Before I left for Taiwan, my brother gave me some advice. He's famous for dishing out little tidbits of wisdom. When I was having girl troubles he told me a lengthy anecdote about a girl he dated who worked at some kind of Disney based entertainment venue and was remembered in his mind for having worn her "squirrel suit" for my brother's entertainment. "That's the type of chick you need" he said. "A chick in a squirrel suit." It was good advice, and I remembered these words every time things got a little too serious with a particular girl. When I left for Taiwan, he offered more wisdom which I underestimated at first, but then came to appreciate. "Watch out for typhoons!" was his solemn warning.
This last weekend I went over to a climbing area on the northeastern coast of Taiwan for some oceanside climbing. I rode the train for several hours, and because of the effort required in reaching this distant destination, I brought some camping accoutrement(s), including a hammock, a sleeping bag and a thermarest. I made my way out to the steep cliffs of the Longdong "rock yard" and looked around before deciding that it was time to find a place to make camp. In exploring the cliffs I found a cam that was stuck inside a crack at waist level, far too close to the ground to be of use as pro, and it occurred to me that someone had the same idea I did. Use a nut and a cam to set up a hammock for the night. Though I noticed that everyone else was going home as dusk settled in, I found it reassuring to note that someone had tried this method before me, just as I would be happy to find a wand sticking out of the snow in a whiteout-- a familiar sign that someone had passed this way before.
As I set up my kit for sleep amongst the sandstone towers, I remembered that this hammock had been given to me by my former girlfriend as a Christmas present because she didn't want me sleeping on the ground in Costa Rica. The way that she had supported my desire to travel over Christmas rather than spend time consuming was very romantic to me at the time, and as I watched the sun set over the crashing waves to the east, I grew a little melancholy. If it's true, as Kalil Gabrain once noticed that "much of your pain is self-chosen" I bolstered my loneliness with a memory of camping at Big Sur with Anna and Henzi. We were in a tent right on the beach in the winter and the waves collided onto the beach making a sound which Matt described as "not exactly soothing" and to which Anna reacted by panicking all night long, depriving us both of sleep. The worst part was, she would not allow me to do anything about it. Do you want me to move the tent? I would ask, and she would say no, but then she would again refuse to go to sleep and she would wake me every so often to ask what we should do to stay safe. I know it should be obvious, as it is for many, but the meaning of this incident totally eluded me as I tried vainly for sleep in the hammock given to me by my former girlfriend that night. At least I'll eventually sleep tonight, I thought.
I tossed and turned and further pondered my life when I decided that I was thirsty. This would prove to be a problem as I had run out of water earlier. However, I had spotted among the flotsam, a few half empty two liter bottles of water at the base of the crag left there by some climber who probably makes the trip out every weekend and doesn't want to hump gallons of water in to the crag each time. I grabbed a headlamp and set out in search of the aforementioned bottle, hopping boulders across the rocky moonscape. I jumped from one rock to the next until one tumbled from underneath me and I fell. When I came to rest, I was atop a pile of soft material. Upon closer examination it was a pile of styrofoam washed over from China. The last boulder was nothing but a giant piece of plastic which looked like a rock in the moonlight. I eventually found the water after having discovered all sorts of peculiar odds and ends gathered by the waves in the last big storm. I made my way back to the bivy more carefully this time.
I was hydrated and worry free when the old familiar ear ringing noise commenced. It was a swarm of mosquitoes, as could have been foreseen. My mosquito repellent was no match for the fierce Taiwanese insects that appeared suddenly and in full force. For some reason insects here are about 5 times the normal size. While surfing the previous weekend, I took photos of a six inch long grasshopper and some palm sized spiders. Mosquitoes were no exception, and to make matters worse they were louder than normal. A gust of wind blew suddenly and the mosquitoes were gone as mysteriously as they had appeared.
It was then that I felt the first raindrop.
At camp we play this game where the kids simulate a thunderstorm by rubbing their palms together then snapping their fingers to imitate the sound of the first drops, then they move to the more deluge-like hand clapping and knee slapping, and finally they stomp their feet as if a real flood was upon them. This storm moved from snapping of fingers to stomping of feet in twice the normal time and I found myself soaked to the bone with no shelter and no escape. I dumped my water out, seeing as how I was now getting hydrated through osmosis, cut off the top of the bottle with my pocket knife, shoved my camera and phone in there and turned the bottle upside down so that my only valuables would be protected from the torrent. I stripped off all of my clothes and cradled myself wrapped into the folds of the hammock, and lay there shivering in my own private puddle of despair. I went to sleep when it stopped around 4 am and I woke around 6 am when the sun hit my face and felt like it would burn through my eyelids as I lay there.
I packed my stuff to leave when I ran into a guy with rock shoes clipped to his pack. He stopped and asked me the time. Time to make the best of it and do a toprope or two, we decided. I told him I had camped there in a hammock and he looked shocked and told me that he had done the same but that he lost a cam that way. There we were, the only two guys bold enough to climb rock on a rainy day.
My brother once said something else which looking at the Chinese fisherman on the shore made me think about. We were out fishing somewhere near Pine Lake where we grew up. We just dangled our poles in the water silently for a very long time before Matty said "happiness is a fish that's very difficult to catch." Some people catch it I suppose, while others have to ponder it lying in fetal position in a puddle of rainwater on a small rock overlooking the South China Sea.
