I awoke this morning in a quandary.
Before heading back to the big mountains, Fabio and I met up in Nanaimo (on Vancouver Island) and headed north to Quadra Island to check out a climbing area we’ve never had a chance to visit.
We climbed a few routes on Manzanita crag and then wild-camped for a night in our rented minivan (which, actually, is brilliantly set up with everything one could possibly need to comfortably hang out in the middle of nowhere… except a toilet… though, in the middle of nowhere a bush will do).
The following day (Friday), we made a plan to link up a series of climbs on several crags and headed back to the climbing area. Other than the heat and some smoke blowing in this direction from fires to the east on the mainland, we had another good, long day of exploring and climbing. Except… my bad hip started complaining (it doesn’t like uneven terrain) and I definitely started feeling as though I was not in the best climbing shape and perhaps should have planned to take the next day off.
Alas, on Saturday my dear friend B and her husband drove all the way up from Victoria to meet us despite the fact she had just been stung in the hand multiple times by wasps and her hand was plump and round, so swollen it was unable to open and close properly. I can’t imagine how painful that must have been and yet, B was game, ready to see how the climbing would go. And so, I decided that my aching hip was not worthy of complaint and having my good friend join us would make everything better. Given the shape of her hand, who was I to be such a wimp??
As the day progressed, the heat, the hip, and a mounting sense of dread (I am mortal, I am going to die - maybe not today, but at some point - everything hurts - who am I to think that I should keep climbing when I already have one fake hip and need another - and, oh, the heat… I feel crappy - I can’t climb a hill of beans… where’s the elevator to get me out of here??) all conspired to make me feel as if I should not have crawled out of the minivan that morning.
[Meanwhile, because she is pretty amazing, B climbed HARD stuff with one-and-a-half hands, her pudgy, stinging/itching/semi-functional sausage-fingers globbing onto rounded rock I couldn’t cope with even with my perfectly ok hands… I was truly impressed — and simultaneously depressed — witnessing her effort on the sun-baked black rock. Did I mention it was stinking hot up there yesterday?]
We did, eventually, make it back down to the car, sweaty and exhausted. We headed back to the campground adjacent to the Heriot Bay Inn for showers and a bite to eat.
There followed a restless night (via a visit to the pub where a funky local band had everyone on their feet and dancing) during which I tossed and turned and fretted and moaned and couldn’t get comfortable (stupid hip) and woke up this morning feeling even older and more decrepit than yesterday.
Have you ever been caught in one of those terrible decision-making loops where you really, really want to do something fun (go climbing again) but know in your heart of hearts you should be sensible and stick around the campground, study a bit, write a newsletter, check emails… maybe go for a stroll on more or less horizontal terrain?
I mean, I enjoy writing these newsletters - but to send my nearest and dearest off climbing without me? Oh. Heart pain.
Anyway, I did do the sensible thing. I finished reading Sappho: poems and fragments translated by Stanley Lombardo and was struck by how much can be conveyed so movingly with so few words.
We don’t know much about Sappho - Greek poet of antiquity - most of what she wrote has been lost to the ravages of time, a church that didn’t like some of what she had to say, that unfortunate fire in Alexandria, the fact she wrote in a dialect not many were interested in copying out by hand and translating. Papyrus, alas, is fragile, as is pottery. Shards survive - and, amazingly enough, a few choice lines of her poetry had, at some point, been scratched into said surviving pottery bits.
We are left with tantalizing tidbits, suggestions of what Sappho may have been thinking/experiencing/feeling.
Of the 10,000 lines of poetry she reportedly wrote, only a few hundred remain. Reading a few of the words that have survived (and which have now been translated and re-translated and analyzed and discussed at length) it occurred to me (as I sat with my back against a driftwood log watching the tide come in) that … well, a lot of things occurred to me.
whether I’m here or not, the tide will keep coming in
I blather too much - who needs all these words?
if you choose the right words, very few need to survive in order to make an impression
if what I’m feeling is miserable because my parents are dead which means, in the natural order of things, I’m next in line (I’m the oldest of four kids), then how few words do I need to say I don’t like getting old and I really do not wish to die).
Fortunately, I never go anywhere these days without some basic art supplies, so I took a few moments to capture the place where I rested on the beach - away from the comings and goings of campers - and sketched.
After that, I played about doing some rubbings and prints of driftwood bits and by the time I was done, it was easy to stand, stretch, and amble back along the beach, up the road, and back to my campsite.
That’s where I’ll leave things for now… sitting here with my laptop as the sun sinks toward the horizon. Soon, Fabio, B and B’s hubby will be back and we can all go out for dinner at the Inn. Which seems to me to be a pretty good way to end a fine day.
I’m enjoying your stories so much. I always learn from you.