Quel es? ... Ahhh ... la belle femme skunk fatale!! Tch-tch.

I went rock climbing for the first time on Friday, something I have been avoiding for years, because I was deathly afraid of it. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights; it’s that I’m afraid of my ability to hang onto the wall. First of all, I don’t exactly have a lot of upper body strength. To be honest, some of my shirts button right over left instead of left over right. But mostly, I don’t have a lot of hand strength to hold onto the wall. I’ve always pictured rock climbers as having vice grips on the ends of their wrists. But on Friday, I was finally talked into it, mostly because I didn’t want to be the only one not to go. I learned a lot about climbing that day. The first thing I learned was that the shoes really hurt. In fact, after I laced them up I no longer had any fear; I just wanted to get it over as fast as I could to get that special kind of torture off my feet. I scurried to the top as fast as I dared, repelled to the bottom, and ripped those things off of my poor little patos. Once the pain diminished to an aching throb, I realized that I had made it and started to feel pretty good about myself. I was amazed to learn that rock climbing is done mostly with the legs and that you don’t have to do the equivalent of a thousand pull ups by hanging onto a crack. Another thing I learned was how different climbs are rated, and that the one I had just struggled with was aptly named “bunny slopes”. I no longer felt very good about myself. Later that afternoon we went to a more “moderate” climb. To me, it seemed like we were trying to shimmy our way up the side of a rock that had a face as smooth as a mirror. I did my best to hold back the tears as I laced on those foot sized iron maidens and then began to climb. Do you remember the old Warner Brothers cartoon about Pepe Le Pew chasing around Penelope Pussycat? And do you remember the part when the cat would eventually get cornered and would try to climb up a sheer wall while the skunk stood at the bottom reading poetry and declaring his love? Well, I was like that cat. I tried to scratch and scrape and claw my way up the wall, while the girl at the other end of the rope voiced her approval. But in reality, I just kept slipping, swinging into the wall at the end of the rope, and bumping my knuckles, arms, legs, head, buttocks, you name it. Each time I slipped, the girl at the other end of the rope must have given a heave so that I was a bit higher on the wall when I regained my grip (lather, rinse, repeat). By the time I got about half way up, I started to feel like the belayer was just hoisting a piano up to the fourth floor, so I decided to tap out. I give props to rock climbers with sufficient technique to rest their entire weight on a bump of rock the size of a pea.