El Portero Chico

Monday evening, 9:07PM, I’m burrowed inside my sleeping bag—my small nylon cocoon—and clipped to the wall, sardined on a prominent ledge system with William to my left. We’re six pitches up “La Sombre de Muerte,” an excellent, sustained route that makes its way to the right-hand summit of the Sendero tower. Four days into my first trip to El Potrero Chico, I’m already wearing that perfectly disheveled look of wind-blown hair loosely pulled back and tucked under a cap and helmet, swollen knuckles ringed with torn cuticles, a dirt-scrubbed face intermingled with plenty of sun. With my calves trembling, my fingertips raw, a deep ache in my triceps, it feels glorious to finally let my weight settle into something that isn’t my own tendons. Above us, the night sky opens like a cathedral ceiling. Below, the valley glows. Floodlights cast long shadows against Wild Wall and Zapista Wall toward the park. Out farther, the town lights flicker in warm clusters, amber and soft, tracing roads and neighborhoods like constellations of their own. Tiny headlights drift along the highway. Somewhere down there, music drifts faintly upward—just a suggestion of bass and laughter, a reminder that life continues horizontally while we exist in this vertical in-between. The world narrows to the rhythmic rustle of fabric, the metallic tick of cooling carabiners, the steady pull of gravity against the anchor. It’s quiet enough, still enough, to feel the texture of limestone at my shoulders and low back, to notice the way my breath fogs briefly in the cooling air.

Lying here, the feeling is like I’ve borrowed something rare: a night lived entirely above the absurdity, above the noise, above the official story of our time, the official conversation of our time, which at times can feel so strident and harsh and loud and fractious. Here, even just a few pitches up, it feels like there is another narrative unfolding, one antithetical to the adrenalized tenor of mainstream discourse which is defensive and swollen with certainties, whether they’re earned or not.

It’s not entirely peaceful as I contemplate this. I’m keenly aware of the geopolitical revolutions convulsing our history with tension, violence, and fear. Only yesterday, in Guadalajara, a special forces operation targeting cartel leadership left multiple dead, including Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Retaliatory violence ignited across Jalisco; entire neighborhoods folded overnight into a necropolis of roadblocks, arson, and assaults on government facilities, with civilians caught in the blast radius. Tucked into mountainous limestone born of ancient compression itself, I feel like I’ve emerged in a parallel universe. Up high on a cliff forged by tectonic insistences building invisibly until stone warped, fractured, and lifted skyward, I think of forces which accumulate in more complicated ways—through policy and poverty, corruption and grievance, history layered upon history—until something gives. The rupture always looks sudden. It rarely is. When the surface can no longer stretch over the pressures beneath—economic, political, historical—it buckles. Streets become fault lines. Neighborhoods rise as ridges of consequence. Violence is almost always the visible contour of long-standing subterranean strain.

Tonight I feel suspended in the fragility and endurance of things. I think of Suleika Jaouad’s words when she wrote, “The universe does not bend to intention; it flares, veers, interrupts itself. Uncertainty is the ground we stand on. What remains within our reach is attention: the discipline of noticing, the choice to respond with imagination and care.” How then do we grasp the other side of violence and the possibility of joy? How do we bear witness to the fullness of what is carried and what has been survived? Oh, but we must. We must continue to hold our collective breath just long enough to hold the weight of this living; and to exhale a way to tell one another, and to tell one another often: that despite being so human and so terrified, we can live. And we will.