A procession of elk saddles.

There are so many alternative names for bouldering pads, all fantastic. Sketch pad, crash pad, elk saddle, backcountry massage mattress, volcano cork, marmot holster, rock toboggan, tree band aid. Surely, you’ve rejoindered some wheezing tourist with your own variation after being asked:

“Say, now, what’s that there on yer back?”

“It’s a parachute! See ya on the way down!”

“Now, I don’t mean to be stupid, but ain’t those pretty big packs?”

“That’s not stupid, and these aren’t packs. We’re in an all-male university massage club and we prefer to practice in the mountains, up there in those boulders. Well, behind those boulders. On these pads. See ya later!”

“Ya’ll camping out over night?”

“Oh, ho ho. No, not at all. You see, there’s been a gang of bears sharpening their claws on trees up and down the gully and we’re headed up to place these band aids over the trees’ wounds. Be careful for that crew. Make a lot of noise; you don’t want any nasty surprises, do you? They seem really intent on sharpening those claws, and that can mean only one thing… Cheers!”

Tree band aids as restaurant accoutrement.

Crash pads are – or, at least used to be – an uncommon sight in South Korea. Climbers on the peninsula used to spend a lot more time in the gym or at the crags, but with the last decade’s FA explosion, bouldering areas have sprung up from Seoul to Busan, Sokch’o to Mopk’o. Those big black squares bobbing from shabbily dressed foreigners elicit at the very least a couple comments on every hike in or out.

Wallach

I’m not brave enough to pepper hikers with the aforementioned nonsense, but the same can’t be said for my friend Wallach. One Sunday afternoon just outside of Seoul, while I was still on the peninsula, a group of expatriate climbers had met up at the Riverbeds (RBs) in Bukhansan National Park to crush the snot out of some problems. Wallach, a tall, strong, funny Californian on his first tour of South Korean teaching, met us amongst the boulders, many of which cut the river’s current. We crushed snot, chatted, took pictures, chilled out on the stone steps of the local monastery, drank cooling coffee and ate fresh kimbap.

Climbing at the upper RBs.

On the walk out of the RBs we met up with some super freak expats, a couple “southern girls from Tennessee,” as they later admitted. Obviously aching for us to turn around, they chattered at squeaky, twangy decibels. Our crash pads, as always, took center stage.

Number One: That’s for rock climbing, for bouldering, so when they fall they don’t land on the ground. They put it below their rock climb and that’s where they land.

Number Two: That’s crazy. That’s all that helps them land?

Number One: That’s all they use because they’re bouldering and they don’t have any ropes. They just climb without ropes…I’m not like 100 percent sure or anything, but I think that’s all they use.

Number Two: Wow…

Number One: But, I’m not sure. If that is all they use, though, that is totally crazy.

Just two steps behind us, their voices rising higher and higher, yearning for a glance, an acknowledgment, a chat. An engagement.

“You guys got it,” I said, looking over my Asian Mad Rock. “They’re climbing pads.”

“That’s crazy,” Number One said.

“So I’ve heard,” I answered, tapping a finger to my ear.

Crash pad as scooter safety gear, Koh Tao, Thailand. Photo by Kyler Deutmeyer.

Wallach, taking the bait whilst clandestinely tip-toeing in for a chance to rattle these girls’ brains, slowed his pace so we could all share the conversation together, shoulder to shoulder. Number One, the gal with all that innate knowledge of our sport, had wrapped herself in hippie accoutrement before leaving her apartment that morning; flowing cotton and discordant colors and knitted mittens. Her face had that doughy sort of geography that never quite settles but rather ticks and stumbles through expressions as though it wasn’t quite sure of what was happening in the brain’s command center. A rogue face, prancing about of its own accord. These things are usually attached to loopy sorts of folks. Number One obviously suffered from some sort of mental dissonance. She spoke in a shuffling cadence, all southern inflection and stretched vowels. Her face ticking away and her voice lazing about in some verbal expanse of cotton candy grass and strawberry-scented wind, she leapt across great chasms from one catch of random dialogue to the next.

“I have best friends in San Francisco who live on an Eco Farm,” Number One said. “They’re really rich, but they want me to stop by their Eco Farm. Oh my god, they are so rich. You know what an Eco Farm is?”

“Oh yes,” said Wallach. “In San Francisco, right?” Wallach is from San Francisco.

“Yeaaaaaah. They are so rich. I’m really excited to go live on their Eco Farm.”

“Oh, yes,” and Wallach glanced at me with great urgency. “Dave, did you bring your knife?”

“My 14” Bowie knife with the serrated edge and compass and the fishing line in the handle?” I asked, casually, rattling off nonsense I’d half remembered from John Rambo and late night infomercials in Iowa.

“Yes. That one.”

“No, damn it. I left it at home today. Sorry.”

The girls uneasily glanced at one another. “Why do you guys need a knife?” asked Number Two, a gal much more sensibly dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, green bandana over blonde pig tails.

Wallach glared at her as though she’d just looked at herself in a mirror and asked, Who is that? “Oh, you always need a knife in Bukhansan. We were attacked by a bear a couple weeks ago.” I’m here to tell you that the Korean War incinerated, blew up, or hunted out all indigenous Korean animals, save squirrels and pigeons. Plenty of those left.

Number Two tilted her head a bit, narrowed her eyes, smiled, and said, “No, you weren’t.”

“Oh yes we were!” I demanded.

Number Two titled her head a bit more, narrowed her eyes to slits, ratcheted tight her smile a couple more screw turns, and said, “Really?”

“Damn right,” said Wallach. “That’s why we need the knife every time we go climbing. I don’t want to be caught in that situation again.”

Number One stared through saucer eyes. I’ll wager she was wondering if bears roamed that Eco Farm in the Bay Area. I have no doubt that those perceptive bears in San Fran would have steered well clear of this one, as if snorting at a poison berry, a deadly mushroom, a naked person wrapped only in a straight-jacket and sprinting across an asylum lawn screaming “Skittles!”

“Come on,” Number Two said, elbowing my pad.

“Do you really think I’m joking?” Wallach asked.

“Really…wow.”

“No,” Dave said, looking back up trail, quite seriously. “I’m joking. There aren’t any bears in Bukhansan.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We saw a bear skull on the trail, I think,” offered Number One, helpfully.

We nodded silently and continued walking down the trail, the ghostly Bukhansan bears foraging our thoughts. Number One and Number Two left on an early bus. We leaned on our crash pads, waiting for our own bus back to Seoul’s suburbs. Elbows on foam, I ruminated over my pad, a light-bulb delicately flickering to life in my brain. Wait a minute, I thought. This isn’t a tree band aid, a rock toboggan, or an elk saddle.

A crash pad would come in awful handy here.

Genius.

Marcel Proust is a tough read, no doubt about it. That’s why I only read his quotes.

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

I so vividly recall tectonic moments in my life, shifting my perspective so radically that I truly grew new mental parts. These rearrangements have revolved around the satisfying sigh of a book closing for the final time. The conclusive words uttered, that crowning period. I finished George Orwell’s 1984 in a corn field on my lunch break at Northrup King in Washington, Iowa, the summer before my freshman year of college, and stepped out of that patch of green and brown an expanded human. Granted, my mind had been blown hither and thither and the attendant void carried nothing but a confused clicking and twittering, but that novel created a space for society’s hidden reeds to hatch in my head and heart.

Danny Sugarman’s Doors expose, No One Here Gets Out Alive, was finished at the Iowa State Wrestling Tournament, which I had traveled back to from college. I didn’t know the taste of beer and couldn’t fathom a roach being anything you’d stick in your mouth. That book raised a black velour curtain on a whole counter culture I would tromp through for some number of years. And isn’t it just fantastic that I first yearned for LSD (whatever that was) while watching my old underclassmen teammates execute crisp single legs and Japanese whizzers?

Lessons, like rifts in my head swallowing up all the bullshit I thought I knew, have rent my life, books as combustion. To Kill a Mockingbird taught me, as a writer, what a true narrator sounds like, and what it is to love that narrator. All Quiet on the Western Front had me staring at my Doc Martins in college and wondering if I could infuse them with the significance of Remarque. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and The World According to Garp drove me crazy with dreams of adventure, that I had better get to it, that Huck and Holden and Garp had lived more before 18 than I may in my whole life. The Metamorphosis taught me that a roach can also be a human, your neighbor, your lover struggling with a demotion at work. Though I owned a number of Coltrane albums, I heard jazz music for the first time in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. It remains the only book I can reliably snap my fingers to, rhythmically. Notes from the Underground sent me to counseling in college, such was my mind rattled (true story). A Clockwork Orange, The Fall, The Roominghouse Madrigals, The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, The Road, The Stranger, Blood Meridian, Animal Farm, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, Journey to the End of the Night, American Pastoral, Native Son…on and on it went, challenging everything I knew, everything television would never offer. These books wrote the script for so many late night chats around a table with friends, became the inspiration for songs when I had hair and clubbed around Iowa City in a band, drove my fingers to massaging my temples in my bedroom, a bedside lamp warm and wonderful and a friend for lighting the word.

And that’s just the fiction! Non-fiction, which I switch to on a bi-bookly basis now, has crushed my ignorance and naivety so often that I wonder how deep that dank well runs. Seemingly, I have a never-ending supply of the stuff. Just a quick story, if you’ll allow me.

I was not a climber while enrolled at the University of Iowa. Indeed, if a sport didn’t involve a ball, I was totally unaware that it existed. Somehow, I had picked up Krakauer’s Into Thin Air while thumbing through the non-fiction section at the student union book store, ready to part with some more loan money I wish I would have saved. Except for that purchase.

One Saturday afternoon I was wrapped, the flu raging, in a gaggle of comforters in my college slum house, shivering on the Goodwill couch and reading Into Thin Air. Outside, sirens howled through the open screen door and fire engines and cop cars zipped by, one after the other. The screech rattled the windows. I coughed, licked my thumb, and flicked past another page. The sirens seemed to congregate just down the block, but I was just too sick to get up and gawk.

A couple moments later I heard a clopping up the wooden stairs and a pounding on the screen door. My friend Brian stood there, shirtless, hair in standing chaos, wearing only green slacks and combat boots, shouting for entrance.

“Come in, fer chrissakes,” I wheezed. His unlaced boots clapped the floor as he sprinted through the living room, halting directly over my cocoon.

“Dude,” he said, his chest heaving, “can I use your phone? My house is on fire.”

To this day, every fantastic Krakauer book I read, I think of combat boots, fire engines, and the flu.

Even the pop stuff is fun to read. I’ll take this opportunity to say NEVER trust a friend who only reads the classics. Especially when they let you know about it. Or harangue you for reading something not published early in the 20th century or before. Yes, I get it. You’re super smart and really, really hip and your mind an acute instrument of social dissection. I can’t quite string words together into an effective sentence displaying how nauseated this rare bird makes me.

You didn’t like The Da Vinci Code? Fuck you. You didn’t enjoy The Stand? You’re a mirthless prick. You can’t possibly deal with Bill Bryson’s cheekiness? Screw off. You haven’t even given Harry Potter a chance? Get…the fuck…out of my house.

Perhaps writers, those most discerning page turners, have the most to say about the importance of a good book. Here are some undeniably good reasons to pick up a book – right after you finish reading this little blog and peppering it with loving and fawning comments that will leave its author blushing and muttering, “Why, you shouldn’t have.”

Robert Byrne said, “Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.” You see? Reading as suicide prevention, writing as taunting suicide. Read more, write at your own caution.

The great education reformer Horace Mann noted, “A house without books is like a room without windows.” This reminds me of another quote, admittedly by the less roundly esteemed director, John Waters. He said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck ‘em!” If truer words were never spoken… By the way, I have TONS of books in my house, so…ladies…

So many people I meet, when I ask them what books they’ve recently enjoyed, invariably riff on how busy they are, how they don’t have time, how they used to love reading. Perhaps they should read this quote from Confucius, “No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” Were he leaning over my shoulder right now he’d nudge my side and say, “Hey, add this…’Fox News is a cesspool of ignorance, MSNBC is a charlatan, and one of the History Channel’s most popular shows espouses the legacy of ancient aliens. Gently strangle your television with its own rubbery power cable. It won’t teach you as tenderly or reliably as a book.’”

And if that isn’t enough to shame the non-reader, perhaps this will. “I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.” You know who said that? Coolio. Coolio said just those words. If Coolio can do it… Well, you get it.

I could go on and on, but let’s get to the heart of the matter here. A couple days ago, my friend Kyler asked if I was going to write up a “Best Of” blog of the books I’d read in 2011. It was like I’d been socked in the face.

“You read my last ‘best of’?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He didn’t say it was good. He didn’t say it changed his life. He said, “Yeah.”

Proof that one person reads this blog is all the fuel I need, baby! And with that, I present to you a wee list of the best and worst books I read in 2010 and 2011, seeing as my last list appeared in 2009. They weren’t banner years, but I did put down exactly 65 books over the last two years. Some were stinkers, some I think about almost every day. I was introduced to authors I wish were still alive, and others I wish to be quickly exiled to an island – sunny, comfortable, that’s all fine; I don’t care – without any means of outside communication. I hope you’ll be inspired to pick up one of these books, and maybe we’ll chat about it in the coming year, sharing impressions, getting caught up in the greatest debates in the history of the world – the ones about books. Maybe you’ll just be inspired to read more this year, as would be my New Year’s wish for everyone, including myself.

As Mark Twain once grumbled through that nasty white broom pasted to his upper lip, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” So true. Perhaps this should be the year, though, eh? Infinite Jest? Finish it. War and Peace? Tackle it. The Brothers Karamazov? Tear it asunder! And then, just think of how you can brag about it to all your philistine friends…constantly.

Top 15 Best Books Read of 2010/2011

• City of Thieves, David Benioff (F)
• Matterhorn, Carl Marlantes (F)
• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (NF)
• True Grit, Charles Portis (F)
• Born to Run, Christopher McDougall (NF)
• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann (NF)
• Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (NF)
• Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank (F)
• The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (NF)
• Warlock, Oakley Hall (F)
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead (F)
• The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass (NF)
• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky (NF)
• War, Sebastian Junger (NF)
• The Great American Derangement, Matt Taibbi (NF)

Top 10 Honorable Mentions

• The Lost City of Z, David Grann (NF)
• Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane (F)
• The Third Man Factor, John Geiger (NF)
• A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (NF)
• The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea (NF)
• Point Omega, Don Delillo (F)
• In Search of Captain Zero, Allan Weisbecker (NF)
• Good Omens, Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman (F)
• Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz (NF)
• Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer (NF)

Top 10 Gross Pukes and Bummers

• Regulators, Stephen King (F)
• The Army of the Republic, Stuart Archer Cohen (F)
• The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich (NF)
• Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk (F)
• Under the Dome, Stephen King (F)
• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch (NF)
• Ultramarathon Man, Dean Karnazes (NF)
• The Wall, Jeff Long (F)
• The Man from Beijing, Henning Mankell (F)
• Copper Canyon, Dick Fischer (NF)

Alphabetical Order
F=Fiction, NF=Non-Fiction

Best wishes, my friends, for the New Year. But know this: If you don’t read more books, I will find you. I will break into your home, perhaps with a crowbar. And then I’ll tie you up to a chair in itchy manila rope and read Stephen King’s Under the Dome to you, out loud, with dramatic pauses and great flourishes. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen…

Parachuting Santa.

Andrew, a young first-year teacher from Washington state, rang me up one Saturday night a couple weeks before Christmas, informing me of an evening out at a local pub, called Wa Bar. Then Scott – one of those expat friends you stay in contact with, even if they are Canadian – called to say he’d drop by after our school’s holiday party at a local business venue, called Kintex. Thomas the Brit, Sean the Floridian, they were on their way.

Scott sidled up as Andrew, Thomas, Sean and I were tucking into our first beer of what would likely become a very long evening. The guys, who had all gone to the Kintex holiday party, regaled me of the event’s highlights, of which there were none. Andrew wore earbuds through the festivities. No one spoke English, anyway. Musicians, comedians, rambling speeches, all in Hangul mal, a bunch of English teachers picking lint out of their belly buttons and staring at their cuticles and slumped over asleep in the audience. Most left early. Scott stayed until the end. Mystifying, the polite and accommodating disposition of the Canadian.

Sean, a comic book dilettante and lover of horror movies, wisely steered the conversation from Christmas work parties. He illustrated the stunning and twisted nature of many an expat in Korea, which brought great holiday joy and wonder to the table. He noted that last weekend he’d met a fellow at another local watering hole, Bar Boom, who had offered a sampling of homemade pornography captured on his cell phone. Sean had politely declined the offer, numerous times, until the freak thrust his cell phone into his face and clicked on a video. Our man mentioned that this particular scene was but a tasting of all the women he had conquered in Korea. Sean was host to top shots, bottom shots, sideways shots and upside down shots. Shaky cam, all, as the humper also assumed the responsibilities of cinematographer.

The girls obligingly played their starring roles, and as one would imagine, Sean mentioned that these were not the types you’d bring to dinner on Christmas Eve. Neither was the videographer. The pornographer went on and on about his conquests as Sean’s face grew green and then ashen. The pornographer finally introduced himself as Gabriel. His name has not been changed for anonymity. I wish I knew his last name. More on Gabriel later.

Yes...this is what expats look like on the way to the bar. Totally awesome. Suck it.

Andrew, a vaguely unsullied fellow, made a hasty retreat after hearing of Sean’s sordid encounter and the remainder of our gang walked through Ilsan’s downtown promenade for some darts at Bar Boom. The bar was empty and the dartboard vacant. As we approached one of the many open tables near the dartboard Sean grabbed my shirt-sleeve and whispered, “That’s him! That’s Gabriel!” He pointed to a guy flipped through his phone, alone, leaning back in his stool at the bar counter.

“Who?” I asked.

“The porno guy! Gabriel,” Sean hissed.

“Ah,” I said. “How fantastic.” I snuck a peek at Gabriel’s cell screen, relieved to see text messages scrolling by. Amazing luck, I thought, to study this vile creature in his natural habitat. And flying solo. Perhaps he was on the hunt!

The bar began filling up as our darts generally missed their marks and careened to the sticky floor. We had arrived early for Korea, and as the minutes slipped towards midnight bar space shrank. There’s no hurry in Korea, as the bars stay open either all night, or until the last tottering patron decides to pack it in and pass out in the middle of the street. The crowds really begin to thicken around midnight, with the bell curving and sloping down around 3:30. By 4 o’clock, only the die-hards remain, caught in the throes of hopeful bedding or unmitigated swilling. By 6 o’clock, all hope is lost, yet stragglers remain, slurring and spilling and pin-balling about the great hollow barroom expanse.

Four fellow teachers, all Korean, joined us at a nearby table; two familiar girls, one guy named Casey and another gentleman whom I only vaguely recognized. I remembered his humongous head wobbling atop his diminutive frame, fearing it might gyrate off onto the floor. The only time I had ever spoken to this peculiar fellow more than a cursory “hello” was at my first dinner for our school, a couple days after my arrival in Ilsan. He was so sponged full of booze all he could blather about were the Red Sox, the Yankees, other assorted baseball teams. Curse my Red Sox cap. He blinked his drunkenness at me and sputtered, “Clemens, very good,” or “Big Daddy,” presumably meaning Big Papi, “very good.” He carried on until he barfed on the sidewalk, his head bobbing up and down like a mighty oil rig horse head gone spasmodic on its walking beam.

This ain't Bar Boom, but it might as well be. Note the girl dancing in the striped white and black shirt. Really fantastic.

Bar Boom’s walls were bending with the vast roaming humanity when a curious thing occurred. A gaggle of six Korean girls sauntered into this mostly expat filled bar, cozied up to a table, and ordered some oddly colorful mixed drinks. Like spilled blood spreading in the sea, the sharks began circling. Honestly, you won’t find a more astounding sociological experiment than throwing a handful of attractive Korean girls who speak English – even in its most rudimentary applications – into an expat bar. Especially when the gals are devoid of male chaperones.

Don’t think for one moment that the girls didn’t know it. I could tell from the get-go that these princesses had absolutely no intentions of letting any sharks into the cage. To mix the analogy, none of these barroom puppies was getting past the butt-sniffing stage with the girls. Of all the bars to choose from, they picked damn near the most popular expat bar in Ilsan. There’s a certain amount of adoration folks need in life, a moment of fawning over. Even if but for a fleeting second. These girls knew where to find it, god bless them.

Like numbers clicking off at the bank – Number 34? Number 34? – foreign dweebs stumbled over themselves on the conveyor belt, sometimes four at a time. Beer in one hand, they leaned their free paw over a girl’s shoulder, offering their lead offs and introductions, dead horses all and beaten relentlessly. Assure yourself they weren’t offering holiday greetings. And boy. These guys. They would never approach girls at home that looked like these gals. Some disheveled, some slovenly, some shit-canned, some massively obese, others straw thin, others mongoloid, others having chosen to wear a V-neck sweater over a t-shirt. Swirl the scene around in your head…

But no, nothing would stop them! They swooped in and were shot off into space like trajectory missed, eventually regaining their inertia and sighting the target again and once more bouncing off orbit into the darkened recesses of the bar. A bunch of Plutos, relegated from planets to dwarves, destined to circle the sun in frigid darkness and shame. These girls, impervious through their force field.

I generally don’t like “the game,” or “playing,” or whatever the hell folks call it nowadays. More than that, it makes me cringe to see it all play out so pitiably. Yet, I couldn’t tear my gaze away. This speed dating from Hell held me captive, quite willingly. I was starting to have fun. To my great detriment, I even talked Thomas into going over to the table and giving it the old college try. He and Sean, neither a specimen of great beauty but both first-class fellows, slid from our table, folded their beers to their stomachs like Bar Boom Napoleons, and sauntered into the dark Korean cosmos, inertia spinning them dangerously out of control.

Sean returned first, muttering something about uselessness. Then Thomas, explaining the pain of being ignored, resumed his seat and began fondling the darts. He elucidated his sneaking suspicion that the girls were mocking him but letting him carry on his charade of hopefulness. I threw an entirely miraculous bulls-eye to win the game of darts as I harbored a fantasy of each of the girls hooking up with a mongoloid in a V-neck sweater.

As I made my way to the bar for a beer, our man Gabriel noted what pathetic dart players we were. He informed me that we should never be allowed to play again under any circumstances. Anywhere. I courteously replied that we had paid for one more game, and that, indeed, was that. Taking my new beady beer in hand, I held it to his smirking mug for a very elongated beat, and turned away.

To my chagrin, that was not that. During our second game he pulled up a chair to our table and asked, “You guys like magic?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head emphatically. “Does anyone like magic?”

