Bored to Bliss

"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"is the kind of film that an ordinary audience will find so boring that they'll either leave halfway through or focus their eyes on the dull glow of their smartphone. But this film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is, if you're patient enough, a methodic, dream-like meditation on life, death and karmic reinvention.
Uncle Boonmee is a Thai man suffering from kidney failure who  has enlisted his sister-in-law and a couple of young men to care for him while he bustles on with his regular duties on his tamarind and bee farm. One night, Boonmee's deceased wife appears at the dinner table followed shortly by his vanished son, who has taken on the form of a kind of mythic ape. As Boonmee's time of death creeps out of the ubiquitous tangled jungle we are taken on an almost lackadaisical tour through a few surreal vignettes, including one where a princess is seduced by a charming catfish.
Mr Weerasethakul has a knack for this sort of filmic magical realism. As wonderfully bizarre and sometimes startlingly strange things go on his characters, behaving as if in a dream, don't react like you'd expect. No one screams when an ape man sits down at the dinner table; they offer him leftovers and show him photo albums. The result for me was almost like when I've finally finished a boulder problem that's felt impossible for years; a feeling of blooming content.
"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"is well worth it's two hours on the screen, though I did check the time once or twice. If you're a fan of David Lynch or Terrence Malick, I'm prepared to say you'll enjoy this film, but if your favorite filmmaker is David Fincher, you'll be bored to death and probably quite annoyed by that catfish.
Uncle Boonmee trailer

Imperfect Betsy

With a new storm huffing at the door,  I trudged out to Middle Elden with friends Matt and Spence. Middle Elden lounges in the sun all day and even when it's cold enough in town for snow, it can be almost warm enough in the protected canyon to take your shirt off, find a nice rock to sit on and drink tropical cocktails out of coconuts. Well, it's not really that warm, but the snow melts fast.

Not fast enough, it turns out. After warming up we labored up-canyon in search of Entering Betsy. There was enough snow on top of Broken Symmetry, a beautifully pure line of crimps, pinches, and slopers up a steep wall with a flat landing, that it would be impossible to top the problem out.
Whatever, we had Betsy on mind and she was all that mattered. Matt  and I had spent the day before at the Waterfall plugging cams and climbing cracks. He'd spent most of the afternoon talking up this problem and the area.
Betsy is a problem named as some kind of male assertion on another after one stole the others girlfriend. Entering Betsy is the tastefully crude name of the low-start. It begins with a large dynamic move from underclings to a hueco and then climbs sloping crimps to an enigmatic top-out. It looks like a three-star problem worth twice the hike.
But somehow, in the few hundred feet between Broken Symmetry and Entering Betsy, we got hopelessly, miserably turned around. Matt, the only one of us who'd been to Middle Elden before, seemed to have no idea where he was anymore. He dropped his pad and wandered through the snow and the maze of jumbled boulders and never found Betsy.
I did, long after our muscles were cold again and the snow was seeping through to our socks. I saw a small cave and, since one of the walls was covered in a glossy patina of ice I wanted to get a closer look at, I climbed through and found Betsy on the other side. Of course, the top of the problem was coated in a thin veneer of snow.

The buzz of climbing was gone, though we tried to find something dry for another hour. After climbing one, kind of loose problem way up on one of the canyon's sides, we decided to leave and try Broken Symmetry on the way out.
Walking back down I wondered if the rest of Broken Symmetry would be wet. Earlier, it's snow cap was melting so fast it was pouring off the lip of the boulder and leaving all the face holds dry. now though, it had cooled down and the snow underfoot gave a satisfying crunch with each step.
Matt's dog, Roxanne raced ahead, occasionally turning back as if to say, "come on, this way."
Contributing to the comedy of errors, only the crux hold of Broken Symmetry was wet. It was enough to make the problem unclimbable and to make all of us smile.

Some days just don't come out of the mold shaped for rock climbing the same way some days, like today, don't allow decent writing or perfect luck. I once spent a stubborn week in the back of my truck in Red Rocks reading The Grapes of Wrath and waiting for it to stop raining. My summer was spent racing thunderstorms to the various bouldering areas in central Colorado, races I usually lost. And what I remember about all those days isn't the frustration with imperfection and rotten luck, but the tight comfort of my sleeping bag and the taste of wild raspberries I picked while wandering around in the rain and repeating the mantra, "at least my skin is waterproof,"a thought that can get me through most moist discomfort.
Going to Middle Elden was a bust, but it was still fun, and in my mind, worth every minute of unbalanced walking and cold feet. What I'll remember about this first trip to Middle Elden is the comedy of errors, the glossy ice near Entering Betsy and how much fun a dog can have running in the old crunchy snow. Next time, I'll bring the tropical drinks.

