[Perry] Wherein Perry Goes Rock Climbing

So the first three months of the year tend to be a little busy in my family when it comes to the birthday department. There are four members of my family with birthdays between January and March.

Most years, we usually pick a day in mid to late February and do up everyone’s birthdays at once with some sort of get together.

This year was no different.

The initial plan was to head out for a day of trampoline dodgeball.

Yeah, you heard me. Trampoline-fucking-dodgeball.

Doesn’t that sound like a hilarious time?

Unfortunately, those plans fell through due to distance, availability and money so we opted for the backup option instead and trouped off to an indoor rock climbing center.

Now, I’ve never been rock climbing, indoor or out. Have you?

It was an interesting experience.

We started with a brief session on ‘bouldering.’ That’s when you’re shown a short wall with a whole bunch of knobbly little bits that you’re supposed to hold and navigate to the top of the ‘course’ as best as you can using only certain assigned colored holds.

It was half puzzle solving and half learning to plan your route before you actually went up.

It was here that I learned that as light as I always found myself (compared to the average guy my age and height), that light weight felt a lot heavier when you’re hanging on by your fingertips and the very tippy tips of your toes about four feet off the floor.

Following that were the harnesses.

Oh dear lord, the harnesses.

For one thing, stepping into a harness and clinching it tight sort of felt like being hugged by an amorous octopus.

…and given exactly where and how the straps felt the tightest and most binding? It was a VERY amorous octopus, if you catch my drift.

I mean, there were a few times throughout the course of the day where the straps slid up in just the wrong way and I started wondering if I’d ever have children.

We didn’t start climbing then, though. Because then, we had to learn how to tie a few knots, something that I was apparently much worse at than I thought. I had a hard time following along with the instructor’s instructions visually, sort of like the difficulty I initially had learning how to tie a proper knot for my tie. Eventually, the instructor had to come around to me and run through it again with a little child’s mnemonic about forming a snowman, giving him a scarf and punching him in the face (if you know how to tie a figure 8 knot, run through it and you’ll see it makes sense lol).

Then came belaying.

This is the method climbers use where one person at the bottom uses their weight to sort of anchor the person climbing against the threat of falling.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a story worth telling if I did it properly the first time, would it?

What happened was my older cousin James went climbing up a wall with me serving as his anchor.

What happened was that the guy was about 50% heavier than I was.

What happened was that he got to the top of the climb and, ready to come down, stopped holding his own weight.

That, of course, sent me freaking flying off my feet and toward the wall as his weight yanked me off mine. If my other cousin hadn’t been there to grab my legs, I’m not sure what would have happened but I’m assuming nothing good.

Hilarious, to be sure. But not good.

The rest of our lesson went without other issues and eventually we broke from the lesson group to find another wall to climb.

The first wall I decided to tackle was a fairly high one but it didn’t look too bad from the ground and I figured, what the hell. With James on the ground belaying for me, there’s no way I’d plummet screaming to my doom, right?

I was fine for most of the climb. Please keep in mind that this was my first time rock climbing at all really and I want to repeat that I was doing just fine.

About three quarters of the way up, though, there was a window. Not directly in front of me, but a bit off to the right, there was a window in the side of the building looking out onto the street below and I remember thinking to myself, “hmmm, the view out the window looks pretty high up.”

Then I looked down.

You ever get that feeling? You know…the Coyote feeling? I’m sure you have. It’s like when the Coyote chases the Roadrunner in the cartoons. he runs straight off a cliff but he doesn’t fall right away, does he? No, he’s perfectly fine for a couple of steps until he makes the mistake of looking down.

Yeah, that happened.

Looking down suddenly pounded home the fact that I was most of three stories above ground.

Very suddenly, I felt fragile and the handholds I was clinging to seemed a lot smaller than they were a second ago.

I made it the rest of the way up the wall alright and back down but I’ll admit to just you guys that there was a tiny bit of shakiness going on in my fingers and toes.

But that didn’t stop me from going up and down another wall a couple more times before the day was done.

It was a fun activity and I highly recommend it. It’ll stretch your body in ways you might not expect and if you’re in the same kind of shape I’m in, you’ll go through a day or two with some pleasant twinges in your shoulders, much like you’d get from good, honest exercise.

The day ended off with dinner at a Mexican restaurant downtown. There were no tables open so me and my cousins ended up sitting lined up at the bar which made for a wonderful unexpected picture.

Moral of the story?

Go rock climbing.

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[Perry] Not Everything Needs to Make Sense
[Perry] The Flag of Splenderificness
[Perry] Wherein Not All Things Need To Be Ambitious