16326077:Cobb Life MARCH 2012 dummied to trim size
2/20/2012
2:31 AM
Page 82
reflections
New FRONTIERS By Adam Miller This is the brief history of a rope. A mountaineer’s rope. The kind you see on TV. 120 feet long. Red with black and yellow specks. I bought it in the tenth grade for a hundred bucks when I started rock climbing. It is amazingly resilient. It can carry a car from a helicopter or stop a climber from hitting the ground as he loses his footing hundreds of feet off the earth. It’s followed me to every Southern state, been dragged along granite, limestone and sandstone. It’s carried my weight in all these places. I flash back to an outcropping in middle Tennessee—my dad, Phil, 70 feet below looking up in terror as I leaned over smiling. I remember a long fall I took on the rope in Centre, Alabama, because, instead of belaying me, my friend was busy flirting with some girls who were walking by. I remember my girlfriend (now wife), Megan, belaying me in Roswell and floating weightless as I fell from a cliff pulling her skyward. I also remember the day I cut it to tie the kids’ bikes to the roof of our groaning Honda minivan as we packed for Hilton Head. I severed 20 feet, singed its ends and secured it to the luggage rack. Honestly, sawing through that rope with a Leatherman knife felt both exceedingly manly (for this suburbanite) and also as the premature end of something.
But now, a few years later, I realize it marked the beginning of something brand new. While climbing with that rope is out of the question, it’s found other more noble uses. Now in at least five pieces, it’s been repurposed as rope swing, brush hauler, bike strap and backyard winch at our West Cobb home. My son, Benjamin, sees it as a makeshift whip or swinging vine. My two daughters, Abigail and Sarah Kate, have perfected death-defying performances swinging from part of it in our front yard tree. The neighborhood kids line up to take their turn at the act. Perhaps I haven’t spent days on the side of a big wall in the Yosemite Valley in California or crossed distant glaciers in Nepal. But you also can’t say I’m settling. For now, all that is someone else’s adventure. I’ve got my own right here in West Cobb, with that rope and so much else making life a little crazier and a little more magical. As much as that rope reminds me of long ago summers, you could also say it’s linking me to the future. With each branch I tie with one of its pieces to haul it from the backyard, with each twirl the kids give it, it’s perhaps drawing this family steps closer to an expedition more daunting and rewarding than any distant summit.