Finding Life Between The Cracks

LIMING, YUNNAN PROVINCE, CHINA, 2014. DAYS BEFORE THE NEW YEAR.

My hands are raw in the pockets of my coffee-stained blue puffy. Scabs cover my knuckles and the backs of my wrists like bark. “We don’t need to tape up,” Juan had said. “We’ll build up calluses.”

The learning curve of sandstone splitters feels as steep as the walls we’ve been climbing here in Liming, China, over the past two weeks. Dueling with these black chasms each day is taking its toll. More than once already I’ve scared myself shitless, desperately thrown caution to the wind, and double gastoned the crack in front of my nose, trying to pry the beast apart.

I stand in an empty dirt road, looking up at the stars. The 750-person village has one main drag, and this is it. Crops spread out on either side in the little farmable land there is before the Earth takes a turn to the vertical. I look over at the Dinner Wall crag, a magnificent orange face scowling on the most prominent hill above town, so named because the first climbers to visit the area would gaze upon it each evening as they ate their meals, minds pregnant with dreams that they would need to carry just a little bit longer. I shiver. The Hontashang-brand Chinese cigarette warms my lips and throat and nothing else.

I’ve been living in China nearly a year, guiding international students to the country’s least-known corners, and climbing blue-white limestone tufas at my home in Yangshuo, Guangxi Province. And now what? No future plans. I’m restless. I’ve begun working on an article about my experiences that I want to submit to some magazines, but—now nothing. Whatever the reason, I can’t summon the words I want. Back at the Faraway Inn, my notebook remains mostly full of blank white pages.

Getting published feels like a pipe dream, as large and unlikely as a splitter newbie like myself leading the yawning offwidth up at the Pillars Wall that a bunch of Spaniards supposedly protected with sawed-off logs. The cracks hellbent on destroying my hands seem to herald inauspicious things to come. What will next year bring? Where should I go?

I walk into the dim, dingy restaurant that is no warmer than the street outside despite a wood-burning stove in the corner. My buddies Juan and Devin and Nick are already seated around a table with a lazy susan nearly its full diameter. With them are two other people I’ve never met. Even in Liming—a town forgotten by time; guarded by red ramparts and a permanently azure dome overhead; only a handful of non-resident visitors there at any given moment—people come out of the woodwork. How we’ve never met or crossed paths in the preceding two weeks is a mystery.

His name I forget. Hers is Rahel. She has deep brown eyes and her dark brown hair falls up in a bun. There is a classical, biblical beauty to her. In the Bible Rachel is infertile, barren. Unable to create. But this woman has a beautiful smile full of hope, and her laugh warms the dark wood-beamed restaurant.

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