The Transplant Song

Ive been a transplant too
Anyway as Im not mad at you
But I get compared to all of you
makin a thousand bucks a day
My heads all wrong to live here any longer anyway

I should have been born in North California
Northern California fifty wintertimes ago

I am moving away from the place I am from
Cause I don't like to squeeze where I dont fit in.
Its my birthright to stay but Im leaving anyway
North country take me in.

My mother is always telling me that I don't work enough.
"You don't work enough" she says, but it isnt true.
It just burns me up to think she thinks
that I don't work enough.
No one can see the kind of work I do.

Im a native in a stranger land,
there is a stranger in my box of sand.
I would gladly accept him extending my hand,
he looks at me,
he doesnt understand.

I am moving away from the place I am from
Cause I don't like to squeeze where I dont fit in.
Its my birthright to stay but Im leaving anyway
North country take me in.
North country take me in.

North country take me in.

--Transplant Song
Tim Bluhm

Backcountry in PA

For some reason, the Mid-Atlantic has had a phenomenal winter. Central PA has seen several first descents. Gary and I skinned up to our county's highpoint and skied down (approx. 600 vert).

Here is a pic of the approach

Work in progress

"Excelsior"

I spent my morning ice climbing. I felt like a medieval warrior,
weilding two razor-sharp ice axes, like twin excaliburs, and donning
stainless steel spikes on my broken-in mountaineering boots.
Feeling much like a sea urchin, I tied into my frozen climbing rope.
My breath was as visible as my misgivings in the cold January morning.
It happens every time: this feeling of "what the #$%^& am i doing
here!"

What am I doing here?
Why do I subject myself to this barbaric, dangerous, cold, wet pastime?

I climbed up about 50 feet, my ice axes skritching and scratching on
the bare rock, like nails on a chalkboard. I longed for the reassuring
"thonk" of a well placed ice tool in deep ice: safety. I continued
this delicate dance toward the sky. Perhaps I was more a dancer than
warrior, my delicate movements finely tuned so as not to shatter the
chandelier ice I was on.

In this twilight zone between control and choas, success and failure,
life and death, I find myself.

Perhaps that is why I climb rock, ice, and snow. When I climb, my mind
is emptied of everything else but the climb. There is simply no room
for distraction. I become lost in my environment of icy blues.

Climbing is a microcosm of life. There are successes and failures, and
every decision has a direct consequence, often amplified by the
immediacy of the decision.

I finally reached the top of the climb, and built an anchor: safety.
success. My urchin-esque, warrior-dancer projection of myself had made
all the right decisions in this microcosm of life. It reassured me
that I can make good, successful decisions in the macrocosm of life.

Now onto higher mountains.

Excelsior: ever upward.

Right-click and select view image for full view.