January 14, 2004

• Just call me Saint SuSu

  
  

  I’m a bit late announcing my canonization… sorry ’bout that.  About a week ago, Greyfox read me this from The Village Voice, and I meant to post it but got distracted by other matters. 

  
  

  
  

  The Village Voice: Horoscope: Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny
  
  VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Pope Jean Paul II has canonized 477 new saints, exceeding the total of the last 86 popes combined. His secret? Previously, candidates had to have performed three miracles, whereas now it’s two at most. Other saint-makers have been inspired by the pope’s example. The Church of the Subgenius is creating an average of 2,100 new saints per year (non-Catholic variety), while the Discordians are close behind with 1,875. I’m embarrassed to say that my own faith, the Temple of Sacred Uproar and Rowdy Blessings, has been lagging far behind—until now, that is. In honor of the miraculous feats of beauty, truth, and love that Free Will Astrology-reading Virgos have been pulling off lately, I hereby bestow sainthood on every one of you. You may hereafter put a “St.” in front of your name.

  
  

  Among other new saints, let’s not forget Saint Sophia Loren, Saints Ingrid Bergman and (Mother) Teresa, Saint Pee Wee Herman, and Saint hotvette101… and the Wee Saint Chicken Lover… oh, and my granddaughter, Saint Cassandra… or did Rob mean ONLY those of us who read his column?   No matter, we’re all deserving.

  
  

  And to get back to one of my favorite subjects, my Kid, not a saintly Virgo, but a willful and cocky Leo born in the Chinese Year of the Cock:

  
  

  
  

  ---

  Climbing

  
  

  The night after I’d posted the foregoing blog about my kid and me, I noticed as I was on my way to bed that Doug was reading it.  He’s one of my regular readers and I always appreciate his feedback on my stuff.  The next day, I asked for feedback.  In his usual masculine way, he gave me a judgment, not the sort of feedback I solicit but no more than I’ve come to expect.  He said it was “all right”.  Then he said, “You’re going to tell them more about the climbing, aren’t you?”

  
  

  Okay, now that I think about it, that’s a good idea.

  
  

  He was climbing before he could crawl.  I’d sit down with him on my lap and he’d creep and claw his way up to my breast.  When he was full he’d sleep for a bit and when he woke he’d climb up to my shoulder and look out the window behind the sofa.  I knew that such exertions were good for developing his little muscles, so I would just sit there thinking of myself as Mom Mountain, and let him climb all over me.

  
  

  He was about a year old, still cruising around hanging onto furniture for support, one day when all three of us: he, Charley and I, were out in our yard.  I was working in the garden and Charley was in and out between the house and the old school bus we had converted into a kitchen for our natural foods booth at the state fair, readying it for the upcoming trip to Palmer.  Doug had been crawling around, playing in the dirt, using my trellises to pull himself up.

  
  

  I looked up from my weeding when Charley tapped me on the shoulder.  He pointed and I followed the line of his finger to… Doug, standing one rung below the top of a 16-foot ladder that was leaning against a storage shed.  He was hanging onto the top rung, looking as if he was trying to figure out how to go up that next step.  I was on my feet in an instant with a yelp, leaping toward the kid.  Charley grabbed the back of my shirt and shushed me.  He said quietly, “You can’t keep the kid wrapped in cotton all his life.”  I needed to hear that.  My mother had overprotected me and I had to work to overcome my own impulses to do the same.  We walked over beside the ladder (where I could catch Doug if he fell) and guided him verbally step-by-step as he backed down the rungs. 

  
  

  We moved to this valley just before his second birthday.  It was right around that time, when we were camping out on our land in an old VW van before Charley got the trailer moved out here, that he expressed to me the first of his various “when I grow up” ambitions.  He said he wanted to be a mountain climber.  I could relate.  It’s one of the things I’ve dreamed of (with little real hope of accomplishing) all my life.

  
  

  Later that same summer, Charley and I put a lunch in a knapsack and Doug in his canvas seat slung from another shoulder harness and headed along the trail to the Susitna River, exploring our new neighborhood.  I know I’ve blogged about that trail before, and Sarah walked it with me when she was here, but for those of you who aren’t familiar with it–straight-line as the raven flies, on a map, it is a mile from here to the edge of the river channel.  The trail is somewhat longer.  It runs along the top of a bluff and ends on an even higher, steeper bluff at the edge of the braided, mile-wide collection of channels that is the Susitna.  The trail itself is a braided course of moose and bear trails.  In many places they are one, and then at some natural barrier they diverge.  The moose trail goes up around the tops of fallen trees if they landed hung-up high enough for the bear trail to go under, and sometimes over the trunks lying on the ground when the bear trail skirts around the upthrust root masses at their lower end.  In places where water erosion has cut back into the bluff, the bears often go down into the gully and up the other side but the moose skirt around its margin, staying on top.

  
  

  I’ve no idea how many times I have walked that trail.  I know that Doug has done it more times than I have during his growing years here.  That was the first trip.  Charley packed him part of the way, and let him walk some.  When we got to the Su (and in case you haven’t noticed, the river and its valley are where I got my nic, SusitnaSue), we scrambled and slid down the steep bluff, walked a ways along the river, jumped a few narrow channels and ate our lunch on an island among the willows.  We were all tired by the time we started back.  At the bluff, knowing that he’d need his balance to climb it, Charley took Doug out of the pack and told him he’d have to climb on his own.

