But I digress- this particular evening I was reading one of John Keats’ letters to his brothers where he discusses “negative capability.” What? Never heard of it? Trying to wikipedia it as we speak? I’ll save you the trouble and give you the ubiquitous excerpt from the letter: Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” simple, right? Just accept phenomena and experiences as beautiful and don’t try to analyze it all away to a theory. As I reflected on the letter, which I’ve read several times since Grad School, I realized how well it complemented my experiences, and my mindset, during my week-long climbing road trip through Tahoe and Mammoth. So sit back, strap in, and enjoy (or criticize) some of my meditations from a week on the road pretending to be a dirt bag climber.
Alright, a little background here. The seven days I spent in early August driving the 395 was the direct result of my boss chastising me for carrying over a month of vacation time; yep, I was TOLD I needed to take a vacation, and had no idea how badly I had needed one until I had turned off my phone, turned up the radio and hit the road. It speaks a lot for your work when you get in trouble for NOT taking a holiday… we need more of that in the Corporate American zeitgeist! Workaholism be dammed, my buddy Gavin and I planned almost the entire trip while at a hanging belay that spring out in Big Bear. I would already be up in Tahoe for a wedding, so we just decided to meet up at Lover’s Leap, send some lines there and then drive wherever we damn well pleased.
It was one of the most uncomfortable starts to a climb I’ve ever experienced. I had started the weekend beset by decorum and ritual as a wedding guest at a large wedding where I knew very few of the people involved. I had exhausted my “thank yous,” “what do you dos,” and other platitudes of small talk. I had hidden the fact that I spent the morning before the wedding curled up in the fetal position in a meadow outside of a coffee house throwing up the $300 tequila that custom and politeness dictated I had to drink as a guest during the pre-wedding festivities. And now, I was literally sitting between two dudes arguing over the efficacy of double ropes at a semi-hanging belay station 400 feet off the ground. Gavin and Wayne had been climbing for almost 3 days non-stop and their nerves were pretty raw, along with their patience. Not the best way to start my trip but, in some sick way, it was still fun…even when you look at how fucked up our anchor was (see above photo)- definitely glad nothing went wrong on that one!
That afternoon Wayne left, and the tension seemed to lift. Gavin and I hadn’t been climbing and camping together for any period of time yet, thus we weren’t contemplating clubbing each other with a #4 camalot. I led my second trad lead the next morning, a 5.6 called “Knapsack Crack,” and then we headed over to get on “Bear’s Reach,” a classic TM Herbert line that a couple people have died on. I spent the night before brooding in the tent, hoping that the rain would get worse and give us an excuse to skip it, but there we were! In retrospect, what a treat it was. “Bears” was quintessential rock climbing, like the kind you dream of as a kid reading National Geographic magazines. The whole thing was dead vertical with beautiful movement and positive holds. Like Keats said, just live in the uncertainties and doubts, don’t overanalyze anything or any danger. Accept where you are and that you’ve come there of your own volition, absorb the experience like a sponge, live, and then move on. The route was a real treat that I hope to go back and swing leads on someday.
Getting restless with the area, we moved on south towards Tuolumne after we jammed our gear into every presentable crevice in the Prius. It was almost farcical, just how much stuff we had piled into that car and the disparity between the intended purpose of our gear and the economical banality of a hybrid hatchback. Tuolumne was anything but a bucolic playground, we never made it past the hundred car line just to enter the park. Instead we flipped a bitch in the middle of the “parking lot” line and headed down to Mammoth. As luck would have it, we stumbled upon a recently vacated campsite right next to Lake Mary and our alpine objective for the next day, Crystal Crag.
Within fifteen minutes of being in Mammoth, I had concluded it was a rad town; I could live there! The campsite, however, was full of families that we regularly offended with our swearing, our drinking, and our general need to point out all the pragmatic steps to camping that clearly eluded them and their not-so-keen common sense. The dude next to us was an LA county firefighter…his family ended up being fined and asked to leave because they couldn’t even succeed in dowsing their campfire in the mornings, not to mention the guy nearly chopped off his friggin’ finger because he didn’t know how to use an axe! Somehow the years of fire academy must have been lost on him? Even more humorous was the morning we were the only people who slept through a “terrifying” bear encounter. READ: The bear sniffed someone’s open bear box and plopped down next to a tree to scratch itself. Anticlimactic for sure.
The climbing at Mammoth was in complete opposition to our circus-like camping situation. We climbed the North Arête of Crystal crag. It was super classic and a couple times I could have fooled myself into thinking I was climbing in the alps. The rock itself is equally amazing, and Gavin was freaking out and gopro-ing not the climb, but the cool quartz band that he dubbed “superman’s island thingy,” like in the old movies. We traversed the ridge to the true summit, and I freaked out and cursed the gods on the heinous (apparently) 4th class walk off. I unofficially named it the death walk off and have decided I would gladly leave some gear and rap that rotting granite trough than walk/slide off the thing again. Gavin just laughed at me. We finished out our trip with some sport climbing and, just so my hipster friends don’t feel left out, a single boulder problem.
The trip ended abruptly when I finally reached my mental breaking point on “Finger Lockin’ good,” a classic route on Mammoth Crest. After seven days of continuous climbing, my body was a little banged up, but my mind was absolutely destroyed. Even Keats, or beer, couldn’t calm me down and I sat at another belay while Gavin lead a thin finger seam that had bad news written all over it- a fall factor two, but luckily he pulled through it. I unceremoniously announced my surrender and said I wanted the hell off. We got down and jetted back to Orange county that night, all the while still decompressing from the sensory overload of the week. In keeping consistent with surreal shifts in mindset, that night I came home reeking from a week of camping, climbing, and bad hygiene into a house full of drunk old people. It felt odd to clean up and drink wine in the security of a patio chair after so many dubious belay stations and awkward movements that could have resulted in a fall. The trip started with a wedding and ended with a grilling of how are sales, etc, etc from my Uncle and Father, the consummate businessmen. All the while they sipped their wine and reminisced over corporate shenanigans and victories in their glory days and expected me to play along and take my place in that ritual of American upper-middle-class manhood.
In that moment I felt a nagging sense of discomfort as if I didn’t belong but, in all absurdity, I knew this was my family. It was something more oblique than that, and it didn’t materialize into something palpable until this evening when I sat down with Keats to read some letters and bitchin’ poetry. That’s when I realized that both of these events that beset my trip, and my work life that circumvents my days off and vacations, only helped to magnify the sense of accomplishment, wonder and rejuvenation that holistically materialized while I lived purposefully, simply, and without the reductive judgments we are constantly forced to make in modern existence. Keats himself once wrote “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts,” I don’t think I could find a more pithy way to sum up my trip. So, my final thoughts: Live in uncertainties and doubts, knowing full well that if you embrace them and accept the dangers (physical or emotional) rather than defaulting to scrutinizing every wonder, fear, or love into oblivion, ad absurdum, ad infinitum, you will feel alive. Get outside!
