Access to the dead columns of vbouldering.

This was column #8 -- It is only in wild mountains that the wilderness in us can be born.--Reinhold Messner So there’s this woman in this ghetto. Nowheresville man just nightime one a.m. and dead streets. Ain’t nothing there not even a Church’s chicken. I see her across Stockton Boulevard sitting on a bus stop bench and it’s so cold out. I’m at the Cancer Survivor’s Memorial Park at the UCDMC (University of California, Davis Medical Center for all you mountain gumbies). She’s the same woman that I saw the other day in the Hollywood Video parking lot all asking me for a dollar seventy five to get to West Sacramento. She said she was just in the hospital and her mom had just died. I gave her a dollar she said god bless. She asked me again today but I told her no. See I was onto her game. She tells people that her mom just died and they feel bad so they give her money. Who knows how long she’s been doing it for. I wonder when her mom just died. Yeah, so she’s across the street and she looks cold. I have my Saucony’s on and my chalk bag dangling around my waist. My hat’s backwards too. Standing smack dab in the middle of the park. So there’s this sculpture in the middle that’s surrounded by eight or so columns in a circle, each about twenty five or so feet apart. The columns are connected by a meter thick band of concrete that links the top of each column together making a circle. Back lit letters say “Cancer Survivors Memorial Park” on the front of the circle. Yeah the sculpture has a grandma and grandpa at the back and then there’s this metallic square-spiral whirling to the front with a young woman limboing right through it and at the end there’s this man and woman holding a child’s hand and the child is smiling. They’re all smiling. They’ve survived Cancer or something symbolic like that. So there’s these sounds of sirens and the occasional gunshot. Sure seems wild to me. I’m just scared enough to be THERE AWAKE. We do not have the right to alter the structure of the mountain environment for our own purposes and games: to make it a fitness club, just because everyone wants to go for a workout out of doors.-- Reinhold Messner So I didn’t give her a dollar today but she still looks cold. I wonder when her mom just died. Slide open my chalk bag and take a breath that I can see, square-spiral smoking whirlies. Dry hands plenty cold squeeze the dual edged aretes of the first concrete column. Slap slap slap with my hands and squeeze. Shimmy like nobody’s looking but you know they are. Get a knee bar where the meter thick band meets the column. Look over across the street and she’s still there. Look over at the hospital and man I bet there’s somebody’s mom way past eight thousand meters in there. They’re in the death zone. Cancerous tumors bigger than Aconcagua and hazier and silenter to boot. Man I’m fucking telling you that the mountain is right here. Ain’t no difference between alpine and urban we’re all scared to die and people dying everywhere everyhow. So the meter thick band has an edge on either side of it, one for the left and one for the right. Now we shimmy upside downside with dual heel hooks and a sloth like crawl. Forearms burn and I’m only half way around. Fuck, the cops! Wait, breath, they’re just pulling a car over. Reds and blues of the database siren and a nervous tenseness to my ever escalating pump. Keep going on. Fuck the cops! Keep shuffling my hands, keep skating the heel hooks. Look, the woman’s gone now. Finally caught that bus West I guess. I’m pumped and the Cancer Surviors sign makes it impossible to maintain the double heel hooks. The ground is far enough away! Campus keep campusing. My hands are bleeding. The fucking cops are there, waiting. It is pretentious to think that the cities aren’t wild and the mountains are. Fuck that isolated mountain of ideals and get gritty in the city! The magazine's untimely demise left an entire issue unpublished. In order to make the columns about bouldering I wrote accessible to those interested, I have recently published a compilation of my columns that includes a previously unpublished column that discusses -- in futuristic and apocolyptic terms -- the commodification of the athlete in the bouldering world and in sports in general. In addition is an unpublished expedition summary of the 2003 North Face A5 Patagonian bouldering expedition, and a short adventure story called "a northern christmas" If anyone is interested, they can check it out at lulu.com under "A Northern Christmas: the vbouldering writings" by me, victor copeland. All of the proceeds go to helping me and my girl get hitched. It's at http://www.lulu.com/content/141192