Warren Harding was one of the most useless presidents of the 20th century. Chances are you don’t remember him. Think corruption and the Gilded Age.
Warren Harding, on the other hand, was one of the best climbers of the modern age.
He was the first person to climb El Capitan.
Perhaps you do not know about El Capitan. Allow me to set the stage.
A hundred million years ago, light-colored rock, known in the field as felsic, solidified beneath the earth. Uplift after uplift, erosion after erosion and then glaciers scrapped by, carving out a U-shaped valley from the granite, striations and erratics and all the rest.
And now there are 3000 feet of course-grained granite towering into the sky.
It is July, 1957. Warren Harding, the climber, is an accomplished rock climber who spends his days scrambling the Yosemite Granite. When he is not climbing, he is the raucous drunk who’s heart murmur disqualified him from the draft and who’s dreams of scaling the rock prevent from holding a job.
He and his friends have been beaten to the first ascent of Half-Dome by a few days. He gave his arch-rival a sincere but dispassionate congratulations.
He turns to El Capitan, so much larger than all the rest of the granite monoliths of Yosemite that no climber has really considered it.
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But that is what we do, isn’t it? Russia gets into space first, we set an even more impossible goal: the moon. Berlin is blockaded by road, we will fly it all in by air. You have to have the faintest wafting of insanity to even consider it, that which is always looming over you but is for all intents and purposes clinically impossible.
You must be the best so you set an even more unreasonable goal for you to achieve.
And then all eyes are on the sky.
Or, for Harding, on the cliffs.
And they are not watching for you to stagger over the rim; they are waiting for your inevitable surrender.
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But rock climbing is the one thing Harding is good at.
He has nothing else to his name, except bar fights and failed jobs and he looked up at the monolith in the cooling fall air and decided he would do it.
This is a classic case of unstoppable force meets unmovable object but even El Capitan was no match for Warren Harding. He made pitons out of stove legs and made huge pendulum-like swings across the face and was strung up against the granite for 45 days, until he finally staggered over the rim.
“It was not at all clear to me who was conqueror and who was conquered: I do recall that El Cap seemed to be in much better condition than I was.”
You cannot beat granite, beat that which is millions of years older than you and will last far longer than you. Only fools believe they are better than that, better.
But Warren Harding is victorious for a moment. Someone hands him his cheap red wine, his beverage of choice.
And the climb is over and his back on solid ground and all his problems come rushing back. On a climb, Harding is superhuman. On the ground, he is no better than his namesake.
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We can’t ever really win, can we? At the end of the day, with whatever we attempt, we have all become Harding, staggering over the rim, conquerers become the conquered and the moon will not bow to us now that we have stood on it. There is so much arrogance that goes along with everything we attempt, this illusion that now we control things.
We don’t.
In all of this, El Capitan is unmoved.
Granite flakes and flecks and calves but it does not care.
And what is there to learn from Warren Harding, the climber, the only Warren Harding that matters in the long run?
Do not let the reality bleed into the dreams and taint them.
Do what it is you love until your fingers are ragged with it and you cannot get breath back into your lungs and to look down it is a dizzying 2,500 feet but you must look up and make one final push to the summit.
You cannot conquer. You cannot tame. You can only ascend.
And even the impossible can be scaled. Maybe you have to break off your stove legs use them for pitons, but even El Capitan can be summited.
Do not let the heights dissuade you from the dream you are dreaming.