How to Climb
John Long: On the Road
And you thought your last climbing trip was tough
During my 1,000 or so road trips over the past 30 years, I’ve endured bullet holes in my dad’s Lincoln, fisticuffs and flying spears with Papuan coppers, and eight days in a Tennessee lockup. But for sheer grief and frustration, from start to finish, nothing can rival my trip to Mexico’s Throne with the graceful “Rose,” fellow member of the University of La Verne Outdoor Recreation Club.
Only Melvin, from Duluth, Minnesota, joined the rec club to shoot arrows into hay bails, kayak in the local mud hole, and toprope out at Stoney Point. For the rest of us guys, the pressing recreation was of the horizontal variety, with the dozens of smashing hotties, excluding Rose, who’s father — a husky mountaineer and volunteer outing director — said he’d crush the skull of anyone who tried to sack his daughter.
Anyhow, during one Memorial Day weekend, I decided to skip the annual club slog up Mount Baldy and instead planned a climbing trip to El Gran Trono Blanco (the Great White Throne), down in Baja. Then at the last moment, my partners fell out. For over a year I’d schemed to take Rose climbing, hoping she’d rip the lederhosen right off me and keep her yap shut about the whole affair, and her chance had finally come. I jogged over to the girls’ dorm and found her reading Sylvia Plath and listening to Bartok. I spelled out my plan in shorthand, and just as I’d hoped, she loved the sound of a Mexican adventure. Early the next morning we loaded up my VW bug and headed for the border.
Rolling south I tried to cut the figure of the cool and dashing rock stallion who would guide Rose up an exotic big wall in nothing flat. Every time she inquired about what part of the Mexican continent we were heading for, and what we were actually planing to do, I’d toss out an offhand reply and Rose would tell me she trusted that I knew best, and then she’d settle back and say nothing for 10 or 15 miles. Slowly, these lingering silences started working on me. After another empty mile I asked Rose what was wrong. “Nothing worth mentioning,” she insisted. I pressed her — friends could be frank with each other, surely — and Rose lauded my maturity. As it happened, there were a few small concerns.
I hadn’t vacuumed or washed my car in a year (the whole rig stank of smoke). Nor had I shaved in a few days, and my clothes were “eccentric.” And it didn’t make sense that an athlete like myself should smoke cigarettes. With every passing mile Rose found another vice or foible, all mentioned with a coy little smile, as a sort of courtesy. By the time we crossed the border at Tijuana, I was defending my right to be alive. I felt put upon, in fact, so in El Hongo, just shy of the dirt turnoff for the Throne, I dropped into a bodega and snagged a quart bottle of mescal, a fierce and hazardous Latin “shine” leeched from agave cactus and old tractor batteries.
I drank the whole bottle, and probably the worm in the bottom, and for the first and last time in my life that night’s debaucheries were a total blank the following morning. Who knows how we got to the desert campsite, 40 miles down a maze of crisscrossing dirt roads, in the middle of Baja.