Rest Days and Drive-Bys

Winter sunrise in The Tanks. It's that time of year once again, when the desert crawls with smelly people, when Foosball and Bocce become spectator sports, El Pasito is standing room only and all the new kids can't stop talking about how good the tortillas from the Vista are. Hueco Tanks is a place of hard bouldering, a place of Pull Down, Not Out top outs, of bruised fingertips and cracked cuticles. At The Tanks you have to rest, there are no weeks straight of bouldering. No, rest days are essential and sometimes it's those days that become cemented in mind while the others melt away like sand from an hourglass.
I've never spent a full season in El Paso, but I've done a couple month-long trips down there. I turned 18 by the fire pit at The Rock Ranch, climbed my hardest graded boulder problem, and sustained my biggest climbing related injury falling off that same problem on one of my many tries.
Saying that I broke my back is a bit dramatic, but I did indeed fracture a vertebra. Stress fracture, so tiny it will never heal. But in Hueco, even after I fell so badly, I didn't know how hurt I was. The pain was something awful, like my vertebra was simply not in the right position anymore and every time I moved the serrated edges of the break cut deep into the surrounding tissue.
But I was on a climbing trip so I kept climbing, kept falling, kept hurting more and more. I was forever picturing the source of pain deep in my back and hoping every night before I fell asleep that the pain would be gone by morning.
I started taking more and more rest days, eventually reading through all the books I'd brought. I sat by the fire with a couple guys from New York, Frank, Yuri, and the usual Rock Ranch fixtures. I spent days with the New Yorkers in their site and shooting at kangaroo rats with an air-soft gun. We found a bottle of glue and glued rocks together so we could try to rip them apart again. The word Boredom was  growing in font-size in my mind, and my back, even after a few days of immobility, still shot ice up my spine if I moved wrong.
I had just a few more days left in The Tanks and decided to give the whole rock-climbing thing another try. I was paralyzed with fear that whatever I was doing to my back was permanent, that I'd tweak it in some way and never move my legs again, or something. But I went on a tour anyway. When I was hitting the last hold of Three Years Dead, I felt something separate. I mantled and tried to stand up strait. I couldn't, I was stuck in a hunch like some ancient man. I needed help taking my climbing shoes off.
That night I drove into El Paso and, guided by that giant star on the hill over the border, to the hospital.

The muscle relaxants I was prescribed made my hands feel like they weren't attached, as if there were balloons tied to my wrists and my arms hung limp in the air. There was nothing left for me to do in Texas but sit watching TV, drooling.
Then Yuri and the New Yorkers asked me if I wanted to go shoot some guns.
Hell yes I did.
A few cars full of people sped across the desert to someone's trailer where some illegal activity took place behind closed doors. We were ready to be Irresponsible, to lay all NRA approved shooting rules aside and, beer cans beware, practice our gangster skills.
Armed with a 9mm and a 30-30 we moved quickly from your standard slow trigger squeeze to the hollywood approved sideways approach and the hip shot. Someone appeared with a camera and started to go through tremendous efforts to get the right shot. He lay on his back is the soft dust, changed lenses every thirty seconds, and stared at his camera screen with a seriousness lost on everyone else. We were having fun. Laughing, smiling trying to come up with more ways to make things more ridiculous.
"What about a drive-by?" someone suggested.
Brilliant. We set some cans on the hillside next to the road.
A group piled into a mini van with the guns and the driver turned up the radio, which happened to be tuned to NPR. The van turned around and gravel flew from under the tires as it gained momentum. The back door sprung open and someone shouted, "Break Yo'self,"before unloading a clip into the hillside while Diane Rehm's wobbly voice screamed from the stereo.
When the ammunition was gone and everyone had had a turn we all went to El Pasito to celebrate. I didn't think of my back or find myself in any places of great narcissism. Boredom wasn't even in the fine print. It was a simple, fun day narrated by the whims of a bunch of rock climbers with too much time on hand and an entire desert at their disposal.

Even though I didn't climb my project that trip, even though I couldn't climb for half a year, it's still the most memorable time I've spent sleeping in my truck, if not for anything but the friends I made and the feeling of firing a gun out of a moving car.
Winter is here again and the New Year is, as of now, unplanned. I'll be driving south with fingers so sweaty they slip on the steering wheel and NPR turned way way up so the voices crackle. Soon, I'll be back in the desert after a two year hiatus from Hueco, and I couldn't be more excited. People wonder if the restrictions ruin it, if it's just too much trouble. Maybe it is for some, but for me, the smell a rare desert  rain, the sight of an escaped Ibex, and winter sunrises' make it worth it. Plus the bouldering is good too.

