Just got back from rock climbing in Carrollton. For those who haven’t been there, they’ve converted a bunch of old grain silos into climbing walls. (You can climb up the inside or the outside; as it was raining, we stayed inside.) They claim it’s the tallest indoor climbing gym in the world.
I fared okay, considering the last climbing I did was in college, and that was of buildings, not rocks. A great guy named Lukas lived across the hall from me freshman year — probably the most brilliant guy I’ve ever met. (He took fourth-year graduate-level theoretical physics as a freshman.) Among his (non-marijuana) interests was rock climbing; on a whim he entered a contest and won the Connecticut state rock climbing championship. But he did most of his climbing on the Gothic spires of our campus: they were convenient and fun to conquer. During spring semester, he lost his dorm room keys; instead of getting new ones, he just left a window open on the third floor and climbed in every day. I’ll never forget the look of horror on this one poor freshwoman’s face when Lukas appeared outside her fourth-floor window one night…