Gumbies! In! Creek!

Well, the curse of the Coast are the Saturday rains, and last week was no exception. I peered carefully into the future, and it became obvious that there was not going to be anything mega-exciting in Squamish, such as another Cobra Crack ascent, or big-wall going free, or, for that matter, a sudden spike in the sale of boudering pants at Valhalla Pure in Squamish. Nothing exciting happening...

So I went to Indian Creek, along with Napoleon and Ginger Slack. Mr Slack is, well, a slack-liner, and he had plans to not only climb but to string a highline between the Bridger Jacks and then walk across it. I thought you might as well just kill yourself from the ground up, save yourself all that work, but then I was told that these highliners use harnesses and, like hippies on acid confronting the Army at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 Chicago, they also use daisies to make life nicer for themselves (or so, like those hippies, they hope)

The thing about this trip was, we would (later, alas) realise the sheer power of words. If we said it, it happened. Now, being idiots, we naturally failed to discuss either Roman orgies,,
sending 5.13,
or the key to winning the lottery, and we stuck to yapping about cops, snow, mechanical hassles and killing animals.

As we drove through Blinkandmissit, UT, Slack said "and there's these American towns where they nail you for speeding even if you're like 2 mph over, cos that way the town gets more revenue." At literally that exact moment a cop pulled us over-- 58 in a 50-- "that will be $90, please, and no sir, you do not need to tongue my balls. Enjoy your visit to Utah." Muthaf**kin' 5-oh on my TIP, y'all as Ian Bennet or the rapper of your choice other than L'il Wayne would say.

Now Hemingway famously (and allegedly) said that "there are only three sports: mountain-climbing, auto-racing and bull-fighting. The rest are mere games." Now there was obviously a fourth sport: the correct use of hyphens: a noun (person, place, thing, idea) in front of a gerund (a noun ending in "ing") needs to be followed by a hyphen. Hemingway by all accounts mastered the fourth, as you can see by his exhaustive sport-and-hyphen dictum, and the fifth (epic drinking sessions).

Now of course it was ironic that Napoleon wasn't driving. Napoleon drives like it's a race. He climbs. And his bullfighting involves arguing with me. Come to think of it, Napoleon, at the moment that Officer David Mormon pulled us over, was actually doing one of two things: jerking off to tax spreadsheets or fast asleep, while I (if memory serves, which it frequently doesn't) was jerking off to either midget porn or images of Indian Crack.

Now let's not make fun of people who jerk off to income tax and retirement spreadsheets, (as they say, 95% of us jerk off, and the other 5% lie about it, and, ladies, you, as that famous Seinfeld episode showed us, are part of this too)), since doing income-tax spreadsheets is pretty rough sport and also massively sexy to others. If you f**k it up, you may end up in the pen, like this guy.


So we drove on, chastened, the way Tiger Woods feels after his soon-to-be ex-wife rescues him from his SUV driving problems by using a golf club on the back window of his SUV.

We dropped Mr Slack in Moab to meet his slacklining buddy, and, McLane style, scored nearly free pizza, and then blasted out into the desert, where we immediately got lost. I warned young Napoleon about the dangers of mixing high-speed driving, night-time, and animals on the road (pick any TWO and you're OK). So of course we nearly hit a deer, and then smoked a rabbit. Napoleon wanted to make sure it was dead, so, on reversing, he backed over it and on later inspection that was a good move because the rabbit was not only totally doubly thoroughly dead, but also split open with guts coming out its mouth, belly and anus. Napoleon wanted to cook it up etc, but we are yuppie cunts with no clue about how to actually skin gut and eat once-living things, so we left it for the wolves, escaped convicts and Mormons having revelations.

We next drove somewhere into the Creek, threw down sleeping bags, and passed out, awaking to the sound of rustling leaves, the rattle of gear, bright sun and of course German. Naturally we had a flat tire and so our car got what in retrospect Napoleon (and the poor rabbit)should have gotten last night: a wheel that can't be driven over 40 MPH. Word quickly spread through the Creek's non-Napoleon'd wildlife that Napoleon was a whole lot safer to graze in front of, which, as it would turn out, nearly prove our undoing.

So the bill to that point was one dead rabbit, $90 ticket and a flat tire.

As we tried to leave the campground, we ran into a bunch of random dirtbags (you know the type...down jackets, stubble, toques, headlamps, "stoked to get on ________," i.e. generally interchangeable). They said there was a "leave the campground" toll which consisted of two jokes, which rate was reduced to one if yours was politically incorrect enough. The Yankee to the rescue:

Q: How is sport climbing like having your dick sucked by a guy?
A: it feels great until you look down and realise you're a fag!

Now I would like to apologise to all of my gay or sportclimber friends, and also to all of my gay AND sportclimber friends. I really needed to get out of that campground to get in line for this:




And our random dirtbag interlocutor replied with

Q: How come Asian drivers can't drive?
A: Cos they're Asian?

This got our car limping out of the lot and off we drove. Then we went climbing. Oh, sorry, did you want a blow-by-blow of the day's sends? I thought not! Let's just say that Indian Creek is wonderful-- lots of gear, clean falls, beautiful, ass-kicking, etc. One climbing story is pretty much like another, well, at least if you're me: we came, we tried, we didn't think we coudl do it, we ha da moment of epiphany, we sent. So, yeah.

Next: Part 2 of Gumbies! In! Creek!, wherein Ginger slacks, Napoleon tries to kill a cow, Sarah Panofsky does Human Bouldering, Tony McLane acquires a hair Sponsorship from L'Oreal, and yours truly has The Cleaner's Riot Act read to him by the Squampton Janitor. And now, as rappers say before they kill some niggaz and slap some bitches, peace out.