Class goals and rock climbing

THE JOURNEY BEGINS at 5 a.m., with your alarm clock chirping with great annoyance into your sensitive ears. This causes you to wake up like a soldier in boot camp. You sit up, wipe the sleep out of your eyes and stare at the time.

You have to suck it up, though.

In January, you declared to a bunch of people you hardly knew in your recreation class that you had never been rock climbing — and that you’d like to do so in order to accomplish one class goal.

And last Friday, you got that chance.

The one-hour eastbound drive on Highway 168 to Tollhouse Rock is a long and boring one. But you manage to make your way down a narrow road with your dozen-or-so classmates. You park your car and this is where it gets interesting.

There are two jeeps and one pick-up truck waiting. You get inside one of the jeeps. The vehicles are there to navigate through the dangerous and bumpy dirt roads that have more twists and turns than a M. Night Shyamalan film.

The ride wakes you up.

Your stomach starts doing gymnastics and 10 minutes later, you meet your rock-climbing instructors. They say the most dangerous part of the trip is the hike down. They warn the class about skin-eating ticks, slippery rocks and the narrow path that can lead to falls.

No worries, though. You have a helmet on, and the instructors just told the class: “Don’t walk too close together. If you fall, you’ll take others down with you.”

With that in mind, the class makes it down to the rock-climbing site without the occurrence of deaths. You get there and it isn’t exactly what you had imagined.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you thought the granite rock lives on a flat surface and that you could play a mean game of handball with some classmates while the others charge up the rock.

Not quite.

You stand on a ledge wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. And if you were doing something stupid, like not paying attention, you could have easily tumbled to your death down the hill — or, quite possibly, tripped over someone’s climbing shoe, fell down head first, hit a couple of branches, had pebbles imprinted all over your face and then tumbled to your death.

The first person to climb is, apparently, Spiderman’s brother. You watch in amazement.

When it is your turn, you decide to get comfortable with the rock by placing your foot on the small nearby ledges ingrained in it. You climb up a little.

“Dude,” one of the instructors say, “you need a rope.”

Oh. You knew that. “I just wanted to practice.”

After you finally got a rope secured to the harness over your shorts, you start climbing. Ten minutes of climbing, you total about zero feet.

You struggle with your footing on the tiny ledges of the rock that your classmates and instructors claim are there. They are invisible to you — the ledges. You continue to slip, but this time it results in causing your knees to get more banged up than they were when you played football on the street during your childhood.

Your body stays close to the rock. “This guy likes to make love to the rock,” one instructor says to the other.

He then proceeds to demonstrate — which is all in good fun.

Somehow you manage to get halfway up the rock, and then you morph into Spiderman. You don’t stop there. You keep going and going. It is a beautiful sight to see — the top, which is about 40 feet above from where you started.

And just think: you wanted to only show up and hoped it’d be enough for the professor to give you points. Instead, you succeed in a way that points could never measure up to.

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