Mikayla stands at the base of a cliff, staring up the rock face.
Since she was a little girl in Spanish Town, and then a teenager in the Bronx, Mikayla had been fascinated by mountains. She’d climbed the Blue Mountain Peak multiple times with her father before she left Spanish Town and those hikes had inspired her to climb mountains all over the world.
She liked being up high where the oxygen was thin and surveying the expansive view around her. When she got to the Bronx, she was eager to be on the roofs of buildings that towered over everything and she loved the view of the city with its boxy, artificial design that existed in contrast to the natural, jagged view from a mountain summit. She enjoyed being up high and looking down. She appreciated the perspective, to see what dwellers of the land can’t know unless they make an effort to climb to build technology to fly. It was the privilege of those with the courage to explore and innovate.
“I think you can do it, I believe in you.”
Mikayla wears shorts and a T-shirt under all of the harnesses. She hates the harnesses, she prefers free climbing, but this is a competition and the rules force climbers to be as cautious as technology allows.
Jody stands near her, holding her water bottle and giving her best pep talk. She knows that Mikayla has only been rock climbing for just a few years and though she is a natural, competitions like this one are about speed, and to move with speed up a rock face safely, requires skill and experience.
Mikayla has climbed this face before. She’d moved up the rocky wall deliberately, exploring the nooks and crannies of the formation with her hands, her fingers, her feet, her toes, all the way up to a cliff edge that was about fifty feet from the ground. She’d done it leisurely with Jody, who had extensive gear while Mikayla wore as little gear as possible, and it took them about fifteen minutes. When she did it as fast as she could, she managed five minutes without a harness and a minute with the harness; there was no denying that the harness made a climber feel more secure to take risks.
“Even if you don’t win,” Jody says, “it’s just the first of many.”
“I’m just glad I didn’t have to go first,” Mikayla says and she stretches and prepares for her run. She eyes her competitor who will climb next to her as she does the same. “I’ve done it in less than ten before, and no one’s done that so far. That was three runs and there are three more after me. I think if I do under thirty, I’m top six, under fifteen and I’m winning this thing.”
Jody hugs her as the official calls both women to the starting line at the rock face. Mikayla loses nothing if she loses this race. There was no entry fee, the competition had been organized by a local climbing company that had been looking to find more customers for their new offering of climbing classes in the local community when the cliff face was measured at extremely close to fifty feet by the city. There had been a concert earlier in the day and food trucks did well with the families mulling about and being amazed at the climbers moving so fast up the cliff side. Most of the climbers who had entered were regular customers to the store and dedicated climbers who had expressed interest in competing in speed climbing. Mikayla entered on a whim after demonstrating her proficiency as a climber to the organizers at the store, and even if it took her thirty minutes to reach the cliff, it didn’t matter. The crowd would cheer for her and she and Jody would get drinks at the bar on the way home.
There is no pressure, but Mikayla wants to win. She’d never competed in anything before she started rock climbing and when she started timing herself on her climbs with Jody, she felt exhilaration pushing herself to beat her own times. The crowd around her, the other excited climbers, Mikayla wants to show them what she can do.
She steps to the wall as the official tells the climbers to prepare themselves. The whistle sounds and Mikayla is off, using the pressure she creates for herself to propel her forward to victory.
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