EVOLUTION

Hanging out with the climbing gang, I've noticed there's a somewhat substantial sector of the climbing population that has developed alternative cleanliness standards. Some have become a bit "squiggly about the edges," emitting an earthy pungency while wearing clothes that are, admittedly, routinely hung on their bedroom floors. The most enthusiastic climbers I've met have hairstyles that have a perfect balance of the unruly nonconformist and unwashed.

I call their big, curly, greasy, floppy, or stringy coiffed mops, "Neanderthal chic."

At first, I thought these practices reflected a ethnographical connection between the land and the (wo)man. You know, the closure one gets to nature, the more natural one becomes. I attributed this earthy mystique to nature itself, to the love of rock and scenery one must certainly develop while ascending to great heights.

But in my humble two months of climbing, I've discovered it's far more practical than that. Always looking for theories, I missed the practices.

I, too, get a bit squiggly, and it has nothing to do with the great outdoors. I'm not making a political statement, or imagining a life free from chemical interventions, like deodorant. Though it's true that I'm becoming more lax in my shower schedule and more tolerant of undone dishes, my motives have nothing to do with saving the earth.

I just don't want to get my hands wet.

Cleanliness may bring one closer to Godliness, but washing dishes and showering every day make the callouses on my hands far too tender. They rip open, give way, while projecting routes. I've had several days in the last two weeks when my hands hurt so badly, I had to stop climbing far earlier in the night than I expected. In fact, I'm rather disappointed in my milquetoast hands at the moment. I'm trying to toughen them up.

As a blossoming wall weasel I'm discovering, to my horror, that all the rhetoric surrounding women's hands as soft, as worthy of protection and in need of a fantastic moisturizer to keep them looking youthful, is a bunch of crap. If I want to climb the way my heart wants to, I'm going to have to give up my insecurities about age and agelessness. Shit.

And like other climbers I know, while contemplating an evening out, I've stood before the shower stall and weighed the need to be clean with the need to climb later. "If I wash up now, my hands are going to be hamburger later," I think. Nobody bothered to tell me that becoming a climber could mean becoming a proponent of the "whore's bath" - and I'm amused by this secret bond we share.

Today, for example, is a climbing day for me. It's morning, and I should be embarking on my toilette routine. Instead, I'm sitting here, weighing the benefits of squeaky clean v. protecting my callouses. "Screw it, I'll shower after I climb" has become a mantra of mine, and when the goal is to climb every day I wonder if I'll ever find time to shower at all.

Though one must certainly take great care of one's grundle and/or bandt, and women certainly must avoid the Pike's Place Fish Market complex, climbing and bathing present an awkward paradox all the same.

Before climbing, I was a home spa girl. I loved shower gels and lotions, back scrubbers and anything that made me feel pampered. Now that I've been flailing about on the wall, however, I'm looking at all the products in my shower caddy and considering them obstacles to my overall goals. My bottle of sandalwood rose shower gel is no longer decadent. It's a lure to tender skin failure. Bath and Body Works, my once happy place, is the devil's workshop.

So what's a girl like me to do?

Well, I'm going to shower this morning but only because I stink. But I know as soon as I get on the wall today, I'll regret it. This seems to be the daily dilemma, and today's no different. While I'm harnessed in and working on that overhang 5.7 later today, I'll admire the Neanderthal chic, their swagger and calloused attitudes toward bathing and hope that someday, I'll be like them.

ROCKIN' THE POETRY WORLD

You know, I'm not just a climbing novice.

But I've got big news: The Split This Rock Poetry Festival has invited yours truly to present a panel with colleagues. The festival is in Washington, D.C. and it looks like it's going to be a smashing good time. Split This Rock is, at its heart, an anti-war event aimed at reclaiming language and our collective potential. Poets from all over the country come to this festival that is a mixture between an academic conference (with workshops and presenters) and a public protest (such as the march to Lafayette Park across from the White House).

The organization is supported by grants, and this year it will be filming a documentary about the festival itself. For now, you can see videos on YouTube, such as this one:



For the 2010 Split This Rock Festival, I will be presenting with Madeline Wiseman and Aimee Adellard titled, "Fatty Girls, Imaginary Cocks, and Vaginas Built Like Bookstores: A Workshop on Writing the Activist Body." We're thinking the title alone got us into the festival, but we're planning on helping other poets who want to take their interior poetic lives into the public in hopes of affecting social change.



In this sense, I'm taking on work people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg sponsored during Vietnam, and did in the later years of their careers, long after the Beats were considered history. I've been thinking about this more and more as I consider the curricula goals for my section of the workshop, as well as how this speaking out and up work will fortify me as a writer, poet, and climber.

I've also been thinking about how sacred Lafayette Park is as a site for democratic activity. It is the ground in Washington where activists of all sorts demonstrate, and where, I'm sure, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI gather photographs and documentation of those who show up to exercise their First Amendment rights.

But I've been thinking about Ferlinghetti's book, Poetry As Insurgent Art, and these lines in particular:

"The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it."


"Words can save you where guns can't."


It's not that I've always been a peace activist, or even a poet. It's not that I've always picked up my democratic responsibilities as a citizen of the United States. It's not even that I've always believed in the power and reach of my own words. I've never been to the East Coast. I've never been to Washington. It has always been a mythical place, something I've seen on television and wondered if it existed at all. I'm just a woman learning to live, write, and climb and seeing where that takes her.

