“Set your tent anywhere you want and stay as long as you like,” Dave said, pointing out back where a group of climbers were huddled around a fire. “The warshroom is inside at the end of the building.” 

In the clarity between sleep and wakefulness while Caroline nuzzled next to me in the tent, I dreamed of all the routes we had done that day, replaying them each in my memory knowing full-well they would be replaced and forgotten by tomorrow’s climbing. 

BANG!!! 

And when I slept, my dreams were filled with bits and pieces of my family. My grandmother (who looked oddly like Betty) trying to pick up a midget of a grown man, which upon closer inspection and REM provoked analysis turned out to be me. 

BANG!!!! 

Slippery narratives found my grandfather running a red International tractor through a grove of apples, his cap flying off as the tractor, which had lost its brakes, picked up great speed, crashing into a cardboard barn filled with angry deer. 

BANG!!!!! 

My mother combing her hair with a rake, while a coyote, coming out of nowhere, bites me on the hand. 

BANG!!!!!! 

“What is that sound?” Caroline says, nudging me awake, the bleak morning sun lighting the inside of the tent. I startle awake, stiff from the cold and the hard ground. 

BANG, BANG!!!! Bark, Bark, Bark! 1. 

“That’s a shotgun. Hunters, probably,” I say. “With their dogs.” 

“They sound close.” 

“Good thing our tent is orange,” I say, unzipping the tent and peering outside. “International color of ‘don’t shoot me.’” 

Of course, once outside I realize I’ve made a big mistake. The cold bites at my legs and I’m clad only in my red Patagonia silk boxer shorts with the floral design, the only merchandise that was on sale for a reason—Yvon Chouinard’s fashion faux pas. Damn. I duck back into the tent and pull on a pair of pants. I hear Dave talking to the fellers with shotguns. Turns out their rabbit hunting for Thanksgiving dinner. “Keelled four so far.” One of the hunters, Dave tells me later, is the county health commissioner, “so you gotta stay on his good side.” 

The hunters are kindly fellows with accents so thick they could be speaking in tongues. Dressed in orange vests with shotguns over their arms, they walk away from the camp to their pick-ups. Just then, a small white dog bounds out of the woods with a dead rabbit in its mouth. Blood covers his tail and haunches. Happy Thanksgiving. 

Counting our blessings, Caroline and I fire up the station wagon and head downhill to the Lady Slipper/Global Village crag. We want trad and today seems appropriate enough. We walk through the thick forest on a winding climber’s trail, tamping on dead leaves as we go. On an outcrop jutting out above the trees, we rack up for Jake Flake and Vision, both stress-free moderates, but good solid cracks that eat pro for breakfast. Then, around the corner, following the sun, we do Father and Son, Miguel and Dario Ventura’s family-values crack climb which seems more than apropos for the day. (Besides the famed pizza maker and his son, the route was additionally authored by Alex Yeakley and John Bronaugh) Then, breaking out the draws, we do Kentucky Pinstripe (5.10a), a fine-tuned arête that gets progressively easier the higher you go. 

In the lengthening shadows, we head down the cliff to Casual Viewing (5.7). Caroline leads the steep crack and I lead on her gear. It’s the way we always do it, switching off back and forth as if we’re on a multi-pitch. We both concur it’s one of the best trad routes we’ve done at the Red. A few routes later and we’ve built up enough appetite for a Thanksgiving dinner at Miguel’s. 

By the time we arrive there’s a line out the door. So many pilgrim climbers that the kitchen is beginning to run out of food. Caroline and I squeeze into a long table festooned with votive candles and pine branches. Our family, our tribe of climbers sits together eating turkey and fixins on paper plates. It’s not fancy but it’s good. And the sweet potato pie takes me home, wherever that is these days, and drops me in front of my bag of guilt. Soon enough, though, the blood in my thoughts migrates down into my stomach to assist with digestion, leaving me satiated, nearly guilt-free, and ready for bed. 

That night, back at the camp on the hill, three climbers from the tent next door invite us over to their fire. The Milky Way blazes brightly over our heads and we tentatively get to know each other. They’re college students—Rhett Kenny, Mike Angstadt, and Tom Luckey—from Houghton College in New York who’ve all managed to escape familial duties. They’re on their second climbing trip ever, greenhorns trying to figure how the Red works, but totally, completely enraptured by climbing. It’s love. It’s a beautiful thing to behold. 

