With “10% chance of rain” the fixed lines drip neon colors back to the ground. Single cylindrical rungs of ladders to turn alpine ascents into medieval siege tactics. Tom yells from the bridge, his words amplified by the focusing of a camera’s lens. Hardmen hunker down on the wall. They stay up there through the rain and sideways rivers funneling down the face of ElCap. I have never met a hardman on the ground. I wander between parties preparing to start up a route and parties drying out their things for the retreat back to the meadow.
In my darkened car, my face is lit by my laptop screen. I steal Wifi from my gym when they close. Rain against the windshield of my car does not remind me of being outdoors. In an empty parking lot, I hear the freeway as the muted buzz of the Merced River. I press my nose against the red nylon to feel the cold on the other side of the portaledge. This is welcome relief from the suffocating warmth of my breath leaving my mouth, weaponized and returning as drops of freezing water once enough has gathered on this side of the storm. The sound of snowmelt on a failing rainfly while Alex shivers in his bag next to me was the last time I remembered being in the outdoors.
Rainwater is strangely warm when you imagine yourself in it. The air, windless and still. Your partner breathes simultaneously with you so that you both can wait out the storm, every breath taken in filling you with the perfect time between when you left the ground and when you stand upon it again.
I plan my next trip from my car. Topos and trip reports frozen into pdfs and stored on a dropbox folder titled, “Up.” These bit of information are breadcrumbs up the wall, raindrops eating away the safe path back so that you become stuck on the wall, a neon retreat beneath you and two weeks of planning dripping past the corners of the new Cliff Cabana ledge you bought to erase the last time you fell out of the sky and retreated from the wilderness.
