the large domed steel building on the southeastern side of the University of Wisconsin had housed cows for its agricultural program. Then it had been converted into an arena for music performances; a few years ago, a national climbing gym chain based in Baltimore had come in and purchased the building and built one of the premier rock climbing centers in the country. University students populated it, and it became a favorite of families wanting to entertain for their kids’ birthday parties, plus get their own kids exercising to combat the flood of obesity that had swept through America with burgers, chips, soda, and lattes. The nation was on a crash course with diabetes and resultant soaring medical costs, so the programs Anna taught were one way the trend was beginning to reverse, she believed.
She parked. Errant apple blossoms wafted on the air, settling like miniature lifeboats on the green sea-lawn. Anna kicked off her Birkenstocks and buried her toes in the grass as she floated towards the climbing center.
Entering, she called out, “Hey Charlie, how you doin’?” to the cleaning guy who was emptying out the paper recycling. Madison’s student population offered some diversity, but Wisconsin’s midwestern population was mostly white, barring some Hmong immigrants, so Anna always breathed a sigh of relief when she interacted with some real live people of different skin color like Charlie. The brief time she had spent in Baltimore checking out its rock gym she had experienced what it felt like to be a minority, and found it good for her soul.
“I’m arright, Miss Anna, ’n you?”
“Doing better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Any kids’ groups coming in today?”
“Them deaf kids due in today. Salvatore laid out some of the ropes upstairs.”
“Oh, right, forgot about that. Thanks.” She signed in her name and went in to the area with the lockers and toilets, took her harness and friction device out of the pack, and stashed them before heading upstairs to stretch out. She liked the set-up time in the gym because it gave her the chance to reflect, which she often didn’t have time for otherwise.
Sal, the climbing specialist from Spain whose parents owned one of the largest rock climbing harness companies in the world, was upstairs laying out ropes and hooking them up to the friction belay devices used for stopping someone’s fall. Sal secretly was the envy of every climber there, whether the employees or the regulars, because not only did he have a taut hard body, dark hair, and a delicious accent, but he was independently wealthy, so he could afford to travel the country and the world, designing rock climbing routes in gyms such as this. Whereas Anna liked creating climbing sites outdoors for organizations and schools, Sal preferred mapping out and bolting the specially constructed artificial rock holds people used for hands and feet on walls that were angled and textured with a spray-on concrete surface meant to mimic real outdoors rock. Apart from the occasional lustful eye they threw one another when they were bored or questioning their life choices, Anna and Sal had a high respect for one another and had given each other references often.
“Hey, Sal.”
“Hey, Anna.” He gave her a wan smile today.
“Sal, were you here just a little while ago? Did you feel that tremor?”
“Fon-kee, eh?” Correct vowel sounds occasionally eluded Sal.
“Yeah. It’s just weird. I guess we can’t have the rising sea level affect us here like in Bangladesh, but you’d think we’ve got our share of nature anomalies with the tornadoes and the flooding.”
“Where I am from, in Spain, it is very dry now, for several years. We have it in our fields and wells.”
“Maybe I’ll get there someday.”
“No, no, you should go to France, to Chamonix. I cannot believe you have not climbed it.”
“Don’t rub it in. Someday. Gotta come up with the money, or get a contract from someone over there. Hey, I just got a call to set up a climbing site for an experiential ed school in Israel, near the Dead Sea. Ever climbed in Israel?”
“Israel! Ha! What is there much to climb there, except on the heads of religious people? You be careful if you go over there. That is not a safe place.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for your concern. Now all I have to do is tell Jonathon.”
“Uh-oh,” he clucked at her.
“So we’ve got the deaf kids today?”
“Si. Remember, they can’t just talk when they want to.”
Anna nodded her head and laughed. They had an ethical dilemma teaching deaf kids to climb: in order for each kid to learn how to keep his or her peers safe when the climber was attached to the rope and climbing on the wall, the person holding the rope, known as the belayer, had to hold the rope and run it through a friction-creating belay device. Two hands had to be on the rope at all times, and in the event of a climber falling off the wall, the belayer was to crimp down the rope in the belay device so the climber’s fall would be arrested.
The trouble with deaf kids learning this was that they communicated with their hands. Usually Anna and Sal heard the soft soundings of deaf people, occasionally growing louder in excitement. But as they grew more excited and wanted to help their climbing partners, or look to an instructor for help, they would take their hands off the rope and begin conversing in American Sign Language. This was not a good thing for the safety of the climber on the rope.
Still, the instructors couldn’t exactly tell the belayers they couldn’t communicate. So it was a population-specific dilemma. Anna treasured these experiences; they made her a better instructor.
She recalled one of her tensest moments at an outdoor climbing site teaching a deaf kid, Aaron, to rappel. Rappelling was a counterintuitive activity that consisted of hooking a person up to a rope and telling him to walk backward off a cliff. One kid had actually vomited before going over the edge because he couldn’t bring himself to defy his elders and say “No! I won’t!” With Aaron, Anna had a safety rope on him for backup, and he was supposed to control his own rate of descent with the same friction device climbers used for climbing up rock. He began whimpering, “OhbyGot, OhbyGot,” his m’s voiced as b’s. His hands flailed, speaking what, she could only guess. Once she had convinced him to get his hands back on the rope and his face had changed back from ashen to pink, she had called the interpreter up and the two of them had successfully talked him backwards off the sixty-foot cliff.
Sal belayed Anna up the test routes, watching the well-toned latissimus dorsi muscles work in her back. She checked to make sure all of the holds were bolted in securely, no “spinners,” which could disconcert a climber at best, and at worst make him peel off the wall unexpectedly, usually getting scraped or banged up in the process.
“So when would this be? You going to Israel.” He lowered her off the climb.
“Probably not till the fall.”
“And you’re just here for the summer, teaching classes and working at the barn?”
“Yeah, some, and I’ll be writing the sports rag for the U.”
Between the rock climbing work and the riding lessons she taught at a stable dedicated to saving mustangs, Anna did well enough financially, but her family felt she underutilized her potential—meaning, she was too smart for what she was doing. She should have gone to Princeton for law. Jonathan saw the logic in this, and was generally on her family’s side, which didn’t sit well with her.