Shock danced across his face, his outstretched palm holding a lighter slightly quivering. “Some, but whatever.”

“Well, we aren’t a table of toddlers at a birthday party, but go ahead, man,” I said, folding my hands. “Give us some magic!”

“Alright.”

No doubt, the caustic blood was bubbling after his dart comment and hearing Sean’s story earlier in the evening. Yet, I didn’t really want to start a fight. Rather, if I started a fight, I didn’t want to have to be the one to actually do the fighting. So, Gabriel charged forth on his magical steed and he made his blue lighter levitate over his fucking palm. I haven’t the slightest idea how he managed it. That sort of ignorance can enrage a man. In chorus, our table asked how he had suspended the lighter and he knowingly tucked it back into his jacket pocket, quite aware of his small victory. Gabriel silently retired to his solitary stool at the bar, where no one could challenge his sorcery. He gazed at our dartboard, aloof, patiently awaiting our assured ineptitude.

Against all probability, the night continued on its goofy trajectory. Casey informed me that a young lady sitting at a table nearby wanted to dance with me, that “she likes the beard,” which I had just grown. I was immediately suspicious of any girl that likes a beard. Of course, she spoke zero English and my Korean remained…vestigial. We did a lot of innocuous grinding in the bar’s darkened corner, but I received no early Christmas gifts.

Eventually, a couple of expat teachers joined our table after Thomas left, feeling ill, and we all chatted in that amiable netherworld of unshared and discordant histories. Nothing serious required, just a story. One fellow from New Zealand struck up a conversation with Sean about the B-movie horror gluttony of Peter Jackson. They huddled over the minutia of zombie lawn mower slaughter, or some such holiday cheer. Scott and I listened while the other gent, a huge-bottomed Canadian, whimpered about how he’d given a paper flower to one of the Korean girls at the Princess Table and that she had harrumphed into his frumpy face. I mean, honestly. Like you can’t help but feel a bit sorrowful after hearing that tale, listening to this hefty lad gripe about not being taken seriously by a gang of girls that in the States would be encircled by star wide receivers, quarterbacks in letterman jackets, and class presidents. Country to country, culture to culture, some things remain eternally the same, like Groundhog Day in junior high.

The conversation was going swimmingly when Gabriel the Magician and Amateur Pornographer swaggered up, leaning his elbows on the table between Scott and I.

“Nice fucking hat, man. Trucker hats are really stylish.” He said just that to me. I specified I wasn’t wearing my Schlitz beer hat for style and mentioned that this fact should be obvious to anyone taking the time to notice my wardrobe. I wore it, I said, because I liked it. I told him I was far too old for teenage style trends and whipped off my hat, waving it in his face.

There it is! That stylish Schlitz hat! Please, observe my stunning wardrobe at this high class norae bang. I am a man of unimpeachable style.

“Look at me. Do I look like a guy trying for style?”

“Bald, too,” he said with a merry guffaw. “No wonder you wear that hat.”

Alright. There remained little doubt what the magician was looking for. Fisticuffs. He sniffed me out as the slightest fellow at a fairly large table and went in for the kill. Merry Christmas.

“Fuck you, man,” I said, combing through my mental thesaurus. “Why did you come over here? Just to get in my face, to make fun of the little guy, the guy with the funny hat? Nice work. Get out of here and carry on.” And I swept my hand away, like some bored magnate releasing the hayseeds from my audience.

“Fuuuuuuuck you,” said he. I noted the intellectual turn our bon mots were taking. It was nearly 3 o’clock in the morning, after all. Vocabulary, like my starring pate, grows thin into the wee hours.

“Listen, I’ll smash your face into a curb if you don’t get out of here.”

“I’d like to see that,” Gabriel said, suddenly standing erect with his arms thrown to his sides, his back arched as if he were about to launch into a gymnast’s routine. In a way, he was.

“You punter,” I said. And then, some words I had never strung together but always pined to glue into a massive, triumphant, altogether crushing sentence, “You want to step outside?”

“Yes,” he answered, very quickly. Oh Jesus, I thought. This is going to happen – a fight. I’m going to get bloodied and Gabriel’s going to bleed and this is just going to be an awful mess. I like neither the notion of smashing someone’s teeth in nor having my own dental work displayed willy-nilly upon a barroom floor.

“Just one thing,” he said, sneaking closer. “We gotta make a deal first.”

“What?”

“I don’t call the police, you don’t call the police. No matter what.”

“Deal.”

This was all going terribly south, and during the holidays, no less. I was just sliding off my jacket when a thought occurred to me, a revelation I had heard many years ago in high school from my wrestling coach.

“You know what, magician? I’m going to impose a rule of my own. We’ll fight, and maybe you’ll kick my ass, or I’ll kick yours. Don’t worry about that. I can guarantee you that I will not quit fighting for 30 minutes. You can knock me out and walk away and 15 minutes later I’ll follow you and find you and we’ll keep going. Or, maybe I’ll knock you out in 15 minutes. I’ll keep knocking you out for the next 15 minutes. That’s my rule.” I noted that I may break his neck on a street curb and that he may leave me on the ground bleeding to death, but the 30 minute rule applied. We both remained calm, chatting to one another with evil intentions.

Alas, these engagements so rarely ripen to bulbous richness. Indeed, some third party usually dives in and parts the churning waters, thank god. The Peter Jackson obsessed Kiwi karate chopped his arms between Gabriel and I and put an abrupt end to the madness. He berated the magician for getting in our faces, uninvited, as we quietly chatted amongst ourselves. The reproach continued two minutes longer, for both of us, until Gabriel returned to his magical barstool, sulking, probably thinking of jumping me on my bar exit. I almost immediately forgot about him.

Crisis averted, just like that, over in less time than it took Gabriel to levitate his blue lighter. The tubby fellow with the paper flowers informed me, “Dude, I don’t think you wanted to fight that guy. I saw him kick the shit out of two dudes a couple weeks ago.” My shoulders went up and down.

“Two dudes who don’t know how to fight don’t pose much of a challenge,” I harrumphed, swimming through an ocean of false cockiness.

Secretly, I thought I may have snuck out of a very nasty situation. Scott, returning from the bar, informed me that the magician had confided, “I don’t think I wanted to mess with that guy, anyway.” Hence, my arrogant and foolhardy confidence in my undersized fists remains intact to this year of our lord, 2011.

No blood was shed. Scott and I took off after we finished our beers. And so another happy holiday evening came to a wobbly end in South Korea, the land of the skinniest Santas on the planet.

Jamie, in purple, from a previous ClimbTalk show.

Mike Brooks:  This is ClimbTalk, I’m Mike Brooks.  Dave McAllister from www.pumpfactoryroad.com co-host, and in the studio we have Jamie Emerson.  Jamie, thank you for joining us for ClimbTalk.

Jamie Emerson:  Thank you for having me.

MB:  Jamie, you were climbing where today with Kilian [Fischhuber] and Anna [Stohr]?

JE:  I was climbing at Rocky Mountain National Park, at Endovalley.

 DM:  Let’s talk about who Kilian and Anna are.  Introduce us, real quick.

JE:  It’s my understanding that Kilian and Anna are the current World Champions in bouldering.  They’ve been extremely successful comp climbers for a long time and they have a very high reputation.  They climb really hard problems outside, too, all the time.

MB:  You’re a competition climber/course setter.

JE:  I’m not a competition climber – I’m a course setter.  I’ve never done any competitions.

DM:  Why not?  You’re a course eand you’re a forerunner…

JE:  There’s one reason:  Because I make more money setting.  [laughter]  That’s the only reason.

DM:  So, how was it out at Endovalley with those guys?

JE:  It was awesome.  They’re great to climb with; they have great senses of humor.  We have a really good time together.  They both climbed really well.  Anna did Cambrian Explosion, a V10 – she did it pretty quickly.  And Kilian did the king line, Flux for Life, Carlo Traversi first ascent.  He did it in a couple of hours.  It was really impressive.

MB:  How hard was that?

JE:  V13.

DM:  It’s so improbable-looking, too.  The footwork on it is out of this world.

MB:  You’ve seen it, Dave?

DM:  Many times.  Only seen it, as well.  I’ve touched it…

JE:  Never climbed on it?

DM:  No way, I couldn’t even start it.

MB:  Jamie, you have a new bouldering guide out.  Is this route we’re talking about in your guidebook?

JE:  No, Endovalley was not included in the guidebook because I didn’t have enough information to do an accurate job.  I think guidebooks don’t succeed when there’s a lack of information, and I didn’t have enough information to do it properly.  So, I excluded it from the guidebook.

DM:  Let’s talk about the guidebook.  This is Rocky Mountain National Park and Mount Evans Bouldering.

JE:  That’s right.  Sharp End Publishing.

DM:  When the guidebook left the galleys and you could spread it around to a couple people, like Peter Beal and [other] people to review it, were you nervous about the reviews it was going to get, about how people would accept a guidebook to a fragile ecosystem?

JE:  Interesting question.  First of all, I had done as much fore-work as I could to let people know what I was doing and to talk to the rangers.  I had a long meeting with the rangers at Rocky Mountain National Park and Mt. Evans and we talked about the implications of the guidebook.  They were fine with it; they thought it was a great idea.  They thought not only was it a good idea, that it was acceptable, but that it would help them manage the land better.  Because they would have a better understanding of where things were, if there was an accident how they can get to certain places.  They both seemed really excited about it.

I got very little resistance from anybody in the community.  I got one person that wrote me an email that was upset and her reasons, I thought, were really valid.  I took a really long time and responded as well as I could and tried to address every single one of them.  [I] said, “I appreciate your concern, but I think it’s acceptable because of this and this and this.”

…what was the second part of the question?

DM:  Were you nervous how it’d be reviewed?  It’s your first book, right?

JE:  Yes, I’ve never written a book before.  I just wanted people to like it.  I wanted people to feel it was a book that was helpful to them.  And it was about everyone that had climbed in the Park and they could really use it.  I wanted the usability to be really high and I wanted people to feel like, “I climb in Colorado, Colorado is important to me.”  I spent a lot of time in Rocky Mountain National Park and Mt. Evans and this is kind of my book, too.  I really wanted to convey that.  It seems like, so far, people have received it really well.

MB:  Jamie, did you consult any other guidebook authors about the layout, format, etc.?

JE:  I did.  I talked to Matt Wilder a little bit…

DM:  He did the Hueco [Tanks] guidebook.

JE:  He did the Hueco guidebook and the Yosemite guidebook, as well.  But, I really relied on Fred [Knapp] and Heidi [Knapp].  They run Sharp End Publishing.  They gave me a lot of leeway, but at the same time kind of said, “Hey, this is what we expect.”  It was a really awesome learning experience for me.  I feel I got maybe not quite a degree but an associate’s degree or something, because it was two years of work and learning two or three new programs.  They really let me make it my own, which was awesome, on their part.

DM:  I know that you’re a reader.  It must have been cool to see the publishing process from the inside out.  Instead of being a voyeur inside somebody else’s book, you’re the guy writing it and going through this whole publishing process.

JE:  You know, that’s an interesting thing, because I found that it’s so easy to get lost in the woods and not see the whole forest.  I’m looking at the moss on some little branch when you’re trying to create this gigantic forest.  That was a real challenge for me.  At one point they were like, “Okay, the guidebook looks great.  You’re done.  We need to stop.”  I think I needed to hear that.

DM:  And how are sales going?

JE:  Good.  It’s really nice that I can sell it on my website.  That’s been a huge advantage.  I think they’re excited about it and I’m excited about it.  I’ve run www.b3bouldering.com for four or five years now and I haven’t really made any money off of it whatsoever.  Not that this pays for very much, but it helps a little bit.

MB:  We had Mark Rolofson on ClimbTalk a couple shows ago and he’s a guidebook author and he self-publishes.  What do you think about that, Jamie?

JE:  For me in this instance, not knowing anything, that task seems extremely daunting.  Having Fred and Heidi there to guide me…it’s hard to express how much that was worth because [at] so many turns I had no idea what to do and they were like, “Do this.  Do this.  Do this.”

DM:  And they really add quality to a book, a publishing house like Sharp End.  Not to say that Mark doesn’t publish high value things, but the quality of the product he presents can’t match somebody like Sharp End Publishing.  But, that’s what he…you know, he’s kind of DIY.

JE:  It’s nice to have an extra set of eyes.  And they’ve done it before; they’ve done it a lot.  They did the Eldorado [Canyon] guidebook, which I think is a great guidebook.  They did the Indian Creek guidebook, which is a great guidebook.  So, I saw those things and I thought, “They’re looking over this and they’re going to add this kind of touch to my guidebook.  I need that help.”  Because, I’m really good with the information but I don’t have much background in graphic design.  They really helped out with that a lot.

DM:  In the guidebook we have all of the Rocky Mountain National Park – not all – a good portion of the RMNP bouldering, Evans [areas] A, B, C, D.  There are two areas that are left out.  There’s Endovalley, which of course got a lot of first ascents going down this year when you were well on your way to publishing the book.  And then Lincoln Lake, which got a lot last year.  We know the reasons why you didn’t include those in the guidebook, but are you thinking about doing an addendum, like a digital addendum?

JE:  Yeah, I’m actually working on the Endovalley section right now.  Also, I’d really like to do a Lincoln Lake thing, too.  I want to talk to the ranger.  If they’re not psyched then I’m not interested.  But, maybe they’ll see the success of this guidebook – not financially but just how it directs people to the right place – and say, “Hey, we can do the same thing with a fragile environment like Lincoln Lake.”

DM:  People are going to go there, regardless.  So, the question is, do you not write a guidebook to hold to some sort of ethical standard…not ethical – maintain the integrity of the ecology?  Or, since people are going anyway, do you put it in the hands of somebody who is going to be responsible with it and do it the right way?

JE:  Right.  I can answer that question for how I feel, but it really comes down to the ranger.  He was like, “You can do whatever you want to,” but I’m not interested in stepping on his toes.  I’m not interested in being like, “Well, we’re climbers.  We can do anything we want.”  No.

DM:  It’s apparent we can’t.

JE:  This is not Eldorado in the sixties, Mike!

MB:  Or seventies…  You mentioned that you were going to do an addendum to Endovalley.  Now, isn’t that somewhat controversial to the locals up there in Estes Park?

DM:  Ohhhh…I was gonna ask that question.

MB:  I know!  I was looking at your notes…

JE:  [With a big fat grin on his face]  What controversy…what are you talking about?

DM:  Some of the locals gave you a hard time for giving Endovalley the spotlight this spring.  How does that kind of “local vibe” affect you, or come off to you?

JE:  There’s a number of things.  I tried, as much as I could, to talk to as many locals as I could in Estes Park and say, “Hey, I want to write this guide book to the bouldering in RMNP.  How do you feel about that?”  And like I said, I got resistance from one person.  Everyone else, if they felt resistance, didn’t vocalize it to me.  I tried to give everyone the opportunity to do that.

The locals that were upset about Endovalley apparently had not been there in four years and apparently had done almost nothing.  I’m not trying to say that Dave [Graham] was the first person to go there; I don’t think I ever said that.  I think I had been there before – I have photos on my camera from two years ago when I walked through the boulder field.  It was just this resurgence.  And to see thirty people in this area, which had been neglected for so long, and people really enjoying the problems and thinking these problems are really classic…  Who knows, maybe [John] Gill walked through there.  I would like to know the history, but…

DM:  It’s certainly accessible enough.  People have seen it.

JE:  Oh, yeah.  What I was trying to speak to, and maybe this wasn’t coming across clearly enough, was that there was a renaissance, or there was a revival in the interest in the area.  It’s far exceeded what had ever been done before.  I told those locals, I said, “I’m not trying to wipe out your history.  I’m not trying to take away from anything that you’ve done.  I’d love to hear about it.  I want to know all of the information, so tell me.”  And that was received with…

DM:  Unconstructive criticism on your website.  I think some of them took umbrage – well, with a number of things – but with the verbiage “rediscovery.”  I think that might have come off like, “We rediscovered it and we’re going to put it on the map now.”  They intuited that you were saying, “What you’ve done in the past is of no consequence.”

JE:  Right.  And I’ve written numerous times that I want to know the history and I would be happy to hear the history.  Someone mentioned that they ran into Tommy Caldwell and he’s like, “I’ve bouldered there before.  I’ve bouldered there for years.”  I would never be like, “It doesn’t count because I’m here!”  [laughter]  No.  I want to know.  I want to document what’s been done.  I try to give them an opportunity and say, “If you’ve climbed problems, let’s hear ‘em!  What did you climb?”

DM:  Did you get any feedback?

JE:  None.  They said, “Get out of here.  You’re heinous.  Whatever.”

DM:  I find it hard to believe something like The Portal [really nice, obvious moderate] hadn’t been climbed before.

JE:  Right.  Yeah, maybe Tommy had done that or maybe other people.  I emailed a couple people and they said, “Oh yeah, we bouldered there but we really didn’t do much.”  Some of the old Estes locals who were bouldering in the Park.

This kind of leads into this thing…I talked to the first person who had ever bouldered at Emerald Lake [in RMNP].  His name is Jim Hurst.  He would guide clients up Hallet’s Peak and he had been to Hueco.  He was like, “Hueco is so amazing.  I love it.”  He would take people up Hallet’s Peak and he would say, “Okay, I’ll take you up, but you have to spot me on these boulders, because these boulders are awesome.”  He actually did the first ascent of The Kind – or I wrote in the guidebook In Your Face, which is what he called it because there’s a big block that would threaten to come off.  But, just this idea of he had been there and I’d talked to him on the phone and he was super-forthright with everything.  He was like, “I will answer all of your questions.  I will let you know exactly what I did.”

Here’s the first person – he’s more local than anyone because he’s the first person to boulder – and he is super happy to share all the information.  And then, somehow, these other people were not happy.

The other issue is that we’re bouldering in a national park.   This isn’t private property.  This isn’t someone’s secret.  It’s literally 25 yards off of a road.  Three million people a year visit the Park.  It’s hard to justify saying that you’re not allowed to tell people about this.  It’s one of the most visited natural areas in America.

DM:  That’s a point that you can’t logic away.  I was thinking that when I was reading the 60 or 70 responses to your initial posting.  It’s like, “Hey man, this isn’t somebody’s backyard.  This is a national park that I pay $40 for every single year to do exactly what I want, in a respectful way to the environment.”

JE:  Not only do your taxpayer dollars go there, but you pay an admission fee to get in.  You’ve paid a lot of money to have the right to run around that place.  The idea of withholding information…  If it was a really sensitive alpine area, I could see a better argument for it.  But when it’s right off a road?  The rangers went up there the first few days.  The ranger that I came into contact with, Jess Assmussen [sp?], has been super-awesome the entire time.  I ran into him again there and we talked for a long time and he was like, “I think it’s totally acceptable that you guys are bouldering here and I have no problem with it.  We look at your website and we think it’s fine.”  I was like, “Awesome.  Everyone’s happy.”

DM:  It’s the most accessible bouldering.  If you put it in your guidebook…I mean…it’s 25 steps off a road.

JE:  Right.  It’s so easy to get to.  And…it’s not the next Chaos Canyon and it’s not the next Hueco Tanks.  But, it’s a great little collection of boulders and the season is a little different than Chaos Canyon and Mt. Evans.  So, it’s another great addition to Colorado bouldering.

DM:  Exaclty.  Say, you go to Evans on Saturday and you’re like, “Oh!  My legs!  They’re friggin’ killing me, but I’m not going to Flagstaff [Mountain in Boulder] and I’m not going to Horsetooth [Reservoir in Fort Collins] and I don’t want to stay in the Front Range…”  You can get a day of alpine bouldering…and it’s a ten minute hike up.

JE:  Right, that’s awesome.  Kilian and Anna really liked the approach.

DM:  Did you see the new Urban Climber Magazine?

JE:  I haven’t seen it.  Is this the “Best 100 Boulder Problems”?

DM:  Yeah, I have it in my backpack, which isn’t in the studio.

JE:  I was involved in this discussion.  I don’t know if I’m named or not; I think there were some anonymity issues, or something.  I helped pick out some of the boulder problems.  It was myself, Jason Kehl, Jackie Hueftle, Kevin Kukovich [sp?], and we called a number of our friends to get this or that.  It’s funny, I think people expected me to be a lot more opinionated, but I was just like, “Well, this is extremely arbitrary, I don’t know how…”

DM:  So, the new Urban Climber Magazine, for everybody listening, has one of those argumentative articles that is the perfect thing to talk about at a bar, or whatever, or whatever climbers do.  It has the 100 best boulder problems in America, actually numbered from 1 to 100.  And there’re a number of RMNP and Evans problems in there.

JE:  Yes, there are.  I advocated probably more for Colorado problems.  I think people kind of advocated for their home areas a little bit.  So, I tried to eliminate as much bias as I could…

[I walked out of the studio to grab the mag and brought it back in for Jamie]  Oh, here we go…

MB:  Okay, what is that?

JE:  I’m looking at the newest Urban Climber with the 100 best boulder problems in America.  Number one is The Shield.  It’s a gorgeous boulder problem, although I argued that it was contrived and some other things.  But, it’s a really nice boulder problem.

DM:  V10.  Number four is V13, man.  Whatever happened to…come on.  Give me some easy ones…

MB:  Where is The Shield?

JE:  The Shield is in Tennessee, in Little Rock City.  The southern sandstone there is some of the best rock I’ve ever climbed on.  It’s outstanding.  It’s aesthetic.  It has an amazing texture.  It’s nearly a perfect medium to climb on, so to pick that problem is not ridiculous.  But, I think you could find objective things that are wrong with it.

DM:  I was going to transition from the Urban Climber Magazine to your experience in the mountains of Colorado.  Give me the best boulder problems in the Park and at Evans that people shouldn’t miss, those tiers from entry level to moderate to advanced to elite.

JE:  One of the problems that I mentioned earlier, The Kind or In Your Face…

DM:  I think that’s number 10.

JE:  Yeah, it’s awesome.  It’s V5, which is a pretty accessible grade for people who are avid boulderers.  That is an amazing problem.  And on the next boulder over is Whispers of Wisdom, which is V10, I think one of the best V10s in America.  Those are outstanding problems.  I don’t know if Tommy’s Arete made the list or not, but that’s in Chaos Canyon.  It’s V7, it’s kind of in-between.  That’s a fabulous problem, too.

DM:  That’s my favorite problem in Colorado.

MB:  It is, Dave?  Why, exactly?

DM:  I don’t think it’s V7, first of all [Jamie laughs].  Whatever grade it is, there’s no discernable crux.  I don’t feel like it can shut you down, so it’s enjoyable all the way through.  There’s nothing that’s physically going to put you in pain.  There’re no iron crosses that are going to hurt your shoulders, there’re no tiny little crimps that are going to blow up your tendons.  But, it’s what…18, 20 moves steadily rising.

