Well, it's time for a new mat. My thesaurus suggests for
dropzone:
Main Entry: abandon
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: desert
Synonyms: abdicate, back out, bail out, bow out, cast off, chicken out, cop out, cut loose.
Well, having bounced around on Johno's Franklin Dropzone at Dumbarton I'm resigned to getting my paws on a new one. Since John washed his, & had to hacksaw the foam to re-insert it, his mat now retains the awesome proportions of being 2ft square but 8ft thick
[nearly a boulder problem in itself aye]. Excellent for highballs but hard to target, unless you have some
twitchers kit with you. Maybe a Franklin Satellite in dangerous yellow will do the job...these choices are always risky, unlike everyone elses. A precious few know, that when Hyperballad was climbed ground-up, there was no mat below me. Not having had the luxury of a mat at the time since my original flew onto a beach fire one high summer, I scoured the Europaidh beaches looking for shreds of fishing nets & soft marker bouys. These I found in hord after hord. The result was all of the boulders being hidden beneath 2ft of multi-coloured nets & rubber balls, & tested, they did the job until the sea reclaimed them after the ascent. It was a surviving trace or vestige, a remnant of carting mattresses up into the high coires all those years ago, that allowed me to pad out the bottom of Hyperballad with no mat. One thing has to be said about falling into fishing nets though. Employing the
drop & roll technique [Koho Kaiten Ukemi in Aikido -in case you were wondering] will leave you entangled in a ferocious battle for freedom akin to that of the fish for which the nets were originally designed. Believe me, I've had easier battles escaping frenetic groups of crystal waving new-age hippy idiots who insist on group hugging you for drinking a cup of tea, & easier escapes from soft toy shops wearing a full velcro suit.
Trawling the local skip-dump, we took more bedding away from the council than people could throw at the council. One day to get four mattresses up there in the heat & soaring hills & hide them under perma-dry roofs. One day of rest from having a giant pair of useless flapping wings springing up & down on your back. The mattresses generally lasted all year, until the winter rain & ice claimed them. It was an accepted part of bouldering in those days, you would drag each fat collosus up there & one late Autumn afternoon, pulling it out, the handle would rip off leaving you holding a clump of Slumberlux patented plastic, still knitted to some cloth, with a foot of horse hair hanging off. If a tourist had been passing & I'd had a machete in the other other hand I would have shouted:
Yeah I scalped the basta, want some of that as well?! ...such was the empassioned veracious soul of those days. If they had a
death-smell about them, a rotting air, the mattresses were imovable. We'd leave them where they lay, like fatally wounded soldiers & clear up any leftover bones in spring, when the flesh had disintigrated. When your down in
Glen Novice don't be suprised if you find one of these corpses under what you believe to be a new found steep development...It's probably been climbed.
I left a Slumberlux under the Heather Hat roof one year, a great bivi, only to return from Donald Camerons cottage at the mouth of the glen, to find some Kiwis [a couple of Spanish speaking origin] had used it to start a bonfire...did I care? not really. As payback they were tasked with spotting me on what would become
Mazie Gunns [even ripping out their V-Dub camper van cushions to get the dropzone covered] & recieved a flash-flood of free roof warrior demonstrations. We retired later, to the top of the Heather Hat & the Spanish fella strummed out & sang something as similar as
Canción del Mariach-Morena de Mi Corazón [extremely well] on his classical guitar in the sunset while we shared whisky through the smoke, becoming a sloe-eyed absent minded frenzy of dancers
...[you know, that opening song from Desperado by Los Lobos]...So you see, the essentials of bouldering are passion, blood work, soul conviction, will & movement, not always the gear you surround yourselves with - this is the monk life...the retreat of the person who cares about the rock first & looking good later...Yep, 95% of life, is showing up, to be part of it, even if you can't find yer trousers.
Years before all this I remember climbing my first E6 with a Boreal Ace on my right foot with the big toe sticking out, an oversize torn Mythos on my left foot & having only one old rope & 3 original strung Wild Country rocks, it was a bold lead. [The red Rock9 used that day was kept for luck & is now my dogs collar] At the bottom of the crag were the gear-mongers, all shiny & puff-chested, sneering at the two scruffs eagre to climb ahead of them. They laughed at our appearance...at first. The short of the story is, we nailed the line twice & our baiters were still wandering around at the base like glamour models on a cat-walk, to fearfull to try, locked in a peackock style display of eachothers feathers..or was it shiny unused racks & faultless Ronhills? Taking the same spirit into bouldering with little or no proper equipment, improvising on the task at hand & not on the excuses to get you out of the task at hand will bring the days ahead into an overflow of fire. Those days gave us bold lessons of commitment & an applicible practicality for the future, one you can smooth into a situation with the mood of hot slow oil & a purposeful touch, as light or destructive, as it comes....
Anyways, the Kiwis & the Spanish-Kiwian duet...Had they of burned my soon-to-be-realized Franklin there may have been real corpses stuffed under those river boulders...I've never been one to bring damp matches to a bonfire...
And James, thanks for the long loan of the PoD, much appreciated.