The airline ticket alone is going to be around $350. The hotel rates are staggering, even if William Shatner asks on Priceline.com, "Who's ready to take a ride on the deal stallion?" Democracy, it seems, will come at a cost - as it always must, I suppose.

So for the next few months I'm going to enter every poetry contest offering a kitty I can. I'm going to have to step-up my efforts at fundraising, and I'm thinking about a bake sale (however quirky it may seem). This may become an "E.F.R. Goes to Washington" sort of thing, and I'll admit this: I've thought of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington more than once since receiving my invitation to the festival.



I'm pretty sure Jimmy Stewart didn't go there to yell, "Vagina!" at people, but still ...

As a poet, this is a pretty big deal. I'm taking my work far from Nebraska, way out into the public sphere, and doing that work in a very respected poetry festival among celebrated poets. And I'm thinking of women and men who have gone before me, of those people I respect who have taken the risk to say out loud what their soul needed to say. I'm humbled and excited, intimidated and encouraged.

Performance poetry, embodying the activist poet, teaching others to let the words seep into their bones and perform instead of recite a poem ... all of this is spinning in my head as I write today. Or as Peter Gabriel sings: "Ill be a big noise with all the big boys ..." (Seriously, watch this old video ... it so fits my story!)



As exciting as this new challenge is, you have to know that I'm already trying to figure out how to find climbing opportunities in the D.C. metro area. I'm looking at Earth Trek's facility in Rockville, MD (a quick train ride from D.C.), and SportRock in Alexandria, VA. The latter is in the middle of a remodeling project to make it more competitive with Earth Trek's gyms, so I'm thinking I should check both of them out in order to write a fair and balanced review.

I love this justification, of course, because that gives me license to monkey about in the name of P'UP.

I'm thinking too about the ways in which climbing is shaping my approach to writing and public performance of that writing. I don't know if I'll get the chance to climb in D.C. or not, but I do know that when I take the stage or give my workshop, all I've learned through climbing about patience, personal achievement, and moxie will be with me. I'm thinking, too, that I might shoot a documentary myself ... more on that later.

EPIC(UREAN) FAIL

(PHOTO: New computer cam tries to capture my Cheshire Grin. Unfortunately, bad cake had paralyzed my mouth).

I had hoped to post a new recipe for a whole-wheat apple spice cake today.

Unfortunately, my first attempt is now a brick of healthy fodder on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator. It looks good, but something went awry in the preparation.

Maybe I’ve created a muffin recipe – a stay-with-you-all-day muffin. Maybe, well, maybe one shouldn’t try to use all whole-wheat flour instead of a flour blend. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear to me now that I’m no “Ace of Cakes.”

All I know is that a cake isn’t supposed to remind you of bran flakes, or roll on your tongue like Ready-Mix in a cement mixer. Cake isn’t supposed to dehydrate your face.

I may have just invented a cure for acne. On my second bite, when my mouth went bong-dry, I felt a pull from deep within my pores. I’ve had a glass of milk and two glasses of water since my first 2 by 2 inch square of apple spice disaster.

Drinking that much liquid after a piece of this epicurean experiment was like pulling the rip-cord on a life raft.

Despite this culinary misdeed, I’ve had an awesome day. I met Ryann and Schnook at the wall this afternoon, and enjoyed a couple of good hours of climbing and belaying. I knew it was time to quit while ascending my last climb of the day, when I forgot I had feet. It was as if I were dragging myself up the wall, sort of like when a dog hustles her hindquarters across shag carpet.

It wasn’t pretty.

A good fifteen feet after the bouldering line, my feet flailed about like flags flapping in the breeze. I looked down to Ryann, and yelled just one word:

“Dinner!”

We packed up and headed for our bikes. It was a delicious fall evening, crackling with excitement as Husker Nation scurried about campus in preparation for the showdown with Oklahoma. It was dark out, and I realized then that I had forgotten my halogen lamps. Stupid Daylight Savings time.

Riding hard, passing football fans and drunk idiots, I welcomed the chilled November night into my lungs. Two weeks ago I began the “step-down” smoking cessation program my doctor recommended. I can already feel a difference in my body and my mind. Even so, habitual self-destruction is harder to give up than one might think.

Addiction, even to something as pedestrian as nicotine, shapes and distorts who you are. It's difficult to imagine you and your life without it. It's difficult to admit you're entitled to good things, like love, or life. It's even more challenging to face down your inadequacies and self-destructive nature in a public sphere, with your life "Out There" for anyone to see.

P'UP, though, isn't some narcissistic endeavor. It is not so much a projector of my life as it is a microscope. Even the small things, stuff that doesn't seem related to climbing at all, is beneath the scope of the project. So here I am, thinking about all the years I wasted five minutes at a time, smoking to calm the uncertain beast that is, when matching my feet and plotting my approach, humbled and silent.

All my disappointments, the hurt, all those times I didn't get what I needed ... they all get left on the ground, stamped out and discarded, like a cigarette. I love that. So two weeks in to the new cessation program I’m making progress. Nov. 30 is the “no butts, baby, it’s-all-over-but-the-cryin’ deadline.

But it ain’t gonna be a walk in the park, and it definitely won’t be a piece of cake. Thank God.