JE:  The rock is outstanding.

DM:  Yeah, the holds are outstanding, the movement is stellar.  You go from cross-through-crimps to long moves and then into these huge blocky moves at 17 feet off the deck, maybe, with a huge boulder against your back that makes it exciting if you fall…but you never do if you trust yourself up there.  And it’s a good top-out on big holds.  You go totally [horizontal] at the top of the climb with a heel hook.  It’s just exciting!  And this green lichened rock, this swirling granite…Ah!  Beautiful!

JE:  It epitomizes a lot of the really awesome characteristics that make Rocky Mountain National Park what it is.

You know, we could also talk about Alaska.  I went to Alaska this summer.

MB:  Tell us about that.

JE:  Well, I’m on the lookout for new bouldering, always, and I want to find new bouldering in exotic places.  I like to look where people haven’t looked or I don’t think they’ve looked. That’s not 100 percent true because there is a little community up in Alaska, a couple really dedicated climbers that are awesome.  They’ve done a lot to put up as much as they can.

So, I had the opportunity to go up there this summer and we went to check it out.  It was really an exploratory trip.  It’s interesting because I’ve been climbing for a long time, or I feel like I’ve been climbing for a long time…maybe not as long as you [looking at Mike with a shit-eating grin].

DM:  That’s a safe guess.

JE:  How long have you been climbing?

MB:  A long time.  Go on with your story. [laughter]

JE:  What I was going to say is that I’m to the point now where I want to go develop an area.  I want to find an area.  I don’t want to find a problem here or there; I want to find a whole area that hasn’t been climbed, or there’s still a lot to develop.  This trip was really an exploratory trip.  It wasn’t like we’re going to send all the V13s and V12s…we’re going to see what’s up there, see if it’s worth going back to.

We spent a lot of time hiking.  It’s a really complex landscape.  You’re way up in the mountains, way above the tree line.  We spent a lot of time just figuring out, is this worthy?  Is this someplace that we want to come back to?  Could this be a new summer destination for people to go bouldering?  It seemed like the answer was “yes.”  I’m planning on going back next year.  It’s awesome.

 DM:  For people that have been to Lincoln Lake, with a talus field, is it similar to that?

JE:  It’s more spread out than that.  In a lot of ways it’s the next level of alpine bouldering because you have no trails, really.  You have grizzly bears, which present a serious threat.  I mean, we saw people on the trail with guns all the time.  That was a normal, legitimate thing to have, like you’d bring a rain jacket to Evans.  You have a gun.

DM:  That’s the last thing you need to put in a boulderer’s hand…

JE:  Right.  So, there are grizzly bears you have to deal with.  The landscape is similar to Mt. Evans, but the mountains are much steeper in Alaska.  There’s just more to explore.  It’s just more complex.  I think that whole element was what I was looking for.  I wanted more adventure.

It’s kind of this new thing that’s been going on.  You saw Jason Kehl went to India.  We went to Alaska.  There’s a crew in Idaho that is now hiking six or seven miles to this bouldering – you take a boat and then you hike to a bouldering area.  People seem to really want to branch out.  It seems to be the new way people are exploring the whole sport of bouldering, which I think is really fascinating.

DM:  I was just thinking about that the other day, about how backcountry bouldering is exploding right now.  I think it’s a natural progression for the sport because bouldering is much younger, [as] a sport of it’s own.  I think this is natural.  People have developed these areas like Horsetooth – just talking about Colorado – and Carter Lake and all the Flatirons areas…

JE:  People have bouldered Eldorado Canyon for 20, 30 years, if not more [looking at Mike making a face]…oh…more!  70, 80, 100 years?

DM:  That circumference is growing, right; it’s just like a radar.  So, people need to go farther.  I think it’s natural.  And it’s great for the sport.

JE:  It’s great for the sport.  [looking at Mike]  I think part of the reason you’re seeing this is because maybe people from your generation were route climbing.  They were like, “We’re looking at Redgarden Wall [in Eldo] and then we’ll go bouldering after we finish and we have a couple of hours.”  Now, it’s all they do is go bouldering.  All I do is go bouldering.  I can climb a lot of boulders that are roadside…now it’s like, what else is out there?  When you start going out there you find that the things that are out there are way more impressive than what you’ve seen…you know, Horsetooth is great but it’s really small.  It’s nothing when you compare it to a mile-long talus field of amazing boulders.  It’s really motivating, for me, to see so much new rock.

MB:  That’s Jamie Emerson talking about Alaska and Idaho…but you haven’t talked about Wyoming.

JE:  Mmmm.  So, like I said, I’m really interested in finding new areas.   In the guidebook, Dave [Graham] touches on the early development of Chaos Canyon and what that meant to him.  I think that was a really special time because there were only a handful of people that even knew, and it wasn’t this environment of saturation of media; videos, pictures…  If you talk to the right people and you ask the right questions, then you can find out about these areas.  It’s awesome to try and recreate that in other environments, in today’s day and age.

So, I can go to Wyoming, which I did over Labor Day weekend, because I got this tip from this guy who said there’s a lot of boulders in this place.  We should go check it out.  We went and it’s incredible.  You have these days where it’s three or four people in a gigantic talus field and you don’t even know where to begin.  You just start putting chalk on rock and climbing.  You’re there with a couple friends.  There’s no one else there, there’s no names, there’s no grades, there’s just climbing and enjoying being in the outdoors.  It’s a really awesome experience.

That’s the kind of experience that I’m looking for.  I found it in Alaska and I found it again in Wyoming.

MB:  Where is this place in Wyoming?

JE:  It’s just outside of Lander, which is awesome, because Lander is an amazing climbing town.  It has a long history of being a great sport climbing town.  And, the National Outdoor Leadership School is headquartered there.  For them to have bouldering, it’s like, “Wow, you guys actually have a lot of boulders here.”

I think one of the things that’s really interesting is that when bouldering areas can actually help economies.  Like in Orangeville, Utah, Joe’s Valley.  It’s a super-depressed little town and then the climbers come and they actually bring money to the town.  I think that’s one of the really interesting things about how developing bouldering problems can actually affect the economy, which is a pretty radical idea.

DM:  Absolutely.  Not that Bishop [California] needs a lot of money, because there’s certainly a ton of money in Bishop, but climbers are a boon to that economy.

JE:  Right.  There is a substantial impact from climbers visiting that place.  Or, a town like Rifle.  A lot of these places are pretty out-of-the-way places and [climbers] really do bring money into the economy.  Even in Estes Park, which has a lot of tourists, there’s still…my book, or people stopping at the Country Market to get food, all of those things.  It’s more than just a couple of climbers.  30 climbers a day are doing that.

DM:  You’ve been to Joe’s Valley a million times.  Back in the day when you’d go to Joe’s Valley and you’d go to the Food Ranch and upstairs is the little outfitting place.  Back in the day it was all hunting and not even Coleman stoves, these off-brands.  And now you go up there and I think they have one style of Mad Rock shoes, they sell chalk, chalk buckets.  It’s unbelievable.

JE:  They wouldn’t carry those things if they weren’t selling them.  I think that’s a huge impact that climbing has on places.  Lander seems to be doing well on it’s own, but this [bouldering] is bringing me up there.  I’m going to go back up there in a couple weeks.  I’m sure if really hard problems start to come in, get put up, more and more people will want to go.  It may even become a destination.  It may become like Chaos Canyon or something.

MB:  If people want to learn more about this new Wyoming bouldering where can they find the information online?

JE:  There’s only one place right now, as far as I know:  www.b3bouldering.com.  It’s called the Devil’s Kitchen.  There are two areas, actually.  There’s the Devil’s Kitchen and then there’s another area on the same road called the Falcon’s Lair.  The Falcon’s Lair is an alpine area.  It’s more like Mt. Evans.  The Devil’s Kitchen is a lower area.  They have two seasons now for bouldering, which is awesome.

There’s a couple guys, I want to mention their names, Davin Bagdonis.  He has been instrumental in Wyoming bouldering development.  He has done a great job.  Jessie Brown is another one who lives in Lander.  He’s really spearheaded the move to go to Devil’s Kitchen.  He was the one who named it.  When I went there two weeks ago I think there were four to seven problems established, which is nothing.  There will probably be 1,000 problems when it’s all said and done.  It’s huge.  It’s gigantic.  It’s literally a Chaos Canyon volume of rock with Poudre Canyon quality granite.

DM:  Talk about the approach.  You don’t ever like to say the word “epic” with bouldering, but the approach sounds epic.

JE:  It is literally twice the elevation loss as Lincoln Lake.  Lincoln Lake is 800 feet or 900 feet and this is [a] 1700 or 1800 foot drop into the canyon.  Which is fine going in; it’s 45 minutes going in.  On the way out it is brutal, with a crash pad on.  I think the first day we ran around so much.  We ran down, ran around for eight hours, and then hiked back out with all of our gear.  And then you have a half an hour on a 4-wheel drive road, which at the end of the day was not fun.  And then another hour on a dirt road.  It was a long day.

We all woke up the next day and we were like, “Are we going to do this again?  This is ridiculous.”  But, we went back and we were like, “This is amazing…  We’re going to keep doing this.”

DM:  That’s like a three hour approach, door to door.  An hour and a half of driving and 45 minutes in.  And on the way out, probably an hour and a half?

JE:  Yup.  Maybe an hour out, but it’s steep.  There’s no trail yet, too, so you’re bushwhacking.  We hiked out at night the first time and my legs got really cut up.  But, there’s so much rock.  I  always feel like all these little boulders are just ways to express…how can I put this…all these options are ways you can move your body.  It’s what every boulder represents, human movement.  There’re a million representations of human movement that are frozen in stone.  You can walk into these boulder fields and you’re like, “This is an almost infinite palate for human movement.”  In an amazing setting.  That’s really motivating to me because there’s so much to create.

DM:  I don’t know why I have this allergy to people [calling] climbing “art”.  It’s not art.  I understand the analogies…  But, “a palate of human movement,” that’s nice.  “Frozen in stone,” you said, as well.  It’s not artwork, it’s more like capturing a gymnastic movement that’s going to be repeated ad infinitum.

MB:  You make a good point.  We were talking earlier about some people who have been potentially chipping holds.  You want to go there?

JE:  [laughter]  You can talk about whatever you want.  It’s fine.  It’s a free-for-all.  I like freedom.

DM:  Earlier this spring there was some mention of a route at Lincoln Lake that someone, who is actually named, was employing a paint scraper and a screwdriver to – I hate this term – “aggressively clean”, i.e. chip or alter a problem that had been established and climbed by ten people.  What happened there?

JE:  Well, it’s a complex issue…

MB:  Why would anyone do that?

JE:  That’s part of the complexity of the issue.  If you walked into Fontainebleau or Joe’s Valley or Horsetooth Reservoir, the rock is really solid and really clean and it would be appalling if someone had a screwdriver there.  Even [a] first ascent.  It’s unnecessary, completely.  You’re just going to damage the rock.  The reality is that Lincoln Lake is pretty chossy and there’s a lot of cleaning that’s gone on.  It’s cleaning with wire brushes, it’s the kind of thing that’s just going to accelerate the process.  You’re going to step on a foothold a thousand times and it’s going to break a thousand times.  Instead of having that happen you just take a wire brush, tshk-tshk-tshk, and clean it off and accelerate that process.

What happens is that those tools, like a screwdriver or a wire brush, they come out and the boulders are being cleaned and then someone climbs it.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s a boulder problem.  Is it appropriate, then, to put a screwdriver to an established boulder problem?  Even if it’s like, “That hold is going to break off”?  And someone tries to break it off and can’t, but, “It’s just going to break if 10 more people climb on it”?

I think these are questions that haven’t really been addressed.  In sport climbing they’ve been addressed, people just break them off with crowbars, hammers, whatever.  That’s a really common sport climbing practice, I think, around the world.  But, in bouldering it’s less common and it’s less established as to what is proper etiquette.

Here’s a great example.  We were in Alaska, trying a project.  They had a really established project and it had a loose hold on it.  It’s the kind of hold you could break off with a screwdriver.  It was just wiggling and it’s going to break.  Do you take a screwdriver to it and pop it off?  No, we didn’t.  Brian got on a rope and yarded on it for half an hour before breaking it off and raking his knuckles.  Now, he took the high road, for sure.  He was like, “I’m going to just break it off with my hands.”

The question is, “What’s acceptable?”  Is it okay to use a plastic screwdriver?  Is that acceptable?

DM:  I think the only acceptable way to break off a hold…  If something’s obviously chossy and you can pull it off with your hands, of course break it off.

JE:  I think another issue is the safety.  I’ve actually cut my head before breaking holds off during first ascents.  I don’t like that.  I don’t want to do that.  If I thought I could just pop something off with a screwdriver easily, then I would be way more inclined to want to do that.  Then the argument could be made that it’s a safety issue.

DM:  That was my next point.  If you’re talking about a 30 foot boulder problem and there’s a chossy hold at 27 feet…  I mean, that’s happened to me.  I broke my leg on a popped hold.  That’s kind of a different story.  But, if we’re talking a hold at seven feet that’s through the crux, there’s a real quandary that you break into.  Can somebody break that hold in a fashion that is going to create a hold that is comfortable for your hand?  Or, when it breaks naturally…that’s two different ways of hold management, so to speak.

JE:  Right.  I think that one of the interesting things is that you could say that someone who’s experienced, who’s climbed for a long time…let’s say Mike [Brooks].  You’ve been climbing 50 years, whatever.  [loud laughter]  You’ve been climbing for a long time.  You could say he’s got a lot of experience, he’s done a lot of first ascents, he knows what to do, etc.  So, he’s earned the right, somehow, to use a tool, like a screwdriver, to break a hold off.  But, that leads to a slippery slope, because then you’re like, “I’ve climbed with Mike a lot.  Why can’t I use a screwdriver?”

If you want to make a rule for it, the best rule is to say nothing, to say no screwdriver, whatsoever.  You could even say no wire brushes, no metal.  You could use a substance that’s less hard than the rock.  That would be a really nice rule, I think.

DM:  What do you think, Mike?

MB:  I do agree.  A scraping device, like a brush, should be softer than the rock.  But, it’s nebulous.  Who’s going to say how hard the rock is?  How are you going to get an accurate estimation of how hard the brush is?  It just creates a lot of problems.  I like the concept, in theory.

DM:  Don’t use a wire brush on sandstone.  I think a wire brush can be used to take lichen off…

JE:  Right.  It’d be nice to have a rule, to say, “This is the rule.”  But, you have such wildly varying rock types and such wildly varying ethics, too.  Let’s say someone develops routes in Rifle or in Spain where it’s totally acceptable to just break off things with a hammer or things that would be appalling for a boulderer.  They’re like, “Yeah, it’s fine.  We just need to prepare the route for people.  Because 1,000 people are going to climb it.  We need to make it friendly for everyone.”  Then again, you get into, “Are we here to make things friendly or are we here to try to step up to the challenge of the rock?”  There’s a lot…

DM:  The rabbit hole just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

JE:  Oh, yes.  I would love to come up with answers and I try all the time, but it’s really difficult.

[Some talk of the World Cup that came to Boulder’s Movement Climbing and Fitness Center in early October, the gym for which Jamie works as a route setter.]

JE:  I think it’s great for America to be exposed to the European climbing scene.  The Europeans are so far ahead of America, in terms of these competitions and in terms of paying people professionally to be climbers and supporting people to be climbers.  I think it’s great to not only be exposed to those kinds of things, but also to be exposed to European climbing techniques.  The emphasis in Europe is much more on technique, “How can I be a good climber, not just how can I hang on as hard as I can?”  If you go to The Spot, that’s what you’re seeing.

MB:  So, Dave, he didn’t just slam The Spot?  [laughter]

JE:  No!  I love The Spot!  What I’m slamming is American climbing technique.  It’s generally horrendous.  [laughter]  But, what’s not horrendous is our power.  We have amazing power and the Europeans are always impressed, “Oh, their fingers are so strong and they’re very powerful…but always so sloppy.”  There’s just not a whole lot of thought.  When I see people climbing in the gym, they’re not thinking, “Where can I put my foot?  How can I turn my hips?  How can I engage the left toe and the right toe and the left arm and how does it relate to my hand position?”  All those things.

DM:  One of the boons for European climbers is like you noted, they’re paid to train.  I mean, there is a competitive sponsorship scene there.  They’re paid to train, their paid to heighten their technique, whereas American climbers [are] not on that level – they’re not paid on that level.

JE:  I agree, but it would be nice to see people interested in becoming better climbers for the sake of becoming better climbers.  To really develop their technique, to really develop themselves as climbers, not to just focus on a certain kind of problem but to try as many different styles as they can.

[Doing some PSAs, get to talking about the Lincoln Lake clean-up.]

JE:  I think that’s tomorrow.  I don’t know a whole lot about it.  I think, Chris Shulte and Jackie [Hueftle] are kind of running that.  It’s my understanding that they have gotten in touch with the US Forest Service and they’re doing it in conjunction.

DM:  I believe they are.  The Forest Service is picking up all the trash.

JE:  Those kinds of things go a long way towards maintaining a good relationship between the climbers and the rangers.  It’ll help not only keep the area open but it will help things, like if there are issues we know who to talk to.  Maybe it’ll help me write another guidebook.  Even if I don’t write the guidebook, maybe someone else will write it.  I think that’s a great effort on their part.

DM:  This is the first time, in my memory, that a non-trail building, actual clean-up of rubbish has gone on in the alpine area.  So, you think about Lincoln Lake – the users there are climbers.  Climbers are causing enough rubbish to need a clean-up at Lincoln Lake?

JE:  Interesting.  I think there is a little bit of that.  I don’t think it’s very dirty there.  There is a lot of weird trash that comes off the road.  There are actually road signs there, thrown over the edge.  There were a few cones, there were a few road signs, there’s old mining stuff.  Just weird remains from human activity.  It’s nice for people to say, “This isn’t our trash, but we’ll clean it up anyway because we want the place to look nice.”

I think, generally, climbers will do a reasonable job of taking care of an area.  It seems like there has become an awareness that this isn’t just three people going to the mountains.  This is an area and we’re going to climb here for a long time and we need to take care of it.

DM:  Now they just need to install an escalator.

JE:  Maybe a gondola with a little coffee house down there.

DM:  I got this question when I was at Evans last weekend and I don’t know how to answer it.  If you want to go to Mt. Evans, it’s not a bad hike in.  The fire road sucks, but the rest of it is beautiful.  But, as you’re hiking and you get on the fire road, zip, red Chevy pickup.  Zip, Ford Explorer drives by.  You walk past the lake there and you see gigantic Winnebago’s with people camping.  Somebody asked me this the other day, “Why can’t climbers park here and drive up there?”  My answer is, all the time, “Well…they just can’t.”  Why not?

JE:  Because the ranger said so.  [laughter]   They are legally allowed if you live in the county.  If you’re a resident there, you are legally allowed to access a key to drive up that road.  I asked the ranger about this because it is a huge issue.  He said, “It’s caused so many problems…because then you have people trying to copy the key.  And then you have people trying to sneak in…they didn’t get the key but their friend did and they’re going to leave the gate open.”  He said, “I just want to end all of that.  If you’re a climber…I know how strong you guys are.  Just do the hike.”

The hike is not that bad.  It’s just part of the experience.  I’ve done the hike a hundred times – it’s fine.  It’s a small price to pay to maintain access and a good relationship with the ranger.

DM:  So, you have a nickname, “The Sherriff.”  That moniker can be bestowed upon you in an endearing way or an unflattering way.  How do you feel about being nicknamed “The Sherriff”?

JE:  I think it’s amusing because it was bestowed upon me in a very endearing way.  It was actually Jimmy Webb from the South who came up with the name because I was giving him such a hard time about starting a boulder problem in the wrong place.  He’s like, “That Sherriff’s gonna come git ya.  You better watch out.”  I think…he appreciates my commitment to want to see people do things with the highest ethics.  If not that, then at least to put thought behind what they’re doing and say, “You can’t just do whatever you want to and say it’s okay because you’re having fun.”  If you want to make claims about doing things…

People want to say, “I climbed V13.”  Well, did you actually climb V13?  What does it mean to climb V13?  Say, Jade [in RMNP].  What does it mean to climb Jade?  Well, did you start in the right place?  If you want to take credit for what you’ve done then you should really know what you’ve done.

DM:  If you want to make a claim in the public forum…

JE:  Right.  I’ve always said if people want to go off and do whatever they want to, by themselves, I fully advocate that.  They should have the freedom to do that.  But, it’s imperative that if they want to make a living and they want to get paid and they want to get credit and they want to be famous for climbing Jade, then we need to define what Jade is.  And they need to say, “I fit the parameters of what we say Jade is.”

DM:  Animal, in Clear Creek Canyon, is a perfect example.

JE:  Yes.  The thing is…  I know people always say I’m a jerk or I’m trying to cut their experience.  I just…if you say you did Animal, do Animal.  What is Animal?  And here’s the history.  And here’s the information.  I think if you say you did Animal and you didn’t do it, that’s just inaccurate.  I strive for accuracy.  It really comes from a desire for things to be accurate, correct.

DM:  In the public forum…

JE:  In the public forum.

DM:  Everybody can climb Animal if they aren’t going to put it on the Web and start it at the V7 and tell all your friends that you did the V10.  More power to ya.  That’s what I do.

JE:   If you’re there by yourself and you want to enjoy the rock and do whatever you want, by all means, please go do it.  I’m not trying to stop that – ever.

DM:  Let’s give your website a little promo.   Your website has definitely evolved over the years.  When did it start?

JE:  I think 2007.

DM:  What is it evolving to?  You mentioned you don’t make much money off of it.  Do you want it to be your job, to be your career?

JE:  No, not at all.  I do b3bouldering because I love climbing and I love thinking about it and I love talking about it.  I like the idea that I have a forum to share all of the information and all of the thoughts that I have.  And not just exclude, but include everyone, share as much of the information and all of the thoughts I have.  That’s why a lot of the times I write posts that are kind of open-ended and say, “Hey, what do you guys think?”  I could say, “This is exactly what I think.  Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.”  But that’s boring.  I want to include…I think it’s awesome when people write in.  Sometimes their comments drive me absolutely up the wall.  That being said, I want to give them the chance to speak their minds.  A lot of times I approve comments that I just hate.  I’ll let their words stand for what they are.

