12
KAUI, 2008
Indian Creek
That fall we lived in the landscape. We climbed on the fringes of crusted mountain ranges once plowed by glaciers as big as cities. We set our toes and fingertips on razored bits of stone and slipped ourselves into the veined cracks of sheer walls of limestone or granite or basalt, all of it ceilinged by a thunder-brained sky. I felt the first people in those worlds. The earth that generations of Shoshone had lain on was there still, underneath our tents, right? Frigid air that cycled off the snowcaps, what had once been of the Kiowa’s breath, passed through us the same.
With Van, with Hao, with Katarina, suddenly I wanted fright-fest runouts at Smith Rocks. The Totem Pole in Australia and El Potrero Chico in Mexico. The Salathé Wall in Yosemite and El Chorro in Spain. The more we climbed the more it got in deep. Under my skin.
And something even better happened. Those hard-climbing nights I’d collapse in the wet-dog smell of our tents and plunge into black oceans of sleep. I’d dream of what must have been Hawaiian gods. Women as large and distant as volcanoes, their skin dark like pregnant soil, dolphin-kind bodies thick and slick and full of joyful muscle. Their hair tangled and tumbled down into the trees until I couldn’t tell the vines from their locks and their eyes were golden or blue or green without white and smoldering. Everywhere they touched the land, the land grew into them, skin blending with earth, until you couldn’t find where one ended and the other began.
I guess that was when I danced. Or at least that’s what Van told me every time the dream happened, especially at the start, right. She said I’d be deep in it: On my back out cold, sleeping bag slipped to my hips, dancing hula in the tent. Arms locked and pointing forty-five degrees, periodically sweeping across my body, hips rocking in ‘ami or knees going in ‘uwehe. She said she had to duck and flinch so I didn’t smack her with my gestures.
She asked what did I dream about. There was no point in explaining the women—it would just sound stupid—but even explaining the ambience wouldn’t work. It felt like I was being dragged, like I was in a riptide, thick cords of current carrying me to a nameless destination.
* * *
INDIAN CREEK will never be the same for me, because of what we did there. It was the start of the end, I see that now. It was our fall-break trip. Indian Creek with its sandstone cliffs going copper in the early sun. The smell of coins, strong from the distant lake. Hao and Katarina were there, but we’d started to pair off for our climbing in the same configuration, more and more: Hao and Katarina, me and Van. Me and Van. We climbed like it was a conversation. She was elegant and precise. Fatigueless. I was powerful and dynamic—big sweeping moves and hard lock-offs. And we displayed those things to each other, she responding to me and me responding to her, so that we were pushing each other, even as we admired. We were turning each other into the sort of people we wanted to become, creating the sort of experiences I never knew I wanted until I was having them.
“You need to flow more,” she called up to me, as I worked my way through a hard series of locks on a finger crack. “Settle into the flow. You shouldn’t have to try most of the time, only at the crux.” And I was like, Sometimes I don’t want to flow. In those cracks in particular for me it still went like a war. I’d fumble among the smallest gashes in the rock and all the muscles in my back would be yanked through with strain and I’d have to squeeze and quit breathing and grit my teeth to pull through. Van up there before me on the sharp end of the rope like a liquid snake. All spread knees and leg flagging and delicate camming. I’m the hula dancer, you bitch, I wanted to say. Then I did say it, and she laughed, right? Because we knew each other.
I’d finally taken to climbing well enough that it had all the danger I wanted. The second day in the Creek I took a fifty-foot fall from a splitter crack. The seasick feel of plunging through the air, rope slack and rippling in the air below me. Falling and falling until the rope finally caught on two shaky pieces of gear that left me dangling just above Van’s head. Had those pieces pulled, I would have broken my back. Neither of us said anything for a long time. Okay, I just hung there, trembling from my belly out.
“We should have brought more number twos,” Van said, all chill and clever.
“It’s better this way,” I said. “Consequences.”
It’s what I wanted. Take me and Van: I didn’t know what we were and there was something in the not knowing. In playing at the edge. Climbing was the same. Again and again we did it, teasing the edge of disaster. The consequences made us into something that was completely known when we walked around on campus, right? It spilled over into classes. I was building off those first semesters, establishing myself as one of the best students in every class I took, stoked to be understanding the mechanics of the world: what I could build with my brain, the sciences. I could make buildings or bridges or engines if I wanted. I had no questions now of what was inside me.
Except with Van. It had been a month and a half since the wine festival and I was cramped with want for her. Our dorm room was a pressure cooker: casual bumps or grazes as we handed each other pens or textbooks or the remote, or when we passed on the way to our lofted beds.
The week before this trip, she’d come back from the shower, closed our dorm-room door, and dropped her towel. I was on my bed, knees kinked up and reading my Statics & Dynamics textbook. T.I. was playing in my headphones—Paper Trail had just come out—which I remember because I can’t hear “Whatever You Like” now without being yanked back into that moment, her body. Mint and flowers, the white smell of soap, even. It was never her body itself that I cared about. The surface or whatever. It was how she wore it: tension and flex, asymmetric, solid. I remember a few things. The rooty tangle of her barely groomed crotch, the thickness of her wrists and forearms, the thin veins sprung by the climber’s muscles. The flex in her neck. She just stood there naked. My insides kinked and kinked. Then Van crouched and pulled underwear out of her drawer and rolled them on over her clean skin.
In any chemical solution made up of two or more parts, there’s a solvent and a solute. I knew this. I studied these sorts of things all the time, okay? The solvent does the work, creates the acidic burn. I told myself with Van I was the solvent sometimes, but I wasn’t kidding anyone. Mostly I knew what it felt like to be dissolved.
Now we were at the Creek and in our tents under great spills of midnight stars, me and Van in our tent together, across the campfire from Katarina and Hao, whose banter we could faintly hear. They never stopped talking, but it was like a brother-and-sister thing. Van turned to me in her sleeping bag.
“You going to dance hula again tonight?” she said.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Don’t get all moody,” she said. “I like it.”
I shrugged, because I couldn’t think of how else to not react. “I don’t control it,” I said.
“Almost everything’s like that, isn’t it?” she said.
I made a skeptical face. “Yeah, I don’t think philosophy’s your thing.”
“I’m serious,” she said.
“So am I.” I grinned.