We Have Walls

My fingers are crammed into a wedge of rock. My fat boots are only partially lodged in a shallow crevice. Already I can feel my weight tugging me from the wall. I hastily scan the too-smooth surface for a better grip. My thoughts are this: Spiderman is a fraud. First of all, even if he does have some kind of magic ability to stick to walls, surely the weight of his body would rip his skin off. Yet he still manages to stick to sheer objects like lint on velvet, making the whole ordeal look ludicrously easy. Then again, unlike me, he doesn't make a habit of climbing rock walls with gigantic hiking boots. Score one for Spiderman.


Twice more up the wall, a couple of bloodied knees later, I finally get wise. This time I go barefoot, my toes reaching into small cracks and lifting me with ease up to higher, smoother areas. I almost feel like I can shed the harness. Almost. The lack of boots cuts my climbing time in half. I slap my hands on the top of the wall with satisfaction. Then I propel back down, slowly, preferring to keep skinned feet from slamming on sharp rock.

I've decided I like rock climbing. Even the heights-thing. Even the total-body soreness afterwards. Really, any intense activity outside a cubicle is welcomed.

All around my building, the walls are going up. The warehouse below me is being doubled in size. We hear drilling and banging and screeching metal. Every day at exactly 3:30 p.m., I take a walk with some coworkers. We circle the block, stopping to admire the new calves behind a neighbor's wooden gate. We collect wormy apples from the ground to feed the horses. The area is a strange mixture of rural and industrial. There are concrete office buildings within view of a duck pond. We pull fresh plums from a stumpy tree half a block from construction cranes.

Then, at the end of every walk, we stop to watch the walls. Some days they are pouring them, other days lifting them. All the cement reminds me of the half-finished complexes dotting suburban Dakar. Those walls looked like the gray, flaky ribs of something prehistoric and complicated. These walls are simple, plain, lacking flair.

I find myself wanting to climb them, to discover the cracks on their sheer surface. I want to see something exciting somewhere in this scene of expanding workspace. We have new walls, but nothing new.