7 May 2011, Saturday
First, I hear a dog bark. Then I hear Chad’s voice. Then I hear Timmy’s voice. The sun is shining brightly through the tent fly so I figure it must be at least 8:30. I get out of my sleeping bag and open my Coke. The top is covered in red Shelf dust. I pull on my climbing clothes and then turn on my Blackberry. It’s 6:30 in the morning.
Cursing at being up at such an ungodly hour, I exit my tent and find Timmy and Chad in the middle of making eggs for breakfast. Though everyone in camp gets up soon after I do, we don’t end up making it to the trail head until around 9 am. We’ve decided to climb at the Menses wall and Gabi consults a map in the guide book to figure out the best trail to get there.
I’m confused about the discussion on terrain until Rob explains to me that rocks and loose gravel present a serious obstacle to walking, and that up hills and down hills can be difficult to hike with a prosthetic. We elect to go left, taking a trail that’s longer but, according to the map, less steep.
It ends up being the worst decision ever. The trail is just as hard as the one to the right, and it’s longer. The group becomes strung out because the athletes walk at various speeds. I decide to stay with Rob, who’s walking in the back of the pack. He’s not in a huge hurry to get to the crag, and he’s a captive audience for me to talk to while we hike.
Rob gives me the low down on how prosthetics work. I’m surprised when he tells me legs are held on just by suction to the stump, the term most people use for what’s left after an amputation, though the technical term is “residual limb”. A stump can change size even over the course of a day, so there are things called “socks” that he uses to make sure his prosthetic stays put if his stump changes size because that affects the suction and the athlete’s ability to keep the prosthetic leg attached. Rob has what appears to be an endless supply of socks in his backpack. Some are sort of like tube socks and they hit him mid-thigh. Others are really small and look like those caps they put on babies in the hospital. He also has neoprene looking socks that have a spike sticking out of the bottom of them.
After walking for a bit Rob would stop to repack his stump – that means he would take off or add socks to keep his prosthetic situated. A pattern emerged when it was about time to repack. Rob would start going “Fuck, shit, fuck!” The socks would come out of his pack. He would take some socks off and put different ones on, all the while patiently explaining to me why he was using a particular configuration of socks. I thought the neoprene spike socks were the best but Rob kept taking them off, I guess because they were making him sweaty.
He apologized often for his language, and I pointed out to him that I often use the f word even when it’s not needed. Rob suggested maybe I shouldn’t use the f word so frequently. I agreed, and was silently thankful he wasn’t lecturing me about smoking instead of my profanity usage.
At one stop to repack his stump the topic of shark week on Discovery channel came up because we had been talking about orcas attacking great whites. Rob told me how he was thinking about applying for a job as the commentator for shark week (Discovery is looking for someone). Rob is very handsome in a James Bond way, and I told him I thought he would be an excellent commentator. As he pulled himself to his feet with his walking poles he said “I don’t know how good I would look in a wet suit. But at least they wouldn’t have to worry about a shark biting my legs off.”
When we reached the crag the other climbers teased Rob about being late. I told them we had been talking and taking our time, and Rob pointed out that actually I had been talking. I apologized for monopolizing the conversation and Rob said “Well, what could I do? Run away?”
We had been joined by a photographer/journalist named Caroline. She interviewed the Paradox athletes and talked to them about their stories. I had found out on the hike in that Rob had lost his legs to a random invasive strep A infection. He went into a hospital on a Saturday with what he thought was the flu. He awoke from a coma two weeks later with no legs.
Rob has a theory that that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t experience phantom limb pain. He thinks that since he didn’t know he would lose his legs, and that he never had to make a decision about whether or not to lose them, his brain some how more readily accepted the fact that his legs were gone. He considers himself lucky because he knows a lot of amputees who have debilitating phantom pain.
Hiking with Rob provided me with great information about how prosthetics work and it also made me feel more confident that I wouldn’t say or do something stupid, as I normally do in social situation. On Friday night I had feared asking any of the athletes how they lost their legs, or anything about their prosthetics, though I was extremely curious. But all the athletes I talked to were totally open about their stories and their equipment. And they had no qualms about making fun of each other. I didn’t meet anyone that weekend that was self conscious about their prosthetic. To them it was just another piece of climbing equipment.
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Climbing with the Paradox athletes is like climbing with a group of nerdy robot engineers. They test out each other’s prosthetics to see how different prosthetic designs feel. They are always looking around for wrenches to make minor adjustments. They also give each other advice and tips, some of which are followed and some of which are ignored.
One thing I noticed immediately was that Christa, the sole female athlete, would pick her prosthetic, put it on with a wrench in a speedy and efficient manner, and make adjustments after a climb to improve the fit.
The guys, however, seemed to spend forever putting on their prosthetic. They would pick up the foot they were thinking about using and examine it as if it were some new object from outer space that they had never seen before. Then they would have long discussions about rubber, size, angles, stiffness verses flexibility, and length. Then they would keep tweaking the various bolts with the wrench, making what looked like miniscule adjustments. I thought about how guys always complain that women take so much longer to get ready, and realized that in this situation the reverse was true.
