Creative Writng English Essay: Between a Rock and…Another Rock.

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Creative Writng English Essay: Between a Rock and...Another Rock.

Nick Mastroddi 10P 5.5.01

'C'est le meme chose d'une...cliff.' (It's the same as a...cliff.)

I looked up at the wall. And up. And up.

Perhaps the description of the wall as a cliff isn't fair. I have seen few cliffs in my life that were quite that sheer. The sports centre's climbing wall, for one reason or another, was by the far the most interesting and expensive section of the whole building, which also happened to comprise two Olympic standard swimming pools, over twenty tennis courts and a gyroscopic exercise wheel. This was possibly the second most expensive piece of equipment, definitely the most useless - being somewhere between an oversize hamster wheel and a spinning top - and I used it twice a day. If you know the experience of coming off a running machine, perhaps you could imagine that feeling of abject confusion acting in all 3 dimensions at once. This was all situated on four storeys, with a clear pyramid roof over the top. This was already very high, I thought as I walked through the sports hall entrance towards the stairs.

Of course, it wasn't quite high enough for the climbing wall. The wall actually extended underground for another few storeys. It was a simulated cliff face designed to replicate the environment you experienced if you took advantage of the excellent Alpine climbing faces in the local area, except that on the muddy brown rock were five different trails. The first three were made of green, red and blue prosthetic 'rocks', which varied in size, shape and distance apart from trail to trail. The next one was sprayed gold, with none of the moulded handprint hold sites that you would find on the upper side of the 'rocks' of the other trail, and the last one took up just over half of the width of the entire wall. The rocks were actually made of the same material of the wall face, and their colour made them almost indistinguishable from the rest of the wall. They were very far apart, and some of them were only intended the be reached by using natural low ridges in the wall to throw yourself up. This wall was the pinnacle of climbing achievement for anyone who found themselves at the top of it, and it seemed strangely close from the bottom. At the top of the wall were two hooks set in a panel of cement, multi-coloured climbing cables swinging loose over them all the way back down to the ground, and above them was the goal. Daylight. A panel of open windows, through which the white sun and warm mountain winds came. All the trails snaked up to meet these windows, but only the natural trail would take you directly underneath them, so close that you could reach one hand outside into the cool air before abseiling back into the shadows. If you reached this window, you had completed the most advanced training course the climbing school could offer. I ached to reach that window from the moment I laid my hand on the first rough, blue block of the first trail.
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A wall had seemed like an simple challenge before I started the course. I'd been climbing alone in the old silver quarries for a few days without any equipment - always down, of course - but eventually decided that it was probably too dangerous, and that I could end up falling to the piles of discarded white rock crystals. Perhaps the scenery would be less breath-taking in the interior of the sports centre, but I could always go back out in the quarry. When I arrived at my first lesson - late - the instructor gave me a ...

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