laurels

Laurels

By Ray Purcell

I mean no disrespect to those of you who love liver and onions, but I detest them. Yet, inexorably, my saintly mother served the damn things well into adolescence knowing full well that I could not choke the bilious things down. Mom's cooking followed a kind of Mid-Western doctrine of signatures. You needed liver, and beets that were boiled beyond recognition for the blood, while brains and eggs were "brain food". We never discussed sweetbreads. The most predictable part of any vile dinner that I would turn my nose up at, and to be honest there weren't many, was when she"d cock her head ever so slightly to the side, patronizingly raise her eyebrows, and in a soft voice thick with under tones of good Irish Catholic guilt say " there are starving children in Europe, right now, who would love that dinner."

Had mom said- there are starving climbers in Yosemite, right now, ...- it might have meant something to me. Though it still wouldn't have persuaded me to eat that damn liver. These thoughts came to me as Lisa and I were pulling apart a Bar-B-Qed chicken and sampling chunks of melon while we sat in El Capitan Meadow. As we ate we watched a conga line of climbers inching up The Nose Route on the face of El Capitan like a necklace of human action figures. That's when I drifted back to the day in 1970 when my dad incredulously read me a headline in the San Francisco Examiner about Warren Harding's first ascent of the Dawn Wall. By that time our family already had three generations of Yosemite Valley campers. We had, like most, marveled at the vertical enormity of El Capitan, and had an almost aboriginal incomprehension that it might be scalable.

Though it wasn't the daring-do or legend of those climbers of that Golden Age that started me climbing, it was Yosemite it's self that did that. Yosemite with its vast seemingly blank granite walls were all the siren song that was necessary to draw me into its rocks. Back in the meadow Lisa and I raised a toast, carefully touching the flimsy Ramada Inn plastic cups that held our wine. We toasted Warren "Batso" Harding, and all of the other table-scrap-scarfing Lotharios of Camp 4 who"s lives ultimately shaped the nuances and style of modern climbing.

After lunch we wandered up to Manure Pile Buttress. I wanted to share paradise with Lisa, take her to Mecca, circle Mt. Kailas. I waxed nostalgically with tales of my first Yosemite climbs in 1976. We looked up at After Six, now more polished by the soles of countless climbing shoes than the passing of the glaciers. While I was moved by the aesthetic line, the fun moves, the pedigree, and lineage; Lisa was ... well indifferent. She hadn't succumbed to the same siren. Lisa had tried climbing and just didn't enjoy it. But, she knows that climbing is important to me, in a kind of- in good faith- sort of way, and that's enough for her.

At the time, that first trip to The Valley had been huge for me. My partner, who?s name I have regrettably forgotten, drove from San Francisco to Yosemite in the 1968 Ford F-100 pickup truck that I had bought at a Cal Trans auction for $350. We rolled into Camp 4 in the rusted orange beast one early afternoon with the goal of climbing Royal Arches Route the next day. As we set up camp we gawked about as slack jawed as two Ozark Hillbillies dropped into Manhattan.

With the better part of the day still ahead of us, and on the recommendation of the clerk at the Old Mountain Shop, we headed off to Manure Pile Buttress and After Six. I lead the first pitch, and not being very accomplished at placing protection, wound the rope into a dizzying zigzag. By the time that I reached the first belay I felt like a tugboat pulling a freighter into the bay on an outgoing tide. On top of that I was wearing Rachile boots with Norwegian Welted Vibram Soles, which was no small impediment either.

Regardless, on the way off of the route we thought we were hot shit. Our first climb on our first Yosemite route. But when we got back to the base to pick up our packs we were humbled to find that the local kids had showed up at their home crag, and by comparison our climbing was strictly Special Olympics. I don't remember the subsequent evening particularly well since, quite honestly, we'd been smoking- you know... lots of uh... herb. Though I do vaguely remember being feed an enormous dinner by a Baptist Church Group who was sponsoring a large group of Japanese students. I also vaguely remember leading said group of Japanese students in around of Michael Row Your Boat Ashore and a song from the movie Billy Jack while I accompanied myself on the guitar. I may have sucked as a climber but to the Japanese I was Elvis.

The point of our current trip to Yosemite was not climbing at all, but solely to catch the Yosemite Valley premier of The Vertical Frontier, and with any luck, meet some of the great and good who had become my heroes and the stuff of rock climbing lore. The film, that was produced and directed by Kristi Denton-Cohen, captured my attention because it had won in the category of Best Film on Climbing at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2002, and was promised to be an excellent documentary on the history as well as culture of climbing in Yosemite.

