Mount an earring
I should be typing this with my elbows, since my forearms are paste. It’s not that the keys are too small; they’re too close together. It’s a design flaw. You ought to be able to type with the appendage of your choice.
My forearms are sore because I went rock climbing with my brother yesterday. Rock climbing is a sport you play with your fingers, mainly. Ninety percent of the muscle strength you need comes from your digits, which are the point of contact between you and the rock. And for physiological reasons I cannot explain, when you work out your fingers, your forearms take the brunt of the punishment.
Then again, maybe I was just doing it wrong. Maybe there’s no need to clutch at the rock for dear life till your fingers are curled and cramped like raccoon claws. But if the was some other way of doing it, no one told me. And if there was some way of putting on the climbing harness without producing a horrible pinching sensation between his thighs, nobody told my brother.
Still, we had a great time, and we’re planning on returning. There’s just something so natural and childlike about wanting to climb things. And it’s instinctive; you just climb up. There aren’t a lot of special skills to learn. No rules to follow. Just grab whatever you can get a hold of and pull yourself upward.
And, despite common sense, the chance that you could fall is a big part of the thrill. Never mind that you’re suspended from a rope that could hold a sumo wrestler. Forget that the rope is attached to an anchor that could sustain a small car. When you’re thirty feet in the air, it feels like the only thing between you and the ground is the strength in your finger and your toes.
Anyway you look at it, humans are not meant to move this way. We are not built like mountain goats. So to do it is to defy not only common sense, but nature. And who wouldn’t enjoy doing that?
Does that same impulse drive people to risk their lives climbing ridiculously high mountains? Must be. But there must be something else about those people that allows them to take it that far. Me, I like the danger … as long as there’s no danger. I like the imagined danger. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy climbing in a situation where I might actually have to rely on the strength of my fingers.
On a road trip a few years ago, we stopped at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (that’s the one from Close Enounters Of the Third Kind that Richard Dreyfus builds out of mashed potatoes). All around the base are huge boulders just begging to be screwed around on, so I obliged. I screwed around, scampering up and down them, imagining myself a great climber.
Then I looked up. There, about half way up the sheer vertical face of the tower, were two little dots; one blue, one white. Climbers’ helmets. I don’t know much, but if it had been me dangling there, I’d have wanted not a helmet but a parachute. Or a jet-pack.
A few hours later, they’d be at the top, where the view is, I’ve heard, impressive. But at what cost? Craziness?
No, sorry. I’m happy to attach myself to a nice, firm rope and pretend-climb in a gym. But this business of actually risking your life in the pursuit of fun is not for me.