No, I don’t ever want it to be a job.  I do it because I love it.  I do it because I’m interested.  I do it because I need an outlet to think about climbing and to express my climbing.  In terms of the evolution of the website, it got really boring to me really quickly just saying, “I went here.  I did this.  I did that.”  When I follow other people’s blogs that say that, it’s just like, “Ehhhhh…”  Right, you climbed V10, you climbed V12.  I understand that is on some level part of what we do.  We just go climbing and we climb problems, and when you just break it down into words, that’s what it turns into.  “I went here.  I did this.  It took me this many tries.  The sun rose, the sun set, the river flowed.”

[This part was tough to dictate…obviously Jamie is passionate about how he represents himself and climbing, which caused a lot of unfinished thoughts and speedy shifts of ideas.]

But I talk about the information and what the climbs mean to me.  I think my love for climbing is expressed in every…  I think what it does is represent the complexity with which I see the sport of climbing.  It’s like a gigantic tree and the more I write, the more branches…  It says, “This is how I see climbing.  This is my view of climbing.  What do you guys think?”  People seem to respond really well to it.

It’s interesting.  Sometimes the posts are controversial.  Going into it, I know it’s going to be a firestorm, “Oh boy, this is a hot button.”  Other times, it’s just information.  The Wyoming post was mostly just information.  It’s interesting for me to see…the Wyoming post gets a handful of comments.  The other ones get a hundred comments.  So, do I want to keep the focus on information?  Is it better to keep the focus on information?  I’m not interested in being a tabloid.  But, I do like to discuss…I think they’re hot button topics because people’s egos are tied to…  You know, if I question, “Did someone start there or do this,” they take it really personally.  Even though I think it’s important that we discuss these issues and I know a lot of times it’s my friends.  In fact, I called Dave Graham out for starting in an inappropriate place and he was not happy with me, at all.  We had to have a little talk about it.  He was like, “It’s really ridiculous that you’re calling me out.”  I’m like, “Hey, I’m an equal opportunity Sherriff.  I’ll write tickets for everyone.”  No one’s above being questioned, including myself.  Ironically, I feel like I get questioned more than anyone.

DM:  Thanks, Jamie.  Thanks for coming in.  We really appreciate it.

JE:  Thanks for having me.

Jason Kehl, a frequent guest on ClimbTalk, has been pushing the highball bouldering envelope for over a decade.  He’s also a potent member of the climbing artistic community, shaping climbing holds, running his company Cryptochild, and making movies.

The two are showing three films at this week’s Adventure Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado, Richard’s Cold and Kehl’s The Zanskar Odyssey and The Seventh Circle.  They dropped by the ClimbTalk studio to talk about climbing on the edge, filmmaking, the illusion of fear, and the reasons why we all do it, whatever “it” may be in our own unique climbing worlds.

Cory Richards

Mike Brooks:  You’re listening to ClimbTalk on Radio 1190.  My name is Mike Brooks.  Dave McAllister from www.pumpfactoryroad.com is the co-host.  We have Jason Kehl and Cory Richards in the studio.  John Sherman’s going to be calling us from Arizona.  Looking forward to that.  He has a new guidebook out, called Better Bouldering 2.  Jason and Cory, thank you for joining us.

 [John, we found out later, had been trying to call and receiving a busy signal the entire time.  He never got through.  Our ineptitude in the studio knows no limits.]

Jason Kehl:  Thanks for having us.

MB:  Cory, the Adventure Film Festival is going to be coming to town in a few days and you have a new film out, right?

Cory Richards:  Yeah.  Cold is going to be playing.  It’s a film that we did last year in Pakistan during the first winter ascent of Gasherbrum II.  I’m excited to see it play at the festival.

MB:  We were talking earlier; why in the winter?

CR:  [laughing].  That’s a good question.  Everybody wants to know why…why do we do it in the winter?  It’s like adding suffering to suffering.

Back in the ‘80s, the Polish climbers were kind of fed up with the mass amounts of people that were overtaking a lot of the Himalayan peaks.  They decided to sort of wipe the slate clean.  One of the ways they thought they could do that is by doing it in the winter.  So, it sort of erases all of what’s become known as the “Everest infrastructure.”  It takes away all the ropes and the people and you’re doing [it] sort of how it was meant to be done.

MB:  So, you didn’t have a support crew?

CR:  We had a couple people in base camp, helping us cook.  That’s it.

MB:  That’s pretty hardcore.  Tell us about the movie.

CR:  When I came back and I was looking at all the footage, it became very obvious that the film, if there was going to be one created, really needed to be told from the inside of my brain.  A lot of times these things get overblown and it becomes a sort of heroic adventure and bla bla bla and the wind’s blowing and all this.  [laughter]  Realistically, I think the experience is a lot different than that.  So, I think the film is more about doubt and figuring out what’s going on in my own head during those times.  I think it humanizes the whole experience to a different level and it makes it a lot more accessible.

DM:  When you’re shooting a movie like that do you go into the climb (you just had a small hand-held camera, I know) with a vision already amalgamated in your head or does it organically come about as the trip progresses?  Or, does it happen after the trip – you just take your footage, and, “Do I have a narrative that I can show people and be interesting”?

CR:  I think all adventure film comes together in a different way and it can be any one of those three.  For me, on this trip, my job was to be capturing the trip.  The film, as it came together, was basically the last option there.  I came back and we looked at everything.  Probably, out of nearly a terabyte of footage, we used maybe one percent to create the whole film.  It takes a tremendous amount of footage and material to ultimately come together and start looking at things and saying, “How can we tell this story effectively and make it accessible to people?”  So, it was much more, in this case, coming back and saying, “This is what we have and this is where the story works.”

DM:  Telling a compelling story isn’t always easy, right?

CR:  No.  Especially about mountaineering!  [laughter]  Let’s be honest, it’s not the most exciting thing sometimes.  Most days when you’re going alpine climbing you’re sitting in your tent worrying about climbing.  That’s not really exciting.  You’re just sitting there scared going, “How’s this going to play out?  This is terrible!  I’m just scared all the time.”  That footage is not really compelling.

Looking back on how much we actually came back with, it was pretty staggering to see the amount of footage we had created.  And how much of it was absolutely useless.  [laughter]  There’s just so much that’s not that interesting.

DM:  Right, it just doesn’t add to the story at all.  It’s just you guys cooking tea…and weather reports.

CR:  Yeah, one night we were making pizzas in the tent and I got at least 40 minutes of “making pizza” footage.  I’m not sure how that would ever add to an alpine film, but I’ve got the footage in case anybody wants to make a film about making a pizza…I got it.  Alpine pizza making.

DM:  You guys came back with a compelling story, though, regardless if you shot footage or not.  So, we know that you ascended Gasherbrum II.  You’re the first American to [summit an 8000 meter peak in the winter].  But that’s only half the battle.  Of course, getting off the mountain is oftentimes more dangerous than ascending.  Tell what happened on your way down.

CR:  It’s a really good point to make.  So often people view climbing mountains…it’s more digestible to think of climbing to the top and when you climb to the top you’ve somehow succeeded.  There’s a good quote that says, “Going up is optional but coming down is mandatory.”  That was Alex Lowe.  He didn’t come down one time.  That concept is very prevalent.  As soon as you get to the top of a peak like that you realize that pretty much I’ve spent everything I have getting here…and I’m only half way.  Getting down becomes scary because you’re exhausted and you start making some bad decisions.

On our sixth day out we were trying to make it back to base camp from camp 1.  We were exhausted and we were tired and it had been snowing now for two days straight and the winds were super high.  Avalanche conditions were getting worse and worse.  We basically were traversing under a massive slope on Gasherbrum V.  The snow was about waist-deep, so you can’t really move that quickly.  Moving in that sort of terrain…it’s basically a terrain trap.  For anybody who doesn’t know what that means, it means you’re in an area where you’re basically trapped to whatever happens around you.  It usually refers to avalanches.

We were trying to traverse this plateau that’s also horrifically crevassed and an avalanche was triggered by a crevasse falling about 3000 feet above us.  It came down and it came out of the clouds and it came fast and it hit us all, pretty much full bore, as frontal as you can be hit.  We got carried about 500 feet…

You know, I try to paint the picture of being in an avalanche and what that’s like, and it’s basically like being in a Maytag, except it just keeps getting darker and darker and darker. You’re trying to swim against it, you’re trying to do everything you’ve ever been taught to do in an avalanche, and it just doesn’t work.  And there’s a lot of time to think.  It just gets darker and darker and darker and pretty soon you realize that you’re being pulled to the bottom and as soon as it stops you’re going to be screwed.  That’s just it.  Especially, the size of the avalanche that hit us was just something you don’t walk away from.  There’s sort of an immediate acknowledgement of the fact that you’re dying.

For whatever reason, when we stopped – we were all tied together, which usually works against you in this case.  It didn’t.  I got pulled upright and ended up lying on my side with my face out of the snow.  My face and a piece of my arm.  In that moment, my first thought was…I was really angry because I thought, “My partners are dead, obviously.  There’s no way that all three of us survived this.  And now I have to figure out, how do I get down by myself?”  Because there’s nobody there to help you and really nobody knows that you’re there.  You’ve got your base camp staff, but that’s it.

Then, I heard the voice of one of the other climbers, Simone [Moro], and he asked if everybody was okay.  I thought, “Everybody?  That’s odd.”  And then I heard Dennis’s [Urubko] voice and he said he was okay.  I couldn’t see because I was completely trapped.  The next thing I knew Simone was digging me out.  As soon as I could sort of move he left and went over to Dennis and started digging him out.  It took us about fifteen minutes to get out of it, to the point where we could all move.  I turned the camera back on at that point and that’s sort of the second climax of the film.  Certainly, for me the emotional…

MB:  And that’s going to be at the Adventure Film Festival, November 3-5?

CR:  Correct.  Cold is playing on the night of the 5^th and I’ll be there to talk about it, as well.  Again, I’ve had one film in Adventure Film [Festival] before and this is my second, but I’m really, really excited to see this one there.

MB:  That sounds good.  In the studio we have Jason Kehl, as well.  Jason, you have a couple flicks in the Adventure Film Festival, as well, right?

JK:  Yes, I have two.  The Zanskar Odyssey, which just got released on DVD and digital download.

 MB:  Where can we download that?

JK:  It’s at www.hdclimbingvideos.com.  If you go there you can choose between the two.  There’s a bunch of new stuff that’s in the DVDs that isn’t in the web series.  That and The Seventh Circle, which is a long-time project I had in Hueco Tanks.

MB:  So, you sent your project?

JK:  Yes, finally.  Three years working on the same thing.

MB:  You guide down in Hueco, as well, right?

JK:  Yes.

DM:  This is your second season guiding.   You’re guiding, what, four days a week?  Five, three days?

JK:  Whatever you want.  You can go out every day if you want.

DM:  Do you have any stories about cantankerous boulderers who want to break apart from the crowd?  Because I know when you’re guided down there the group goes to one boulder, and then they go to another…

JK:  I’ve never had it on my tour, personally.  But, I’ve been on some tours.  I remember, we were down there and we were filming Best of the West, with Chris Sharma and Nate Gold and a couple of other guys.  An old friend of mine who has been a guide forever, J-Bone; we were just kind of all over the place and he kind of snapped at us at one point.  It was like, he’s going to turn this tour around right now.

DM:  Like a dad driving a car on vacation…

JK:  Yeah.  You really have to obey the rules there and respect the place.  I think people forget that, especially when they’re used to going to other areas that aren’t as crazy as Hueco Tanks.

DM:  I have a question for you, Cory.  I want to step back to what we were talking about with the avalanche, because that blows avalanche statistics out of the water, what happened to you guys.  That’s – I hesitate to use the word – miraculous.

CR:  [laughing]  Yeah, I’ve had a couple people come up to me and they’re like, “Where’s your faith?”  In fact, I was in an event the other night and somebody asked, “Do you have any specific religious affiliation that you’ve picked up after this experience?”  I was like, “Uh…no.  Anything that advises staying away from avalanches would pretty much be my religious belief now.”

It is miraculous.  All of us…just don’t know how…  It just seems silly.  I don’t have an answer for it.  It just defies logic.

DM:  You stole the words out of my mouth.  It defies description!  What can you say that would do that moment justice?

CR:  The moment of knowing you’re alive or the moment of knowing you’re going to die?

DM:  And all the attendant moments that happen after that, as well!

CR:  I think that second where you’re like, “Wow, I’m on top”…it’s so brief because you’re instantly drawn back into the environment and the fear that you’re experiencing in that sort of situation.  Take any moment where you’ve felt a great amount of relief and multiply it…infinitely.  I guess that’s how it feels.  It’s hard to really capture in words.

DM:  I have a question about the fear, the fear that you experience, generally, alpine climbing, in the hostile environment at 8000 meters.  That’s a visceral fear.  It’s not some esoteric fear that’s prancing around in the distance – it’s in your face.  Is that something that you can be prepared for when you enter that realm for the first time or is that something you have to face – nobody can train you, nobody can teach you?  I guess my question is:  What is it like to come face to face with life-or-death fear, visceral fear, for the first time?

CR:  I think we experience different elements of fear throughout our entire lives, so you’re basically training for it forever.  It’s really not that different, I think, to the fear that Jason feels when he’s doing a super-highball, dangerous boulder problem.  It’s very much the same.  I think the difference is that when you’re alpine climbing it’s not so acute.  It’s not that fear of “I don’t want to fall off the top.”  It’s drawn out over a much longer period.

Facing it for the first time, or facing it for the most recent time, always seems to be the same.  It doesn’t really matter how much experience you have.  I think it’s probably the same for Jason.  You can have a ton of experience, but fear is fear, and it smacks you in the face.

Jason Kehl and Cory Richards

JK:  I try to remind myself that it’s just a feeling.  A lot of times I’ll look at things that I want to do and I’ll feel this fear, but it’s just this feeling that you create.  When you are in the moment, if you are feeling fear, you’re creating that fear yourself.  For me, anyway, because I’m aware of it and it comes and it goes.

DM:  But, you’ve suffered the consequences of your fear.  I’ve had consequences…like, bodily; broken bones.  Doesn’t that change the validity of the fear a little bit?

JK:  It tries to, but you can’t let it.

DM:  I agree with you 100 percent…but it’s hard.

JK:  The more you realize what it is, the more you’re going to fear it.

DM:  I know…it just circles back on itself.  You’re right; you have to overcome it.  But, I feel like after the fear is gone and the consequences are there – you’re not fearful anymore, you’re just kind of screaming, waiting to go to the hospital – then that’s a whole different paradigm.

JK:  If you’re not pushing it to that point, then what are you doing?

DM:  I couldn’t agree more…

CR:  You can’t recall on that experience and just worry that the same thing’s going to happen.  At the same time, I think there’s a big difference between intuition and just straight-up rational fear.  Most of the things we feel, that’s just rational fear.  That, I think, is what Jason is addressing when he says “it’s just a feeling”.  Intuition is something totally different.

Finding the line between the two is often very, very, very difficult.  I’m certainly not saying that I’ve managed to find that, but there are times when you just decide to turn around because it doesn’t feel right.  That’s different than saying, “No, this is just rational fear and I’m going to work through it.”

DM:  Yeah…  That’s indescribable, as well, almost.  Both healthy.  Intuition is a necessity for all climbers in all disciplines and rational fear keeps us safe…

I have another question.  I don’t want to be an alpine climber.  I admire the hell out of it but I never want to be an alpine climber.  Ever!  But, I’m fascinated…

CR:  I actually don’t want to be an alpine climber either [laughter].

MB:  What do you mean by that, Cory?

CR:  First of all, what’s your question [Dave’s] and then I think I’ll answer that one [Mike’s] with it.

DM:  Probably.  Do alpine climbers have an innate proclivity to suffering or is it that you’re drawn to alpine climbing, like “I really want to do that,” you get there and you’re just pummeled by the suffering and you learn how to deal with it?  Or, is it some strange, awful gift you’re born with?

CR:  Or is it a gift of masochism?  I think, basically, you’re drawn.  For me, I’m very much drawn to that environment.  I’m drawn to very, very big places and I’m drawn to the feeling I get from being there, which is sort of a feeling of insignificance and realizing that there really is no control.  I can do everything perfectly and still get caught out.  Experiencing that, or having that love for those environments, you just kind of take what comes with it.  A lot of times that is suffering.

I usually joke, “It’s Type 10 fun, it’s the type of fun that doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.”  When you’re in the moment and you’re doing it it’s much more like work than it is fun.  But then when you wake up in the morning and you look out that tent and you’re looking at a 7000 meter peak that’s just getting first light, that’s why you’re there.  Realistically, the whole experience is fun, but it’s a different manifestation of that word.

DM:  Yeah…it’s like “retrospective fun.”  During the day you’re like, “This is awful, this is crushing my soul!”  And then the next day, you’re like, “Hey, in retrospect, that was fun!”

CR:  Well, there’s something to be said for when you have a tough day and come home…  I mean, just going out for a run and you’re running through sleet and you come home and you’re cold and you’re like, “Yeah, but I totally did it.  And that was rad.”  I think that exists, again, in any discipline of climbing.  It’s just, expedition climbing or alpine climbing basically takes that bell curve and stretches it at both ends and makes it…longer.

DM:  I’m going to bandy the same question that I just asked Cory [to Jason].  Some people are drawn to alpine climbing.  Madeleine Sorkin, who as on last show, is drawn to gnarly, dangerous trad climbing.  And you’re drawn to bouldering.  What draws you to bouldering?

JK:  The simplicity, for sure, shoes and a chalk bag.  And I like the fact that I’m always aware that I’m falling to the ground.  I hate rope climbing because I fall and then I get pulled into the wall.  I like being aware of my surroundings and what’s going on and how I’m going to react.  I really like the discovery aspect of it, doing first ascents.  Discovery and creation, you know; you see something and you wonder if it’s possible and then you do it and then it becomes this thing.

I would always say that bouldering is similar to trad climbing in the sense that you’re taking the purest line.  There’s one way up the boulder, same as a crack.  You top out; in sport climbing you do not top out.  So, I always feel this connection.  I enjoy trad climbing for that aspect.  You’re taking the purest line and you’re not using any gear, like bolts.  It’s somewhat free, same as bouldering.  You’re summiting something.

DM:  Unless you’re at Morrison…

JK:  Yeah…don’t do that. [laughter]  But, I hear there’s stuff on the other side, across the road, that you can top out.

DM:  I was just there on Sunday!  There’s some really good stuff over there, in all seriousness.

MB:  So, you like to boulder at Morrison, Dave?

DM:  No, I’m not…  Yeah!  I’m not ashamed!  Don’t judge me!  Morrison’s fine.  In the middle of the winter.  When it’s raining.  Where else you gonna go?  Into a gymnasium with rock grips and toe holds?  I don’t think so.  [laughter]

 [There’s some speculation as to why John Sherman hasn’t called in yet.]

 I have a question that I wanted to ask Sherman that I want to ask you [Jason].

JK:  Oh, no.  Should I use Sherman’s voice?

DM:  So, we had Jamie Emerson on a couple shows ago, who’s a pretty insightful, cerebral guy when it comes to climbing.  He was talking about the progression – I hate that word, it’s like a thumbtack in my brain – of bouldering, and he cited you, your trip to the Himalayas, The Zanskar Odyssey.  You as well, Abbey [Smith, who is also sitting in the studio].  And his trip to Alaska.  And I guess there’s a crew up in Idaho that takes a boat for a mile and then hikes six miles into the mountains.  He proposed that the future of bouldering is these sort of extreme adventures, just traveling farther and farther.  You think so?

JK:  Definitely.  There’s so many people into climbing these days that it seems like you go to a popular area and it’s going to be crazy crowded.  So, what do you do?  You walk another hour to the next area and it’s not that crowded.  And maybe the next year people find out about it and you go out there and it’s crazy again.  We’re always looking for something untouched.  That’s what I’m looking for.

DM:  You think all those people are sustainable?

JK:  No, no, no.  I actually wanted to bring up this question to Mr. Sherman, because we both participate in the same activity.  We love the outdoors and we want to get away from it all, but at the same time we’re promoting it, which crushes our dream.

DM:  That’s a sad thing to say.

JK:  Yeah, we want this one thing, but to have this we have to promote it and turn it into something else.  Therefore, we have to run even farther.  With books, Better Bouldering, or with films, we’re expanding the sport and I don’t think the earth can really handle it.

DM:  It can’t, right?  It’s apparent and obvious to anybody that holds will get polished and the environment will be damaged.

JK:  [to Cory]  It’s the same thing that you were saying in your show last night about Everest.

CR:  Well…just the fact that the whole point – it’s sort of consistent through all climbing – the whole point of going and doing something in the winter is getting away from everybody.  It’s the same thing that we’re talking about.  You run as far as you can from the crowds.  What happens is you go to these incredible places and you make a really great film, right?  And then people are really inspired to go there.  So, all of a sudden you’ve taken this wonderful, utopic ideal of finding the most untouched place, and you’ve basically broadcast it to the world.

But, that’s also very necessary to perpetuate the sport on a commercial level, which is beneficial to all of us in terms of better shoes, better climbing gear.  All that money goes back to R&D and then goes back to sales, which helps people go climbing.  So, it’s a double-edged sword.  Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?  I don’t know.  It’s just sort of the way it is.

DM:  Super contentious issue…

JK:  I think it’s bad.  I think it’s real bad.

DM:  The promotion of climbing?

JK:  I think it’s all real bad.

DM:  You’re in such the wrong business, bro.

JK:  I’m in it and I can’t turn back.

DM:  There’s a lot of people, in this city especially, who would bang their heads against a door hearing people say that the money generated by these promotional tools somehow helps the sport.  They would say this isn’t a sport, this is a lifestyle.  I mean, we’re in the business, too.  We’re a climbing talk show.  So, we’re all in the same boat.  But, they’d go crazy saying you’re ruining a lifestyle and creating a sport.

CR:  I don’t know what I’d say to that aside from, “How did you learn about climbing?”  Inevitably, their answer’s going to be, “Well, I saw it in a magazine.”  And then, “What magazine was it,” whether it’s Outside, Climbing, Rock and Ice?  And maybe some of the old guard is like, “We just went climbing.”  Yeah, that’s a pretty natural human instinct.  We go climbing.

Most people that have that gripe with too many people climbing and it being a sport are not in touch with where they came from.  I’m not afraid to say that.  Yeah, it is a sport.  And, you can make it as much of a lifestyle as you want it to be, but it’s still a sport.  The lifestyle and the sport are two very different things.  Just because you’re a climber doesn’t mean you have to live in the back of a car.  Likewise, just because you live in the back of a car doesn’t mean you’re a climber.

DM:  Mike, I guess you can move back into your house.

MB:  There ya go!  Cory, you have a flick coming up in the Adventure Film Fest, and I was going to ask why it was called Cold, but I guess I already know that.

