La Petite Epic: Learning the Ropes, French Style

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It all began with an overhanging limestone pocket at Wild Iris. Actually there were two of them, and, due to their distance apart and the lack of other features surrounding them, I was supposed to be holding onto one and heel hooking in the other. The problem was, however, that I am unfamiliar with the art of heel hooking. The concept seemed simple enough but each time I tried to lift my left leg into the pocket, I felt like I was beginning an upside-down cartwheel.
    “Try the Gaston!” yelled my partner Charlie.
    “Who?” I screamed as my arms gave way and I launched into the space below.
    While I hung on the rope trying to catch my breath, I looked up at the route that had suddenly taken on the equivalent appeal of a high-school calculus test. I envisioned a bright red “C” spray-painted on the cliff as I was lowered to the ground. While Charlie untied my welded knot I looked up and counted the seven additional bolts that stood between my high point and the chains, and decided it was time to learn how to sport climb.
    It did not take long for me to conclude that learning to sport climb would best be accomplished in France. Where better to perfect my skills than the modern Mecca of overhanging limestone, pain au chocolat, and merlot rolled all into one glorious pastoral scene? Plus, I explained to Charlie, I spoke French, or at least I took French classes in high school and a trip to France might finally be a way to make something of my illustrious education.
    Two months later we flew over the Atlantic with our luggage nestled below. Packing had been easy: a rack of draws, two ropes and plenty of extra halter-tops thrown in to take up the extra space. In the spirit of vacation we’d outlawed any prior planning, guidebook purchasing, or worrying. This is the way to travel, I thought to myself as I emptied my three-ounce bottle of gin into a plastic glass.
    By the time we were an hour outside of Marseilles I began to question our lack of foresight and absence of a map beyond the small sheet from Hertz signifying its branch locations in Southern France. Though we’d located our destination (the Verdon) on the map, Hertz apparently had a need to place its logo directly over the space which rep- resented our highway exit. Seeing this as an opportunity to showcase my verbal acumen, I suggested a quick stop for directions. As we decelerated on the exit I began to clear my throat and gargle my “r’s,” warming up for my first foray into the French language in more than a decade.
    But, five minutes later, when I was face to face with a real live French person, my entire speech vanished from my brain and all that I could recall of my extensive studies was a nursery rhyme about three elephants.
    “I thought you said you spoke French,” Charlie said when he noticed the blank stare on the attendant’s face.
    This comment, coming from the man whose only French vocabulary came from the chorus of “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir,” only served to make me try harder.
    “Por favor, nous neccitez vamos a climbing,” I said with authority.
    “Nice Spanish,” Charlie said as he took out our map and used the international language of finger pointing to get us on our way.
    By the time we arrived in the little town of La Palud outside of the Verdon I had my communication down to a science. Charlie, for his part, pretended not to notice when I returned from the local bakery with a baguette instead of directions to the climbing shop.
 
By nightfall we had procured a guidebook, and were splitting a bottle of red wine and picking out the next day’s route. Tradsters at heart, Charlie and I chose the Verdon for its famous long routes. After my second glass of wine, though, I began to get confused as I flipped through glossy pages and saw the multitudes of routes that had a funny looking icon next to them that looked suspiciously like a nut. I poured Charlie another glass of wine and hoped he would not remember it was me who suggested we should leave the nuts at home. “Nuts,” I’d said, “They don’t even have a word for nuts in French.”
    By 11 a.m. the next day I cursed my stupidity. While I’d expected long runouts, I did not anticipate trying to keep my head together and hyperventilating while staring at a perfect placement for a #6 Stopper. In an attempt to assuage my growing anxiety, I hung off my right arm and traded out my wire-gate biner for a locker on my light- weight quickdraw to use at the next bolt, whose existence I had yet to visually confirm.
    That evening Charlie and I sat in the campground trying to fashion jammed knots with any extra cord. Any hopes of making friends with local climbers began to disappear as they walked by and shook their heads. “Vous-etes Americains?” asked one woman with forearms bigger than my calves.
    “How’d you guess?” I muttered, not even bothering to try it in French.

