1.

For several weeks in January 2015, handholds were making front-page news around the world. Rock climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson were attempting to climb the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, California; if they succeeded, it would be considered the most difficult big-wall climb in the history of mountaineering.

For that surreal interim, reporters and commentators were offering ongoing updates about the climbers’ progress to a mainstream audience, and in each of these reports, the drama hinged on the composition of El Capitan’s exceptionally smooth, glacier-polished granite. The climbers—it was explained in dramatic tones—were relying purely on the contact their fingertips found with the protuberances from the wall to keep themselves aloft.

The New York Times was running articles on the ascent daily. A few excerpts from that delightful barrage of reportage read as follows:

The cold weather and the razorlike granite had conspired to make Jorgeson’s fingertips raw and bloody . . .

Climbing for days in a row can rub fingers raw . . .

The wall’s relentlessly smooth face has few cracks to penetrate or nubs to clench . . .

Over the course of a week, [Jorgeson] fell on 10 attempts, always on the same spot, shredding the skin from his battered fingers as he clung desperately, and vainly, to sharp, pebble-size holds on the wall . . .

2.

The handholds and the fingertips receive almost exactly equal treatment; often they’re mentioned in the same sentence. For all the retroactive meaning-making, the superimposition of narratives about “conquering obstacles” and “achieving goals,” the real story was superficial: literally superficial. The whole endeavor could be reduced, quite accurately, to the microcosm of fingertip-sized handholds interacting with handhold-sized fingertips.

The drama hung—again, literally—on the contact, the connection between people and their environment: the outermost rind of a mountain cliff and the outermost rind of a human body.

3.

The ascent of the Dawn Wall was a study in scales. It was a global sensation, an oddly viral phenomenon, it was larger-than-life, it spun off into a book and a movie, it has its own catchphrase (“What’s your Dawn Wall?”).

But in reality, for the dudes who were living it, it looked more like this:

By then, Jorgeson had studied footage of each of his failures—how he pinched the rock on this hold, how he cocked his wrist on that one. He found that each fall had to do with a single foot placement. “A millimeter change in the angle of my right foot on the exact same piece of rock,” Jorgeson said. “Before, it didn’t match the contour of this tiny little pebble I was trying to step on.”

It worked.

“It clicked. I reached this balance where I could do this pivotal move.”

The narrative and the wall: macrocosmic, macroscopic.

The actual action: microcosmic, microscopic.

Devoid of abstraction, the pivotal moment for Jorgeson is about aligning the contours of himself and the wall—his toe and his toehold—so impeccably that the two conjoin and conspire to allow him passage.

4.

During the Dawn Wall ascent, a few key handholds became internationally famous. Perhaps the most widely known of these were a pair of holds—reasonably “big” ones by El Capitan’s standards; they were at least visible to the naked eye—separated by eight lateral feet of blankness. Tommy’s line up El Cap had a caesura at 1,500 feet off the deck.

One short section requires a sideways leap, feet and hands off the wall, to holds the size of matchsticks . . .

Having scouted a variety of alternative lines, Caldwell determined that the best option was to make a “dynamic” leap—a “dyno,” in climbing terminology—from one of these holds to the other, bypassing the section of blank wall. The old climbing adage, the one I learned from my grandfather when I first started dabbling in the sport, was that, in order to ensure full control on the wall, a climber should only ever move one limb at a time; the other three should remain fixed to their respective positions. This way, should a hold break or a hand or foot slip, the remaining points would prevent a catastrophic fall.

Caldwell’s move would be an “all-points” dyno, meaning that all four of his limbs would simultaneously sever contact with the wall, float eight feet leftward, and then regain contact with the monolith—first the hands latching the incut hold on the far side of the blankness, and then the feet “smearing” and stabilizing against the wall below, to keep his momentum from pulling the just-latched hands off their purchase.

5.

One of the lessons I teach in every one of my intro-level creative writing workshops is on a topic I call “the imaginative leap.”

To non-poets, such gestures may seem indistinguishable from the non sequitur; it’s a move when a poet “leaps” rapidly and, perhaps at first, inexplicably from one point or image to another. I had never made this connection before writing this essay, but as I rehearse it, I can feel in my mouth that in my lesson on the leap, I always end up using the word “dynamic” to describe the effect of these moves on the reader. Poems that leap are dynamic; poems that obey more predictable movements, that don’t stray from the line so wildly, tend to be more static.

