CINEMA PARADISO

RE-DISCOVERING CLIMBING AND COMMUNITY IN THE DARK //

Mid September, I went to the nationwide premier of the Reel Rock Film Tour at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado. It came as no surprise that the theater was packed — Boulder is, after all, one of the most climber-dense regions in the country. It was so jammed, in fact, I feared for my safety. I imagined myself walking by some heated climber convo and catching a mimedgaston elbow to the face, or an air heel hook to the groin. “No, you have to bust to the sidepull out right,” some boney dude would spray to his bro, and THWAP! He’d send my glasses fl ying into the dark rows of trampling feet. (If you can’t tell, I’ve been in the climbing industry just long enough to develop a crusty, jaded hide.) Luckily, the throngs were civil, and many friendly faces from the community appeared to say hello. The show, my friend Dana told me as the lights went down, was sold out (meaning there were more than 850 people watching).

What happened next, I can only describe as the magic of cinema. Since I was a goober gumby grabbing grips in Ohio, I’ve loved climbing flicks. When I lived in NYC during my college years, I got to know Josh Lowell, one of the founders of the Reel Rock tour. Once, he lent my buddy and me a copy of his newest DVD teaser before it was released. So amped up was I by its slapping, dynoing, power-growling montage that I found myself pinching beer-bottle caps in half to shed some of my excess fi nger fl exion. In the Boulder Theater, though, something even bigger than climbing porn was afoot. First, video shorts submitted for the amateur contest were screened, and the audience laughed out loud and murmured words of approval. Then Sender Films showed scenes from their upcoming climbing television series. At footage of Alex Honnold free soloing the 2,000- foot Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, in Yosemite, people cheered and clapped. More than a thousand feet up, on a two-footwide ledge, Honnold stood with his back to the sheer granite wall, toes hanging over the literal and metaphorical abyss, and weathered a moment of doubt. The audience held its breath. A whitehaired man next to me, who didn’t look to be a climber, whispered to a younger friend, “Who is he?!” When Honnold snapped back into focus, you could hear the collective exhalation. Spontaneous shouts of encouragement in the room seemed to push him over the top, to safety.

That night at the Boulder Theater, much of my crusty jadedness fell away, leaving only that bright core of excitement that lights in us all during those perfect climbing moments, those moments that bring us closer to ourselves, to nature, and to our friends. In the scenes that were shown were moments of deep sadness, moments of disbelief (at the levels to which people have taken climbing), and moments of understanding that damn near everyone sitting in the dark of that theater, faces painted with the pale fl icker of the screen, knew more or less what everyone else was feeling.

It’s all too natural in the climbing community (and the human community) to feel disconnected from others, to see our own views and ways as the only right ones. But such is the power — and maybe more importantly, the value — of movies (and photographs, words, shared experience, etc.) to transform us into our better selves, if only for an evening at a time.

That night, in the dark with a room full of strangers, I was reminded of all the reasons — reasons I’d discovered, forgotten, and discovered again — I love climbing.