Mountain Climbing

Never go mountain climbing unless you are absolutely sure the person going with you has a clue about what they are about to do. Simply watching someone on television is not enough to get you there safely, words of wisdom. My son always gives me that strange “how do you know that this is a bad idea” look. Little does he know adventure has always been my middle name. Ol Darv and I had just watched two guys scale the vertical side of a mountain. Our conclusion, how hard could it be? So we got fifty feet of nylon boat rope (mistake one), got a couple of D-rings he had acquired at a yard sale, and headed for the closest cliff to begin our journey to the top. The cliff we selected was fifty feet to the top with jagged ledges along the way to make things easier. Between the cliff and the river was a two-foot ledge, just enough room to slide around. Ol Darv took off up the side of the cliff like he had done this his whole life. I waited at the bottom until he got the rope tied off. Then with him pulling up the slack I climbed up after him. After reaching about the thirty-foot mark, I was feeling really good about the climb. Knowing Ol Darv was holding me with the rope, I decided to try a pendulum swing. If you never saw someone do a pendulum swing while climbing, it looks like a clock pendulum swinging, thus the name. I yelled for Ol Darv to give me a little slack so that I could attempt a pendulum. The problem was that he only heard give me some slack. So he let go of the rope. About the time he let go, I jumped off the face of that cliff and dropped like a bucket into a deep well. Down I went and a blood-curling scream that came from me is still echoing around the base of the cliff. Sometimes at night people still say they can hear that sound. Ol Darv had smoke coming off his gloves as that rope was spooling at about 100 miles an hour. In an effort to save his best friend, he grabbed the rope and braced himself against the tree stopping my free fall. At this point, I was about two inches above the water. It was also at this point that I realized we did not tie the “Swiss-seat” body harness properly as we saw on television. It was up around my chest causing my voice to raise several octaves. So with what sounded like a schoolgirl, and with all the breath that I could muster I uttered, “Slack, slack, give me some slack”. Then splash, I hit the water. After shaking off the water and listening to Ol Darv explain how he wished I would make up my mind whether I wanted slack or no slack, I decided to cross mountain climbing off my list of things to do.