  
  

  After a few protests that he was tired and repeated insistence from us, Doug resigned himself to going it “alone”.  I was right behind him, to catch if he fell.  Charley was off to one side and just a little ahead.  Step by step, one hand and foothold at a time, we guided him up the bluff.  Charley repeated several times the climbing rule:  three points of contact at all times.  When Doug was stymied on where to grab the next handhold, Charley would point one out.  When I saw a little foot waving around in my face seeking a foothold, I’d grasp it and place it on firm footing.  That experience and a few more like it got me over my fear of letting Doug climb.

  
  

  He liked to go up trees, too.  There is one particular very tall poplar (called “cottonwood” around here) up on the side of the bluff above the spring where this neighborhood gets its water.  Most of the cottonwoods around here are hard to climb because their lowest branches are very high off the ground.  That one, being on a steep slope, offers access to its low branches and so Doug grabbed one one day when I was filling jugs at the waterhole and went up. 

  
  

  I just now asked him what he remembers about falling out of that tree.  “Gravity” was his answer.  Then, after some thought he said he had fallen out of one cottonwood and got stuck in another one.  All I recall of the incident was, at one point, hearing him call out, “Mom! Look!”  When I looked up the bluff, I couldn’t see him.  I called out, “Where are you.”  I got a pretty good directional fix on his voice, but still couldn’t see him for the leaves in the treetop.  He was probably wearing camo.  He favored camo for a while around that age.  A bit later I heard some rustling and a little “whoop”, nothing alarming.  A little after that, he was back down at the spring, a little scratched, exhilarated from the adrenaline.  All he said was, “I fell out of the tree.”  All I said was, “Are you okay?” and after he assured me he was, “remember:  three points of contact.”

  
  

  By that time I had been working on transcending my fear.  I’d even done post-hypnotic suggestion, made a tape of my own voice with suggestions for all the things I wanted to do and be.  (and, come to think of it, have now done and/or become).  A few years before that incident with the tree at the spring, when I was regularly going with a bunch of neighbor women to the old Sheep Creek Lodge to work out with Jane Fonda tapes (Doug hadn’t started school yet then, was about four or five) I’d had a slightly fearful moment.  I’d finished my workout and was suiting up to leave when I heard some feminine screams from outside.  Someone came in and called me to come out.

  
  

  Doug was at the top of a forty-foot ladder that was leaning against the woodshed beside the lodge.  I had a mental image of him falling, and then quickly erased it (I’d been studying NLP).  I yelled at him, asked him whatthehell he was doing up there.  Matter-of-factly, he answered, “climbing.”  “Well,” I called out, “just climb right back down here.  You’re scaring people.”  He paused.  I guess he knew I wasn’t going to come up after him, and that whatever trouble he might be in when he reached the ground wasn’t going to be any worse if he took a moment more to enjoy the scenery.  Then he backed down the ladder, not particularly cautiously, nor too swiftly or carelessly, either.  Three points of contact all the way, confidently.

  
  

  About ten years ago, when Doug and I had just gotten home from our Big Field Trip, Greyfox and I were having lunch in the new Sheep Creek Lodge, built to replace the low rambling lodge that had burned down in the ‘eighties.  I heard screams and excited shouts from the porch, and somehow knew that Doug had to be involved.  Last I’d seen him he was playing out on the porch with about half a dozen other kids.  I stepped out on the porch and looked up.  There he was just beneath that highest bit of roof overhang, clinging to the log front of the building.  Below him, either still trying to get as high as he was, or else on the way back down at parental demand, were the rest of those kids.  Doug had honed his climbing skills on our trip.  I hadn’t even realized that log wall was climbable nor, I suppose, had any of those other kids until they saw Doug go up it.

  
  

  That log-climbing incident didn’t scare me, but there was one incident early in our trip that had us both scared.  At Joshua Tree National Monument, I’d been setting up our camp on the day after Thanksgiving, 1993 when Doug asked me if he could explore.  I said to stay within sight of camp.  Joshua Tree, in case you’re not familar with it, is popular with rock climbers.  It is scattered with piles of huge rounded boulders bigger than houses.  We had seen people all over the rocks as we entered the park.

  
  

  Several times I looked up from my work and located Doug, saw him working his way up into a pile of boulders across the road.  Then I heard his voice call out distantly, “Mom.”  I looked up and saw him waving from a ledge about halfway up the rock formation he’d been climbing.  “I’m stuck,” he called.  I started over to him immediately.  When I reached the bottom of the formation and looked up, he explained that he had reached the ledge by sliding down a rock face behind him, but that he couldn’t get back up it.  I did not think it wise for him to try and come down the tall sheer face before me, so I started around to look for a way up, to see if I could find the way he’d gone down and help him back up.

  
  

  As I went, we conversed in shouts as I tried to follow the direction of his voice to find him.  Sound was broken up and distorted by the rocks and I must have spent half an hour or more, as the sun went down and the wind came up, fruitlessly trying to find the slot he’d gone up to reach the slide down onto that ledge.  I was beginning to think of calling the rangers, of floodlights and foofaraw in the middle of the night…. Meanwhile, some other campers had heard our conversation, and joined the effort.  Two young men, college students from back east somewhere, J.J. and his friend whose name I’ve forgotten, found Doug.  One of them held onto the other as he dangled down that slide Doug had taken, and Doug climbed the man’s body back out of the trap he’d gotten himself into.

  
  

  Just now I asked Doug if he still wants to be a mountain climber when he grows up.  “Nope,” he said, “mountains are cold, for the most part.”

  • 6:23 pm
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