Webster Art

I was 20 feet up the cliff and had no protection. I’d seen the bolt from ground and knew the hangar had been removed. What I didn’t know was it had been removed the previous fall and was now severely rusted. I attached the spare hangar from my little pouch and screwed down the nut, but because of the rust it cross threaded.

My power was fading fast as I frantically looked around for protection. I saw a crack over to the right that might take a small nut. I carefully weighted the cross threaded hangar, using it as a handhold while I tried to place the nut.

The rusty nut popped off the bolt. Time slowed down and I just had time to realize I was airborne with a useless rope coiling below. I fell 15 feet and hit the sloping ground at the base of the 5.9 route called The Knobs. It’s to the left of “A Crack” and the 5.4 gully route at the Peshastin Pinnacles.

Because of the slope my catlike landing posture was for naught and I broke my damn ankle. Will offered his shoulder as we hobbled down to the car half a mile away. The ER doctor loaded me up with pain killers and I caught a Greyhound to Tacoma. Will, Paul and Lemon had decided to continue the weekend of climbing. It was our first weekend of the year and I’d gotten overconfident. Sue wasn’t answering, probably at work, so dad drove half an hour up to the bus station and taxied me to our apartment.

Sue answered the door, shocked to see me home early from the weekend. She was wearing a cast on her forearm from wrist surgery a week before. She’d tried to crawl through an open window to clandestinely visit a friend. It broke, and she severed a tendon.

“Why are you home early? Oh no, you’re on crutches…what’s wrong with your ankle, what happened!”

A week later, we had just pedaled around Vashon Island. At the ferry, the dock worker noticed the plaster casts on Sue’s wrist and my ankle and told us we should stop fighting. Halfway across Puget Sound we heard a boom and saw the smoke cloud when Mount St. Helens blew up. That was May 18, 1980.

My ankle has never been the same, but it is usually just an annoyance, not a deal breaker. However, at Wednesday ping pong I was playing Randy and Bob. They are tournament level players and I get severely worked when I play them. Normally I love the challenge. They wipe the floor with me but I put up a brave fight and it’s a ton of fun. But my ankle started twinging with severe pain.

I bailed early but my suffering wasn’t over. I still had to walk a mile back to the house. Sue was out helping her 98 year old mom at the hospital. Limping home with my ankle getting worse and worse was ugly. Now I’ve been sitting on the couch for 2 full days hoping it will heal up. Without exercise my weight has ballooned up to 175. When I’m healthy I was already struggling to get under 170 so it’s frustrating not being able to work out.

It’s Monday and I’m able to walk slowly around the house without pain. There are occasional minor twinges of pain but it’s generally much better. I was able to climb at the gym Friday while loaded up on Ibuprofen so that’s a plus.

It’s possible that the Prednisone of the last 15 months has been masking the ankle inflammation. And now that I’ve been off the drug for a full month my ankle is alerting me to the fact that I have a problem. I do get occasional twinges of pain in my knees and I still have a few lingering side effects from the drug. I’ve read that it can take more than a month to “get back” after quitting cold turkey. Glad to report that I just rode my Schwinn Aerodyne for 50 minutes. I had the rear of my foot on the pedal without any pain.

On a side note, I just de-activated Instagram and Facebook for a while…needed a break from the doom scroll syndrome. So much of Social Media is a bad joke these days. Jeez.

Newspapers

I subscribe to the New York Times. It’s important to support Journalism…especially when it’s under attack both from the government and dropping circulation numbers. Occasionally I see something worthy and feel like writing a letter to the editor, or, as they call it now: adding a comment. Today they had a great article about aging and I was prompted to submit a comment, shown below:

Nice article about aging! Everyone gets a chance to be young and pretty. If you’re lucky, you get a chance to be old and wrinkled. That’s me now at 70. Young people are so pretty. They’re like fresh roses, they sparkle. 

I never wanted to be this old…couldn’t imagine it when I was young. Every year it seems like more is taken from me. I’ve had a few annoying diseases come and go, always taking something. Lost my hearing in one ear, for example.  And Long Covid wasn’t pretty. Unlike many people I know, I’m blessed with a lovely woman, my long suffering wife, plus two nearby kids and 4 grandkids. I shouldn’t complain, but it’s hard not to look back at who I used to be as a young man. 

I still do the activities of my youth, but I can’t do them as hard, or as long, or as often. Thankfully I can still rock climb, both at the gym and outside in places like Yosemite. And I treasure my back up activities like landscape painting, for when I need something less active. The years are winding down for sure. None of us get out of here alive. Carpe diem!