Anxious to get good seats we arrived an hour early at the auditorium. When we arrived we found that The American Alpine Club had set up a pre-showing reception in the adjoining auditorium. On the door was penned a sign that read PRIVATE PARTY. Now I know from experience that climbers just don't have the PRIVATE PARTY mentality. There's always someone ushering in friends at the backdoor, if not the front, and this soirée was no exception. It would have been nothing to walk in and rub elbows with the "dignitaries"; I thought that I might even stick out as an outsider if I didn't try. But Lisa is a self-described "rule follower" to the bone, and I knew better than to test her patience and graciousness than to even try.

The other auditorium was unlocked so we walked in and grabbed seats. I have never in my life pimped for autographs, just TOO embarrassing, but tonight I was ready with a pen and my copy of Steve Roper's Camp 4 - Recollections of a Yosemite Rock Climber. I picked seats behind a row of napkins that had RESERVED written on them in ballpoint pen. The idea being that I could surreptitiously pass my book down for signatures. Astonishingly close to the announced start, considering Climbers Standard Time, the "dignitaries" from next door's "PRIVATE PARTY" wandered in. The first was Yvon Chouinard, who, not liking the seats on the floor level, agilely straddled the first row of seats and placed himself in the second row. My seating strategy had worked except that Chouinard was just out of reach. So I couldn't casually and inconspicuously pass him my book for signing with out leaning over three other people.

Then, a corpulent man with the habitus of a marmot that's been well feed on alpine grass, or climber's rations, approached the dais. He wore the venerable Park Service gray uniform and introduced himself as Bob. After begging our indulgence to not eat or drink in the auditorium Ranger Bob introduced Kristi Denton-Cohen. Like the scriptural seed cast on rocky ground, much of her introduction did not take root with me since I was anxious to see the movie. Until, until during her dedication she mentioned that her father was a climber and that he had died when she was six years old. Ms. Cohen, whom I'll call Kristi since I presume that she'd prefer it that way, then went on to say that she came to better know her father through the climbers that had collaborated with her in the filming of this project. A father myself, I was captured by the humanity of her dedication and my expectations of her work elevated- I wasn't disappointed.

Then the lights dimmed and the soothing voice of Tom Brokaw introduced the seminal mountaineers of Yosemite. Beginning with John Muir and ending with Hans Florine, the documentary intelligently transitioned from Muir's solo ascent of Cathedral Peak to Lynn Hill's as yet unrepeated totally free ascent of the Nose. In between, the audience was introduced to the Golden Age through interviews with its most influential figures: Dave Brower, Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robins, Allen Steck, Warren Harding and others. Logically placed segues traversed the once rancorous dichotomy between the evolution toward clean climbing, as espoused by Royal Robbins, and the siege tactics of Warren Harding, and was it done with the grace and delicacy of a free solo climber on a thin exposed edge.

This documentary must not be confused with a climbing video. It is a work that distinguishes it's self by portraying the human condition through the act of climbing. By illuminating at once the philosophy, spirit, romance, arrogance, ethos, vanity, and even theology that makes climbing, to use John Long's words 'the King of the Sports.' It is a film that portrays the symbiosis between the evolution of climbing and the mythic Camp 4. An inextricable connection between a dust patch of ground and an expression of freedom that justified the inclusion of Camp 4 into the National Register of Historic Places in February of 2003.

As the credits scrolled I had scarcely noticed that 90 some minutes had passed. The lights came up and I began to sweat at the prospect of asking for autographs. But in the end, with the elation of having put a grippy pitch behind me, I had signatures from Allen Steck, Yvon Chouinard, and Tom Frost all on the face page.

Kristi was still entertaining grateful patrons in the front of the auditorium, and Lisa was standing there also. I approached, introduce myself, and was tongue tied by the breadth of meaning that her film had brought to my enjoyment of it. The best I could do was to ask for her autograph. Kristy obliged, and after seeing the three signatures on the face page instead signed the inside cover. I'm hesitant to infer a reason for this, save to say that I certainly think that her signature, by virtue of the boldness of her art, was worthy to share a page with these others. As Lisa and I left the auditorium I asked what she had said to Kristi, and Lisa replied that she hadn't. But what she had wanted to do was thank Kristi for a film that had helped her to better understand my love of climbing and necessarily me.

May 2003