On Belay

In the eighteenth century, a dreamer named Edmund Burke found the perfect word to describe epic paintings made to portray the awesome power of nature in comparison to the finite might of man. Images such as those of helpless man-made ships at sea, dwarfed by towers of cumulonimbus and waves about to crash upon them. Explorers standing atop mountains, looking out at a skies full of weather that seems indifferent to the human condition. Something about those works of art inspire a mixture of awe, horror, wonder, and fear as we humans consider how powerless we are at the hands of the violent natural divine. The word he coined was "sublime."

Sublime. 

A great word. It soars unbidden through my mind as I stand on Eastside Drive and look up at the spire of stone jutting two hundred forty feet above the fuzzy lodgepole tops. The triangular wedge of rock splits from the earth like a reaching hand, scraping the heavens in sharp contrast to the gentle mountains that wind along the skyline, and the lazy river that wanders humbly at its feet. Horrible, wonderful, unbelievable. It clears even the tallest trees, and from the road down below I almost throw up as I’m dwarfed like an ant below a red-wood. Utterly choked by the sublime. 

“No way!” I laugh, breathy and tremulous as I swallow the fear and spittle pooling in my dry mouth.

“Is that it?”

“That’s it!” Amber says, a crazy grin on her face as she tightens her blue harness and gathers a pair of gloves into a matching helmet. 

“Spooky, right?” 

A troublesome tremor in the pit of my stomach travels to the stabilizing muscles in my knees, making the figure 8 hanging from my hips rattle subtly against the carabiner and metal cinches that keep my borrowed rust colored harness tight around my belly button and trembling thighs. 

“It looks like cursed-Minas Tirith!” 

“What the heck is a minas tirith?”

I swallow again.

“Uh, you know the big white tower in Gondor that Denethor throws himself off of in the third movie?” 

“Is he the dude who eats tomatoes like a freak?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Dude I hate him! That was such a satisfying way for him to go out.” she laughs, and I think I’m going to be sick.

While I stare in open-mouthed horror at the spire, Amber checks her watch and makes an excited noise.

“Ooooo it’s one thirty, which means it’s our time slot! You ready?” 

She waggles her eyebrows and pokes my arm while I give her a pathetically unconvincing smile.

To get to the top of the two-fourty, as the wicked spire is so creatively called, we leave my beat-up truck parked on the shoulder of the road and hike through what’s little more than a game trail that wraps around the back of the natural structure. We wade through huckleberry bushes stripped of fruit and crunch over pine needles, dry as a bone, fragrant and baking in the mid-August heat. After three months of hard labor on the water front, this hike should be a breeze for the both of us. Our legs are tone and burned from weeks of carrying water-craft and chasing after rowdy campers. Even though we gain a crazy amount of elevation in a relatively short amount of time, I’m expecting an easy go of it. To my dismay, I find myself tripping on roots and catching the toes of my hiking boots on every pointy little rock I can find in the scrubby underbrush. It’s as if the mountain’s malefic influence has seeped from my subconscious into the very earth, slowing my progression and squashing my confidence before we even reach the apex as I stumble on, drunk on the sublime thrill spilling off of dark Minas Tirith.

Unphased as ever, Amber chats along merrily ahead of me, confident in each impact caused by her heavy jump-boots that stay permanently fixed in the upper field of my vision as she climbs faster than I do.

Pine boughs ripple by like sea grass as we ascend, climbing the trees without even touching them, and I audibly gasp as at last we reach a jagged lip of stone carpeted by lichen, boost ourselves up, and break the surface of rock and forest. 

“Welcome to the top of the world, Kylie!” 

Wind grabs at my braided hair before a tall and blocky guy named Jared reaches down to take my hand after Amber’s. He’s a sturdy looking dude with permanent tan-lines on his neck from wearing his climbing helmet all summer and neglecting his sunscreen. While Amber and I are creatures of the lake, he looks like God made him specifically to haunt the cliff side. His calves are like canons, and his wide feet look perfectly sturdy atop the narrow tightrope of escaped bedrock. I resist the urge to stick to him like a frightened cat as I blink through the sudden sunshine and look up at an unobstructed sky for the first time in nine weeks. 

“Hooooly crap!”

The blue is way too big! Plunging like an eternal inhale sucking on a bottomless clear sea, I see from up here that which I couldn’t notice down on the ground. Beautiful and harsh chemtrail lines slice through lazy cirrus clouds that float just inside visible perception. Rushing tides of atmosphere grow deeper the farther they get from the shallows of the planet, and it feels like I’m staring up at a vast and bottomless vacuum. Like I’m going to trip and go flying up off the face of the earth! 

“Don’t look up or down,” Amber jokes, seeing the stricken look on my face as Jared clips me into a safety line anchored to the mountain and ushers us forward. 

“Are you two the last of the staff coming up?” Jared asks.

“Yep!”

“Sick! That will get us out of here before it gets any hotter.” And then he turns to me, testing my connection to the safety line with a jarring yank. 

“You’ve done the camp wall, but have you ever rappelled off anything else before?” 

I nod, “I’ve done Monkey’s face back home a couple of times, but it’s not even half this size!” 

“Eh, it’s not that bad! We’ll have Amber go first, show you how it’s done.” 

“We are so high up!”

“Yep! And in just a minute we get to chuck you off! What an honor.”

I’m laughing, but I think I’m just high on the fumes of sublime that waft up from the sun-baked stone. 

Amber crosses confidently to the edge and I watch with woozy fixation as Johnny- the climbing director and also, coincidentally, my father- hooks her up to the rappel line with complicated and diligent knots that look suspiciously insufficient. 

“I feel like I should be taking notes!” I remark to Jared, but I do a double-take and realize that he’s gone! I crane my neck around and see him packing up the other rappel stations with the climbing instructors, leaving me standing all alone, the tallest woman in the world. 

