The seasons came and went as it watched; never moving from its solitary post, still following the last task it was given. The seasons eventually turned into years and finally the years became eons, yet still it waited and watched. Eventually even the mountains slowly eroded away and the rivers shifted their course until even the animals had evolved and change. Only it remained the same, condemned to seemingly remain forever as it was. Eventually Homo sapiens showed up and as it watched them travel by in small groups learning and developing into a society it found itself feeling something new, watching their behavior it became “curious”.

  Looking at one such group as they travelled through the mountain pass below it observe and gave thought to how humans seemed to reminded it of its own creators. A curious race human, it thought always seeming to be moving, never standing still, yes so much like its creators. It thought once again about those creators, those who had foolishly created it and how that curiosity and ignorance had lead to that that last foolish command. A single thoughtless command given that destroyed both them and their world forever.

  Looking at the humans in the valley below for the first time in its existence it felt sadness. Knowing that eventually these too would also find a way to destroy themselves and in that process take this life filled world with them.

  * * * * *

  Looking down was definitely a big mistake I thought, as I swung there on the rock. I was, hanging on by my fingertips a hundred feet up the cliff face trying desperately not to fall. Seeing the misty valley stretch below my dangling feet was not helping me either. This was not the worst situation I had ever found myself in but definitely ranked in the top five. Looking to my left a couple feet over I could see what looked like a small crevice. It was little more than a crack in the cliff that “might” barely be wide enough for my foot to fit in. It was also in the direction of a narrow ledge that gave promise of a place I could rest and recover, if I could make it that is. Now all I had to do was find some way to swing myself across and reach it. Measuring the distance with my eye I thought I might be able to reach the crevice with my foot if I swung out and around while stretching my leg out. Once there I could hopefully then wedge my boot in far enough to get the leverage needed to reach the ledge. It might not be the best plan but with my fingers starting to cramp up it looked like it was going to be my best bet. Clinging tightly to the cliff face I tried to psych myself up to making the attempt. My thoughts drifted back to how I got myself in this predicament.

  Dad met mom on a save the whales expedition. Their favorite story was about their first meeting on a small inflatable Zodiac boat that was trying to keep between whalers and the whales they were trying to spear. From the stories they would tell me they had fallen in love on that trip while chasing a factory whaling ship and its catcher fleet across the pacific. During my growing up they were always away on one cause or another but whenever possible would take me with them. I’m sure having a little kid with them on the trips cut down on their environmental efforts, but they never said anything about it. Sometimes I think that might be where I got my wanderlust and dislike for what civilization has so far done to nature. But the truth was I just didn’t want to be around people or grow attached to anyone who could just disappear from me like my parents.

  For most of my life I have been going off to somewhere alone and private to think things out. I don’t remember doing that so much when I was younger but after my parents died I spent weeks under my bed at the orphanage hiding from the world. The orphanage was crowded, noisy and filled with sad, unwanted kids. I wasn’t the only kid there trying to get away from it all. Eventually the authorities managed to contact my uncle and get him to accept responsibility for me. They didn’t tell me why it took so long but after the director there told me my uncle was coming for me it still took two weeks before he showed up. I had never met him an only heard my parents mention him a couple of times. Waiting those two weeks I kept going back and forth about meeting him and wondering if he would be like dad or even like me. Later as I kept waiting I started to wonder if he had changed his mind about me and wasn’t coming. I don’t remember exactly what I was feeling the day that he finally showed up. I really only remember seeing him for the first time in the director’s office signing some forms for her. He looked at me for a second then, turned back around to the director and asked her what my name was.

  . He had showed up in front of the orphanage in a limo with a driver. It caused quite a commotion from the other kids wondering if a lucky orphan was being adopted or if it was just a major contributor. As I was walking out to the car a few kids’ seeing me yelled insults at me in jealousy thinking I was being adopted by a rich family. Later in the car as we drove to his estate we didn’t talk or have a conversation. The only thing I remember him saying to me was that I would be starting school on the following Monday and his housekeeper would make sure I had what I needed for going. When we pulled up to his house he told the driver around the back to the garage and show me where I would be living. After he got out the driver turned and looked at me with a uncomfortable look and drove around the house.

  The garage was a large barn like structure with room for three cars. Part of the attic had been enclosed in with an external stair up the side to access it. The driver let me look through the window at it for a minute then got out of the car and opened my door for me. After I got out with my small bag he took it from me and walked up the outside stairs with it. Opening the door at the top he motioned me in first. I was a little hesitant looking in from the door but from what I saw it turned out to be what I later found out to be a typical one room garage apartment. The room was small but clean and had a bed and small kitchenette and a corner closet size toilet and shower.

