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.