The next morning, while our European counterparts were sleeping in their tents or performing their morning constitutionals of cigarettes, Charlie and I were the first to arrive the bakery. When Charlie ordered a Café Americano, I shoved my elbow into his side and covered up his yelp with a request for a cappuccino. “We’re in France for Christ sake,” I said.
    “Actually,” the woman behind the counter replied, “what would be most appropriate is a café au lait.”
    I stared at her, taking in her jet-black hair arranged in a casual twist and knee-length A-line skirt. She went on to describe the difference between each drink in impeccable English.
    “Now that’s a woman with a knack for languages,” Charlie said when we walked out of the bakery. I nodded, wondering who in the world bakes in a skirt and wishing we’d started our day with Clif Bars instead.
    By the third day at the Verdon, Charlie and I decided to take the plunge on a classic long route. At 7 a.m.I watched as he jotted down route notes on a napkin, noting the powdered sugar cascading from his pastry onto our plan for the day. A Xerox machine would have been impossible to find, and I had my doubts about the resiliency of a cotton napkin.
    “It’s sport climbing,” Charlie replied when I asked if he wanted a piece of paper, “You just go up.”
    Two more pastries and another café au lait later, we were standing on the edge of the Verdon, strapping into our harnesses, and looking into the void. Though many of the routes are labeled with delicate red paint, ours was not, and we’d resorted to a highly refined anchor-counting system to arrive at what we thought was our line. The morning’s approach took approximately four-and-a-half minutes, and by the third rappel the sugar and caffeine burning through my bloodstream caused my heart to flutter and hands to shake. By the time I was perched on the two-foot-wide grass ledge, my bloated belly began to mount a revolt. I looked between my feet at the river several thousand feet below, in front of me at the small painted arrow pointing upwards, and above me at the myriad bolted lines. Our napkin topo showed only one climb. Its features were limited to one roof on pitch four and the approximate lengths of each pitch.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” I announced, grabbing the topo from Charlie’s hands, figuring I’d at least found a use for it.
    After three pitches and several pendulums, I decided maybe we were not ready for the Verdon. The top of the cliff was hours away and we’d already left four bail biners as we swung from line to line. “I can see a roof!” Charlie shouted triumphantly from above as I fed out more rope and wondered if I should point out that every pitch in the Verdon
has a roof.
    By the fifth pitch we had settled on a line, chosen for the plethora of chalk and big holds. It took me fifteen feet of climbing to realize the obvious downsides of the easiest route on the cliff as I tunneled through yet another French version of a scrub oak on my way to the next bolt. When we finally topped out my arms and legs looked worse than they did after a week at Indian Creek. Sport climbing, I thought to myself as I wondered how to say Neosporin in French, is supposed to be easier than this.

The next morning we waved goodbye to the Verdon in the rearview mirror and drove the winding roads north to Ceüse. Two hours into the journey our gas tank was hovering on empty and we pulled into the nearest station to fuel up. As Charlie fit the nozzle into the car, I noticed that the dispenser next to ours looked suspiciously like diesel. “Are you sure that’s not diesel?” I asked as he contracted the lever.
    “Nah, this is the regular stuff.” The Euro counter started to spiral upward. I looked again at the machine next to ours, saw its yellow label reading “Disele, Gazole 97”and noticed our tank had gazole written on it as well. Never having learned this word in my high-school French class, I decided to cast my faith in Charlie’s innate car knowledge. After paying the equivalent of forty dollars for eight liters of gazole, we sped away in our blue box.
    The road soon began climbing upwards and I casually asked what would happen should a person put diesel in a regular car.
    “Can’t be that bad,” Charlie answered, as the car suddenly lurched forward with a groan and a creak unlike any vehicular noise either of us had previously heard. Within a hundred yards, Charlie had to put the car in neutral to turn it around and go back to town. I made a mental note to double-check his mechanical expertise at a later time.
    Ten minutes later we spotted the gas station and I got out of the car to practice a whole new set of French words. “J’avais une petite problem,” I said to the attendant, feeling momentarily impressed with myself until I realized I would have to continue.
    “La yellow, ici es diesel, oui?” I tried, wishing I was wearing the bakery woman’s skirt instead of being four days into my current pair of shorts. “Es un problemo,oui? Nous car n’aime pas la diesel, oui?”
    The attendant looked at me in confused disbelief and proceeded to rattle off a string of words that I interpreted as one big, “why?”
    I shrugged my shoulders and rolled my eyes. “Je ne sais pas,ce n’est pas le fault de moi,” I added, happy that Charlie decided to stay in the car while I talked to the attendant.
    Four hours and $160 dollars later we were back on the road. The diesel was siphoned, fuel injectors cleaned and both of us chastised (or maybe cursed at, since I am still not that up on French swearing) about the difference between gazole and sans plomb.
    “Apparently yellow is always diesel,” I said as the gas station faded from the rear-view mirror.
    “Glad to see your French is improving,” Charlie replied as he depressed the accelerator.
 