  Those first few days I stayed inside the room hiding from people. I did look under the bed but it was a platform bed with drawers under it. No room for me for me and no closet in the room to hide in either. The room had all the privacy and quite the orphanage lacked. After the first day I got use to it (or maybe just bored) and started looking at things outside the widow. The window looked out to the back of the house with a bit of road and the hills in the distance off to the sides. Something about those hills drew me and I wondered how far away they were. I stayed alone in the room for two days until I got hungry enough come out and look for some food.

  In my hunt for food I managed to find the estate’s kitchen and met Hannah. She was my uncle’s live-in cook and the first friendly person I had met since the funeral. Hannah was a blue hair grandmotherly type who took the job of being a live-in cook in her words “so I wouldn’t be a burden on my kids”. After she found me going through the kitchen cabinets looking for something to eat she called out to me saying “Are you hungry, honey child?”. I didn’t know how to answer her but after some probing she got me to admit I was hungry and my favorite meal was a burger. A minute later she had a pan on the stove with meat simmering and was digging through a pantry looking for potato chips. A few minutes later I was perched on a stool at the counter eating one of the best tasting burgers I have ever tasted.

  She sat beside me as I ate and we eventually got to talking, my one word answers turning into an actual conversation. She did say she was surprised seeing me in the kitchen, not just because of how I was rooting in her kitchen but also that she hadn’t been told I had even arrived yet. It seems that my uncle didn’t really communicate to her or the rest of the staff much. Even most of his meals were taken off the estate or in his office upstairs. After feeding me she kindly explained when meals were normally served and how I could get my clothes cleaned. Later she eventually showed me how to cook in my little kitchenette, take care of myself and even what her weird hobby was.

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  Hannah’s hobby was disguising food. An odd hobby I didn’t understand until she showed me an example. It seems a while back Hannah got interested in competition cooking shows and in particular cake making ones. One show focused on people making their cakes into realistic objects like cell phones and shoes. Hannah decided to take it one step further and tried making regular food look like other things. She once made me a plate of what looked like fried chicken, mash potatoes and peas. Thinking it a regular meal I bit into it and found out the chicken was made of disguised beef, the mash potatoes cauliflower and the peas were actually small scooped balls of died carrots. After serving it to me I thought she was busy talking on the phone but instead she was actually video recording my reaction. I thought she should go on one of those cooking shows with her talent but she always said she just wanted to play around with it and pull occasional pranks.

  Hannah did have a family, a son and a daughter both married and living a few hours away. There was some issue with her daughter Mary that she wouldn’t talk about but her son Jack would come visit her ever month or so. A nice friendly outdoorsy kind of guy, Jack loved his mother quirks and all. We would sit around the kitchen table talk and laugh at stories of the tricks Hannah had pulled on him and his sister growing up. It seems that trick of disguising food was something Hannah started just to get them to eat their vegetables. They would realize the trick after the first bite but were usually to surprised and happy not to finish it off. Jack was visiting a few months later on my birthday and almost fell off the chair when the cake with the candles turned out to be meatloaf in disguise.

  Hannah had told me that her son loved camping and rock climbing, something my parents loved to do too. Finding that out I spent months of pleading to get him to take me. He always turned me down, not that he was against taking a kid climbing he just didn’t want to without my uncles permission. It put me in a bit of a bind since asking my uncle for anything was not something I could or would do. I came up with a bunch of silly kids plans to get his permission. Everything from slipping a permission form into a stack of his business papers he was signing casually mentioning it in a conversation. I even practiced the conversation to make it sound like we would only be climbing over a few small rocks. I never got up the nerve to try any of them so Hannah eventually just told Jack she got my uncle’s permission. Not sure if she was lying about asking or not since she had such a good of a poker face.

  That convinced Jack and he finally caved in and took me with him on some of his simpler climbs. He was a good teacher and taught me how to safely climb the cliffs around Montgomery. I even managed to become friends with some of his climbing buddies. I was the youngest one in the group but that didn’t seem to matter much when we were hanging off the side of a mountain. One favorite topic to discuss during the climbs was about how many people had made the climb before us. Before one of the first to do a climb was a big deal for them.

