After three years of espousing the virtues of an absolute indifference to thematic cohesion across one’s body of work, I’ve found myself working in a series for the first time.
Oddly, the planet that has exploded into thousands of smaller islands is the world of rock climbing. Specifically, indoor rock climbing gyms. Even more precisely, Sender One in Los Angeles, where Grey climbs. It only took one visit—I went with him and Tessa for a couple hours earlier this month and the floodgates opened.
Firstly, the visuals. If big rock candy mountains shooting towards the sky with tons of planar changes along the way weren’t dramatic enough, they’re pocked with hundreds of multicolored holds ranging from tiny pink gumdrops to suitcase-sized black monoliths. Marked with tags identifying the difficulty of color-coordinated routes, they’re a chromatic choose-your-own-adventure-to-the-summit display. The fact that everyone can see your choice as you stand under these rainbow proposals lays a core question bare: will you choose the comfortable path or risk public failure (perhaps even humiliation) on the more challenging one?
These limb ledges are also fascinating for their truly psychedelic geometry. There’s such a diversity of designs, from oblong red hourglasses to giant lemon wedges to lime green knolls. And their shapes shift as bodies interact with them—one image since imprinted is of a focused climber’s downcast profile next to an amoeba-like splotch of blue with a protrusion that echoed his nose. Like a taxidermied Blue Meanie.
Then there’s the element of body language (my one true love). Never have I been somewhere with so many people voluntarily contorting at once. Watching strangers pretzel themselves onto precarious perches (sorry), I daydreamed about their walks of life. Was the guy mountain goating a microscopic dot in a crucified pose an OB-GYN in bloody scrubs an hour before? Was the woman peering down between her split legs an accountant who just finished crunching her client’s numbers? These were the city’s bipedal sidewalk stoics brought onto all fours and inverted.
What this leads to is an environment that feels like a Ministry of Silly Walks on the y-axis, but there’s also the palpable texture of desire in the air. What I mean by this has less to do with spandex-accentuated bodies and more with constant reaching and reaching and reaching. I’m fixated on this part of it, of arms and then hands and then fingers like spiders straining and grasping for those last few centimeters. Like a defibrillator to my melodramatic heart are the moments where the next move is just beyond the wingspan, so the only choice left is to jump.
But to do so, climbers are legally required to be strapped into a harness connected to a trained someone on the ground who is responsible for their safety. A fascinating dynamic where one person’s ascension is literally bound to another’s humble support. In my case it was Grey who knotted me up and gave me the green light. On the highest climb I did that day, I remember his voice offering tips and reminders as I pulled myself up onto the first set of pegs. These turned to affirmations as I found my rhythm, then faint mutters as I climbed higher still.
In the final push to the top, I remember the sounds below falling away entirely. Being left with my own heaving breaths and a deep focus on one choice at a time was utterly meditative (not unlike pitching, actually), and for a few flowy minutes I took great pleasure in meeting myself where I was. Then it was time to come down.