After we had done a few climbs Chad and two other climbers showed up. The first climber was a guy named Craig. He lost his leg after falling 100 feet in a climbing accident. But I didn’t even notice he had a prosthetic until I looked at his feet. Craig moves with the grace of a phenomenal athlete and walked faster than everyone in our group.
The other climber looked like a member of Hell’s Angels who had recently escaped from jail. He walked up to the rock where I was sitting and said “you know what I really need to do? I really need to take off this fucking pack!” As he settled down onto a rock Christa said hi to him and they chatted briefly while Caroline took pictures.
Wait a minute, I thought to myself, how is it possible that Christa knows this delinquent? Christa is a tiny blond, with size 5 shoes. She always has an expression on her face like she is going to start laughing. During the whole time I spent with her she always smiled, even when the trail got rough or her shoulders got sunburned.
While the degenerate was distracted by the photographer, whom he began flirting with the moment she got near him, I asked Christa how she knew the Hell’s Angel looking character. “Oh, he taught me to walk,” she said. They were also on a television show together. I found that hard to believe so I said “He, that guy over there propositioning the photographer, taught you how to walk?” Christa said “Yes, he saw that I was ready and he helped me learn to walk.”
Finding that out brought up another question. I had never asked Christa what happened to her leg, only hearing smatterings of clues such as “after the earthquake”, “commissioned the plane”, and “Christa was the twenty fourth most googled name after the accident”. I hadn’t wanted to ask what happened, mostly because her prosthetic seemed to be an afterthought to her as she climbed, like someone putting in a retainer before they go to bed. I felt like if I asked she would give me a puzzled look, as if I should be more interested in her 3 month old puppy rather than something as trivial as her leg.
But I figured it was as good a moment as any, so I asked. She cocked her head as if she was trying to remember something from long ago, like the name of the first street she lived on, and then she said “A house fell on me.”
It wasn’t the response I was expecting. In fact, I was shocked. So I clumsily said “wow, that’s so Wizard of Oz”, and then wished I could crawl into one of the rock cracks until the weekend was over. But Christa laughed and said “yeah, I have to figure out how to include the Wicked Witch in my story”.
Christa was a volunteer in Haiti when the earthquake hit. She and a colleague started running out of the house they were in, which was the only place with an internet connection. With the slightest catch in her voice she said “I didn’t make it out”. She was trapped under the house and it took a long time to get her out. She waited 30 hours with no pain medication for a plane to evacuate her. The woman whose house she was staying in collected up Christa’s toothbrush for the flight back to the U.S but failed to grab her passport and other useful papers. When I expressed confusion about that Christa said “That’s what it’s like living in that part of the world. Papers mean nothing. But a toothbrush, which is hard to get, is important.”
I noticed that Chad had gotten on a climb, and Christa and I watched as he made his way up the rock face. Timmy was belaying him. On another climb Rob was almost at the summit when suddenly his prosthetic came loose. Rob asked his belayer to take while he fixed the problem. Timmy looked over and said “Your leg is falling off? What, are you made of legos?” Chad chimed in that he had attached his leg to his climbing harness with a sling because a few weeks earlier he had dropped it on a multi-pitch climb. He succinctly summarized the event: “Lost my leg, got a sling, hooked it to my harness, problem solved.” He’s a Capricorn and they are very project oriented.
After everyone had taken a few laps on the routes that were set up the group came to a consensus that it was too hot in the area where we were. The sun was blazing down on us and the paler members of our group had started turning red. We gathered up our belongings and headed to some new routes in the shade.
That’s when the afternoon began to deteriorate. Timmy began a monologue that went from “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to how a cheese stick I had given to the Hell’s Angel climber, whose name I had found out was Tommy, looked “flaccid and oily”. People told me to stop laughing so Timmy would end the monologue but I couldn’t help listening. He’s like a really annoying pop song that gets stuck in your head, playing itself over and over again until you want to set your brain on fire.
Craig led a hard 5.11b and then Timmy led an easier route for the rest of us to climb. When he finished the route a 10 year old girl came over to our group. It turned out she is a huge fan of Timmy’s but was too timid to approach him.
Sensing an opportunity to ridicule Timmy we encouraged her to go over and meet him. She called him “teacher Timmy” and said she watched his DVD all the time. The guys in the group made fun of him for the rest of the afternoon for being famous and having a fan club.
Craig did the best job of making fun of Timmy, espousing great one liners effortlessly. He, like all the other athletes I had met, became involved with Paradox Sports because he was contacted by Malcolm Daly after his accident. Malcolm, who is on the board of directors and who is an amputee, puts a lot of effort into tracking down injured athletes and bringing them in to the Paradox fold.
Sometimes he does that in interesting ways. Craig told me he was in the hospital just days after his accident when Malcolm showed up to his room. He introduced himself to Craig and then took off his prosthetic and put it on Craig’s bed. “I wasn’t sure where things were going after he did that. I was wondered why this guy was putting his leg on my bed.” After talking with Malcolm Craig decided to get involved with Paradox and he does as many events as he can.