CR:  Yeah, it was a really creative naming process:

“What should we call it?”

“What did you feel?”

“Cold.”

“Alright, sweet.  We got our title.” [laughter]

That was pretty much it.  That was the conversation.

 MB:  How did you guys afford that and what kind of equipment did you need or take?

CR:  That goes back to the last question that we were sort of debating.  I’m a climber for The North Face and these huge expeditions – the only way they happen is if you’ve made a ton of money in the stock market or you have a very, very big sponsor.  It costs a lot of money.  You’ve got plane tickets, you’ve got food, you’ve got all the equipment, you’ve got all that production cost.  It costs a tremendous amount of money.  At the same time, those companies promote and get behind these sorts of trips in order that they can get feedback on their gear and they can actually make gear that works.

Again, it’s almost exactly the same thing we were talking about, in terms [that] it’s a necessary evil.  We wouldn’t be able to do it…I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without a sponsor like The North Face.

MB:  Did you guys use oxygen?

CR:  We did not.  We used aspirin, though, because that thins your blood.  It’s awesome!  Maybe we copped out…

DM:  Yeah…that’s bad ethics, dude…  [laughter]  I keep breaking away from the films that we’re supposed to be promoting, but I’m fascinated by you two guys sitting here.  We have a guy from the alpine world – and I know you’re an all-around climber, as well – and we have a guy from the bouldering world.  The two extremes of climbing.

 But, you guys both face something similar, when you’re talking about risk versus reward.  Jason, I know you’ve done super-dangerous boulder problems.  And, of course, every time you step into the alpine realm – I mean, Gasherbrum II in winter, give me a break – it’s dangerous.  So, how do you entertain the ratio between risk and reward?  How do you balance those scales before you step up to the plate on a dangerous route or boulder problem?

JK:  I think there’s always a sliding rule there.  You’re looking for something that’s dangerous, but at times maybe you’re not willing to push it.  You can’t just go first day out and [say], “I’m going to go for the biggest, scariest thing.”  The process is more interesting to me.  Like, you’re saying these things I’ve done are scary, but I think they just look scary to you.

DM:  I mean, I’ve stood under Evilution, and it’s scary.

JK:  Yeah, it’s scary to me, too.  But, you have to break that down.  Like I was saying earlier, it’s a feeling.  It looks really scary, this thing I want to try in Hueco.  As soon as I walk up to it I’m freaked out, looking at it and looking at the landing.  I’m like, “Oh, wow.  That’s messed up.  What am I doing?”  And then, I keep going back and I keep forgetting that feeling.  I just kind of break it down, like, “This is possible.  This isn’t dangerous.  It looks dangerous, at first glance.”  The more you break it down, the less dangerous it is.

DM:  That sounds like semantics, man.  [laughter]  At first it is dangerous and then only looks dangerous?  I mean…

JK:  It’s all in your head.  At the end of the day it’s all the same boulder problem.  You could fall off the top of something and totally land it and not expect it.  If you’re standing on the ground and look up there and [you’re] like, “I don’t want to fall up there, if I fall up there I’m going to split my head open,” that’s just a feeling.  When you do fall off, accidentally, and you land in the bush, you’re like, “Wow, I’m fine.”

DM:  So, you definitely think about the risks.

JK:  Oh, yeah.  You have to.

DM:  Have you ever walked away from something…

JK:  Oh, yeah.  All the time.  Easy stuff.  [If] I’m just not into it or if people are trying something and I’m just not feeling it, even if it’s well within my ability, I’m just like, “No…I don’t want to do this.  This looks sketchy to me.”  It’s whatever turns you on.  You have to be passionate about it.  You have to want to do it.

DM:  The personal reward has to be high enough.

JK:  Yeah.  I think a lot of people get injured on things that are under their ability because they’re not as focused.  They forget about it and they’re just like, “I’ll just do this.  I can do this.”

DM:  Or, there’s peer pressure.  You’re with a group, everybody’s doing the highball, you’re not into it.  Been there.  What about you, Cory?

CR:  I think the reward has to be worth the risk.  For me, I want to do stuff that’s inspiring.  You look at them and you’re like, “I’m really inspired by that face on that mountain.”  And then you start to look at it objectively and go, “How dangerous is that line that I’m looking at?  Is the line worth the inherent risks that surround it?”  For me, am I inspired to do it?  If I am, how inspired am I to do it?  And if I’m really inspired, is it worth everything that might come with that?  I think every time it’s different.  Every single time.

It’s so funny.  We talk about bouldering and alpine climbing being at the two opposite ends of the spectrum, but at the same time, the emotions that you’re feeling [are] exactly the same.  They’re just more acute or less compressed.  Climbing is the same, pretty much across the board.  It’s just the motions that are different.  We all experience the visceral feelings the same way.

DM:  The temperature’s a little bit different.

CR:  Yeah…bouldering in -80!  Jason takes it to a new level…  [laughter]

JK:  Summer ascents would be more impressive.  A summer ascent of Nagual, in Hueco.  It’s, like, not going to happen.

DM:  Alright, we said the “I” word, inspiration.  This is perfect.  I love having both you guys here.  What inspires you or draws you to get on a particular climb?

JK:  Just the purest line, really.  What I’m looking for is something I’ve never seen.  It’s just so crazy; there’s an interesting feature on it.  It just stands out, you know?  Also, it looks impossible. That’s the illusion that I like because that’s what I’m trying to break down.  I’m trying to break down the illusion.  The cool thing is when someone first walks up to it after the fact and they’re like, “Some dude climbed that.  That’s super-messed up.”

Definitely, the ascetics are super-important to me.  Not about the grade, at all.  People are like, “How hard is it?”  I’m like, “I don’t know, dude.  You should try it and see how hard it is for you.”  It’s all challenging.  A V0 boulder problem is challenging.  It makes you think.  You have to engage.  Just, being more focused on the beauty of the line and also the illusion of danger…I’m trying to pull that off and make it clean and nice and beautiful.

MB:  What do you think about that, Dave?  That’s the third time he’s mentioned or implied the illusion of danger.  Is that oxymoronic?

JK:  No.

DM:  We’re getting into some existential word games, here.  It’s a little bit oxymoronic, but I understand what you’re saying.  It’s an illusion if you…

JK:  …can break it down and understand it…

DM:  …and climb it safely and in control, then danger becomes an illusion.  Because, as much as you can be in control in the natural world [in which] we have to know we’re not in control…but as much as you can be, then that danger becomes illusory.

JK:  Say, the beginning section is super easy but it’s over this crazy crevasse boulder jumble – you don’t fall there.  The next part is the crux.  It happens to be in this nook of rock where you can put a couple of pads.  If you fall on the crux, which is the most likely [place] you’re going to fall, you’re going to be safe.  If you fall after that maybe you won’t be too safe, but at that point it’s more of getting it into your body and understanding it so that you slowly start to break down that fear.  And then, you just do it.  There is no fear at that point.

DM:  We were talking, before the show started, about Worst Case Scenario, a boulder problem in Joe’s Valley that Jason put up that I was on recently.  It’s exactly what you’re talking about.

It’s on the road, kind of on a cliff face.  I imagine you called it Worst Case Scenario because if you take the worst fall you could possibly take on that, you’re spitting 30 feet into the road.

JK:  Yeah, totally.

 DM:  It looks so horrifying and so dangerous, but then when you get on it you realize, “Oh, that’s the easy part.”

JK:  Totally.  Does the name help add to that danger?

DM:  Yeah!  It scared the…um…feces out of me.

JK:  And that’s just a feeling, too.  You read a name and you have a certain feeling, already.  It’s not called Purple Flowers.  It’s Worst Case Scenario. I think that’s important.  And I think that’s just part of the illusion.

CR:  I can’t really add to anything that Jason said, as far as what inspires you.  It’s the same thing.  That’s why I think it is very, very similar throughout all genres of climbing.  Alpine climbing, you’re just psyched when you see a big face.  You want to pick the most ascetic line and you want to do it in the best style possible.  And it looks impossible, because it’s huge, but you go for it anyway.

The only difference is that when you’re alpine climbing your objective hazards are much, much greater.  When you’re bouldering, probably the thing that’s going to spit you off, that you don’t have a ton of control over, is, say, a hold breaks, and you’ve got a lot of tension on it and you go spinning off and land in the road.  When you’re alpine climbing, you could be approaching something and there’s a serac or crevasses…there’s a lot more to the environment that’s going on.  I think that’s really the only thing that differs there.  It’s really about choosing your ascetic line.  It’s about choosing something that looks impossible or improbable and putting all those pieces together and then looking up at it and, “Somebody’s been there.”  Or, “I’m going to try to be there and do that.”  You just have to weigh out those hazards in the alpine realm a little bit more…  I don’t want to say “more carefully”, because that’s not right.  You just have to take all of them into account.

MB:  How do you rationalize dealing with so much objective danger?

CR:  I try not to…because I can’t.  There’s no rationalization for putting yourself in harm’s way, aside from the fact that you’re just truly passionate about what you’re doing.  Throughout climbing, I don’t think anybody needs more of a rationalization than that.  If you love what you’re doing and if you’re psyched to be doing it, then that’s it.  That’s all.

DM:  Cory, I’m going to read you a quote that I read, that you said:  “The truth is I’ve never excelled at anything athletic.  In fact, all of my athletic endeavors have been defined far more by mediocrity than excellence.”  Expound on that.

CR:  [laughter]  Well, I started doing this as a photographer and I started climbing being in this bigger climbing world as a photographer and as a writer, as well.  I was mediocre at all of that, too.  [laughter]  I still honestly believe, as an athlete, that is not in any way what defines me.  What’s ended up being my greatest asset, what is probably very similar between the two of us [speaking to Jason], is the mental fortitude that you have to grasp in order to get over these obstacles, whether it be super-highball bouldering or alpine climbing.  It’s more about what’s going on upstairs, and like Jason’s talked about this evening, understanding that this is just a feeling.  It’s more about that mental capacity than it is about muscles.  Certainly, your muscles have something to do with it.  I’m not going to lie and say that anybody can do this.  But, more people than we think actually can go out and do this.   It’s just finding their outlet.

JK:  Yeah.  You could be the strongest guy, the strongest hands, and if you don’t have the mental aspect you’re not going to do anything.  You can’t get up the wall.

CR:  Conversely, you could have not so strong hands and have an incredibly strong mind and get up it.  That quote…  A lot of people like to ask me that question, but I stand by that.  My athletic endeavors have been defined by mediocrity, it just so happens that this one caught some attention.  But again, it’s about what’s going on upstairs, not necessarily what’s happening in your body.

MB:  Cory, what’s next?

CR:  Next…  I got invited to go back to Pakistan this winter [to] try to do the first winter ascent of Nanga Parbat, which is another 8000 meter peak, and I turned it down.

DM:  Why is that?

CR:  I turned it down because it doesn’t inspire me.  It’s not something I’m excited to go do.  I love the mountain, but I’m not drawn to go do it in winter.  There’s other 8000 meter peaks that I want to do I winter, but I’m not going to do that one.  I just don’t feel good about it.

The next thing that’s on the list right now, I’m headed back to Nepal this spring with Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker to try and repeat the first American ascent of Everest, which was done in ’63.  That’s the West Ridge to the North Face.  That’s the next big project.

DM:  Serious photography power up there.  Holy cow…you and Jimmy Chin.

CR:  Yeah, you can kind of point your camera in any direction and you’re just like, “Sweet.  I got it.”

DM:  I have a question about Pakistan.  Say somebody’s listening who’s working at a gas station right now and enthralled by this and they hear, Pakistan.  “American’s are going to Pakistan to climb??”  I think there is probably an obvious response that people would say, “In this political climate how could you ever climb in Pakistan?”  You want to dispel that myth?

CR:  Yeah!  I’ve traveled a lot in Asia and immersed in several different cultures over there and I have to say that the Muslim culture, especially the one that I encountered in Pakistan, was the kindest, most accommodating, most hospitable culture I’ve ever found myself to be a part of.  These people are incredible.  They’ve got a one-room house with five kids.  You come in and they cook you dinner and they make you sleep on their bed and they sleep on the floor.  It’s that kind of culture, where it’s like, “You have way too much and we don’t have nearly enough, but I’m willing to give you everything I have just to make sure you’re comfortable.”  And what we hear about Pakistan on the news…it’s just…it’s false, most of it.  It’s blown out of proportion.

DM:  What did Bob Dylan say?  He said something like, “I don’t read Time Magazine – they have too much to lose by telling the truth.”

CR:  Exactly.  We have so much more to gain by cooperating and being friendly with these countries that we’re so fearful of right now.  But, that doesn’t work in our current political climate.  I’m not going to say that I’m a political activist, but as much as going to these places and bringing back that culture is activism, I’ll continue to engage in that.  I think first-hand experience tells a lot more than what we see on C-SPAN.

[Some talk about the Adventure Film Festival visiting numerous US cities and a couple international locales and the usual end-of-show jibberish]

MB:  Thank you for listening to ClimbTalk!

Act One

The Site of Suck? I think not...

This story begins with my birth.  Right there at the beginning.  I imagine my parents both overjoyed and ebullient by my cherubial arrival, but I would never bet on that.  They’ve mentioned otherwise.  I’m sure they have bandied about the notion of me sucking.  Maybe parents slip these genes into our cocktail while we’re still bopping around in the belly, this notion of sucking.  It might as well be a gene, because it will never go away; not with therapy, not with opening the chakras, not by bathing in patchouli and wearing open-toed sandals and dancing like a person recently tazered.

And that, dear friends, is what this very, very meaningful blog is all about.  Sucking and our perception of our own suckitude.  For the sake of time, other people’s perceptions of our suckitude will be investigated at a later date.  Suffice it to say that they probably suck more than you.  That’s a good way to look at it.

I’ve thought I’ve sucked, here and there, since happily waving at my mom in the hospital that first day of life, she surely heaving a sigh of relief and sweating and thinking, “Sweet Jesus, having a baby sucks.”  Even when I probably haven’t sucked, I still think I suck.  Is this just me?  Am I the only self-suck cognizant?  Oh, come on.  I think not.  I think all of us struggle with our sucking, most often when we undeniably suck for some reason.  But, also when we don’t suck at all yet still obstinately demand that we are sucking.

What a curious thing.  To say you suck when you are totally aware that you don’t.  But still.  You feel like you suck.  So, you say, arms dallying about as if you were swatting marauding flies, “Gaahd!  I suck!”  And then sometimes you make a scene.  Pitch a fit.  Then you really start sucking, verifiably.

But I don’t want to talk about verifiable suckitude, because that is inevitable to the human condition.  Yes, we get carried away and then we start sucking and then Dean from accounting taps on our cubicle and wonders aloud, “Hey, how can you manage all that sucking there in that tiny office space?”  So, let’s breeze on by that.  And by the way, fuck Dean.  Tapping on my cubicle?  Sheeeeeeyat…

And onto a story of Joe's Valley, as I ponder my nemesis...a crack.

Act Two

Let me share with you an example of what I’m trying to say.  Two weekends ago a group of friends and I drove to Joe’s Valley, Utah for a long bouldering weekend.  The weather was fair, we didn’t drink too much, everybody had some Butterfingers donuts.  Things went swimmingly.

The bouldering was outstanding, as usual.  The feel of Joe’s sandstone on your skin is both a physical and mental exfoliant to all that high alpine Colorado granite you’ve been hiking miles to climb all summer long.  Joe’s is the shoulder season mecca, where you can shed your summer’s skin and begin fostering the fur coat you’ll need for the winter climbing months.

Joe’s or no Joe’s, I am a self-critical guy.  I dislike what I’ve already written so far, for example.  Just plain loathe it.  Isn’t that fun!  I am also critical on the rock, but not as much, because my brain is off picking dandelions or scooping sand in an old tractor tire or looking at a daddy-long-legs through a magnifying lens (right before I use it as a SUN DEATH RAY!).  The brain and body amiably shake hands and skip off in different directions.  Play time for both, but not in the same place.  Some people would call this a vegetative state.  But those blowhards are all wrong.  It’s actually called bouldering.

As fun as Joe’s was, I couldn’t escape the suck creeping in.  I wasn’t climbing particularly well, but I was holding my own and having fun.  Yet, if I failed on a climb at the top of my limit, in the beginning of the weekend, I would mumble under my breath, “Ugh, I suck.”  When, a day later, we went back to a particular problem at the ceiling of my current ability and my friend quickly sent it and I was stymied by the crux move, I declared louder and with more authority, “Holy crap, I suck!”

As you are wont to imagine, I “sucked” a lot during that trip to Joe’s.

Fast forward to tonight.  I got off work early, packed the dog and pads into the car and drove to Flagstaff.  After warming up I got on another problem at the top of my ability ceiling and then I hit my head on that ceiling with a big old thud.  I fell and tried again and fell again.  “Fuck,” I whispered to my dog.  “I suck, buddy!”  Hank, my pooch, looked at me for a beat and then licked beneath his tail.  An unmistakable message.

So, I went to a slightly easier problem and sent it first try, but shakily, really working for it.  “I still suck,” I said.  And then I put in some good attempts on my other project at Flagstaff, but still I whimpered quietly about my sucking.  I even kind of growled an affirmation of my sucking while a group of boulderers were walking by, staring at me.

“Hello!” I said, waving cheerfully.

“Ehhhh,” they said.

So, I drove home with no super wicked awesome sends, contemplating my suckiness.  Why do I suck? I wondered.  My brain answered, This is far too complicated a matter for you.  The Family Guy will be on television in a couple hours.  I told my brain to stop being such a cheeky little smart ass.

The Porta-Potty at Joe's thinks I suck...

Act Three

Let me tell you, really, I neither sucked in Joe’s nor did I suck at Flagstaff.  I simply didn’t send everything I tried or everything I expected to send.  I was climbing at the top of my ability level and I even had a couple triumphs.  I had many more failures.  And everything, success or failure be damned, everything continually felt easier and more doable, little by little.

The question must be asked, why does someone like me – and maybe like you, as well – too often focus on an aspect crucial to the sport (failure) rather than the process inherent in climbing (projecting, failure, failure, failure, failure, SUCCESS!)?

Reasons abound why we focus on our sucking, that’s for sure.  Let me dazzle you with my profundity.  Brace yourself for these three indubitable pillars of wisdom, stumbling blocks each one.

The Expectation Quagmire

We expect to climb something at the height of our abilities, quickly and without adversity.  HA!  BWA HA HA!  Oh boy, I’m tearing up, here.  When this does not come to fruition, we demand that we must suck.  We have to suck to not have climbed that problem quickly.  But that, my friends, is not the case.  Failure is a part of crimpers and slopers and heel hooks.  You slip, you fall, you split tips.  You don’t send.  You don’t send a little bit more.  That’s part of climbing at your limit.  Isn’t that just the deepest thing ever!

This is my crushing friend, but since he's so much stronger than me, I have no opportunity to be some narcisstic and envious butt hole.

The Crushing Friend

You have a friend crushing, as Obe Carrion would have it, “squeezing juice out ‘da rock.”  Your friend climbs in the zone, in the flow, and everything looks effortless.  Meanwhile, you grundle and trundle and look like you’re trapped in seaweed.  You think, God, I’m as strong as that guy!  I must not be, though, because it’s obvious to everyone that I suck!  The problem is neither strength nor ability, but rather one of two different variables.  One, you are a competitive and invidious little prick that wants to do things smoother, easier, and most of all faster than your friends.  If you don’t, you wonder why you suck so bad.  Two, you really do suck and you have nothing to really worry about.  If the Crushing Friend bothers you, you might consider checkers.  Electronic checkers against your computer.  Give up climbing, please.

The Recycled Ceiling

This is the real rub of it all.  We all struggle to break through plateaus and smash through our own glass ceilings.  For most dedicated climbers, this is a common occurrence, the relatively recherché success that keeps us coming back to the crags like one good, deep fairway drive keeps golfers coming back to the links.

One ceiling down, however, does not forestall a new ceiling’s construction immediately after a success delivered.  This ain’t bowling.  There is no perfect game.  Think about this: Remember back to that project that you worked X number of months on and finally sent.  Oh my god, you were so stoked!  You slapped hands and babbled like a street urchin and belayed your friends altruistically for the rest of the day!  Wasn’t that awesome?  Don’t you love that feeling of success after struggle, the splintering of a ceiling afforded by dedication, obsession, and the physical and mental marriage of the perfect skill set?  Of course you do.

And that’s why we always keep recycling our ceilings.  After one breaks we build another.  And another.  And another, ad infinitum.  We’re addicted to the fight.  But while we’re smashing the next ceiling to bits, one shard at a time, we think, Why do I suck?  Why can’t I do this?  Will my suckitude never abate?

Stupid!  Tell me this.  You think Sharma doesn’t think he sucks during an off-day struggling on his newest 5.15b route in Margalef?  You think Rands doesn’t think she sucks, even for a split second, falling from a sphincter puckering highball at the Buttermilks?  You think John Long, Lynn Hill, or any of those old Stonemasters didn’t dip their toes into the rancid pool of suckington?

Of course they did.  We all suck when we’re smashing ceilings.  No matter how strong the climber, they must say, “Son of a prune the fucking raisin, I SUCK!”  V3, A5, WI7, 5.14d.  Doesn’t matter.  If we’re tapping on the old rooftop of our abilities, we must struggle with the notion of suckitude.

Sometimes, success...

I guess the trick is to remember that we don’t, in actuality, suck.  No way.  We’re just failing, methodically, in preparation for achievement.  Isn’t that a pleasant way of looking at it?  Maybe “sucking” is our brain’s way of saying, “Listen, you little baby, you’re going to have to try harder.  You’re going to have to write off this day, just like every climber in the history of climbing has had to do, and reassess your strategy.  Maybe you’re just having a bad day.  Maybe – and this might hurt – you’re being an over-competitive or vainglorious little prick.  Go home, have a beer, and watch The Family Guy.  We’ll start again tomorrow with a clear head.”

And what should we say to that, as climbers?  “I hate you, Judas Brain!”  No, just kidding.  We should never say such a thing to our brains.  We should say, “Yeah, you’re probably right, Brain.  Sucking outnumbers success, but it’s a battle of attrition.  All it takes is one try, one good day, one wonderful suckless afternoon to clip the anchors.”

But then, of course, after that we just suck again.

Isn’t climbing fun!

In the lobby before the show. It must be noted that I wholly apologize for the photography. Good friend and rad climber Trevor Markel is a much more gifted climber than he is a photographer. But thanks anyway, Trevor. You schmuck!

Mike Brooks:  It’s 10:05 here in Boulder, Colorado and you are listening to ClimbTalk on Radio 1190.  My name is Mike Brooks.  Co-host, as usual, is Dave McAllister with www.pumpfactoryroad.com.  Dave, what’s happening?