After the four-hour diesel detour, we arrived at Ceüse in the dark and pitched the tent by car headlight. The next morning we headed up the hill to the cliff, thankful for the forty-five-minute approach that many Europeans claim is reason enough not to climb at Ceüse. When we got to the cliff, sans guidebook, we used the time-honored European tradition of finding the most popular routes by looking for the ones with the most cigarette butts at the base. Once we found a route that was not completely overhanging, I cleared the rain-sodden butts away with my shoe and flaked the rope. I was up for the first lead of the day and as I cried for a take at the second bolt, Charlie backed up to hold me and promptly stepped into the other sign of a popular route, toilet paper and all.
    By the end of our day we had attempted eight routes and finished three — I decided we needed a new strategy. Since being in France did not seem to be the solution to sport climbing, than perhaps being French might. That night we drove into town to buy cigarettes and muesli, and promised each other there would be no more pastries until the end of the trip. By 11 a.m. the next day I had picked a worthy objective and stood at its base, smoking my first cigarette in twelve years as I tightly cinched the Velcro on my shoes and tied into the rope.
    “Au revoir,” I said to Charlie as I wrapped my fingers around the first holds.
    “Hasta luego,” he replied, scanning his surroundings for possible hazards.
    Three bolts up, I wondered if my lightheadedness was cause for concern when I saw the pocket to my left. This was my chance. I threw up my foot and caught the edge with the back of my heel and tried not to yelp as I rocked my weight onto the stance. I swung my butt down, took a breath, and launched upwards, missing my hold by a mile and flying into the space below. That afternoon we hiked down to camp leaving our quickdraws hanging on the cliff above, glimmering in the evening sun. Three days, thirteen tries, and a new nicotine addiction later, I finally reached the chains.
    As we drove back to the airport I took a mental tally of my vacation. By my count, I onsighted two climbs and redpointed four during two weeks in France. The sixteen biners we’d left behind twinkled in my mind, and I wondered if it was a fair trade. As I mulled it over I massaged my heel and watched the French countryside whirl by, thinking I might even feel a callous.

I’m traveling again. Back on planes, pilfering free internet from sidewalk coffee shops, and cutting the top off my travel face moisturizer to eek out the last of the goodness. After eighteen nights in my own bed it’s time to leave and check out the mattresses of the eastern seaboard. It’s time to put on my game face, the one that gets me through security with nail clippers and belay knifes and does not flinch when Katherine, the gate attendant who cannot pronounce Baltimore, tells us it will be yet another forty minutes before our plane arrives.
    I live in a bubble. Boulder, Colorado, where everything is so perfect it’s imperfect. Most people agree with me on major political points. Everyone recycles. Volkswagen van drivers recognize other Volkswagen van drivers with a two-fingered wave. I had not left the bubble for the past three weeks and when I did last Friday I realized what I had been missing. Normal people. The pride in that normalcy.
    I’m flying over the flooded Mississippi looking at lakes that used to be towns. I’m watching a graphic episode of Sex and the City on my computer while the woman next to me reads the bible with an accompanying pamphlet, complete with exercises, entitled “Letting the scripture explain your life.” The kid on my other side has a head that is pulsating in time to the beat of the music seeping out of his oversized headphones. I don’t get this at home.
    On my next flight I elbow-joust with an elderly gentleman for an armrest until I finally turn to him, make eye contact, and offer to rotate the perch on a twenty-minute basis. He agrees.
    I have not spent more than twenty-five days in a row in my own bed since I left the bed I shared with my ex-husband three years ago. Maybe it’s time to admit that I am on the go. Maybe its time to admit that this life—this one of random seatmates and conversations and observations of the other, is what I am really after. Because if I look at my calendar for the next twelve months I cannot find a twenty-five day stretch anywhere. Maybe it’s time to settle in, get on a plane, and pull out my favorite seatback glossy. I did that today and flipped right to The Million-Germ Eliminating Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer. I earmarked it. Then I wrote this note. And then I went back and un-creased the page. What if there are two million germs? I want the toothbrush that will take care of that. I might need it where I am going.