While I was talking to Craig Tommy had meandered over to my end of the cliff, mostly, I suspect, because that’s where Caroline was. She took a picture of him and he said in a wounded voice “Hey, you’re only taking a picture of my leg.” Caroline took her camera over to Tommy to show him she had gotten all of him in the photo, but I think he knew that and was just trying to get Caroline to come close to him so he could try to look down her shirt.
Tommy was the only Paradox athlete who had an amputation above the knee, meaning he can’t bend his leg. When he climbs he climbs with a very short prosthetic. As he ambled over to a route with his short leg on Timmy kept saying “Oy matey, I’m a pirate” because Tommy did kind of look like a pirate with a peg leg.
Around 7 pm we headed back to camp. Gabi and I walked with Rob, who seemed relieved that the trail we took back was shorter and a little easier than the way we had come up. There were a few places where he had to walk around big boulders because he couldn’t scale them, but he didn’t seem too stressed out about the descent even though that’s hardest for the athletes. We arrived at his van to find that he had packed a cooler in the back with beer, which was ice cold. He gave me a blonde beer and that was how I rehydrated after climbing all day.
We arrived back at the camp after everyone else. There was a festive atmosphere and Timmy was cooking teriyaki turkey meatballs. I decided to move my tent to a better position before I had another drink. Chad built a huge fire and then helped Timmy cook the spaghetti that was to accompany the meat balls. Gabi was enlisted to make rolls, and then a lemon cherry strawberry cake, in a dutch oven. I have to admit I was surprised at the meals Timmy and Chad managed to prepare with just a dutch oven and two stoves.
Once the angle of my tent was squared away I went to my car and got out a huge bottle of Yellow Tail wine. Rob had also brought some wine, so I drank a glass of the good stuff before hitting the Yellow Tail. Five more people had joined the party, bringing us to 14 people.
Everyone was sitting around the fire eating spaghetti and exchanging climbing stories. I was hanging out with Gabi, who had been given the position of Timmy’s sous chef, to pick up some cooking tips. I was fascinated by the technique Timmy used to cook in the Dutch oven. He would put coals below the oven and on top of the lid. Then he would keep opening the lid and rearranging or removing the charcoal. I don’t know exactly how he knew when to add or remove charcoal, but everything cooked perfectly.
Timmy’s tent pitching skills were in sharp contrast to his cooking. Gabi and I were standing next to the dutch oven waiting for the lemon cherry strawberry cake to finish when I noticed a tent blowing across the campsite. I grabbed it as it flew past me and Gabi asked the group whose tent it was. Only after everyone else denied all knowledge of the tent did Timmy say “Oh, I think that’s mine!” He had forgotten to stake it to the ground.
The lemon cherry strawberry cake had to cool for some time before it could be frosted. While waiting I decided to harass Tommy about setting up his tent before it got too late. The sun had gone down and the moon was a small crescent, so there wasn’t much ambient light. By the time he got his tent situated and I returned to the cake Gabi had already iced it. I noticed that he made little peaks at the edges to make it look like sharks were circling the perimeter of the cake. I thought it looked cool but no one else seemed to notice the shark fins.
At some point a big bottle of vodka came out of someone’s cooler. People were mixing Izzi juice and vodka. I tried a sip of a drink someone had made for Gabi and decided I still hate vodka, even when combined with grapefruit soda. We could see shooting stars and helicopters flying low over Shelf, looking for forest fires. Everyone was tired, but not too tired to enjoy the party.
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Some time around 2 am I decided I should think about going to bed. Chad, his girlfriend Lindsey, Tommy, Gabi, and I were the only ones still left around the fire. Lindsey and I had just had a long conversation about shoes and strategies for finding expensive shoes on sale. I found out about her love of shoes after she told me about a city in Colorado that is the transvestite capital of the US. From shoes we went to geometry, spheres, and chaos theory. Then Tommy told me about his accident.
Tommy is retired Army. One day, while riding his motorcycle on a winding road in Pennsylvania, he encountered some stopped traffic and swerved off the road. He hit a telephone pole and left 9 inches of his leg embedded in it. Doctors tried to save his leg for over a year, until finally Tommy’s grandfather told him to let the doctors cut it off. Tommy was mad that the doctors never suggested that as an option and instead subjected him to multiple surgeries.
Meanwhile, a friend of Tommy’s pulled his leg bones out of the telephone pole to put over his garage door as decoration. Tommy’s siblings were so pissed they went to the guy’s house, ripped the bones off of the garage, and then beat the guy up. Tommy said his family was very protective of him even though he doesn’t think about being an amputee.
He laughed about how all the amputees at Paradox call themselves gimps, but that people with no amputation would lecture them about how it’s insulting to call someone a gimp. Chad brought up the gimp in Pulp Fiction, and there was a discussion about how some people associate the term “gimp” with sexual deviants wearing black leather masks. At that point I decided if I didn’t brush my teeth and go to bed I would be up all night.
Chad started to kill the fire. Then he kicked back in his chair and said “I really needed this weekend.” He turned to Lindsey and she confirmed he was much less stressed out. Then he said “You know what I love about these Paradox outings? This.” He spread his arms and encompassed all of us sitting around the camp fire.
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