These leaps are a part of a writer’s style; they reveal the cognitive, logistical, and aesthetic preferences in the poet’s language. Leaps are wild and fun. They are dynamic and scary. They provoke a gasp, a flash of insight from the reader.

And to me, they more fully reflect the way that the act of thinking works; my brain doesn’t always have a thesis statement or a transitional sentence; sometimes it’s catastrophism rather than gradualism by which a new insight gets made.

It clicked.

6.

For Kevin Jorgeson, the crux—the hardest part—of the Dawn Wall ascent was the difficult face-climbing; for Tommy Caldwell, it was the dyno that shaped up to be the biggest challenge.

For a time, the caesura in the middle of the Dawn Wall route proved to be a stopper move: a period at the end of the line, rather than a break in the middle of it.

In order to train for this dynamic leap, Caldwell built a replica of it in his backyard. In a short video piece about the training process, called “Big Adventures Start Small,” Caldwell explains, “I have the actual dimensions of the dyno worked out.” Once he’s measured the distances, sizes, angles and orientations of the handholds on either side of the blankness, he then screws similar-shaped artificial holds onto the panels of an exterior wall of his tool shed. The he rehearses the move over and over, internalizing the cascade of interrelated movements that add up to the dyno.

It’s an increasingly common practice that climbers, when faced with a move on natural rock that’s initially too hard to do in situ, will recreate a facsimile, a “problem simulator,” of those moves using artificial holds in a training facility. It makes sense: it’s a lot harder for Caldwell to practice his dyno a hundred times when he’s a quarter mile off the ground; it’s much easier to try the same move a hundred times in the comfort of his own yard.

Angie Payne describes a similar process during her work on Freaks of the Industry, a classic boulder problem in Rocky Mountain National Park. She explains that in the gym, she made “simulators of moves on Freaks [of the Industry] that I really struggled with” so that she could repeat them over and over again during the offseason, drilling the sequences into—I almost said “her brain,” but I really mean—“body.”

In a highly effective cinematic move, a filmmaker who produced a short documentary about Payne carefully avoids showing the full Freaks boulder through the first portion of the film; instead the viewer sees only the problem simulators in the gym. In the climactic scene, seeing Freaks for the first time and watching Angie climb it, we recognize the exact moves she was training for in the gym. It’s as though we’ve been here before. That’s exactly the goal.

7.

Adam Ondra, in his preparations to climb Silence, which currently stands as the world’s hardest single-pitch sport route, worked out his sequences in much the same way:

The route was still so hard that I had to build a simulation in my own gym so I could try it every day. I was thinking about the route all the time, I was visualizing the route all the time.

Ondra’s physiologist and trainer Klaus Isele, who devised Ondra’s training regimen, explains:

I had to find a way, let’s say, that [Ondra] keeps the project in his mind, in his body, and the muscle memories, and the neurological pattern in his head as good as somehow possible.

And Ondra again:       

We cut the route in to the tiniest details so when I was visualizing it I would visualize with every single muscle which was necessary for each move.

8.

There is the outer world of cliffs with infinite possibilities of shapes; there is the inner world of manufactured handholds imitating in a limited (but ever-growing vocabulary) the makeups of those cliffs. Handholds now come with multiple textures, mimicking the varied patters of polish and varnish and wear on natural rock. The language becomes more nuanced.

The idea of using art to imitate nature: well, a lot of people have had that idea. Perhaps its most obvious version is landscape painting, a human-created artifice appealing to the sense of vision.

But other senses have their simulators, too: the pine shaped, pine-scented air-freshener that dangles from the rearview mirror in the family Volvo station wagon.

The grapefruit-flavored water that contains—and I quote—“natural flavor and other natural flavors.”

The sleep-aid soundscapes of the jungle canopy, the waves, a mountain stream, appealing to the ear.

The artificial shearling that lines my Carhartt jacket, the artificial neon-blue fur on my rave-vest of choice, representing the tactility of the wild.

And dearest to my heart, the written word: conjuring in concert not just the sensory trappings of the outdoors, but the emotional—I might even go so far as to say spiritual—sensation of being there. As Nan Shepherd writes in her classic The Living Mountain,

Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think . . .

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow—the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in. If I had other senses, there are other things I should know.

9.

