ivan

8/28 - day 25 - lap 21 - dark days duly dispensed - a 3 mile swim yday before a strike vote, my veins open and pumping a mighty purplish red, the water like wine washing over my zealot head - shakespeare said it best, "all the world's a stage" etc. etc. - today the tempest upon us - half-hearted philippics in the fullness of time become declarations of war n' it's not long really - a right greek tragedy is this one, every actor aware of where his god-ordained line will leave him, loving yet ready to hack off the head of his brother if needed - beacon rock my temple i toppled towards as the day was dying - the simpleness of stone and wind and water - coyotes yip and yowl, and in their wildness tame my scowl

Trip: El Steeple - Brudder Mikey Trip Date: 08/25/2018 Trip Report: the plaider put this one up way back when the world was young - can't remember the origin story behind the nomer but recollect it had something to do with mortality, which one would naturally dwell on whenever putting up a line on this kind of rock - still, it ain't like them millions of marbles loosely stuck together in a shit matrix have gotten substantially more solid in the subsequent ascents nastia n' geoff at the sketchy gateway fred meyer in the mid-morning, a leisurely start indeed - o'er hill n' dale and alongside the swift current of the cascading clackamas we cruised - injun hank campground as i recollected it - pavement yields to gravel - sunflowers n' spitting to span the time i recalled the steeple from the handful of times i'd been to the coethedral - geoff said he was bored with that there wall so we went looking for something a tad more novel, which certainly the steeple is - can't be seen from the launching point though where the road goes more or less to complete shit - not being able to see the objective at any point until right on top of it makes the hike a tad annoying as its certainly a step hillside and there's nothing like a trail - why not flag a line and let foot traffic do what it does? about the best thing i can say about the approach is that it's pretty short shenanigans at the steep base in the dust eventually dispensed with, nastia zoomed up the 5.7 start, laughing off the easy angle until the first pebble popping off under her foot resulted in a shriek - she passed the rap anchor and began to tangle with the steep bolted bulge above, nervously nattering at herself (or hell, maybe that's just her at her natural frequency - maybe i fancy myself more laconic than i oughta firfuksake) our girl did real good, no falls nor pulling on gear, a performance i had no particular interest in replicating - as we came up, each on just 1 of the 2 half ropes the leader'd used, a sense of hate dawned on me that i was hanging my fat ass off so skinny a single cord whilst simultaneously trying to dodge debris kicked off by my lawyer, just 15 feet above - i stopped at the first rap anchor, reticent to continue simul climbing where the going got hard geoff styled up the steepness while i waited once i had the dear devushka's full attention, i commenced with my cluster fuck which out of kindness to myself i shan't describe - all i can say is it's hard to climb anything overhanging when you simply don't want to pull on anything you can touch geoff galloped up the next shortish pitch past the amusing evidence of plaid's learning to bolt back in the day, then nastia did the next, which had us then just below the summit - i made up for my meekness by taking us to the true-true top, where hilarity ensued as i realized i'd left my summit beer in the pack - sigh...fucking amateur... still right hazy - jefferson more a suggestion of a mountain than the real thing self portrait felt far more like fall than the dregs of summer - rain on the way 2 single rope raps then a double to the ground where i revenged meself on my beer and broke a vow of 4 days - then the same steep forest clusterfuck descent, a skosh simpler when it's downhill of course - busted my ass only once, and was okay with it afterall as i ended up in a fresh blueberry bush whose fruit salved the soul the car n' the night soon upon us we growled and gallumped n' grew large at the prospect of tomorrow and began the long lurch home - sweet summer rain short of gateway, the world finally getting washed after months of heat and smoke - not as big a damper on nastia's soul as the mangled door handle on her ride where some tweaker had tried so hard to get inside so...brother mike...a fun day-sized adventure i reckon if'n yer in to that sorta thing Gear Notes: gear only needed on 1st pitch (though there's also a bolted line around left of the obvious junky crack that we couldn't see from below) - just a couple cams, which you can leave hanging on the 1st rap anchor once used - buncha slings and quickdraws - couple hundred gallons of glue to plaster the whole face together would be good too Approach Notes: good luck - walk up hill until it kinda starts to make sense - at least it ain't far...

4th class mostly just means to me "don't fuck up"

8/23 - day XXIV - lap XX - a grey day, smoke subsumed by wind and light rain, kinda nice to feel like ya can breath again - early to rise, my mind tormented by uneasy affectations, happily kilt by burnt coffee and trailer park boys - friendly union bidness near noon w/ the new fish - why join the union, you ask? firfuksakes, 'cause The Man don't want ya to! just a skosh of the afternoon to bang out east, into the storm, and winkle my way up beacon in the big, big breeze and gentle sprinkles, passing folks here and there - time to take in the frenzied scene for a few below the southeast corner ridge but then it was hustling up n' hurtling out, the weasels raging along the edges of this swiftly revolving what-have-you - no better way to get my game face on then to have a construction worker scream "faaaaaaaaawk uuuuuuu" as me and another driver innocently turned through the cones to get to the district office - ugh, was there another way? sigh, the hairless monkey is just a hand's breadth from total hatred in even the most benevolent of times...

just a few hours away from a strike, so only one tune in my noggin...

