2004 - Moonclimb

I know what it feels like, certainly, to be on the verge of something that can only truly be appreciated just by going....and doing... because more often than not this is where I am, where we all are, all the time.

When you look up at the ruins of the desert's glorious rock skeletons, your legs start to buckle before you even take the first step. The top is so high, and so far that you can feel yourself falling even though your feet are on the ground. My good friend Greg is already half way up and I ask him, "How can you just jump around like that? Aren't you scared?"

He pauses for a moment and then tells me, "I don't know, its not really something you think about... up here, it's just me and gravity.... and it could kill me if it wanted to."

He speaks quietly into the darkness but I can hear him from hundreds of feet away. Tiny rocks crumble from under his feet and I can hear them echoing as they collide with the rocks below them.

I didn't know my ears could do that.

I can see him above me. His grey figure in the dusk is crawling up the side of the mountain in a tangle of arms and legs. Greg says, "You should hurry, or you'll miss the moon-rise."

I'll do anything once to see something beautiful.

I look over the black mountain range at the blinking sky. Its such an oily, deep blue that you could probably dive in and float in it. Everything is outlined in tones close to nothing. Greg is about an inch tall now.

In a combination of anticipation of the moon's arrival and fear of being left alone in the dark, in the desert, at the foot of a cliff waiting for heavy objects to fall on me- I start to jump- pushing my feet from rock to rock and bouncing myself through crevices with my hands.

The limestone is like velcro under my shoes. It feels good to move... and I stop thinking and resign my body to a pushing and pulling dance with gravity. I think about climbing on playgrounds when I was little, little me and gravity, my favorite playmate. When did I become so afraid?

Halfway up, I'm so engaged in fluid motion I see no point in looking down. Every boulder in front of me was a stepping stone. Every movement of my limbs a potential opportunity to be closer to the moon. I seem to have lost touch with the girl standing at the foot of the cliff, who I vaguely remember being me. I can't remember my name, or why I'm here why I started climbing, and I couldn't care less what day or time it is. I am movement and force.

I remember watching a creek flow under a bridge while driving through the mountains in Colorado, and trying to figure out why I loved it so much. You watch the water trickle and fall and here is this thing, that is there- but every millisecond it is something entirely different... and this is how I felt... it wasn't about being a droplet of water or even about being part of something more... it seemed to be more about an effortless, loving relationship with the laws of physics, or rather, the way things just moved.

As long as all I thought about was how beautiful that moonrise was going to be, every tenuous conscious calculation it would have taken to keep me from falling seemed absolutely arbitrary. When you're hundreds of feet above the ground, you no longer have to tell your arms what to do. When you're that far up, your only choice is to keep going, or stop. And I don't have to tell you that stopping is pointless.

I see Greg sitting at the top, looking, and before I know it I'm sitting up there, too. Right then the moon oozes over the range and bathes the valley in a sea of translucent light that writes a million mysteries for my eyes. I view like this is for me, and Greg, and anyone who took that first step, because they love to see a beautiful thing that much.

Its only when you're there and you turn around and look down that you truly realize the kinds of things you can do. As the adrenaline rushes to your head you get dizzy and glue yourself to the cliffside. Your body panics in a surge of electric euphoria that gives you goosebumps and makes you feel cold all of a sudden. In your head though, it's like you're flying. Like "wheeee".

The first thought that comes to my head is similar to the one I had before, because I know that eventually I will have to figure out a way to gracefully fall to the ground, rock to rock, unscathed. This seems harder than climbing but much more inevitable. The moon is high above the mountain range and everything is a color that reminds me of the sound of heavy rain in the middle of the night when you can't sleep.

I'm afraid of gravity again but this time I'm at the top and the only way to get back is down. I don't know where to start.

Greg starts to climb down and says, "If you keep climbing down until the moon is just under the range, you can watch the moon rise over and over again. I couldn't have though of a better reason to keep going myself.