Children and Aliens

Aliens and monsters, the undead, paranormal and supernatural happenings, some of my favorite things about the movies. My dad schooled me in the essentials; I'm on a short list of names of people who saw both the 1951 Howard Hawk's The Thing and John Carpenter's 1982 remake before age 13.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind had me building Devil's Tower out of my mashed potatoes and Reese's Pieces will never be the same after E.T.
Last year, while practicing the Butt-In-Seat school of writing, I spent a good deal of time procrastinating by watching movie trailers. They were my two-minute breaks, of which I need quite a few of. It was on one of  these breaks that I first watched the trailer for the new JJ Abrams film Super 8. This film seemed to revel in ambiguity and I hoped  Mr. Abrams, who gained more of my faith with Star Trek, could produce another worthwhile piece of entertainment.
And he did, sort of. Super 8 follows middle schooler Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his friends Charles, (Riley Griffiths) Cary, (Ryan Lee) Martin, (Gabriel Basso) and Preston, (Zach Mills) while they, led by Charles, try to make a zombie movie. Joe has just lost his mother to an accident in the steel mill of this 1979 ohio town. His father, Jackson Lamb, (Kyle Chandler) doesn't really know how to raise a middle schooler.
Charles, brings in Alice Dainard ( Elle Fanning) to be a love interest for his protagonist. The group of children go to the local train station to film a scene. This scene within a scene is one Super 8's most mesmerizing. After they witness a train crash the film loses its originality and become little more than a string of hat-tips by Mr. Abrams to films like E.T. tied together with shadows and witty dialogue.
Super 8 never really pays off the way it seems to want to. It feels shallow and sometimes even soulless with the exception of a scene having to do with a locket and a giant magnet. There are no lasting images like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T, movies Super 8 tries too hard to emulate. Mr. Abrams   obviously admired these films as do I, and this is my favorite part of this film, the nods to classics and that the characters almost know they're in a movie, especially once while riding in a car, staring out the windshield at the audience and passing each other Redvines.
 

The Black Hole

Yesterday I got the chance to watch icicles form, to feel snow melting in my hair, and to climb some new problems at Priest Draw. I went out in the morning prepared with a full thermos of tea and an extra layer to meet my friend Matt, who is showing me all the various boulder problems and link-ups on the assorted roofs in The Draw and surrounding area.
Matt is the kind of person whose excitement is uncontainable and who almost needs to be interrupted to take a breath. He climbs around the same level as I do and I think climbing with someone who, personality wise is polar to me. Matt gets me thrilled to climb something, and I make him pause between tries and rest.
 In a few ways, he reminds me of Jarod, a guy I spent years with in the car driving great distances to Hueco, Bishop, even Colorado. We shared the futon in the back of my truck, pressed against opposing sides of the camper shell, because who knows what might happen if one of our legs brushed the others in the middle of the night. We explored Bishop together, spotted each other on our first V10s, I even watched Jarod get arrested for an outstanding traffic ticket and picked him up from jail a few days later.
Now Jarod lives in Mammoth, California, where he spends as much time as possible on a snowboard flying through cold air at incredible speeds.

So yesterday after warming up in light flurries, Matt and I headed down to The Black Roof where, despite the snow, most of the problems were still climbable. The snow became more intentional and began to stick. Matt's dog, Roxanne, wandered the field and came back wet, shivering and happy. Conversation circled climbing, as always, but mysteriously diverted to apocalyptic subjects like volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts.
The snow continued to fall and Matt showed me how to do The Black Hole, which, after I figured out how to keep my feet on, I climbed quickly. The Black Hole climbs well at first on large edges and pinches but the last few moves are awkward and the ending unsatisfying. We then worked out the moves on The Antimatter Traverse, which follows the same line of holds as The Black Hole but backwards to a different top out.
At a break in the snow we walked over to PBR roof, one I'd never been to. There are many exceptional looking problems on this roof including Cosmic Tricycle and the massive, thirty-foot long Pink Lightning.
I needed to get home so we walked back to the cars.
But my keys were gone.  On the way down a steep bank I'd slipped and pulled my hands out of my jacket pockets, unknowingly dropping my keys in the snow. So we went back to look for them while the snow became more serious. Roxanne immediately ran laps over the area I'd fallen, her tracks looking exactly like what I imagined the print my keys would have made. While I combed through the snow I wondered what I would do if Matt weren't there and an emergency ride home for my extra car keys wasn't in order. My phone was nearly dead and there's little service in the area anyway. I'd have to enter the played out horror movie scenario of knocking on a strangers door and asking to use the phone because my keys had been swallowed by the storm. I'd be that guy, desperate and wet, stumbling out of a blizzard into some family of cannibalistic chainsaw enthusiasts. At least my tea was still warm.
After a few minutes of desperate sifting I found my keys under a footprint in the snow exactly where I thought they'd be. Driving home on the icy roads I turned the heat way up and smiled, grateful to see the snow falling and happy that I'd taken the trouble to wear that extra layer.