  I had a lot of good times with Hannah and her son Jack over the next couple of years but eventually Hannah started to have health problems and needed to retired. She move closer to her kids, something that made Jack very happy, but I’m not too sure about her daughter Mary’s feelings on it. We both cried a lot as I helped her packed up to leave. The last things she said to me as she went to get in Jack’s pickup was “Honey child, don’t take the bad times too seriously, life was meant to be laughed at and lived”. Not something a fourteen year old could understand to well but I did remember it.

  After Hannah retired Jack no longer came around. I still went climbing using the old equipment Jack had left me. Climbing alone was not something Jack would have approved of but was something I had to do. Finding fellow climbers willing to go out with a fourteen year old proved impossible so I had to do it alone. The solitude and thrill of climbing up to places one else had been made me heady with pleasure but doing it without Jack and his bunch of friends was a bit sad. I still would occasionally run into people while climbing. The suspicious looks I got when they saw a kid climbing by himself started to get me worried. It was also proving impossible to get a permit to climb in the regular parks. A few too many questions asking for my name, parents and why I was by myself at the ranger station got me starting looking for more deserted and out of the way spots. The current cliff I now found myself hanging off of was about as far out of the way as possible. It was still technically in a national park but well away from any designated climbing area, trail or facility.

  Well, I thought it’s now or never as I found my left hand starting to tremble. Taking a firm grip on a small protrusion on the side of the cliff face I started swinging my feet back and forth I finally let go of one hand and stretched my leg out wide to reach that crack for a shaky foothold. Scrambling a bit, I managed to shift till I was hanging flat against the cliff with my legs spread in a wide split like a gymnast or that old Belgian martial arts star. With my face pressed against the bird scat covering the cliff face. I thought about how I must look to those same birds if they saw me now. I must really be a spectacle, like a bug on a car windshield. After some wiggling of my foot, I finally got a decent bit of support wedging my boot into the crack. Looking at the ledge it now looked like I could inch over and swing onto the ledge. Of course, now that I had gotten a good look at it, it wasn’t much of a ledge. At its widest it looked only about 18 inches, and it ran for only a few feet at a slight downward angle. There was a small shrub at the end of the ledge, just sprouting right off the cliff face. Still any port in a storm and I desperately needed it to recover from my climb

  Of course, going to deserted areas on my own to free climb a cliff that I’m sure no one had ever climbed before might be considered fool hardy in the extreme and possible suicidal. Still reaching someplace like this little ledge, a hundred feet up the side of a cliff was special. Away from everything and everyone it makes me think I might have finally reached someplace that was truly unspoiled. A rare feeling when even the most difficult and well protected hiking areas show the leftover beer cans and wrappers of all those who’ve gone there before. In the 21st century it’s surprising how unlikely it is to go anywhere and not see evidence of people lying around. I’ve even seen pictures of deserted islands hundreds of miles from civilization covered in garbage that’s washed up.

  I can’t even count the number of times I found what I thought would be a quiet, out of the way spot still untouched but when I got there it was too find cigarette buts, beer cans and trash lying around. However, a place like this ledge I was heading too was so unassuming and hard to get to I was hopeful. Thinking it might be untouched but still half expecting to at least find people's names scratched into the rock. Even Everest had a graffiti problem now with all those climbers leaving comments like "I was here" on the mountain. China’s attempt to stop it with their “Name and Shame” was failing miserable.

  One last quick scramble and I was finally sitting on the ledge gasping and again wondering why I keep putting myself through this crazy risk just too solo free climb. I had thought the finding an untouched spot away from everyone was the reason but after that last desperate swing I was seriously rethinking it. Finally recovering my breadth I took a good look around at the cliff shelf. I couldn’t find any signs showing that anyone else had been there. No scuff marks on the ledge, no left over gear and not even the expected romantic graffiti. For some reason climbers favorite message after “I was here” seem to be love messages like “someone loves someone else” inside a heart everywhere they climb. Although on the rock face I climbed last year near Carlsbad someone had spent a lot of time scratching on the rock a dirty limerick.

  Thinking of those large giant letters with two spelling mistakes written on the cliff face all I could do was sigh. I spent two hours on that climb just trying to remove a few of those letters but only managed to make them a bit less noticeable. But this time there was nothing, just clean untouched rock face around me just as it should be. Deciding to enjoy the rare experience and view I setup to stay a bit longer, although being perched on the small ledge was too dangerous even for my foolhardy sense of adventure. I quickly wedged a camalot into a small crack in the rock face and fasten myself to it with a static rope. Now “safe-ish” from falling I could relax a bit and enjoy the view. Leaning back with a bag of trail mix and my canteen I started to think about what I was going to be doing with my life from now on.