Day 14: clusterf**king made Easy, or, How I Learned To Solo-Aid

The Filth, as you may recall, is my ass-eating, shit-talking, dirt-living, philosophising, beer-drinking economically unproductive (the highest compliments I can pay to any man) friend who si travelling with his wife-- yes, ladies, wife-- The Filth is married, happily-- in Africa. As you may recall, the Filth has been pestering me for YEARS for certain things. First, he wants to fight me. Usually, he gets into this after say ten or twelve beers and then starting to try to twist my nipples, so I asusme he really wants to have sex with me, in the way that Eminem really wants a piece of Moby's ass. I have yet to submit to the considerable temptation that The Filth provides. The OTHER thing The Filth wants is for me to go aid climbing with him.

Now obviously aid climbing and rough dirtbag gay anal sex (or whatever it is The Filth theoretically wants from me and my deliciously tight white ass) have a few similarities. Filth, and The Filth. Beer. Sweat. Pain disguised as pleasure, or maybe the reverse. Gloves. Dubious rewards. And while I love The Filth, in the way that the OTHER half of the Academy loved their Socratic interlocutors, I was not about to get into anything with him without some firsthand knowledge. So obviously Driller and I have been slowly breaking my aid cherry...but my OTHER cherry has not been broken...the solo-aid one. And since Napoleon was off not working on the route, yesterday I set out do get it all over with.

Basically in solo aid, you tie the rope to the anchor, feed it through your gri-gri, and then you aid normally: set piece, bounce test, clip aiders and daisies onto piece, step onto it, move up, repeat, and when moving onto second (and subsequent) pieces you unclip your aiders fromt he lower pieces and clip the rope into the lower piece, so that if you fall, you aren't falling onto static daises.

My pitch was easy: all A1 placements (A1 is the aid-climbing equivalent of condoms plus fundamentalist Christian sexual ethics, plus birth control pills plus having a conrete barrier between you and your lover, i.e., totally safe. Well perhaps the Mormon ethics might fuck up, but basically the odds of anything spicy are pretty minimal).

So I cammed and tree-slung my way up and right, and when I got to a foot-ledge, I fired in a bolt, moved upa nd more right to the top of the flake, added a high bolt, and then proceeded over to the anchor at the bottom of P2. I rapped to the ground, ditched the drill and rack, and set off up the fixed lines with only the gardening tools. I thought the sexu-- err, I mean, aid-climbing part was done. No more pain, sweat, spicy danger or the vaguely louche thrill of tooling around on the mountain while normal folk worked. But I was wrong...

First, I had to pound in Napoleon's shitty bolt, using only a crowbar. This at the end of many minutes of hammering left me panting and exhausted, but quite satisfied-- P1 could now be sent...if it weren't, heh heh, for the enticing but shamefully dirty crack that lures you onto it. I moved higher and began clipping and crow-barring my way up P2. At the second tree, I rigged an elabvorate set-up and began sawing at, and manically jumping up and down on, branches of an odd pair of trees, a cedar and a hemlock, which were intertwined like lovers. As I stepped up tot he foot-ledge, I thought, "gee let's see if this is solid" and one crowbard yank later I realsied that the lack of danger, like condoms, lube and Christian sexual ethics, were gone, like a Republican's free market in banking, and I was standing on a pair of blocks the size of a fridge. Well I nearly killed myself and all potential spectators getting the fuckers off, and when I did they boomed and crashed through the trees. I could see the forest shaking as the blocks knocked trunk after trunk down toward the Mamquam. At this point I hoped Napoleon hadn't decided to make a late entrance.

I made it off the mountain and ended the day with my otherwise awesome girlfriend having an epic freak-out on the phone, so you could well say I'd lost my cherry but saved it in the end: The mountain hadn't quite had its way with me and I aimed for Woman. I cancelled dinner plans with another of my and The Filth's male friends, and headed home to deal with the domestic issue. Of course things at home were FINE...dinner was waiting...woman in bed...what HAD I been thinking up on the wall?