 Dave McAllister:  Little bit of this and that…sitting in the steaming hot ghetto [studio].  How are you doing, Mike?

MB:  Good.  You been climbing?

DM:  This was a tough week.  I only got out once.

MB:  So, where did you go?

DM:  I went to a rock climbing gymnasium where I held onto rock grips and toe holds.  It was fantastic but I don’t really want to talk about it.

MB:  Okay.  We have a really big show tonight on ClimbTalk.

DM:  We have one of the premier American sport climbers in the game today, Jonathan Siegrist.  We have five-time World Cup bouldering champion, Kilian Fischhuber.  We have two-time World Cup champion – both of these lads and lasses won in 2011 – Anna Stohr.  We have international filmmaking sensation, Chuck Fryberger [Quick note: I’ve known Chuck for a long time…I would never actually flip the moniker “international filmmaking sensation” on anyone who didn’t deserve a little jibing…Chuck deserves it].  And we have international rock climbing sensation, Cody Roth, in the studio [note number two:  I don’t know Cody, but I was on a roll].  We have a packed studio.

MB:  Thank you for joining us on ClimbTalk.  Jonathan, what’s happening?  Where you been climbing?

Jonathan Siegrist:  Hi [a long pause filled with much laughter].  What was the question?  Sorry.

MB:  Where have you been climbing?

JS:  Let’s see.  Last weekend I did a slide show for the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous with Tommy Caldwell.  Went really well.  I’m really happy with it.  And then the last few days I’ve actually been climbing in Rifle Mountain Park, enjoying myself there.

MB:  Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, was that up in Wyoming?

JS:  No, that was in Estes Park.  I did an event earlier in the season, the International Climber’s Festival, in Lander, Wyoming, but this was in Estes Park, a really cool event put on by Colorado Mountain School.  There was a Lumpy Ridge trail day and Abbey Smith did a slide show, I did a slide show, and then Tommy Caldwell also did a slide show.

MB:  You’re a professional climber.  You get paid for gigs like that?

JS:  Uhhh…hardly.  I get paid in love.

DM:  He gets paid a lot more at the ClimbTalk radio program, that’s for sure.  [Unfortunate laughter…]  So, this summer you’ve been through Smith Rock, Seattle, Utah, Squamish, the Canadian Rockies, Wyoming, Colorado.  Dude, you’re getting around.

JS:  Yeah, I moved out of my place here in Boulder and I bought a pickup truck and for the last three months, and hopefully the next five or ten years I’ll just be on the road non-stop.  It’s enabled me to travel a lot.  It’s been really empowering for my climbing, certainly.  You could say I’m living my dream, at least.  I don’t know if I’m living everyone’s dream, but I’m pretty happy with where I am.

MB:  You’re living the climber’s dream.  What’s the downside of that lifestyle, Jonathan?

JS:  It’s not exactly lucrative, to begin with.  You know, I don’t often think about the downsides because, to be honest, it’s pretty awesome.  From a really young age I’ve been fascinated with traveling and ever since I started climbing, about seven years ago, I’ve obviously been obsessive about rock climbing, too.  So, to be able to travel and climb, essentially all year-round for hopefully five to ten years, to me there’s really no downside.

MB:  We also have Kilian Fischhuber and Anna Stohr and Cody Roth and filmmaker Chuck Fryberger.  You have the Colorado premiere of The Scene coming to Boulder.

Chuck Fryberger:  I guess that’s why I’m here tonight.  Next Tuesday we have the Colorado premiere of The Scene, which is my new film from the last twelve months of shooting.  We just finished it up and it hasn’t been shown too many times yet.  We just did the world premiere in Salt Lake City at an industry event called the trade show [Outdoor Retail trade show].

MB:  Kilian and Anna [were] in your new film, The Scene.  And, was Cody in it?

CF:  Yeah.  Cody and Kilian have been in my last three movies.  Anna’s been in two of my last three…actually, three of my last three if you count a very brief cameo in Core.  Extra points for anybody who can actually find her in the movie.  She’s the one who is freaked out while Kilian is driving through South Africa.

MB:  Dave and I were talking earlier…why didn’t you have Jonathan in your film?

DM:  Yeah!  What’s up with that, man??

CF:  What’s up with that!  I totally respect Jonathan.  Sometimes my path doesn’t cross with every single amazing climber in the world. [laughter] It’s a bit stressful sometimes when I try to think about how much climbing talent is out there, and the fact that I only have one video camera is pretty humbling.

MB:  You have a special camera, I think it’s called Red One, and you have a great videographer, Nelson.

CF:  Yeah, Nelson was just here on your show.  He’s been working for me for years and full-time for the last year.  For The Scene, we shot it mostly on the Red One, so the video quality will be top of the line.  Good slow motion stuff.  Awesome landscapes.  We shot The Scene in ultra-widescreen, so it’s cinematic.  And at the Boulder Theater we’re showing it off of a Blu-Ray, so it’s, like, in full high-definition glory.  It should be cool.

DM:  Did it cause a lot of consternation to pick out the places where you would film The Scene, because it’s obviously inherent that there is a scene in those places, but, for example, I thought it was a law that an American filmmaker couldn’t make a movie without Hueco Tanks in it?

CF: Heh…yeah.  For me, I tried to pick a few different scenes that would show contrast, so I didn’t try to pick only the five best, or whatever.  But, a scene like Innsbruck, where Kilian and Anna are from, is way different from a place like Moab.  You know, in Moab the hard climbers care mostly about getting up towers and then BASE jumping off of them, whereas the scene in Innsbruck has a really powerful competition atmosphere, where the climbers care a lot about getting to the top of a podium and getting really mainstream media exposure.  I’m not arguing that one is good and one is bad, but that contrast is really interesting.

DM:  I have a question for Kilian and Anna.  The World Cup season just ended for you guys.  How long does it last for?  Because a lot of Americans, I don’t think, are completely in the light when it comes to World Cup comps.  Our scene isn’t as vibrant.

Kilian Fischhuber:  Yeah, there are a couple of really strong American competition climbers, but nobody does the whole circuit, as far as we do it.  This year there were nine World Cups which lasted for about five months.  We prepare three months for that, we compete five months, and then the rest of the year we mainly climb on rock.

MB:  How do you prepare for World Cup climbing?

KF:  Since all the competitions [are] plastic we mainly train in gyms.  That we do in Innsbruck, or we travel to other gyms around Austria.  If we have time we also climb a lot on rock.

MB:  Do you do anything like weight lifting or yoga or anything like that?

Anna Stohr:  No, not really.  I don’t do yoga at all, or weightlifting.  I just don’t like lifting weights.

DM:  You guys are dating, right.  So, you train together, yes?

AS:  Yes.

DM:  How is that…dynamic…in a relationship?  [much giggling and laughter]

AS:  It’s good because you always have someone to climb with, someone who is motivating you and pushing your limits.  So, I think it’s really inspiring to climb together.  But, we don’t only climb with each other because in Innsbruck there’s a big scene of climbers and you always have someone else to climb with.  So, there’s not only a single one, but there are a lot of people.

DM:  Because that would drive you crazy if you were only climbing with your boyfriend or girlfriend.

AS:  Yeah, definitely. [laughter]

DM:  How many days do you train a year for the World Cup, would you say?  I read somewhere, Kilian, you said 200 days a year.

KF:  I don’t think that’s true.

AS:  I think you could say we train five days a week.  You can multiply that yourself. [That would be 260 days a year if year-round, 160 if during training and season, 60 if only during training before World Cup]

MB:  [Mike had been talking on the studio phone for a minute]  We just had a call in here on ClimbTalk and the caller wanted to ask Anna, “How exactly do you train?”

AS:  Well, I train five times a week.  Sometimes in winter, when I prepare for the season, I sometimes train twice a day, but only twice a week.  Yeah, mainly I just go to the gym and boulder for a couple of hours and then I go home.

MB:  What kind of hangboard workouts do you do?

AS:  No, I don’t do hangboarding.  I don’t like that at all.  It gives me a hard time to motivate myself to do that and so I find for myself, I find it more motivating to go bouldering.

MB:  What about you, Kilian?

KF:  I used to do hangboarding a lot when I was younger, but I don’t do it anymore.  What we do, Anna and me, we train on the campus board.  We do dynamic or static training on that.  It helps us a lot for the events.  But, mostly we just boulder or sport climb in the gym.

MB:  Do you have any coaches that help you?

KF:  Yeah, Anna and me have the same coach, Rupert Messner.  He also lives in Innsbruck and he writes the training schedules for us.  We…usually carry them out.

DM:  How do you deal with injuries, climbing seven days a week sometimes?  My arms would burst into flames and then they would fall off.  How do you guys manage injuries or tendonitis, especially?

KF:  The thing is, I’ve climbed since 17 years and Anna 15 years, and you really get used to that.  Your body gets used to the hard work you have to do.  As long as you don’t start training seven days a week right on, your tendons and everything can adapt.  So, we usually don’t have problems or injuries.

MB:  Kilian, you’re a five-time bouldering champion.  How do you do that? [laughter]  Why are you beating everyone else?

KF:  I think…I train universally.  I try to be good in all kinds of climbing:  sport climbing, alpine sport climbing, bouldering…  That helps me to adapt my style for all different kinds of climbing in the competitions.  I don’t know.  I’m really psyched during competitions.  So far, I’ve also been really successful and that gives me the drive to train more and to keep on climbing and to get back to the podium.

MB:  You said “alpine sport climbing.”  Tell our listeners, what is that?

KF:  Maybe the person next to me should tell it.

MB:  Jonathan?

JS:  Well, I suppose it could come in a number of forms.  There are certainly single-pitch sport climbs that are at extremely high altitude.  Obviously, you’re dealing with different environmental variables that you wouldn’t have otherwise.  I assume that what Kilian was referring to was more like multi-pitch sport climbing that would be up high in the mountains somewhere.  Again, you’re dealing with altitude and more severe and dramatic weather.  A little bit more adventurous, I guess.

DM:  Are you glad you didn’t say, “It’s sport climbing in an alpine area”?

JS:  That would have been easier, I guess.  [laughter]

DM:  Let’s keep it with you, Jonathan.  The season in the Red [River Gorge] is coming up pretty soon and you love the Red.  Are you headed that way?

JS:  Yeah, I am.  The last three years now I’ve been looking forward to the Red all year.  I’m definitely excited about the season and I’m doing my best to prepare for it now, while also enjoying myself, too.  I’ll definitely be in the Red this year, for six or seven weeks.

DM:  Such a short trip…

MB:  Six or seven weeks in the Red?!  Sounds nice.  You going to be traveling by yourself?

JS:  Yeah…most of my traveling – well, I have a dog!  He’s my companion.  One beautiful thing about doing a lot of traveling is you meet people from everywhere.  I’m really grateful for all the friends I’ve met and thankfully I have “ins” and places to stay and people to spend time with in most great climbing areas around the US.  There certainly will be no shortage of good friends in the Red this fall.

MB:  If people want to follow your travels where can they go online to find out more?

JS:  I maintain a website, www.jstarinorbit.com.  It’s a bit of cheesy name. [laughter] I’ve had a really fun time with it and I try my best to update once a week or once every ten days with photos and information about what I’m doing and where I am and how my climbing is going and how my life is going.

DM:  It’s super-prolific.  It’s one of the best climbing blogs on the internet, for sure.  Are you going to focus on your writing more?  I know you’ve done some pieces for the climbing mags, but you write a ton on that blog.  Are you planning on sending in more pieces to talk about your travels?

JS:  Yeah, I’d like to do more writing.  I enjoy writing – obviously, at this point I’d have to, to keep up with my website as much as I have.  I’d love to do more writing for different periodicals.  It’s certainly something I’m interested in.

MB:  What about some of your sponsors?  I know all you guys are sponsored by La Sportiva.  Is that also true for you, Cody?

Cody Roth:  Mm hmm.

DM:  Now the question is, how can we get sponsored by Sportiva??

CR:  How do you get sponsored by Sportiva?  That’s a good question.  Normally they come to you, you don’t come to them.  At least in Europe.  I don’t know how they roll in North America.

MB:  Did they come to you, Kilian, or did you have to go after them?

KF:  Actually, I can’t remember anymore.  I’m with La Sportiva for such a long time and it’s one of my best sponsors.  I don’t know how it worked out at that time.  Anna, you’re sponsored by La Sportiva just recently, huh?

DM:  Congratulations.

AS:  Thank you.  In my case, they came after me a little bit.  I’m with them since 2011 and I really like working with them.

MB:  Let me be the devil’s advocate here.  I hear say that Five Ten has better rubber.  So, I guess you guys disagree.

DM:  That’s a bunch of CRAP!!!

AS:  You should just put on a La Sportiva and then you tell me…

DM:  Anna and Kilian, are you guys both sponsored by the Austrian Army, as well?

AS:  Yep, we are.

DM:  That’s a foreign concept.  And they’re like your most important sponsor, is that right?  Can you talk a little bit about that?

AS:  Basically, the Army just sponsors us and it’s like our job.  So, we have a 40 hour week.  We go there each morning when we’re at home.  We go there at 7:30, say “good morning.”  We have to give them our weekly plan, what we are doing, like the training plan.  And whenever we go on a competition or on a trip like this, it’s a free trip.  It’s not a free trip, but we get the time…we can go on the trip.

KF:  So, we are actually working right now.

AS:  Yep.

KF:  We don’t have our guns with us, but we are working.  [laughter]

MB:  So, when you show up at 7:30 in the morning, do you have to be wearing a uniform?

AS:  No.  No uniform.

DM:  Just La Sportivas.  [laughter]  Do you have to sign a contract with the Army, for a specified time?

KF:  Yeah, it’s a special thing.  The Germans have it and the Austrians have it.  It’s a special department just for sportsmen.  We’re there usually with only Olympic sports people.  Anna, me, and another climber are the only athletes who are not Olympic but still can join the Army.  They pay us, we are insured there, we are getting paid a pension, and we can do whatever we want.  That’s the good thing.  It’s not a lot of money, but…

DM:  Good for ya’ll.  That’s fascinating.

CF:  You guys could ask Cody what’s the difference between the American support system and the Austrian support system.

CR:  Not just in Austria, but in Europe in general, particularly in Austria, there’s a lot more social infrastructure for sport.  There’s a national sports council in Austria, and from that national sports council they recognize competitive climbing as a sport.  Through that there’s funding, like the alpine club in Austria.  Pretty much everybody in Austria is a member of the alpine club.  The alpine club has more members than the soccer clubs have.  You get helicopter insurance…you know, people who are hiking, people who are skiing.  It’s a country in the middle of the Alps – everybody belongs to it.  So, you have that social infrastructure that supports things like competitive climbing.  Someone like Kilian and Anna, when they are winning the World Cup, it’s in the newspaper.  It’s on the radio.  It’s something that has a lot of exposure.  That’s the advantage…Austria only has eight million people, a strong economy.  That’s the advantage of having the autonomy of being a small country that is in the mountains.  Skiing is a huge sport in Austria, as well.  Basically, competition climbing I would say is kind of following the model of ski racing.

DM:  Which is a good model…the best model to follow in Austria.

CR:  Economically speaking, yeah.  If you compare it to what the Americans get; to be a competitive climber if you’re from America, it has to be your 100 percent passion, otherwise it’s not worth it.

CF:  If you look at the rankings from most any competition, but especially the recent world championships in Arco and Italy, for sure the Austrian support mechanism is the most effective.  You can argue if it’s the best or the worst, but I think in the women’s lead competition, what was it, five out of six?

AS:  Five out of eight.

CF:  Five out of eight of the top places were Austrian in the women’s division.  In the men’s it wasn’t quite so staggering.  But, the Austrians, they all wear a purple uniform when they compete, and in a place like Arco… [Kilian is laughing about the uniforms]  Well, it is what it is, Kilian.  They’ll be walking through the streets and it’s like a purple wave.  It’s almost the same when it’s time to give the awards.  There are just purple jerseys popping up everywhere.  In addition to having really talented climbers, the system they have in place is really impressive.

DM:  It would seem the system would breed the climbers.  Out of a country with only eight million people, to have that much success, it seems if you ask the “chicken or the egg” question, it’s the system that’s producing…

CF:  Yeah, and it’s the geography.  Austria is near the Alps and it’s the history and the culture.  Climbing’s a big-time sport in Austria.  And it’s been fun for me to go and document.  Just a couple of weeks ago I was with Kilian and Anna when they won the World Cup in Munich, and immediately after we went to this huge interview.  They were on a sports TV show, where the TV show covers things like Formula One and soccer news.  So, right in between these huge, popular sports you have climbing.  In America, climbing is always random adrenaline addicts on a desert tower and you never get any real news.

MB:  Except for ClimbTalk!  So, you guys were talking about Arco.  Now, isn’t that a sport climbing competition?

KF:  Yeah, Arco was the World Championship for bouldering, speed climbing, and lead climbing.  Because of the big event, there are always the three disciplines combined.  Anna actually won the World Championship title the second time after 2007.  I got fourth; a little bit disappointed but still alright.

MB:  Did you compete in speed climbing?

KF:  No, we did not compete in speed climbing.  For me, it’s not the coolest discipline of the sport.  It’s also that much dominated by the Russians and the Chinese that there is little chance to have a result.

DM:  Why is that?  Why is it a Russian and Chinese dominated facet of the sport?

KF:  In Russia it has a long tradition and history.  The Chinese just see a really good opportunity to get medals and be on the podium.  And since it’s also a title, they are racing for it.  It’s actually a good thing.

[ClimbTalk does some local PSAs…mostly about local shows coming up, including the Reel Rock Tour]

MB:  What are your thoughts on the Reel Rock Tour, Chuck?

CF:  I’m a huge fan of the Reel Rock Tour.  Actually, I think we’re doing a semi-premier of the Reel Rock trailer at my Scene premiere.  Me and Pete [Mortimer of Sender Films] and Josh [Lowell of Big Up Productions] were in some ways competitors, but in reality we’re kind of colleagues.  Actually, this year I worked on the Reel Rock Tour.  I shot a big part of the “Sketchy Andy” piece, which is the offering from Sender Films this year.  It’s about a slackliner that lives in Moab, named Andy Lewis.  I spent quite a while out in the desert with Pete.  Reel Rock Tour, game on.  Those guys are doing a sick job.

DM:  Yeah, it’s a fun show.  Speaking of fun shows, last year at the premiere of Core there was a costume party and a faux-heavy metal band.  What can we expect from the premiere this year?

CF:  Last year we did an 80s metal theme.  [laughter]  The support from the Boulder community was, I would say, pretty good.  I would say it was a B+.  But nobody really decked themselves out quite like we did.  This year we’re going with a straight-ahead movie premiere.  But it’s gonna be killer and we’re having an after-party this year.  I mean, if you wanna dress up, I say go for it.  We’ll say it’s “freestyle” themed.

DM:  [Directed at Jonathan]  So, you bought a new Tacoma for the road trip, right?

JS:  Well, it had 80,000 miles on it, but it was new to me.

DM:  Are you planning on parking that thing anytime soon and going overseas to extend the road trip?

JS:  I’d really like to and I’m trying to make some plans to do that for next year.  It’s difficult because I have a pretty limited amount of money to work with.  And I can travel for all year in America for the cost of going to Europe for a few months.  At this point I’m really enjoying being around here but I’d love to do some more international travelling.  It seems pretty certain that I’ll spend three or four months internationally next year.

DM:  Where are you dying to get to?

JS:  I think I mentioned before, I’ve been passionate about traveling since I was really young, since long before I was climbing.  I’ve spent a number of years living abroad in Asia and Europe.  Most of my interests, from a traveling perspective or a culture perspective, are to travel through Asia.  But, I have to admit, from a purely climbing perspective I’d be really excited to spend more time in Spain and France and climbing around Austria, Germany and all that.  But like I mentioned before, and it’s certainly obvious to anyone who has spent time in Western Europe, it’s one of the hardest places to travel on a budget.  I actually spent two or three months in Asia at the end of 2009 and that kind of thing is easy.  Three months in Asia is pretty easy to fund.  Three months in Western Europe is a totally different story.

MB:  You’re going to be on the road for five to ten years; how do you put together your agenda?  How do you plan for it?

JS:  It’s an interesting question because there are tons of inspiring places to go to all the time.  It’s actually been helpful that I’ve more or less been confined to North America recently because I just kind of move around as the seasons change.  There’s a similar group of other climbers.  A lot of the climbing community actually tends to transition between these different sport climbing areas as the seasons change.  Certainly, being in the Red [River Gorge in Kentucky] in the fall is one of those areas.

One area that I added to my list this year that I really enjoyed was the Las Vegas area.  I spent a little over three months living there in the beginning of 2011.  It was brilliant.  I absolutely loved it there.  I loved the climbing potential and I loved all the climbing that I did.  I’ll be spending some months there next year, as well.

MB:  What did you climb there and did you do any first ascents?

JS:  I did not do any first ascents when I was in Vegas this year, mostly because a lot of the climbing was new to me.  I was just enjoying what had been laid before me.  I did a lot of climbing at the Virgin River Gorge.  I climbed at an area called The Cathedral.  I spent some time doing longer routes in Red Rocks Canyon and also doing some sport climbs at Red Rocks., as well as a few other obscure areas.

MB:  Kilian and Anna, I understand you guys were up on Mt. Evans today.  How was it?

AS:  It was amazing today, especially because the weather forecast wasn’t that great and we thought that we’d have to leave really soon, but then we ended up being just right.

DM:  Did you get on any memorable problems?

AS:  Just everything.  [laughter]

DM:  That’s a good answer.

 KF:  You know, we are here for the first time and it’s our first day in Area A.  Chuck and Steph [Marvez], they showed us around and we’re really glad that we have these personal guides with us.  For us, it’s more important to see a new area and to try new things and not to get stuck on a certain problem, which is really hard.  For us it’s more about having fun and seeing new stuff.

CF:  Do I need to do the spray down, with grades and everything?

AS and KF:  No.  [laughter]

MB:  Yeah, let’s hear it Chuck.

CF:  I mean, Kilian maybe didn’t have the best day in the world at Mt. Evans, but for a first visit he did No More Greener Grass.

MB:  Nice.  How many tries?  Can I ask?