Watching climbers make their replicas—their project simulators—then, feels to me to be an intriguingly literary process. They sift through buckets of plastic holds, testing them each until they locate one that’s comparable in size to the natural feature; then they affix it to plywood and test the angle until it matches the feel of the original. It looks, for all the world, like editing, like revision— like trying to find the perfect word. What color was the sea—wine-dark? Hazel, algal, shadowed, striated? Slate-like, stone-like?

As a writer I ask my eye whether the sea was dark like wine, my nose whether the pines smelled like a mix of mint and cold blood. Meanwhile the climber asks his or her body; it hangs from the artificial hold (not like, but almost like, one might hang on a word) and checks the sensation the artificial hold makes in comparison to the original that nature offered. Does it make me feel, here in my private, at-home interaction, the same way I felt on the cliff? (Stone-like, book-like, suspended?)

A writer tests the heft of a word, while the climber tests the heft of him- or herself, hanging on the hold. Does this word support my weight, does it support the argument that is my body, does it leave me tense, in a state of suspension, of shock, do I feel its rightness in my muscles and bones?

Plastic handholds are to the kinesthetic as a watercolor landscape painting is to the visual. The goal of each is to recreate a sensation. Likewise in the work of particularly accomplished nature writers, as in Nan Shepherd’s passage above: the writing, though it enters through the eye or the ear, is on some level there for the benefit of the body. Because in the end, it is the body that must experience landscape; especially when it comes to climbing, the language gets superimposed after the fact.

I can speak from experience—in the middle of an all-points dyno, language is no place to be seen, nowhere to be heard. And yet the dyno is, in the service of the greater line up the wall, a rhetorical move. An imaginative leap. (Bird-like, stone-like, void-like.)

10.

After a nineteen-day push, living on the cliff the whole time, Caldwell and Jorgeson completed their ascent of the Dawn Wall on January 14, 2015. Theirs was heralded as one of the great climbs of our generation, and their route is considered the most continuously difficult big-wall route in the world.

Both climbers admitted that there were times, over the seven previous years of their work on the route and even during that nineteen-day battle, that the line seemed impossible: the holds too unforgiving, the moves too challenging, the chasms of blankness unbridgeable. 

But there had been a sequence of alterations taking place within the ascensionists throughout their years of preparation: tendons growing stronger, fingertips getting more calloused, bodies shedding ounces of excess weight, reactions to the tiny holds becoming more sensitive. And at the same time as these physical changes, cognitive ones took place, too; the climbers learned the idiosyncrasies of El Capitan’s uniquely subtle veneer, memorized their sequences of moves, and visualized the necessary adjustments to their technique, all of which brought their choreography into sharper and sharper refinement. In other words, their respective training plans had worked; while those blade-like holds, those apparent blanknesses on the wall, hadn’t changed, the climbers themselves had.

I’ve committed my life to poetry, and I try to be a full-time True Believer in its power. But in my weaker moments, particularly when I consider the environmental crises in which ecopoetry attempts to intervene, I do wonder whether our writing can ever change people.

These rock climbing “problem simulators,” though, give me a kind of hope. Lots of poetry, and nature poetry in particular, still seems to participate in that pastoral mode wherein the beauties of the wilderness are preserved, time-capsule-like, in verse, for pleasant consideration once one has returned to the metropolis. At first glance, the dyno simulator might seem to be doing the same— helping Caldwell remember the particulars of an especially compelling place “in nature.” But the whole point of that body-poem, that mimicry of rock by plastic on the shed panel, is to prepare the climber for the next trip up the wall. So that, in a literal sense, he can connect with nature where he had previously detached from it, can grasp his surroundings where they once slid through his fingers.

But slippages remain. The strange coda to this tale is that Tommy Caldwell, in the first-ascent push on the Dawn Wall, actually didn’t ever make the dyno move. Despite his preparations on the shed-wall and his countless attempts on El Capitan, he was unable to pull it off in “real life.” Instead, he discovered an ingenious work-around: a circuitous, near-circular downclimb that required hundreds of feet of additional strenuous climbing to bypass the eight-foot leap. This, too, strikes me as a writerly mix of fixity and flexibility, a willingness to return to the drawing board, to rewrite a line on the fly. But such a revision wouldn’t have been possible for Caldwell had he not spent years developing his expansive body-vocabulary as a climber.

And this is an ecopoetry I can support with all my heart: the poem as training regimen. Not a nostalgic backward-looking form, but a tactic by which to hone our senses, so that we can better perceive and respond to the environmental challenges that are yet to come.