I got an email from a friend last week that lives in Addis Ababa. “Saw your book at the Hilton,” she wrote, “next to Time Magazine’s Africa Addition. Does this mean you’ve finally arrived?”
    Nope. But my book has.
After almost three months, Vertical Ethiopia finally landed in Addis for distribution. The first print run happened all at the same time (that’s what makes it a print run) and on February 14th, half of the books were loaded onto a plane from Dubai to Amsterdam to New York to Chicago, where some got on a truck to me in Denver and the rest on to my distributor in Houston. I had them in hand on the 21st. The other half was going to go by sea to Addis. Addis is less than 1600 miles from Dubai. It took the books eighty days to travel that distance, the majority of which time they were hanging out in Djibouti, waiting to be cleared for import and export. It took that long. It should not have. But that’s what happens these days in that part of the world sometimes.  
    The plan behind this project was to work on a book that would communicate about Ethiopia both to foreigners and to locals. Now the locals can finally see the result. My book is all over Addis, in Bookstores, hotels, and hopefully soon, a few coffee shops. The Ethiopian Birr price on the back is finally coming in handy.
    On the other side of the Atlantic, I had a television interview a few weeks ago for NECN in Boston. Over three million people in six states got to see me talk about Ethiopia. And for those who missed it, it was posted online. Check it out HERE. But be warned. You will first have to watch a Porsche Add.
    The clip comes on fast and loud and before you know it the sleek 90K car is zipping into your visual field. And then they cut to Ethiopia. It’s perfect. It’s Porsche’s in Ethiopia—almost.
When I was living in Addis, the arrival of any new car was announced through the community faster than news of a food shortage or political event. Taxi drivers, waiters, government officials and foreigners would all say the same thing.
    “Did you see the new BMW? That makes eight.”
    “Nine.” Another person would clarify, “The black 750 as number 8.”
    “I thought it was the yellow three series…”
    And so conversation would continue until all of the BMW’s in Ethiopia were accounted for. And then they would start with the Audis.
In Ethiopia, the government still taxes vehicles at 100%.  Before my team came to Ethiopia to climb I told them how much it would be to rent our vehicles. “But that’s expensive,” one teammate said, “Isn’t it supposed to be cheap in Ethiopia?”
No, it isn’t. Not when the system imposes those taxes. Not when it takes 3 months for a book to get from Dubai to Addis—even when the book was produced in Addis in the first place.
    In the US, we get everything immediately. I had a television interview and fifteen minutes later it was up on line. My friends recently climbed a big peak in Alaska and it was on another website before they’d even flown out of the mountains. It’s fast and now. So fast and now that maybe the irony of a Porsche add before a piece on Ethiopia goes unnoticed. I didn’t see it the first time I watched it. But I did see the emails from my friends in Ethiopia when they saw my book. I’m trying to catch more things in my life. Really. But then again, I still didn’t notice the new beemer in Addis last March. It was a five-series, I think.

