So my roommate Sarah had told me at some point in the past years that she thought "The Ring" was a pretty good scary movie. I was at the used CD store the other day, and they had a whole bunch of DVDs for $2.50, which is cheaper than a rental, so I bought an arm load of them; one of which was the aforementioned title.
Saturday night I was a bit tired. You see I had gone rock climbing on Friday, I did some cycling on hills Saturday morning before the REI sale, and I hadn't slept well friday night due to after-dinner bloat. So I figured I'd give it a shot.
The movie was OK. I particularly like how they twist up the ending (the scene where the little boy reacts to his mother's report of how things went is pretty cool).
Another friend called me just after the movie, and we ended up talking until like 1am. I wasn't very awake, so I'm sure I wasn't that great at conversation...it gets to the point that I keep forgetting that the other person can't hear me nodding. So much for being tired and getting sleep.
So, I had promised Andreas that I would go climbing with him Sunday morning at 8am. Needless to say, I was looking forward to getting at least the remaining seven hours as sleep.
Around 4am I wake up. The area around my apartment is not so quiet, so I figure it was just a noise outside. I roll over, and feel a stream of blood roll across my upper lip.
Great.
I used to get nosebleeds all the time as a kid, so I am pretty used to it. It is particularly bad in the midwest during the winter, when staying in a house with forced air heat. I bleed daily in that environment. Oregon is quite a bit more humid in the winter, so I rarely get them here, except during some of the drier summer days.
This was the worst one I'd had since I was 10. It reminded me of that Monty Python skit where the guy who builds slaughterhouses is trying to sell his design for a retirement community. "Oh, I guess I misunderstood your attitude towards your tenants". Visually, it was more like the skit where they are picking on
Sam Peckinpah films. One of them throws a tennis ball and chaos and blood ensue. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650989
Of course, I can't help also thinking about the movie I just watched, wondering if I have seven days to live (in the movie everyone seems to a bloody nose in the course 7 days of events leading to their deaths), or if the fact that I fast forwarded through parts of the movie means I have less.
I go back to bed and end up in a series of lucid dreams. The only one I even remotely remember involved a woman who had actual-size big-leaf maple leaves tatooed all over her body in red and green. Don't ask about the plot; I'll claim not to remember it.
I get up at 7:30 to trek over to the columns for some climbing.
The photo shows the area I was climbing in. I warmed up on the wide crack (6 from the left) known as "outer column jam" or simply "fat crack". It is easy enough that my friend Andreas (who has been climbing for over 12 years) free soloed it to set up our ropes.
My next climb was a burly one, fourth from the left. I was still pretty muddle-headed, and was hoping that something a bit more challenging would help wake me up.
Now, when Andreas and I climb, we usually self belay and climb at the same time so we can chat. We use ascenders, which will move up a rope, but not down.
You have to be somewhat careful that you don't accelerate onto an ascender, because the grabs the rope with little teeth that can damage the rope. So, if you get to a sketchy spot, you kind of relax back onto the rope as opposed to falling.
Note to my sister: you might want to skip the next paragraph :)
Well, I get to the crux of the climb, and I can't pull the move. So, I go to relax back onto the rope, and notice that the rope just freely slides: I had forgotten to engage the mechanism that stops the rope from sliding. Lucky I didn't actually take a fall. At best I would have gotten rope burns from a panic grab of the rope.
I decided I hadn't had enough sleep to be climbing, so I finished that climb and then just watched Andreas and tried to soak up some of his techniques.
The day was acutally quite pretty, and once I got home I hated to waste it (especially since, according to my nose and morning in general, I have less than 6 days to live), so I called around and my friend Jody agreed to ride the Row River trail out of Cottage Grove. It is an old rail bed that they paved over and turned into a cycling trail. I'd never done the whole thing (it is 26 miles round trip), and it was nearby. It goes around a nice lake, and is graded for a train, so even though it gains elevation you hardly notice it.
I didn't realize it at first, but my friend Jody worked for the lumber company that sold this rail line, and was one of the major people involved in the deal. He had some interesting stories about it.
Once we got past the lake Jody warned me that we were headed into Appalachian country. Now that I think about it (and have witnessed it), I guess it makes sense. If you live in the middle of nowhere, and don't mind a railroad going through your front yard, you probably don't have really high standards for social graces either.
He told me that there was a lot of opposition to turning it into a trail. My comment was "but their property values must have gone way up", and "who wouldn't prefer a bike trail over a rail line?".
His response was that the kinds of activities that went on up there were the kind that did not appreciate outsider spectators. He said the company kept armed guards during the deal because they were getting death threats.
The major work in that area from 1920 to the time of the sale was timber. The rail served the timber industry, and when the area was logged out you went from the wild west with jobs to the wild west without jobs.
Jody told me several stories from when he was dealing with the land, including meth kitchens in trailers illegally parked at the end of the trail. He said they paid a fee to have the Sheriff make rounds out there while they still had unsold equipment in the mills. That got them one drive through a week.
We rode past the end of the trail, and stopped to eat some wild blackberries. Wow, they were really good, especially the ones that were warm from the sun. Like warm berry cobbler.
We decided to ride a little further on the road towards an area called Wild Wood. As we rode up the road, a woman tending her yard called out to me:
"Look out for the Crazies around the next corner."
I smiled at her.
"No, really." she said.
Jody and I decided to head back. No need to accelerate my demise any more.
On the way home I noticed some dead animals along the road. What one would normally term "road kill". I'm not sure road kill is supposed to include things one shoots from the bedroom window that faces the road.
I was happy to see the lake again.
