Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)

ONE AFTERNOON a few days after the Nose climb, Potter takes me to a twilight party at The Rostrum, a towering, semi-detached spire of granite that guards the western end of Yosemite Valley. Throbbing techno music is playing on a boom box, and about 20 scruffily dressed young climbers are gathered in clusters on the rocks, watching the beginnings of what promises to be a psychedelic sunset.

Potter's revolutionary climbing style combines two contradictory impulses: intense competitiveness and an innate soulfulness that helps him find serenity in the middle of the most extreme circumstances.

The main attraction is a trio of slacklines that Potter and a few pals have rigged. Slacklines are strips of nylon webbing winched taut and meant to be walked tightrope-style. They're like bouncy, inch-wide trampolines, and it takes a special blend of power and finesse to cross them. The smallest of the lines, a 15-footer, is strung between two trees just three feet off the ground. Another, for more serious walkers, spans a chasm 30 feet across and some 80 feet deep. The third runs out and slightly downhill from the clifftop to the summit of The Rostrum itself, some 120 feet away. I ask a climber what the drop is to the valley floor below.

"Dunno," he says, casually leaning over the edge. "Nine hundred, a thousand. A ways, anyway."

The slacklining begins at sundown, the various walkers gloriously backlit by a cliff across the Valley that shines in the last light of day. Strapping on a safety leash hooked to a carabiner that slides along behind him, a guy named Shawn Snyder starts walking the 30-foot slackline. Halfway across he wavers and falls, catching himself with his arms and then shimmying back to the edge to try it again. Twenty minutes later, with several crossings under his belt, he tries the big line. But he can't make it more than two or three steps before losing his balance.

"I thought I had it wired," he admits after his third fall, "but it's just a whole different ballgame."

Then it's Potter's turn. A silence falls over the group—he's been known to cross to The Rostrum and back without a safety line. Today, however, he snaps into the leash and steps smoothly and powerfully onto the line, arms spread wide, weight perfectly poised over the balls of his feet. It's odd to see such balance in someone so tall, but Potter's in total control, some secret gyroscope spinning in his head. He lifts off the heel, then the toe of each foot, moving steadily across and then hopping lightly onto The Rostrum. A minute later he's back.

"I almost like it better than climbing," he says, flushed with the afterglow of his space walk. "It's just easier to get to that silent place where I'm really focused on where I am and how far I could fall. Your senses are just so heightened—it's a complete awareness of everything."

Potter walks the line twice more before dark. Watching him, I can't help but think of the stylites, fanatical Christian monks of the Middle Ages who would plant themselves atop columns in the desert and stay there for weeks and months. Though the depth of their devotion was beyond question, they had an undeniable exhibitionist impulse. So it is with Potter: Despite his outward shyness and spiritual focus, he, too, is a performer. He sees his big climbs and crossings as statements and, without being a chest-beater, wants people to know about them.

At dark, we all huddle around Snyder while he prepares dinner from a bag of random groceries: pepperoni sausage, vegan "cheese," Ritz crackers. A few of Potter's friends announce they're taking off, and he gets up to show them the way back to their cars. "Nobody leave," he says insistently to the rest of the group. "I'll be right back."

"I think Dean wants a family of kindred spirits to coalesce around him," climbing photographer Eric Perlman says of the scene at The Rostrum. "There are the lonely gifted who are just antisocial, and then there are those who feel distanced by their gifts, but to the extent they can reach out and draw people toward them, they feel more connected and more human."

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