I did my first lead climbs at the Gunks, in New York. Back then I was feisty, eager, and adamant that I could pull anything off. After my first lead tying off trees for pro, I decided I was ready for more, hopped on a climb, placed two pieces, and took one of the biggest whippers of my life. On a climb called Baby. The Gunks never really got to be more for during my time out east. It was where I constantly got schooled, while in school in New Jersey. My friend Andrew and I would roam the carriage road looking for a likely two-pitch 5.6 on which to spend the majority of our day. We would toggle the guidebook to our harness, appraise the route, and often times come down with elaborate rappels before even getting to the top.
    Last weekend I was back at the Gunks for the first time in twelve years. It was just like I remembered it. It kicked my butt. I didn’t really expect anything different, and in fact I might have been disappointed if it had seemed easy. What then would I have thought of my younger self?
    In the middle of my book tour I’m also on a climbing tour of the US. Quick forays to Vantage, Washington, Rumney, NH, the Gunks—all in-between dodging rolling luggage in the B Concourse at DIA. The climbing helps keep me sane, but I’ve also had to re-adjust my view of what climbing means in the midst of all of this movement.
    Bodies take time to catch up. I’m bad at letting mine do just that. I have clients all the time who feel out of sorts that first day we are up on a climb together when the day before they were operating on brain or teaching a five-year old math. I have always told them to go easy on themselves. Now I need to take my own advice.
    Yesterday, back on the home turf in Eldorado Canyon, it was no different. Somehow committing to heady leads above loose flakes with mirco cams was not jiving with making sure I had enough shampoo to make it through a seven-day trip out east.
    If you let climbing fully get under your skin, it might never not be a part of you. Believe me, I’ve tried to pretend I don’t need it. Tried to pretend it’s not the one thing that cuts the rest of me off—that part of me that cannot slow down, cannot break out of mental loops, cannot stop thinking of what and how and why and why not.
    But then I actually go and climb.
    I’d like to think this recent burst of travel has taught me to better appreciate the other people who climb in this world. Those who don’t just have access to it every day. And to then, in turn, appreciate climbing more. That felt like a good thing to contemplate yesterday with the Eldo river rushing below me, drowning out any sense of a city but also any sense of full composure, with the air cutting beneath the roof, with hollow blocks, with rounded holds, slippery feet, and then, finally, a respite.
    For me, yesterday and as of late, it may not be pretty and it may not be graceful, but it’s climbing.

I’m home in Boulder for the next five days, three days longer than I have been in town for three months. I’ve been looking forward to this week for a long time, but when I drove into town last night I felt empty instead of relived. I’ve become addicted to the road. The travel creates a sense importance. I need to be places, need to talk to people. Now I am just at home doing laundry.
    I wonder if I could do anything, if I just started doing it. And this is not about the skill, but more the tolerance. What can we get used to?
    A few weeks ago in Houston I was careening down the highway at 80mph and getting passed on each side of the 7-lane highway at 12:30 pm on my way to a hotel. The dome light in my rental car was out, and I used the slight glow from my dying phone to illuminate my directions. In the middle of it, instead of saying I was over it, I was trying to figure out if I could do it. But it really does not matter what you can do. It matters what you want to do. Or it does if you have the luxury of having the time and the resources to make changes from one to the other.
    I’m traveling around the country, at the tail end of the initial tour push. Along the way I am seeing everyone from my past, and just now figured out that beyond reconnecting with old friends, I am also trying on alternate versions of myself. There is the urban planner with his pediatric neurologist wife, the entrepreneur, the stay at home dad, the public defender. We all started from the same point. I know I’m lucky to do this. I’m lucky to do a lot of this. But it’s also incredibly tweaky to your head. Because after trying on every pair of jeans nothing feels good anymore and all you want is to just get out of the dressing room.
    And so I come home. And I did it even before Boulder. On Friday, my friend Sarah picked me up in her dying Previa Van at the end of the Commuter Rail outside of Boston. I sat on the floor in the back and realized I was breathing differently for the first time in weeks. I like to make things difficult for myself, always have. At one point I was supposed to go to the University of Chicago for college and the reasons I decided that this was the right choice were the following: everyone said it was the socially hardest place to go to school in the US, that it was impossible to have a life there, and that the academics were insane. Great, I thought, I am in. I will go and prove that I can do that.
    But proving that I can make it from the financial district to Lowell with 130 lbs of luggage is really not proving anything. I didn’t do this in my twenties, back then I was building a strawbale house on 4.5 acres bordering national forest land. When I left that house and that life, I thought I might have missed out on something else, that I might have wanted to be in central Boston or Miami, or that I should have been. But what I’ve come to figure out is that I might be in the right place after all. I get off the plane in Denver and think yes, this is home. But it only became home once I started going away.
    Choices are intoxicating. For all of us. Almost everyone I have visited with says the same thing. It’s like we try to limit them and augment them at the same time. I’d like to think that at some point we just chill the hell out and live them. Or that I will.