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A supposedly fun thing - Rock Climbing
We go to a rock-climbing gym on Ring Road outside the city.
The first Nepali woman to summit Everest climbs there and they have lockers,
which for some reason reassures me that this is a professional and safe gym.
Kids are playing cricket in the dust nearby.
We are belayed by a stout, muscular man who is clearly a
climber himself and gives off an aura of competence until I notice him sending
text messages from his cell phone while we are up on the wall.
Other employees of the gym gather round us--to watch or help
belay, I think at first, but it turns out they are just there to shoot pigeons
with a slingshot. (There is a crust of pigeon crap along the top of the wall.)
One girl, about sixteen, practices bouldering moves. I hope she gets a chance
to go up Everest too.
I am forced to admit to myself near the top of my first
route that I have a fear of heights. Leah, who has never climbed before, is not
afraid. Instead, the climbing wall brings out an aggressive,
aspiring-law-partner side of her that I have never seen before. She is a skinny
girl but on the wall she is all muscle and when she is descending from her
first particularly challenging climb I watch in awe as she lets off a
completely authentic fist pump. I should feel proud but I am intimidated. She
puts her hair into a ponytail and reminds me of Demi Moore in that movie about
the Navy Seals, but I'm not sure Leah can normally even do a pull up.
At first, I am strutting (difficult to do when your testicles
are scissored between nylon straps) and trying to talk shop with the
professional climbers because I can climb the intermediate walls and Leah can
not. I do this by dint of my arms, which have always been inexplicably strong.
Basically I let my legs hang and yank myself up the wall like a muscled
paraplegic. This is an ill-advised technique. After half an hour I can no
longer make a fist, and have to stand in my emasculating harness with my
quivering fingers, next to the girl holding the slingshot, watching Leah
scrambling up the walls, misting us with excess testosterone, and giving
herself inspirational pep talks near the top (actually saying once, loud enough
that I can hear it fifty feet below and in what sounds at that distance like a
low growl, "You can do this").
There are Nepalis gathered on i-beams at a construction site
behind us, watching her climb, and I feel compelled by a primitive section of
the male fore-brain to make another attempt, so I choose an easy wall but lose
all grip strength half way up and after dangling like a dead worm on a hook,
batting at the handholds with limp wrists, have to whisper to the belayer that
my muscles are shot and will he please let me down.
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