Newtoning

Day two of ropes training and the fun stuff begins.  We’re doing firefighter pickoffs.  Firefighter pickoffs are like baseball pickoffs except nobody dies (because, if you got picked off while I was coaching first or third base, you were dead to me).   

The training exercise is there’s a victim in a room on the second floor.  You get to the victim from roping out of a third-floor window.  Why you don’t just walk up the stairs or use a ladder is not covered in class.  I bet if the class was taught by guys who work for a company that makes ladders (or stairs) the whole rope from an upper window into a lower window scenario would be dismissed as ridiculous.  But we got the CMC duo of Kaz and LeRoy this weekend, so disregard the stairs and ladders.  There are times when those might not be usable.  Let’s do some participatory physics.

Started college as a physics major, so that suits me just fine.  Toss me off the hose tower roof.  Hook me into all manner of contraptions and dangle me into space.  Debate coefficients of friction and (roughly) calculate net forces with the ghosts of Pythagoras and Newton.  Have ice cream cake at lunch.  Beats yard work, that's for sure.

I didn’t die after being tossed off the hose tower roof, so we switch groups and start on the pickoffs.  I’m used to ascending and descending mountains with hundreds and thousands of feet of exposure with gear nowhere near as slick as the CMC-engineered jewelry we're working with, so a third story hop into a second story window has no real pucker factor.  Well, at least for me.  We build redundant safety into the system and independently double-check the rig before anyone goes out the window.  You could launch yourself out the window and the worst that would happen is you’d come crashing back into the cement block wall.  Unpleasant, but completely survivable.  However, the rope we use is comparatively immense to what alpinists use, and that takes some getting used to.

My turn comes up.  I strap into the safety harness, which I am happy to see does not have shoulder straps, like most of our harnesses.  The harness we are using for pickoffs is much more like my climbing harness, with just leg loops and a waist belt.  Just having your hips harnessed is much more maneuverable (for better and worse) that being in the straightjacket-like shoulder and waist harnesses.  Carabiner the wingman (a small block and tackle I’ll use to lift the victim off the floor and out the window) into my harness loops, and get ready to be a Superhero.

Trick to being a superhero, of course, is to have cool tools and not be afraid to use them.  Generally also useful to have some tragic backstory, which helps with the ironic detachment and deflective humor.  Suffice to say, I’m good to go. 

Stand on the edge of the third-floor window and start to head down.  Get the prussiks (small knots) over the ledge and … enthusiastically descend.  Recalling my physics, thirty-two feet per second squared until terminal velocity is maximum descent.  I don’t get anywhere close to that but I do burst through the second-floor window, hook into the victim and start to raise him out the window.  Here’s a physics learning moment; do not pull on the wingman cord at an angle.  Pull as straight down as you can, for the best mechanical advantage.  Learn that through some trial and error with this new tool, then continue the descent, ending with everyone on the ground as alive as they started.  

Big fun, being alive.  Stairs and ladders?  They're lame.  

Head back into the tower and the overly enthusiastic entry into the second-floor window garners some critique.  I take the feedback seriously, though a little deflective humor does seep out.  I learned everything I needed to know about rappelling from Batman.  

Well, before Kaz and LeRoy, that is.