“Turns out fear is a great suppository”

Ok, after that sweet and sensitive post, lets talk about what everybody asks me about. Shit…and piss. It’s not in my nature to talk about this kind of stuff, ask my wife or Heath. I’m a pretty private person about my bathroom habits, but this climbing thing forces you to change your ways. Of course I already blessed you with Timmy’s amazing “vertical toilet” analogy, but it doesn’t really get across what it’s like. He may say that you pee on the people below you, but the part he leaves out is that in order not to pee on the ledge you’re sleeping on, you have to stand on the edge of a massive cliff. Even though you’re clipped in, your pedestrian brain doesn’t compute standing so close to the vertigo zone.

As for number two, it gets a little more complicated. The whole way driving up to Yosemite Heath was laughing at me because he knows my body shuts down in foreign environments. If I’m somewhere new, my body just says “it’s cool, we’ll wait ’til we get home.” So when we got to climbing and I was ready to go on the first day, Timmy put the data together and concluded that “fear is a great suppository.”

Timmy is pretty understanding when it comes to people adjusting to life off of the ground, so when it’s your turn he gets you all ready. He gets out “the kit”, he preps a bag for you, rolls it into a nice little chefs hat, and clips you in with some room to spare. The only problem is, if you’re new to this, you set you bag down on the ledge to pull your pants down and forget about the wind.

There goes your precious bag. Swirling in the updraft like the plastic bag in American Beauty.