CF:  We’ll say a small handful.  And let’s see, he also did Super Gui…second try from the start.  And he did Silverback really quickly.  [Kilian doesn’t want to talk about the climbs he’s done so he tries to steal the microphone from Chuck the whole time Chuck is talking about what they did…Chuck hangs on…it is a climbing talk show, after all…much laughter]  The Austrians, they don’t like to…

KF:  It took us like an hour or so to do Silverback…

CF:  But when he actually did it?  It was fast.  That’s what it means, right?  When someone says they climbed something really quickly…I mean, it took him like 25 seconds…

KF:  I always climb my problems on my last try.  And I keep doing that.  It’s really cool.  [laughter]

CF:  And then also Anna, she did Bierstadt.  And we filmed it.  It was rad.

DM:  That was an American spray down from Chuck Fryberger!

AS:  Very American…

CF:  Sometimes the Austrians just need a little help in the translation [it should be noted that Chuck, Anna, and Kilian are good friends and there’s a good amount of ribbing going on the whole show…Anna and Kilian are reticent to talk about themselves sometimes].  For us eetz mostly about exploring da new area! [in an Austrian accent…much laughter]

MB:  I don’t know if I should say this, but you guys seem a little shy as compared to the Americans, [who are] a little more outgoing, a little more…

AS:  Yeah, Chuck is overwhelming us sometimes!

KF:  That’s why we have Chuck with us.

AS:  Yeah, he’s trying to help.

DM:  [to Mike]  You got anything else with that?

MB:  No…that was it.  [laughter]

DM:  I have another comp question for you guys.  We’ve talked about the physical aspect of training.  How do you mentally prepare, say in the holding area, before a comp begins or before it’s your turn?  Do you guys share a similar philosophy or do you prepare in entirely different ways?

AS:  We prepare really differently.  I really like to have my music on just before I go out to boulder and Kili’s more in himself.

KF:  Yeah, I don’t know.  I don’t have a special strategy, but it has worked out for the last ten years in the World Cup.  I don’t know exactly what I do but usually I get nervous and that’s really good for me because I can focus and I can concentrate a lot.  I say, “This is really important now,” and I want to do good.  My attention doesn’t get drawn away and that’s the most important thing for me; to get nervous at a certain stage, but not too much.

[ClimbTalk falls into a huge and ridiculous conversation of what music one should listen to when preparing mentally for climbing, from the Backstreet Boys to Dire Straits…I’ll save you the pain of reading]

DM:  How big a part does aggression play in your climbing?  Because when I watch video of the comp scene there’s a lot of…energy…would be a diplomatic way to say it.  It seems like you can release a lot of aggression and fuel your climbing…

AS:  I think you have to get into the right mental stage for yourself.  Some people really like to get aggressive and then they can send the boulder, but for me it doesn’t work that way.  If I get aggressive and if I’m really upset with the boulder, then I can’t do it anymore.  But it depends, everyone has their own strategy.

KF:  Anna is completely right.  It’s the same when we go rock climbing.  Some people scream through the woods and get really excited and really angry about it and some other people are really silent and just sit in front of a boulder and kind of meditate.  Everyone has to find his or her own way.

Some people are more aggressive, but there’s also a limit to being aggressive, since it’s a public event and you can’t just kick someone or hit someone.  [laughter]  There is a border to that.  Some people like to kick the wall or throw away a chalk bag…and I think it’s cool if someone finds his own way to express himself, as long as he doesn’t harm or disturb anybody else.

[A couple more local promos followed by…]

CF:  You guys should ask Kilian if he’s ever going to come back to Colorado, because he does an awesome Arnold Swarzenegger impression.  All day today he was dropping lines from movies and I couldn’t even figure out which ones.  He was like, “Man, what an awesome boulder problem.”  And I was like, “Is that from Total Recall or…which one is that from?”  [laughter from all]

KF:  He’s making that up.  He’s making fun of my English and he’s a bastard, but you should ask him about his German!  He’s making progress.  A little bit.

[Follows is a diatribe of German swear words that Chuck is trying to learn]

DM:  I have a question for all the climbers here.  Who are some of your contemporaries and maybe past climbers that you guys admire?  The reason that I ask that question is that we have some of the strongest climbers on the planet here and I want to hear who you guys have admiration for. 

JS:  The easiest answer for me would be Tommy Caldwell.  As we found out, by doing back to back slide shows about our youth and our introductions to the mountains and climbing, we’ve had a really similar experience coming into climbing.  Tommy started climbing much younger than I did, but aside from that, our dads were both enthusiasts and we both spent a lot of time in Estes Park throughout our childhoods.  And, I just really admire his diversity, climbing ability, and also he’s simply a kick ass dude.  Easy to talk to, very approachable, and also a superstar, one of the best American rock climbers there ever will be, I’m sure.

MB:  How about you, Kilian?

KF:  I don’t really have a person I’m looking up to, but I’m usually inspired by the people I’m going climbing with.  So, when I spend a day in the gym or on rock or at the competition, I get inspired by the other people, about how they climb or what they think about climbing, but also about their attitudes, about the whole sport.  It’s not just one single person.

MB:  When you’re competing, are you competing against yourself or are you competing against the other climbers?

KF:  That’s the good thing in climbing – you cannot really compete against another climber because you’re alone on the wall and there are just holds.  It’s the same when you do a sport climbing route or when you do a boulder.  There’s not someone else who tries to push you off or tries to be on the boulder faster than you.  It’s just about you and the obstacle, the boulder or the route or the holds.  That’s a really good aspect of our sport because it makes the community really friendly and there’s really little, how do you say…bad talk, people who envy you.  That’s a really nice thing about climbing.

MB:  And how about you, Anna?

AS:  I think it’s the same as Kilian sees it.  For me, I don’t really have someone who I specially look up to.  I think there are a lot of climbers out there who I really respect and I really admire what they’re doing, but it’s not one single person.  Also, I tend to go my own way, so that’s why I don’t really want to have one person which I want to follow.

DM:  What about you, Chuck?

CF:  I think it might be part of the job, but I admire a lot of people.  Kilian has been getting really upset with me because every time he pulls onto the rock I find something cool about it.  When I’m filming I need to pick out something that’s cool.  Kilian is particularly sensitive, though, when I say, “Wow, man, nice job!”  Or, “That was smoother than anyone else I’ve ever seen do it.”  Kilian just rolls his eyes, like, stop saying that.  But, the fact is that it’s true.  When Kilian does something smoothly it’s really smooth.  Okay, my career is watching people climb rocks.  It’s not just like I’m “fanning” out.  And when Kilian screws up I’m not afraid to tell him that that really sucked.

MB:  I have to ask the obvious.  Kilian, what makes you so good?  [groans from the studio]

KF:  I don’t think I’m so good, I just think I’m consistent.  But, for bouldering on rock I’m sure there are tons of people who are stronger than me and I’m sure there are people who can compete better than me, or people who do harder sport climbs.  But, over the years, I’ve been really consistent [and] that’s made me the World Cup winner for five times.  Some people are strong for one year or for two seasons and then they are not that strong anymore.  For me, I don’t know…  I’ve climbed on a really high level for ten years now and it might not be the highest level in all aspects of the sport, but it’s on a pretty high level and I try to keep that.

MB:  What about you, Cody?  Who do you [admire]?

CR:  I wouldn’t say also that I never had an idol.  I had a really good mentor growing up as a kid in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Lance Hadfield is his name.  We’re still really good friends to this day.  He definitely took me under his wing and gave me encouragement, pushed me, coached me.  And meeting Kilian…  We first met each other at the World Youth Championships when we were 15, back in 1999.

MB:  Where at?

CR:  That was in Italy.  Neither one of us won.  Neither one of us ever won a World Championship.  You made podium.  I made finals a few times, youth.  You made podium, youth, didn’t you?  You were second one time?  Yeah, yeah.

Meeting Kilian definitely changed my life a lot.  Then, when I was 19, I was doing World Cups again and I made the finals in Imst and then Kilian invited me to stay at his apartment in Innsbruck and that definitely changed the direction of my life.  I decided I wanted to stay in Austria.  Then, I competed for another year.  From there I got more into climbing around Europe, actually.  My roommate, who I live with, he’s been an influence, an inspiration – an idol I’m not sure – but he’s one of my best friends.  He’s definitely been a source of inspiration.

For all of us, really, it’s not like climbing’s 100 percent…that we eat, breath, and sleep climbing.  It’s just something we enjoy.  It’s like a way of life, you know?  It’s something we enjoy doing when we have time and when we do we give 100 percent effort and maybe that’s where the inspiration and the motivation comes from.  But it’s cool to see people like Kilian or like my roommate, he’s a social worker and a mountain guide, as well, and a super talented climber.  But he’s just a normal dude, just like Kilian’s a normal dude that you could meet for a beer at the bar.

MB:  What do you guys do for downtime?  Do you have any other hobbies?  Do you knit, or…?

DM:  Knit?!

MB:  What about you, Jonathan?

JS:  I knit scarves and hats.  [laughter]  Before I started climbing I used to race mountain bikes.  I still really love mountain biking.  I went on a ride today, actually.  More and more recently, as climbing’s occupying a lot of my time, I’ve been wanting to be intellectually stimulated so I’ve been trying to read more and play chess and exercise my brain, not only my body.

MB:  What about you, Kilian?  What hobbies and interests do you have?  What do you do when you’re not climbing?

KF:  In winter we go backcountry skiing or skiing on the piste.  In summer we do mountain biking – not at a very high level – but we enjoy it a lot.  Also, kind of a hobby, Anna and I are studying at university.  I’m studying since…eight or nine years already.  I’m making progress…[laughter]  I think I will finish it, but it will take two more years.  In Austria it’s easy; you can study as long as you want.  You don’t pay that much and you can still have a good education.

MB:  What are you studying?

KF:  I’m studying English and sports to become a teacher.

MB:  Anna, what do you do during your down days?  What other hobbies do you have?

AS:  Pretty much the same as Kilian, as we do a lot together.  We go skiing and mountain biking and also to university.

DM:  What are you studying?

AS:  The same.  [laughter]  But we DO have different lives!

KF:  You see, I’m her idol.

AS:  No, I am his.

MB:  I’d like to ask Chuck the same question, but I’m afraid of what he’s going to say.

CF:  Why would you ever be afraid??  What I do with my down time?  I guess my answer is:  What down time?  For the last couple of years I’ve been focusing a lot of my efforts on running a business and trying to grow my filmmaking stuff.  It’s been working so far.  I was really happy with how I was climbing and then I turned a lot of my energy and attention towards my filmmaking.  I figure if I can be a V14 filmmaker then I’m really kicking butt.  At this point I’m probably a V6 filmmaker…

[Everybody says “nooooo...”]

CF:  Awh, thanks guys.  Group hug, group hug!  You know, I try to spend as much time as I can, if I’m not working or climbing, at home, because for the last nine weeks I’ve been at home for about two of them.  Been traveling a lot and in some ways living the dream, but also literally waking up and not knowing what city I was in and forgetting where I was.

DM:  You guys just moved to Denver, is that right?  Moved Chuck Fryberger Films to Denver?

CF:  Yeah.  We used to work out of Golden and now I have a studio in Denver.  It’s not a huge movie studio, but it’s 1100 square feet and we shoot commercials and we do all of our editing there.  I have two people on full-time staff and a bunch of other people that work for me on a contract basis.

We do a variety of stuff, beyond just climbing films.  We have a music documentary that we’re finishing pretty soon and we’re shooting a commercial next week for a wine company.  We do a few different things.  My passion is still climbing films and I still really want to travel around and climb a lot, but branching out is a good thing, too.

MB:  The commercial for the wine company; did you court them or did they come to you?

CF:  They came to me, as a matter of fact.  It was a connection I made through my old DJ’ing years at the Boulder Rock Club.

DM:  Underground Chuck…[his old DJ name]

CF:  Yeah, it was from the UGC days.  Definitely, my passion and a lot of my core work is in climbing, and quite a lot of my mainstream work comes from my connections in the sport of climbing and from my reputation in the core action sports industry.  So, even though I’m not making a million dollars selling climbing videos, it’s good for my marketing and good for my street cred, I guess.  It gets me out meeting a lot of people.

DM:  Cody, what do you do with your down time?

 CR:  In the winter I snowboard a lot.  I’m really into freeriding and backcountry snowboarding.  If it’s a good winter then normally I’ll take five or six weeks where I won’t touch rock, where I won’t climb at all.  It’s nice to have a break.  I really enjoy surfing, also.  And then, I do PR work for a couple of my sponsors.  And route setting work I also do.  Translating work I do for a couple of magazines and companies.  DJ’ing, I got into two years ago.  I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus the last nine months. I would say I haven’t done that much.

[Paying some bills, we talk about sponsorship for all the climbers in the studio…interestingly enough, Anna is sponsored by a pasta company and a mobile phone company, amongst others...says Cody, “And IPA also sponsors me, on occasion, but mainly that comes from Chuck’s travel budget”]

 DM:  Thanks for coming into the studio, guys.  We really, really appreciate it.  That was fun.  And thank you for listening.  Remember, we can be found on Facebook.  Like us.  Improve our self-esteem because it’s very, very low.  [laugter] Email us at climbtalkradio@gmail.com.  Thanks for listening.  Get out this weekend!

[As the music takes us out Chuck takes one more shot at Kilian.  “Ask Kilian if he’ll be back,” he says.  I say, “Kilian, will you be back?”  In the worst Arnold accent ever, Kilian says, “I’ll be back.”  And that’s the show.]

 -   Michael Herr, author of the seminal “Dispatches”

You really get to know someone when you help tile his kitchen backsplash.  Not really, but if you pay attention, maybe.

This is what I knew about Maury after a couple hours on different visits to his kitchen.  He has a round, peaceful face, the kind some grandfathers have.  His eyes are soft behind spectacles.  He’s got a little “older fella” paunch.  He stands about 5’5”.  He likes to hover over you and around you as you chat.  He fidgets.  He is erudite and soft-spoken.  He recoils at confrontation.  He is incredibly fond of his children as are most men who look and act like I’ve just described.  He very much loves his wife and, due to the wisdom of his years, defers to her better judgment concerning all domestic rulings.  He says he knows better.  He says that almost every time I see him and I can tell that he sincerely means it.  His eyebrows arch and say, “Listen, he’s not kiddin’.”  He is active, as well, often trouncing around the mountains by early on weekday afternoons.  He is also retired.  From what I do not know.

I entered his house just before 7am on September 12 to seal his backsplash against stains, my final visit to his home.  Maury was awake but with hair rustled and twisty like a wet bird’s head.  He wore navy blue pajamas.  I thought no one wore pajamas anymore, but there you have it.  Maury welcomed me in and I set up my supplies on his kitchen countertop and got to the business of slowly sealing his new white ceramic.

Maury sat down at his kitchen table, NBC’s Today show on a small kitchen TV chugging along on its daily journey to talk show dumbery.  He plopped his elbows on the table and began scooping cereal into that kind face of his, this sixty-something man.  You don’t think of older people eating cereal, but there you have it again.

I liked Maury, so I chatted him up over his breakfast.  I asked him if he’d seen any of the 9/11 tenth anniversary coverage yesterday, or was he more of a football fan.  He said he was a football fan, woefully speaking of the Broncos efficacy later that evening on Monday Night Football.  He said he also couldn’t have helped but to have seen some of the 9/11 footage.  If you watched any television on Sunday, Maury said, you couldn’t help but see it.

“It was interesting to me,” I said, “because it seems like a lot of that initial rage is gone, or at least not mentioned as much.  It seems like Americans are in the business of remembering us now.  Of the people lost.  I thought that was refreshing.”

“Maybe,” said Maury between mouthfuls.  “I don’t know about that, though.  I don’t think people have forgotten that anger.  It’s hard to forget.  I’m a vet…I think a lot of people remember.”

“You served in Vietnam?”  His age seemed right.

“I served a tour in Vietnam.  Army.”  He told me his division, but I’ve forgotten which it was.  I do remember he said it was the first Army division pulled out of Vietnam.

“Were you drafted, or…?”

“I was actually in law school at the time,” said Maury, setting down his spoon, “but my grades weren’t very good.  C’s if I remember.  So, I knew I’d eventually get drafted.  My grades weren’t high enough.  So, I joined the Army in OCS.”  OCS stands for Officer Candidates School.  Maury wanted to go in as a greenhorn commissioned officer rather than a greenhorn private.  That meant he would receive leadership training and enter Vietnam, fresh from Fort Benning, in control of his very own platoon, a group of soldiers and non-commissioned officers ranging in numbers from 16-44 men, depending on attrition.

“You get in country as a lieutenant, then?”

“Yeah, a second lieutenant.  I was a real butter-bar.  I didn’t know shit.”  I guess “butter-bar” is military slang for a lieutenant because of the gold insignia they wear on their uniforms.  But really, he was just another soldier in a very unpopular war.  He went there because school wasn’t going well.  Can you believe that?  Can you imagine making that choice?  He would have been forced to at any rate, because of his poor grades.  Just another soldier.  Didn’t care about the war or what it meant.  Just wanted to go in on his own terms.  The acclaimed journalist Myra MacPherson once said, “Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.”  Maury was one of those few.  So was my father.

“I can’t imagine,” I said, sealing some tiles over the sink.  I was slowly losing interest in my job.  I wanted to set down my bottle of sealer and pull up a chair at Maury’s kitchen table.

“Well, you get used to it,” Maury said.  “You learn.  Everyone learns.  And I had a great group of sergeants.  I said to those guys, ‘Listen, you guys tell me what to do.  You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’  And they did help me.  They were just great men.”

Maury’s base was mortared on his very first night in country.  It lasted from dusk till dawn.  It wasn’t training anymore for Maury.  “I was scared as hell,” he said, staring at his empty cereal bowl.  “I prayed to God and told him if he would get me out of that place alive I would never complain about anything again.  I haven’t exactly lived up to it, but…”  He nudged his placemat.

“I just took it day by day.  Every day, just one more day closer to the end.  So, it was just a day to day thing.”  He trailed off and picked up a package of blueberries on the table, set it back down, adjusted it.  He kept doing that the length of our conversation, worrying over those berries.  He rarely looked at me as he talked.  He looked at the blueberries.

Maury seemed to be caught in a wave of memories.  Maybe he hadn’t spoken about his time in Vietnam for a very long time.  Maybe he felt no pressure to stop or to worry about how his memories might affect me because I was a stranger.  An interested stranger.  I was rapt, and Maury, although he rarely took his eyes off his blueberries, I think he took note.  And so the stories continued.  I was long done with my sealing.  I leaned my elbows up against the kitchen countertop and folded my hands.  Listening.  Rapt.

In his second month in country he was walking around a rear base and a jeep roared to a stop next to him.  He was brushing his teeth.  The jeep had “one big star on it.”  It was a general touring the facility.

“He must have thought, ‘Who is this dipshit lieutenant?’, looking at me,” Maury said.  But, suddenly he found himself responsible for the general’s tour.  They loped around the base, Maury answering asinine questions and waiting to get back to his teeth.  Finally, the general tired of the tour and wished him luck, releasing him from the discomfort of spending time with such a senior ranking officer.  Maury shook his head and walked back to his men.  Walking back to his toothbrush and soap.

“I remember seeing these huge aircraft flying low, spraying this orange dust.  We were just covered by it.  Living in the jungle.”

“Agent Orange,” I said, knowing of the defoliant the US military used in an attempt to lord over the jungle that no one could ever hope to control.  Half a million people were killed or wounded by the poison.  “Did you guys know what it was?”

“We had no idea what it was.  No one knew what it was at the time.”

Everything in Vietnam rewarded the soldier with injury, with trauma.  Maury said nothing was safe.  Not the jungle, the rivers, the rice paddies or the soldier’s very own weapons.  He talked about how he wears hearing aids now and that this ailment was caused by Vietnam.   Doesn’t have to be anything specific, just “Vietnam.”  He recently filed suit with the government but they say he rolled out of the Army with no discernable hearing problems.  Tough luck.  He’s in the process of appealing.

“The one-five-fives [155 millimeter Howitzer cannons], they were so loud.  So painful.  You couldn’t hear anything.  And they just shook the ground,” he said, his hands going up and down atop the kitchen table.  “Everything hurt your ears.  Mortars.  100 pound bombs.  Small arms fire.  Everything.”

I shook my head.  I don’t know what Maury thought of that, when he sniped a glance at me, but he quickly noted that he was no rear-base punk.  He didn’t sit in an office counting the dead or filing papers alongside some “scared-of-his-own-shadow Major,” as he put it.

“I saw a lot of action,” he said, batting around the blueberries.  “I got a Bronze Star and an Army Commendation Medal.”  Although he didn’t get into much else, everyone knows that these are big medals.  I’ve always thought it fucking ridiculous that the Army awards simple medals to men who die or come close to dying or wished they’d died for some indescribable act of bravery and courage.  Shouldn’t there be more?  But they’d do it anyway, these soldiers who truly love the men serving alongside them.  So, I guess, why not give them a medal?  If it affords one pride in one’s action, if it gifts some semblance of transcending the pledge, then that’s the least the Army can do.

I asked Maury when he’d served.

“I was there in ’68 and ’69,” he said.  “We were actually the first unit pulled out of the war in ’69.”

“You were there for the Tet Offensive.”

“Oh.  That was awful.”  Maury picked up the blueberries.  Then he set them down again.  “The Tet Offensive was an awful time, for us, at least.”  Many Vietnam historians consider the Tet Offensive to be the turning point in the war.  The Viet Cong, the black pajama militia sponsored by the North Vietnamese Army [NVA], along with the NVA, launched surprise attacks across South Vietnam during Tet, creating chaos and a defensive posture in the US military.  This happened in early ’68.  Early in Maury’s deployment.

Many months after the end of the Offensive a senior officer ordered Maury to square his gear, pack up, and jump in a jeep.  His time in Vietnam was over.  At this point Maury said he’d been an intelligence officer and he was being sent elsewhere for the last weeks he owed the Army.  He packed up and jumped in the jeep, dumbfounded by his luck.  As he and the driver rumbled down a trail they began taking small arms fire from the jungle rim.

“The driver hit the pedal.  He just gunned it.  We flew down that road, still taking small arms fire out of the jungle.”  Maury chuckled to the blueberries.  “I guess it was exciting.”  Maury boarded a cargo plane and hours later he landed in Taiwan.  There he met a man he believed to be a CIA agent.  A spook.

The CIA man made quite an impression on young Maury.  “He was this big, huge guy.  Very, very good looking.  He took me to his house.  He had a cook, a housekeeper.  And he had this huge, huge German shepherd.  And the women loved this guy.  Everywhere we went in Taiwan the women loved him.  He was a real James Bond-type of guy.”

The spook offered Maury a promotion and an important job in intelligence, but Maury declined.  He wasn’t a lifer.  “I just wanted out,” he said.  “I wasn’t staying in the Army.”

I noted how scary it must have been.  Vietnam.  I was born at the end of that war.  My father served.  My father’s memories and the movies and all the books I’ve read, they tell me how terrible and unspeakably frightful that war was.