Dave comes out of his hideout in the hanger. He’s had a Thanksgiving from Hell, ending up at one of his rentals trying to jury-rig a stove that was ready to blow though the roof with a turkey inside. Dave, who grew up here, says he has a lot of respect for climbers and may even try it himself one day. But for now, he’s seen the future of the Red and plans to improve the camp little by little to accommodate the crowds of climbers. He’s thinking of putting in a climbing wall inside the hanger; make a shower, and more fire pits. 

“Well, about time we burned the Thanksgiving table, don’t you think?” Dave says with a sly grin. We look around at each other over the firelight, wondering if this is some kind of Southern figure of speech. “It’s a Thanksgiving tradition in Kentucky.” 

“Is it really?” Tom asks. 

“Nah, I’m just pulling your leg,” Dave says. 

But Dave is literal for the most part. He hauls a thick-legged table out of the dark and heaves it on the fire. Soon we have a bonfire that could burn the back of your neck a pleasing shade of red and a new holiday tradition to boot. “You know,” he says, “I like this as much as you do. It’s been a pleasure having y’all here.” Dave goes on to tell us stories about growing up, how he used to explore under the cliffs searching for arrowheads. “We didn’t even think of climbing them cliffs back in those day. That would’ve been inconceivable to us. But I sure enjoyed bein’ ‘round them.” 

We sleep soundly that night without gunshots to disturb our slumber. In the morning Caroline asks Mike, Rhett, and Tom if they want to join us in the Pendergrass Murray Recreation Preserve. We’ve never been there, and the college boys, lacking a guidebook, have been climbing only on one cliff in the Muir Valley for the last two days. Time, then, to expand their impressionable minds. After getting thoroughly lost on an unmarked road we find ourselves in The Playground of Sore Heel Hollow. We do a couple of delightful sport routes to warm up (Tire Swing [5.10a], Slide [5.9]), the sun on our backs. Then Caroline leads a nice dihedral trad line (Octopus Tag [5.7]) so the boys can see what it’s like to climb a trad route. 

The college boy’s gear is all borrowed from the climbing club they are officers in. Sharing one helmet between them and ancient harnesses with edelweiss flowers decorated around the webbing, they nevertheless climb with enthusiastic abandon mixed with a healthy fear that they’re doing everything wrong. They check each other’s knots lovingly like nitpicking monkeys. 

Speaking of monkeys, while Rhett launches up the trad line clipping our gear, Caroline and I, tired and worn from three days of climbing, attempt (badly) the ultra pumpy Monkey Bars (5.10a). Right after doing Balance Beam (5.11b) I’m way pumped out and hand the sharp end to the wife. Just as I get lowered to the ground, I look over in time to see Rhett screaming down the dihedral, taking his first trad and probably longest fall (at least 25 feet) of his short climbing career. Seemingly undaunted, he re-climbs to the belay. But it’ll be the fall he remembers for a long time. 

It’s getting late and we make motions to pack up. Sweetly, generously, (“We’ve been thinking…”) the boys offer us a stay and dinner at Rhett’s grandmother’s house an hour’s drive away. But we have a long way and three states to Georgia and lives to attend to. We’ll meet again, I say, hopefully at the Red. 

Throwing the packs in the car, I spy the bag of guilt and pull it out onto the ground. I lift it up (it’s slightly less weighty than before) and turn it over, spilling it onto the leaf-covered dirt. The fact that its biodegradable and will soon be composting into this sweet earth of ours doesn’t make the litter more appealing. But as I look around the parking lot of cars with license plates from as far away as Utah, I see more bags of the stuff and feel a little better. As soon as we get out of the hollers of Kentucky and out on the highway I’ll call my mother to say I wish we could have all been together, to wish her a belated happy Thanksgiving. And for the most part I’ll mean it.

1. Giving credit where credit is due, this acoustic narrative devise was pilfered from Burkhard Bilger’s fine book “Noodling for Flatheads.” In it he uses the tick tick tick of a fish finder in the title story of his book about weird and wonderful Southern traditions. I am grateful to have found his book by my side during the long nights in the tent and can only hope, in the off chance he reads Climbing.com, that he will be flattered.

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