What Lies Beneath

Flappers are climbing's finest injuries. They perfectly embody what climbing is all about-- the application of focused effort to reach a goal. You don't get flappers by yelling "take!" when things get hairy six feet above your last bolt. You don't get them sitting on your crashpad mumbling about that last round of Buttery Nipples. Fact-- you will never get a flapper eating granola. The skin on pads of your fingers will not stretch out, bunch up, and rip open exposing the raw flesh beneath because you provided a perfect spot. A flapper, in all its hemophobic horror, is a direct indicator of the amount of effort you have applied. You have to earn your flappers and, ironically, the longer you climb and the more effort you are able to apply the harder they become to get.

The most horrific flapper I've ever experienced, personally, happened at Hueco Tanks sometime around Springbreak of 2000. At the end of my second of five days of bouldering I lunged for the lip on the now closed Mushroom Boulder . I slapped it with my right hand after more than an hour of attempts and for an instant I held it. But then the momentum of my jump pitched my hips out and away from the wall and I slipped, howling all the way to ground. My hand came off a bloody, chalky mess. The fleshy pad at the base of my middle finger dangled by a crescent of chalky skin. Blood ran into my palm and dripped between the webs of my fingers onto the sacred dirt of Hueco Tanks.

Later, I used a tube of Krazy Glue and several wraps of white athletic tape to make some kind of functioning unit out of my mangled finger. Halfway through the next day I ripped a hole in the pad of my other middle finger and ripped the glue/tape prosthesis off the first flapper exposing a ragged, oozing crater in my hand.

The next best flapper I've seen happened mountain biking with a bunch of Southwestern University students near Bastrop, TX. Generally, I wouldn't lump mountain biking into the same class of pursuit as climbing, but that is different debate all together and this particular flapper merits mentioning. I can't remember the name of the poor sot that it happened to, but he went down hard while really, really going for it on a long, steep downhill strewn with fist-sized, rounded river stones or 'taters' in mountain bikese.

It truly was a valiant effort. He very calmly appraised the situation from the top of the hill and then with perfect determination pushed his front wheel over the edge and dropped into the run.

I hold it to be self-evident that one should engage in one's passions with the single-mindedness of a meteor falling out of the sky. It doesn't matter much if your adversary is a rock, a hill, or atmospheric friction-- to engage it with anything less than single-minded, focused, all-consuming determination is to have failed even before beginning. Pursuits like climbing and, I will grudgingly admit, mountain biking or big game hunting demand that the energy you invest be at least equal to the task of completely destroying you. Like a meteor burning itself into oblivion in its quest to reach the earth a climber should risk being consumed by his own quest every time he sets rubber to stone-- climbing with fierce, focused will to the point that the very flames of your desire might engulf you at any moment and leave nothing more than a fading starburst lingering for a moment after the flash of your annihilation.

I watched this fellow on the mountain bike with no small degree of admiration. Looking down the hill I found myself touching the tip of my tongue to different teeth in my head, imagining how each one would shatter along different, jagged lines erecting inside of my mouth an interesting new topography of agony. I stepped down off of my bike, resigned to ignominy, at the exact moment that the object of my admiration went ass-over-tin-cup right up and over his handle bars and cartwheeled down the slope.

I performed first aid. He had shattered one collarbone which I put in a loose sling before tending to the flapper which had peeled a swath of flesh as wide as my hand starting just below the knee and flung it upwards in the direction of his thigh. The hinge of the flap was about an inch above the knee. The entirety of his knee cap was exposed. A large amount of gravel had accumulated under the flap in his floppings about after the crash and it required extensive cleaning and that was very painful to this young man. The other students hovered around us while I went to my task. My good friend, Jay Frank, in an unusually candid display of his sadistic nature, reminded me repeatedly as I crammed alcohol swabs into the biker's open wounds to "be thorough, not nice, C."

The point of this digression, is that he earned that flapper. And he earned my respect, not least of all because when facing the same the hill I backed down. Backing down, like yelling "take!" is an abominable act because it is a flat-out rejection of the now. Life only presents each individual with a finite number of moments in which greatness or lack thereof can be truly measured. To say no, to back down, to face a moment with imperfect courage is to reject the now. It is to reject your own greatness. It is to bring shame on all your line because as is grammatically and temporally obvious-- the now, once lost, will never come back.

Chew on that.

I'll be chewing on one of the other great pleasures provided by flappers-- flapper skin. After it's been peeled back and hanging around lifelessly dangling from your finger for a few days or weeks that old flapper becomes a true delicacy. It tastes better than betel nut and it won't stain your teeth.

Try it out the next time you've pulled down harder than your skin would allow. Taste that little dangling sliver of your path towards divinity. It will remind you, the same way that gazing into the raw, red maw of your wound, that human beings, like the rocks we climb on, are composed of many strata. Peel back one, chew on it a while, and examine what lies beneath because here, hidden within our layers, is a clue to the puzzle of the interconnectedness of all things.

Here are some of Team Tuesday's recent flappers plus a few others collected from the web.