“ON BELAY!” 

My father’s shout echoes off the edge of the universe, and somewhere down below in the unseen sea of trees I hear a faint reply,

“BELAY ON!” 

Amber walks backward over the edge. Moving like she’s sitting in a chair, her backside dips into the empty space beyond the spire as she grips the rope above her 8 ring with one hand and holds the slack rope behind her like a tail. My dad gives her minimal coaching, and before I know it, she disappears over the cliff face and begins her backward descent. 

My legs begin to shake and twitch as I stand in the heat and wait, and I don’t know if I am relieved or horrified when my dad gets the signal that Amber has made it to the bottom and it’s my turn. 

“You’re up Kylie!” He waves me over and I walk, jelly-legged- to his station. He smiles and I see his green eyes crinkle behind the dad-shades he wears strapped to his face with a length of expertly braided five-fifty cord that he attached himself. Under his direction, I stand over the thick climbing ropes draped over the side of the 240. My mouth is dry and I can barely breathe let alone talk as my dad fastens me to the line and gives his well practiced safety recital.

“Now, just like Monkey Face, you’ll keep the hand with the slack line locked at the small of your back at all times, unless you’re going down,” He says with militant severity.

“Now, it’s going to be a lot heavier because this rope is longer. Don’t let yourself get complacent! You ready?” 

I’m not ready, I’ll never be ready- how on earth am I supposed to properly prepare myself to walk backwards off a cliff! Oddly, and I think it’s because I’ve been reading Stoker, my mind flashes to an article I read recently about the first wife of Vlad Tepes who threw herself from Poenari Castle to escape capture of the invading Ottomans. My dad gives my harness a last once over as I look over my shoulder at the lip of the cliff and wonder, if forced to choose, if I would face invasion or choose to jump to my death…

“ON BELAY!” 

I stand there, shivering despite the baking influence of the sun, and feel my pulse jump when I hear Amber’s distant shout. 

“BELAY ON!” 

“Okay, now go ahead and say ‘Climbing!’”

“C-Climbing!”

I almost hope not to hear it, but down below, Amber shouts “Climb on!”

“Alright sweety! Nice and slow...” 

Fate now officially tied to the mountain, my shoes crunch over bits of lose rock and black moss. My right leg keeps spasming, and it only gets worse when I step on to the big black car-floor mats that rest on the edge of the cliff to keep the ropes from being rubbed raw by the stone. My dad guides me by the elbows while I grip the ropes for dear life.

“Don’t look at your feet, look at me! That’s it, you’re fine. Keep hold on that rope now, don’t let it dip.”  

I shuffle back, and my heels are officially dangling over the precipice. Now that I’m here, a cool wind rakes its fingers up my back, chilling me to the core. It smells like river water, pine and dust. My eyes wander down, drawn to the ground as if I’m a meteor and it has a planetary pull. The tops of the lodge-poles rest just beyond my shoes, as does the winding Payette river that feeds into the lake I’ve so loved working this summer. But a field of boulders spans between me and that lovely vision, and if I fall, it won't be the water that catches me. 

“My legs are shaking too bad!” I squeak, utterly frozen and barely able to breathe let alone speak!

 “I don’t know if I can do this!” 

“Hey! Look at me.” 

I meet my father’s eyes, and even behind the black lenses I can see how set and severe they are. The doting man isn’t going to comfort me here. It didn’t work when he taught me how to ride a bike at eight years old, nor did such soft coaxing or negotiation work when I was afraid to ride my grandpa’s horse again after it threw me. He knows better than to try now. This loving man has been retired for over a year now, but these are the same eyes that kept his soldiers from losing their nerve in the face of combat during multiple tours overseas. I know what he’s going to say before he says it. 

“Relax. You’ve done this before, it’s no different.” 

“But not this high!” 

“Look. I can pull you off the rock and you can hike down on your own, or you can take a deep breath and get it done. It’ll only take a few minutes, and then it’s over. All you have to do is walk backwards and hold on tight. I won’t let you fall.” 

I swallow hard and nod. 

“Good. Now put your foot right there on that rock and stick your butt out like you’re sitting in a chair, and remember not to try to stay upright.”

Shaking so hard that I’m sure Amber can feel it through the rope, I put my foot where he guides me and begin to hyperventilate when all of a sudden my feet are on the cliff face and my entire body is hanging in space over two hundred forty feet above the ground. The tension in my harness is the only thing keeping me from flying off the handle! 

“Oh- ohmygosh! I can’t!” 

“Yes you can. Pull yourself together and extend your hand away just a little bit and step down, just like always. Good. That was perfect. You’re doing great-now just walk down. You’ve got this. The worst part is getting over the edge, and you’re almost there. Just one big step.”

I pluck deep gasps of air from the wind as I inch my toe back. The rock juts out beneath me and then retracts in a sharp overhang that feels both shallow and impossibly deep. 

“One big step, sweety. Come on.” 

Lifted by his every word, I inflate my lungs and slowly push the air out as I step down. For a moment I think I’m going to fall as I search with my proprioception for a place for my second foot. 

“Steady now!” My father commands, but to my horrified surprise my foot finds its purchase and suddenly I’m hanging. My borrowed orange harness digs into my thighs as I swivel my toes on the rock face and find purchase at last, the rope still clutched tightly in both of my hands, and just like magic, I’ve broken the barrier of fear.

“I did it!” I shout, shaking and terrified but filled with a strange and sublime thrill. Now that I’m off my trembling legs, the wind on my back almost feels like wings! It is fresh and cool. Wonderful and terrible- hanging two hundred forty feet above the earth. I grip the rope at the small of my back, take a deep breath, and woop with terrified pleasure as I take a hop down.