"There is an amazing sense of speed once the iron comes out. A simplicity
to the mashed and forced nature of nailing versus the previous 4 hours of fiddle,
test, fiddle, ease on, jump off, fiddle, replace of clean placements.
My placements fly into their nests, upside down, hanging out of the perfectly flakey pie crust like the
heads of (find those fish that pop in and out of the holes) I hang to my left, balancing
against the fifi at my waist by pushing my feet backward towards where my last
solid cam continues to shift in its place as the rope pulls against it.
“Watch me!... Keep me tight, well… relatively tight… enough to feel me, no,
you’re pulling me backwards, just you know just enough slack” Dixie makes motions
like she can’t hear me. I’m not really yelling loud enough for anyone but myself to
hear anyway.
My voice is the sound of the 2 packs-a-day dust habit I’ve taken up
since this morning. For the first time, I imagine what it would be like to have a
cigarette right now. I’m suddenly glad I quit 2 years earlier, I happily envision
myself hanging against the Balconies Wall on my fifi and smoking cigarette after
cigarette, never moving, and remaining there until someone finally came and pulled
me off this route.
I continue to scan for clean placement but air is long out of that sail. Now is
the race across iron to the end. I am John Henry fighting for the jobs of the rest of
the railroad construction men. I focus on my placements again before I begin to
dwell on the ultimate end of John Henry’s myth.
Amazingly, most of the pitons sing in this final section, I should write that
as “sing” in the Pinnacles filter that everything takes on. The lost arrows and angles
(X in all) mumble the melody of nailing, muffled, but loud enough to imagine the
scored music. I grasp each staff line of the sheet music like rungs on a ladder to
make myself slide across the face."
