The author on one of what would prove to be many early attempts at Spragueasorus, V5+, Blackjack Boulders, Rumney NH ©Tom Quigley

My trimmer guttered across my face like a lawn mower as the battery flickered; the humming razors caught in the carpet of stubble and pulled painfully. Wince, swear, continue, until a reasonably clean-shaven man looked back at me from the glass. Now there was a face that would make a table at the restaurant think, “What a fine, well-mannered youth we have as a waiter. He is most definitely worth a 20% tip!” – which is generally what I aim for. I hate walking out of the place at the end of the night with less than a hundred dollars. Clearly I have become spoiled, since it wasn’t that long ago that I was making minimum wage for skilled labor at a ski mountain, but what are you gonna do? Either you do what you love, or you get paid bank to put up with your job. There’s a middle ground, but it’s occupied by the lucky, the obscenely talented, and the people who brush their teeth twice a day. For the rest of us, there’s slinging pasta at family Italian restaurants for tips, telling each other how glad we are that we didn’t sell out to the man.

And for us, unfortunately, it’s all about delay of gratification, I thought as I rolled back my sunroof on the highway to substitute for the broken A/C. We’re trading our time for a paycheck, since that time isn’t really enjoyed. I’ll not remember this summer as golden moments, just a menial blur that will blend together in my memory like crayons on a hot leather car seat. I’m not challenging myself, and certainly not learning anything worthwhile – anything I know that’s worth keeping around, I learned in school or I taught myself. Nothing I am learning here is applicable to my passions, my career, or my future, I thought despondently, and rounding a corner laden with bread and dipping oil, cracked a huge welcoming smile for my first table of the evening.

As the people poured in, needy families crowded out any more introspection. More bread – where’s our drinks? – hello, welcome to Lui Lui’s – finished with that, sir? – allergic to anything? cats? well, don’t look at page 3 … (hah! hah! 20%). Run to the bar, then pasta line, drink refills, push those salads out, pizzas done yet? In the cracks between waiting for food and rolling silverware into cloth napkins, you can find a few minutes to yourself, and in those moments I vanished from the hot kitchens, back to the last day I had to myself – a place I’d prefer to be, with boulders, calling birds, and leaves on all sides like a verdant fog.

Backdrop – despite living 20 minutes from Rumney for the past 8 years, I had only discovered climbing in the past 4, and then had spent most of the best climbing seasons at school in Atlanta. I had attempted to squeeze the pulp out of Rumney climbing for the few weeks I was back to NH each summer before disappearing to travel or internships, but as a consequence of this shortfall I am an extremely uneducated local, to the confusion of many a querulous visitor looking for the best secret crags. As part of my education this summer, my friend had taken me to Blackjack Boulders – surprisingly for the first time, owing less to my lack of local climbing experience and more to my lack of a crash pad. After a few warmup traverses and flails, we found ourselves at the bottom of Spragueasaurus, a highly-starred V5 featuring a low traverse with just enough overhang to pump you for the crimp festival finish. After a few pulls, the bottom went, but the very first crimp on the steep finish spat me every time. Over and over in the ever-humidifying Grafton county afternoon I dug my fingers into the crux quarter-pad crimp, but as the holds got slicker and my fingers got hotter, I could feel it sliding away as soon as I bore down. Borne forward purely by frustration and force of will, I began throwing myself into the moves, bearing down on my fingertips and slapping fitfully higher, managing to gain a few key inches each time. And then I reached a saturation point, and my upwards progress began to backslide into shit form. I was getting spat sooner and sooner. I would discover key beta, then forget the footwork that brought me there. I second-guessed my order when I was on the rock – do I move my hand first, or step to a higher foot? – which devolved into desperate moves and laughable technique. Fifteen minutes later I realized that I was holding my breath the entire climb. Rookie errors.

Snap back. A table was waving. I forgot their appetizers. Shit.

Now that I’d worked a few weeks, almost everything was mechanical. The table greetings were scripted, the timing choreographed, the small talk interesting but canned. Still there were little tricks that the veteran servers all knew, and they slowly bestowed the knowledge on me like doling out small-time Confucian wisdom – things like, “Tip the hostess at the end of the night, and she’ll bus your tables when you’re busy.” (Who knew?) But one of the things I had the most trouble with from the beginning was carrying drinks from the bar. The restaurant had two floors and a patio, and running up and down stair flights to fetch drinks resulted in a martini that was about a fifth less full than when I’d picked it up – not that they’d ever notice. Except for the dripping martini-smelling tray I was now holding. I tried walking slowly, I tried two hands, I even employed some high school marching-band roll step in desperation. Still, every order I brought looked like I had sampled a bit of everyone’s drink – but given the dampness of the tray, at least I felt quite awful about it. I continued to short each table a few sips each of alcohol until one night I was walking slowly by another server, eyes locked on my martinis and steering around obstacles with my peripherals. As I stepped nimbly around him (and sloshed a sip of Lemondrop onto my hands) he whispered to me, “Don’t watch the glass.”

Don’t watch the glass. Ridiculous. That sounded like a step in the wrong direction if I’d ever heard one, right up there with “tie your shoes together” and “use a live badger as a tray.” But at this point, I was willing to try anything, and I wasn’t particularly attached to the martinis in hand – frankly, I didn’t care at all. I would’ve even given the badger experiment some serious thought at this point. So I lifted my eyes from the flooding tray, concentrated on the steps ahead, and slalomed around a number of tables. I oozed down the stairs and arrived at my table, finally looked at my tray and smugly delivered — a far more full drink than I had expected to serve. What just happened?

Run back upstairs. Another table wants bar drinks. Time for the acid test. I placed two full 20-oz Switchbacks on my tray and proceeded to ignore them like a bad breakup. I meandered through the restaurant to my table, and was shocked to deliver two completely unspilled 20-oz beers, complete with frothy head. Tray after tray I tried this counter-intuitive advice, and I swiftly served up the highest ratio of unspilled drinks I had ever delivered in a night, while my waiter-sensei sat by and chuckled like a wizened old Mr. Miagi. Somehow, when I stopped thinking about it, my brain just balanced the tray out on its own.

The ride to Rumney is a long one with no music or A/C, but in the spirit of my newfound wisdom, I rejected any thought of Sprague. I cleared my head into a Zen cloud, observing with innocence what a clear and bright morning it was. I camped industriously in the Rumney parking lot, overcoming my crash-pad poverty with a roll of duct tape and a few couch cushions. Lugging my bootleg solution towards Blackjack, I thought of how lucky I was to see such beautiful patterns cast by the sun into this copse of trees. I observed the snug grip of my Barracudas and the weight of my body on my arms and shoulders, stretching my recently-awoken muscles like skeins of rope. And looking up with a deep breath, I heaved myself onto the first deadpoint move of Spragueasorus.

We climb with our bodies and our minds. But it’s easy to forget how much our minds need to be fresh, as much as our bodies. As I snapped my hands with precision to each stone ripple, breathing meditatively, my body did the thinking. As climbers, we often forget the beauty of what we do, and the simplicity of why we do it. We get swept up in grades, training, competition, frustration, and overthinking. We watch the glass and get locked into our beta, our project, step by step, grade by grade, everything a kinetic progression. It’s an easy thing to do. But as I sat at the top of Spragueasorus that morning, dangling my legs over the dinosaur ridge at the top like a child, alone in the wild with nothing but the sound of birds and the morning forest to congratulate me, I remembered. That’s not why I started, and it’s not why I’ll continue. It’s all meant for this golden moment – the sun, the send, and myself, alone in the wakening wild.

Source - http://cruxn.com/2011/07/30/watching-the-glass