8/21 - day 23 - lap 19 - discouraging day at the bargain table, a strike all but certain now, no matter the blase niceties that are nattered at us from the other end and with less than a week until the day of days - 6 hrs of pacing around a big table in a tiny room trying not to get uncontrollably pissed, my never significant small talk skills truly tapped out by the end - the noose unloosed, a short flight out to beacon through the choking heat and smoky haze - the stone alone, i soared and sweated and saw the same old sights in the hellish half-light, leaving w/ a new resolution

8/20 - day 22 - lap 18 - thick canuckistani clouds of smoke upon the land - bonneville dam a mystery just 2 miles away - a morning lap w/ familiar faces on right gull and whatever it is we call the line just right of young warriors w/ the new bolts (the bolter himself on hand giving it a go) - not much time for dilly-dallying, but bootied a sweet dmm offset nut after near ten minutes of monkey-hammering on it w/ rocks and nut tool - another below it but non-offset and a bit of a puzzle as to how to extract and thus not worth the effort - some union bidness over lunch dispensed, then it was the doc and my dupuytren's contracture poo-poo'ed and finally a lovely mile long swim back and forth and back again out at battle ground lake

8/19 - day 21 - lap 17 - after a week at buxom lake quinault, i was querulous with cooped up beacon longings - sure, two grand lake crossings, both clad as a glorified white-walrus, did excite the meat in the marrow, but gawdamn it ain't quite the same, is it? the rock much as i left it, rudely exposed to heat and wind, but rife w/ life - a crew with a dude named cannon i think - kayakers all upon the sound, fallen several feet from last i'd seen it - a lovely dmm off-set nut that i shall have come tomorrow morning or me name's not cheap-skate-mcgee

the rainier accident above sounds more like a rappelling accident, eh?

8/13 - day 20 - lap 16 - the morning mist dispersing, 70 degrees and dappled shade and the flow of the universe over my mottled flesh sweet sick-fuck in my flayed mind - the stone as it always is, it is only the curious i that changes i swear, my skin that of a depressed doppelganger that dithers forwards out of a habit of hope - breath and dripping sweat and sinuous movement, the mind a tabula rasa after all its rude ambulations, this is the path to paradise even if it is nothing more than an odd oroboros that ultimately dumps us in disarray at our mother's doorstep, new-eyed and obtused by age

8/12 - day 19 - lap 15 - shut down by rain, or at least the gut fear of rain, after 5 straight days of beacon goodness, i returned for an early morning lap before d'n'd w/ the kids in the afternoon - veritable dogdamn meat popsicle parade on the verge of the cool columbia - passed 13 folks on route, some with birthday caps on, many clearly up there for the first time and having fun - encountered ole chris winter who i ain't seen since the world was young and had a good gavreet - nattered about nastia w/ numerous folks in the know - maybe 10 folks on young warriors as well - topher up high on stone soup frittering time away - a fellow at the base who freed the first pitch of the soup recently and called it only 12a, how strange - woulda loved to do a second lap but time and the judgement of man made me jingle-jangle my way away back west

in this man's opinion, nodders can go fuck themselves

half of the lies i tell are true at least half of the time

the horror, the horror...

8/10 - day 18 - laps 13-14 - the wife away with friends of yore, i slept away the morn until even the kids were bored - they non-plussed at sallying forth, i fled beacon-ways for a bit n' had a good old mid-summer session - topher n' a lovely shiela on the siddle on down after lap one - adam honking as he raged along the road - jim n' a grand gavreet, the things of the past still the same but somehow sliding on by - lap 2 cooler still but nothing to report

8/9 - day 17 - lap 12 - no time for dilly-dallying w/ Serious Business impending, i raced up the scorching stone, soaked in sweat, then winged it back west to the district office to behold 200-some-odd of my pissed off union brothers and sisters sharpening their pitchforks and preparing torches to Storm the Barricades (between bouts of belting down hot dogs of course )

did he post here and under what handle?

sounds straight out of tennyson

i was born in the wrong era

wise sir do not grieve it is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning for every one of us living in this world means waiting for our end let he who can achieve glory before death when a warrior is gone that will be his best and only bulwark

sounds easy

8/8 - day 16 - lap 11 - union war planning in the morning - teacher strikes on the march all throughout this state if The Bastards don't come to their senses soon - 98 degrees by afternoon and my back wound still unstitched i had no options but to return to church and pray that the water might readmit me soon - reached out to denali dave via the luminiferous aether on the long lunge out but the interwebs don't seem to work right and we got wildly different perceptions of the plan - spent a beer's worth of time waiting for his arrival on snag ledge before figuring out he'd run up the trail and was waiting on the summit - lit a fire under my ass to arrive up there, sodden w/ sweat, only to find him gone - lovely views up there though as the magic minute commenced and i cracked open a pbr and settled in when suddenly he appeared, making mystic motions and random runes atop the the tumult of thumb rock - made a down-payment on the beer debt i've built up w/ our boy over the years and we sucked up the ambiance - 2 score of elk ambulating around in the emerald canal, living like lords of the earth - barges banging up the columbia as the coal trains chugged back the other direction - the smoke n haze of our smoldering earth setting everything in subtle shades of hate - sigh...the summer shall not last... https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156452971987777&set=a.111187697776.86437.761227776&type=3

8/7 - day 15 - lap 10 - a dentist visit left me w/ a numb face at the boat launch, wondering what the hell exactly i'm doing w/ my life but ready to take a punch - a tasteless beer in the shade of the pylon n' then it was to the business - not a soul on the face and a big shady breeze in near 90 degree temps - pouring sweat, i found redemption, if not my sense of smell - no time to linger, i made it to "infinity wars" w/ the family just moments after the credits

8/6 - day 14 - lap 8-9 - started w/ a doc yanking a nasty pus-infected strip of packing from my excised cyst - sad news, at least another week of not swimming for the dude, even as savage heat descends upon us, damn near clawing my eyes out to be stroking through the kewl... - beacon after some beers, two laps, both w/ shielas present, damn near paradise

wise sir do not grieve it is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning for every one of us living in this world means waiting for our end let he who can achieve glory before death when a warrior is gone that will be his best and only bulwark