“I was always scared,” Maury said.  “Always.  But, I also had some good times.  I have some good memories, too.”  He got up and walked to his home office to write me a check.

“Did you keep up with any of the men you served with?”

“No,” his voice, from his office, “but I should have.  I wish I would have.”  He came back out and handed me the check.  “I volunteer at the Veteran’s Hospital now.  Drive the guys to appointments and things like that.”

I shook Maury’s hand and he smiled at me, and I wish I could understand what that smile meant.  Maybe it didn’t mean anything.  Maybe he talked about Vietnam all the time, but I don’t think so.  I think he had some stranger working in his house, and this stranger showed sincere interest in his past, and then he talked about it. Simple as that. He probably knows a stranger’s judgment doesn’t amount to a lump of shit, and he probably knew that this stranger wasn’t there to judge anyway.  He wanted to talk.  I wanted to listen.  That was our contract.

As I’ve said, my father, like Maury, is a Vietnam vet.  I’m a Vietnam baby.  And in this culture, in this time, after all these wars and recent tragedies, these men…are they remembered?  I’m sick that these men – these men who need kitchen countertops jazzed up with a backsplash, who tinker around in their gardens while the wife is at work, who shop for groceries and smile when talking of their children – they are not seen for what they once were, if only briefly, in the most unpopular war in modern American history.

I also wish they’d speak up more often, or that maybe I could see their insides, their pasts, just by looking at them.  I wish I could recognize it, like a clairvoyant – that this man on the street, that guy on the subway, this gentleman reading the paper – he used to be a scared shitless kid fighting in a war he didn’t understand and hated  and was there simply because his grades were going south, his folks couldn’t afford school, he didn’t have a god damned choice because there’s no voting down a draft.

But I can’t know these things.  Not just by looking.  So, that’s why I ask.

Almost, a word of two tiny syllables, is what is finally wrong with this world.  Too much almost.  Almost there, almost done, almost Christmas, almost leaving this country mummified in frost and sub-zero winds – Communist winds, obviously, from the North — for the warm, inviting, dreamy beaches of Thailand and bubbling jungle rivers of Southeast Asia.  I was almost there.  It was driving me absolutely bananas.

Korea, in winter, is a lot like my grandmother’s antique freezer she used to keep in the foyer of her Iowa farm house.  Popsicles in there, for one.  Grape, if you must know.  Curious to dip one’s head into and have a poke around, but after a while one realizes that uncovering  the treasures buried beneath the heaps of ice and frost would take a very solid ice pick and result in a debilitating case of elbow tendinitis.  It’s just not worth it.  Well, it’s almost worth it.  In the end, you just want to slam closed the hefty freezer lid and go out into the sun and shoot the rooting pigs in the rump with your one pump BB gun.

This heat fan, in my defunct apartment, sounded like a crashing Piper Cub, threw heat into a space the size of a Dixie cup, and nearly burned down my apartment numerous times after I threw my comforter over it at night, desperate to save my toes and extremities from the deep freeze. Stupid heat fan.

I was almost out of Korea, out of the cold, and on to the Koh Tao beaches and granite boulders hidden in the palms and jungle vines.  I had been convalescing at my friend Tom’s apartment in downtown Seoul, which he had abandoned for his own vacation.  I had been forced out of my own apartment a week before after the contract with my publishing company had expired.  Tom’s apartment was cold.  And very small.  Like my grandmother’s freezer, come to think of it.  That final day before the airport I pranced about the apartment to stay warm, attempting to touch every wall at the same time while bouncing on the bed and rubbing boogers on all of Tom’s private belongings.  That might or might not be true.

That last morning in his apartment I showered and shook violently and chattered my teeth until they nearly snapped out of my head, packed all of my possessions into an Osprey backpack and a Timbuk2 messenger bag, and loped out the apartment door and out of downtown Seoul for my old town of Ilsan, a northwestern suburb.  With all the weight I’d be lugging on vacation resting squarely upon my person the subway provided a fairly miserable experience, what with no available seats.  My shoulders were trying to kill me, and that is why I hate them.

Teachers at my former school trying to ruin the classy neon calm of a night in Lafesta.

An hour after leaving Tom’s I was hobbling through my old neighborhood, a shopping and eating district called Lafesta, hunting for hotels.  Not a one in sight.  Curious how I had lived there for over a year and never had it crossed my mind what out-of-towners did for lodgings.  Even more curious that it crossed my mind how everyone walking the streets should feel deep empathy and compassion for my plight.  Finally, sweating despite the finger immobilizing cold, I stumbled onto a three level hotel tucked right into the shops and boutiques.

I was standing in the middle of Meat Street.  This sector of Lafesta is called Meat Street because every restaurant and shop and street vendor is in the business of meat.  Cooking it and selling it.  Sometimes one before the other, but not always.  I loved Meat Street, having sampled every restaurant a number of times.  I carpet bombed my colon across this intersection of briskets and tri-tips and top round and pre-cut cubes for one fully gorged year.  What the penalty will be for such behavior should provide quite a curiosity in my golden days.

I left the thick wafting of burning flesh behind and entered the hotel’s tight lobby and knocked on a window set into a far wall, interrupting a gaggle of twenty-somethings while eating.  Eating meat, I’m certain.  A sign on a wall to my right advertised 80,000 won for a night’s lodging.  Expensive.  A young woman came bustling forward saying “yea,” in that drawn out way that Korean’s buy time before they can get to you, and slid open the window.  I caught a look of surprise on her face, presumably because she figured that no one knew this hotel even existed.  Maybe because I was a foreigner.  Probably because a foreigner had found the place!

“Onul pam olmayeo?” I asked.  How much for one night?

“Ani, ani.”  No, no, she said, making that hideously annoying and rude double-armed cross sign in front of her chest that means NO and WE DON’T HAVE ANY and HEY, FUCK OFF!

“Wheyo?  Don issoyo,” said I.  Why?  I have the money.

No, she said.  No, no, no.  I inquired as to where I could find a hotel that accepted people needing a hotel and she said, “Taxi.  Taxi.”  Her face said, “Sweet Korean Jesus, how is it that foreigners are so incredibly stupid?”  That’s a pretty good question, I thought, all things considered.  But still.

“Chincha…” I said, glaring.  Really…

“Taxi.”  And then she very delicately slid the window closed.

“Crap-filled buttholes,” I mumbled, flipping off the group of giggling hoteliers over my aching shoulder as I walked back out onto the grey street.  It was well below freezing and gusty, the kind of day you really want to tuck comfortably behind window shades in a very well-heated room.  I wasn’t quite sure what to do or where to go, homeless as I was, so I wandered around Meat Street a bit longer before finally deciding to hail a taxi for nearby Madu-dong so I could at least take care of my pension refund.  All American teachers and writers employed in the education of Korean’s youth are given a pension at the end of the year, roughly amounting to about $2,000 US.  Even the prospect of riches and spoils, however, couldn’t dull the freeze springing forth in my head.  If nothing else the young hotelier had won the first battle of the day, I thought, grumpily sliding into the back seat of a god damned taxi.

I tipped the cabbie some minutes later and jumped out at the Madu-dong subway station, and wouldn’t you know it that just across the street stood a huge, hulking hotel.  The Hotel Roma.  A bulky gray stone ogre set amongst all the lithe and pulsing neon.  It looked like a battlement erected by the North Koreans one cold night when all the South Koreans were sound asleep.  I imagine the next morning the Southerners noted the new gray structure on their walk to the subway and thought, “That’s odd, I’ve never noticed that gray prison before.”  To me, providence.  It didn’t seem overly seedy or overly pricey.  How much could one night in a Communist prison really cost you?  Don’t answer that.

Don't you fret, the Hotel Roma is out there somewhere...

I sprinted across the bustling street, lunged into the Hotel Roma, and noted that the building was only partly hotel, that part located on the sixth floor.  I took the elevator up, exited, and then I just about burst with the kind of joy one might find when tickled just so behind the knee.

Give me just a moment.  You see, there is something called the “love motel” in Korea.  If I were to be diplomatic about it all, I would say that a love motel is a “short stay” pit stop for teenagers in heat and businessmen dissatisfied with their matrimonial obligations.  That’s about as diplomatic and generic as one can handle such wonderful brothels.  Various sorts of folks use these motels to, well, vigorously boink each other.  The thing about a love motel is that from the outside you’re not always sure that you are actually entering one.  Although usually more discreet than your garden variety motel, with smaller windows and some sort of pulsing neon penis or blooming tulip affixed above the entrance (this is not true, but it should be), love motels are basically indecipherable from the outside.  They’re just motels.  From the outside.

Over two years I’d spent in Korea and never had I stayed in a true love motel.  Oh, I’d spent time in them, in Seoul, Daegu, off the beach in Busan, in Boryeoung for the Mud Festival, near Seonunsan on a sport climbing trip with the Frustrated Canadian.  But never, ever, ever anyplace like this.  This was the Real McCoy, man, which a cretin would have noted instantly.  Even I noted these facts after a few moments.

The lobby hallway, engulfing me in warmth, was covered from ceiling to floor in a gaudy olive-colored, check patterned carpet and wallpaper.  Randomly spaced yellow, green, and red lamps dotted the walls and hung from the ceiling.  Caution, Go, Stop, the lights said.  A little like love with a stranger, after exchanging a fistful of money, of course.  You must understand that this is simple conjecture on my part.

I slugged the packs higher upon my mutinous shoulders and tip toed through the lobby, which was quite long.  Every 15 feet or so cheap wooden bookshelves were crammed up against the wallpaper, the kind of do-it-yourself jobs you might purchase at Big Lots.  Each and every one was crammed to bursting with pornographic movies.  I must tell you that I was smiling broadly for the first time all day.  I stooped in front of the first bookshelf I came upon, inspecting the selection.  “Red Heat,” starring the esteemed governor of California.  A couple of Wesley Snipes movies I must have missed in the theaters.  And rows and rows and rows of pornos.  I have friends that would have paid a hefty fee for the opportunity to haul this stuff off.  I imagine I wouldn’t have seen them for a month, and after that sordid ordeal you really wouldn’t know the person who came out of that experience, would you?  I don’t think so.  That much porn could really change a person.

I finally came upon the window counter, behind which sat a wrinkled up elderly woman in black pajamas, like a Viet Cong porno nightmare.  She was, of course, speechless upon seeing me slumped over the counter, a solo white backpacker on the sixth floor of a seemingly empty love motel near the huge and bustling KT Plaza and frumpy shops of Lafesta.  Refusing to believe such an apparition could speak or even understand Korean, she held up five swollen fingers after I’d asked how much for the night.  My smile must have terrified the poor old hag.

“O man?” I asked.  Fifty thousand Won?

“Ne, ne,” she said.  Yes, yes.

“Okay!”

She instructed me to wait a moment and waddled down a hallway and turned a corner into darkness.  There was a soft racket and thump.  I attempted to casually lean into the counter, whistling that nervous droll tune that is always droll and tuneless.  She returned with a man that had obviously been woken from a deep, deep nap, his sweat suit barely covering his girth and his eyes squinting through the Caution, Go, Stop lights.  I don’t know why she’d woken the poor fellow, because all he was good for was taking my 50,000 won, handing over a key, and then sullenly following me to my room, after moaning and waving a general direction down a handful of dim corridors.  Seeing me struggling, he rushed up behind me, meaning to help with one of my packs, I thought.  Instead, he snatched the key out of my hand and opened a door just down the right hallway.  And…oh boy.

Please, if you will, note the subtle hues and gentle Feng Shui.

I cautiously entered a room wrapped like a Christmas present sent from a decrepit Reno casino, that same hallway wallpaper everywhere.  The checked olive-colored pattern morphed into very classy little diamond shapes.  The sleepy fellow casually flipped on the television, which showed a man in violent coitus with a young lady, in what I believe is known as the “scissor” position, legs intertwined, her back facing the screen, ass jiggling like Jell-O.  “Ah…Ah…Ah,” my room said.  The attendant stared at me.  I abruptly noticed something on my pack straps and picked at it.  He then waved his arms about the room, handed me a zip-lock bag, and disappeared out the door with a smile and a “good day.”  He really said that.  “Good day.”

Let me tell you that my room was much more Larry Flynt than Hugh Hefner.  Round bed stuffed into the corner, mirrors encircling it on two walls.  Red and golden fringed sheets and Lord knows how much dried jizz.  On the ceiling, a huge painting of a naked woman in masturbatorial ecstasy, her hand cupping a breast and the other swooping across her honey pot, a mole elegantly rendered below the corner of her parted red lips.  Her eyes were closed, as one would expect, and sheets entangled her trim midsection.  Fantastic, all of it inset a foot into the ceiling.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't bear the notion of your disbelief. So... Proof, I suppose. ENJOY!!

Not surprisingly, everything in the room was prepared for a couple.  Two chairs on opposite sides of a small red table, two coffee cups, two tea mugs, his and her towels and robes, and a fresh box of tissues on a stand next to the round bed.  Apparently the participants were to share the tissues.  Gels, gels, gels everywhere; clear, creamy, sea green, aqua.  No gel unaccounted for in the Hotel Roma.

And in my zip-lock baggie, you ask?  Well, let me tell you, because I whipped out my notebook like the hardened journalist I am upon opening my gift.  Two toothbrushes, a “Ladies Set” package of hair ties, three square cotton wipes, and exactly five Q-tips.  A “Lucky Man” razor.  Indeed.  A single use packet of facial cream.  Finally, a red packet with silver lettering over the outline of a naked woman striking quite a provocative pose.  Perhaps it was the same woman painted on my ceiling?  This packet advertised “To To Gel.”  Five milliliters of body massage gel.  And in the mini-refrigerator?  A small box of orange juice.  A wee box of grape juice.  I imagine they weren’t for drinking.

Home sweet home.

After gingerly settling in I strolled back to KT Plaza and had one hell of a time finding the National Pension Service (NPS) offices.  Thank god everything in Korea is written in both English and Korean, however, because a passing glance at a Korean sign leaves me thinking of writhing worms and squiggly things.  Thankfully, I was saved frostbite when I turned a corner and saw the NPS office sign.  A random septuagenarian lady assumed control of my destiny as soon as I entered the building, forcing me off and on three different floors until I finally extricated myself with many bows and headed for the Information Desk, where I should have started in the first place but would have been too stubborn to check out even if I hadn’t been abducted.

A girl behind me in the elevator, a real cutie, asked, “Do you need help?”  I explained my situation and she walked me to the desk, where along with the attendant we worked out that I was to go to the second floor, where I’d just come from.  This exchange took nearly ten minutes.  I thought, how many foreigners must bust through this desk looking for the NPS offices?  And then I thought, about a metric ton of foreigners every few months.  This caused a sweeping wave of expat frustration and impotence to roll over me, making its tri-daily soaking of my conscience.  In all seriousness, almost nothing is simple when living in a foreign country.  Ever.  Living in a country with such a deep history and rich and unique culture as Korea, for an American, is often like running the hurdles while strapped to a wheelchair.  At any rate, I said goodbye to my cute helper, wishing I’d met her exactly twelve months before, and walked up the stairs to the NPS office. Before parting I failed to inform her, surely to my own detriment, that I had secured a classy hotel room for two.

An hour later I was informed that I’d receive my pension payment via bank transit in about a month.  I was out the door a minute later, by now intimate with the building’s innards.  Outside beneath the grey sky I called Yongsei Severance Hospital on my cell and scheduled an appointment for the next day to receive my malaria meds.  Then my friend Dave called and I talked to him a bit, but the phone cut out so many times that we both gave up after the umpteenth buzz and crunch and there was no goodbye. I was sorry about that, but what is a goodbye between expats, really?  We’re all residents of a nowhere space.  I guess we don’t need goodbyes all the time.  It’s assumed upon a vagabond friendship.   I grabbed a tuna kimbap roll and a bottle of water from a street vendor and headed back to my sex attic in the sky.

Back in my room I sat at my couples’ table and stared out the window at the Madu-dong subway station, wondering if I’d miss it, if I’d miss Ilsan and Korea and the manic expat experience that had defined my life going on three years.  Black haired people shoulder to shoulder on the street below, shuffling and nudging and kind of liquidly bouncing and flowing around each other in the waning daylight, like a tar river.  Neon glinting like an oil slick off clean and caringly pressed suit coats.

Suddenly, I thought about how much I missed the casual hum of the English language, morphed into the mumble of a city’s streets.  Spend a long enough time away from the English language and you actually do imagine it as a casual hum.  Interestingly enough, when you get back it sounds like a barn full of chickens in a death grapple.  But I wasn’t back yet, and I missed it.  Below me now, always around me for three years in a number of different countries, only the exotic cymbal crashes of the Asian languages.  I was ready to eavesdrop a conversation about the ineptitude of my beloved Colorado Rockies baseball team…for like six hours straight.

And then I had a shit in my love motel.  Reading my used copy of “The Beach,” preparing for Thailand and Laos and beaches and sun, I noticed a tiny thread of black fabric stuck to the page.  This must have come from the previous owner.  I thought that was pretty cool, like sharing a sort of mystery with another who had once owned what I now owned, who had once shared my intrigue for this very same story.  I wondered what led them to this particular book.  Were they once on their way to Southeast Asia, like me, or had they simply needed something to pass the minutes while they voided their bowels, curiously also like me?  I fingered the piece of fabric, smiling faintly, and turned the page.  I wondered what trace I would leave on this book when I finally traded it for another.

But then, sitting there on the shitter, I also wondered about the traces left in this love motel.  It was the first truly upsetting thought I’d had all day.  Well, almost the first.

Sometime in the fall of the mid to late 2000s…

Here in Korea, there’s an eight year old in my class.  He sits in the front row, on the right side of the class, and he’s always wearing his tae kwon do uniform.  Normally white, his smock is stained orange here and dull yellow there, a testament to his snacking habits and utter lack of motor skill command.  His fingers are sticky.  A filthy little ninja in my class and his name is Rainbow.

Today we’re reading a parable of familial bonding and oedipal confusion, a child’s illustrated story called “Chompy’s Big Day.”  Chompy is a big green dinosaur, the kind stuffed in the third aisle of every toy store, the kind with rounded teeth and full, smiling lips.  This dinosaur…everyone wants to pet this dinosaur.  I want to pet this dinosaur.  I want to sing it songs.  I want to offer Tyrannosaurus protection and candies.  I can’t even imagine how the kids feel about the cute little monster.  In the story, Chompy goes on a picnic with mom and gets into some sticky business with a cranky Triceratops, biting into its tail thinking it a piece of fruit.  His mother saves the day, and the picnic turns out to be a great success, despite Chompy’s mischief.

Rainbow is crazy for Chompy; he can’t stop squirming in his seat.  He stands and lisps – Rainbow has a remarkable lisp, and a raking, raspy voice – to read the next page, breathlessly adjusting his uniform and retying his belt.

“Teasher!  Teasher!  Me read!”

“Hold up, Rainbow.  Next.  Next.  Okay?”

“Teeeeaaaasher!”

“Sit down, Rainbow.  Wilma is next.  Chomkoman (“wait” in Korean).”

Rainbow releases a balloon of air, squeaking, slowly lowering like a hydraulic compressor shutting down.  Rakes my damn nerves, to tell you the truth, as he’s up and down like some Cheetos stained piston gone crazy.  On an ordinary day he’ll shoot out of his desk as if Chompy had taken a piece out of his ass, running figure eights around the class and usually landing on his back and flailing his arms and legs like a flipped turtle on methamphetamines.  This last crash landing happens, specifically, right at my feet while I’m stunned to silence in the midst of a lesson on this…or that.  But not today.  Today he hisses and then goes stoic and quiet.  And he sits, turning pages to his own beat, absolutely oblivious to Chompy’s great literary adventure.

This silence is unnerving.  Silence is dangerous in a class full of eight year olds.  Silence is a harbinger of mutiny, especially with Rainbow.  Nevertheless, each kid reads a page, slowly, carefully, finger following each word on the page.  I love these kids, most of whom really want to learn English.  Their progress is amazing, smart little buggers.  But still, Rainbow has stopped hissing and lisping and roaming aimlessly about the classroom.  I can smell the danger, pungent and grim.

And then the rapture is broken, and the children begin a chorus of “Teacher, oh sangsangnim! (“teacher” in Korean)”

“Sam, man, what’s the problem?  Wilma, what’s up?”

“Teacher.  Rainbow.  Look.”  Deborah is beside herself, stabbing accusations at Rainbow with her bony little finger.  All the children are chirping now, pointing at our man, mouths agape.  The silence has broken, and the wave begins to crest.

So, I look at Rainbow, and by god the little deviant has succeeded again in making my Korean teaching career an awkward and hellish landscape.  Rainbow is slumped in his chair, a confused grin smeared upon his goofy face.  I notice for the first time that Rainbow is a little cross-eyed.  I think he’s looking right at me…maybe.

Insane eyes or no, below him sits a lake of urine.  Rainbow has peed his pants.  Quietly.  Rainbow peed in absolute silence and thus avoided detection during the act.  Somehow his desk is glistening with urine.  He also peed on the floor.  The streams are crawling towards me at the front of the classroom in horror movie slow motion.  His tae kwon do uniform has suffered the ultimate indignity.

The kids reach some heretofore hidden level of furious hypocrisy (what, you’ve never peed your tae kwan do uniform in English ESL class?  Please…), throwing fits at Rainbow’s lack of integrity.  Chompy is lost to them now.  Only Rainbow’s pee-fest remains.  I don’t know what the hell to do, as one doesn’t want to ostracize Rainbow for sprinkling the lawn by throwing him out of the class, or telling him to go see the secretary.  One must be gentle.  One must take care not to put into motion some psychopathological juggernaut that will someday carry our protagonist into the throes of multiple homicides.

So, I decide on no action.  Frankly, that is the clearest path.  Best line of sight to the end of this madness.  There’s only two minutes left in class, then Rainbow goes home and the afternoon middle school classes begin.  Let his parents deal with it – I am most definitely not paid enough for pee patrol.  Maybe if I ignore the whole mess this will all go away?  Yes.  It will.  Everything is ooohhh kayyyyy…

“Wilma, page 186.”

“But teacher…”

“Wilma…”

“’Chompy ran up the hill…’”

The bell rings as a singing voice from heaven, and I spend my ten minute break cordoning off Rainbow’s desk with newspaper and string, trying to mop up the mess and making sure no one plops down in his befouled seat.  My eight year olds’ classroom looks like a crime scene.  I have no hazmat suit and I have no rubber gloves.  Only Rainbow’s pee puddle and an open reading book, Chompy smiling at me and wondering what a triceratops’ tail tastes like.