billowing gray. In the distance thunder rolled like a great kettle drum, and lightening tickled the top of Half Dome. As we walked back to Curry Village I had to smile to myself. You know, you really can see Japan from those monkey bars if you really want to.

November 2003