The Zombie Traverse
by John Burbidge
It was nothing more than an old cardboard refrigerator box flattened onto the dry riverbed rocks; still, the obvious indentation, human-shaped and pressed into the corrugation, tipped me off to the fact that some poor fellow was in bad need of a new Therm-a-Rest. The crumpled and muddy jeans balled up at one end of the box were evidence that the same guy could probably use a new pillow as well.
I stood there and marveled for a moment at the irony of how bad luck begets bad luck. Now that I was here, with my step ladder, PC-7 epoxy, and putty knife, the very same guy who had been sleeping on the box was going to be in need of a new place to crash—because I was about to glue up a climbing wall in the middle of his bedroom.
It was the perfect bridge support for a glue-up: a 12-foot-high cement wall that stretched about 150 feet, located in the dry outer edge of the riverbed. The side that I wanted faced the water,
hidden from the foot-and-bike path that followed the riverbank above. Because the wall was in the riverbed, I noted right away that the possibility existed for the traverse to be almost completely submerged during high water. This seemed to add an appropriate natural dimension to the concrete personality of the structure. As I glanced over at the swiftly flowing water 25 yards away, I conjured up a disturbing image of myself being gushed off the wall in the middle of a fierce pump, too wasted to hang on as the water sucked at my legs until I let go . . . headed for the Pacific.
Nice and discreet, I thought, looking around. No charges of vandalism for turning dead space into my own little training ground. Hundreds of smooth and juggy river rocks within an arm’s reach, and killer late-afternoon sun to boot. I’d searched the entire town for such a spot. I knew I had arrived.
This dude’s outta here, I thought, as I tossed the makeshift bedroll into the brush. This western-Montana city was well known for its considerable transient population, especially in the summer, when numerous hobo heads could often be seen peeking over the boxcar tops as trains from Spokane and Seattle rumbled through town. I had heard of several popular hobo camps that existed beyond the outskirts of the city; this guy would just have to relocate. That’s what being a transient was all about, anyway. They came and went and came and went, ragged faces turning into recognizable regulars around town. See them here and see them there, twenty times in one day and then not again for a month, until one day, if you happened to think about it, you maybe realized that a particular one hadn’t been around for a while.
Outta here. Who knows to where. I shook my head and laughed. To think climbers call themselves bums. Climbers don’t even know the meaning of the word bum, next to these guys. These guys don’t pack around a couple of grand worth of gear; these guys are the real hardcores. They live the life.
And this guy, I thought as I set my stuff down where his bed-box had been, is going to have to go live it somewhere else.
* * *
Two days and thirty dollars worth of glue and duct tape later, things were beginning to take shape. I’d cleaned up about twenty pounds of broken glass and destroyed a couple of old firepits at the base of the wall, and, after collecting a big bucketful of likely looking river rocks and washing them in the warm, clear water, I had begun to put up holds.
Huge, half-naked women, cartoon I-Dream-of-Jeannie types, and an oddly happy-looking giant skull smoking a stogie already adorned large areas of the wall, giving testament to the past efforts of some talented and twisted graffiti artists. For me, it was easy: Each eye got a handhold, each nipple and bellybutton a foothold. The skull accepted several amusing placements, including one on the only tooth in his smiling mouth. On any words of wisdom, I dotted the i’s and put in periods and other stuff. Basically, the wall built itself. Like all truly classic routes, the natural line already existed; all it needed was a human instrument willing to put in the time and effort necessary so others could experience it. And while I was standing there on the ladder, immensely enjoying the fact that I was that human instrument, a voice spoke up from behind.
“You the artisté?”
Startled, I spun around and did kind of a falling jump off the ladder. As I picked myself up, I saw that a guy in a faded-green army coat was smiling at me, obviously a bum but, I decided, amiable-looking.
“Is this your art?” he asked again. “Hey,” he said, holding up his hands and showing me his palms, “don’t worry. I won’t mess with it.”
Slowly, he walked up to the wall and began fingering the rocks. “I won’t mess with your art, or anybody else’s.” He looked at the ground as he spoke. “But then, you don’t mess with mine, either.”
I flipped off my headphones and tried to wipe the sticky epoxy from my fingers as I inspected this dude. He had bold, orangeish hair and a freckled orange complexion, and slung over one shoulder he had an old, blue Boy Scout backpack. What he obviously didn't have was a clue. Apparently, he thought I was merely adding my two cents’ worth of artistic expression to this slab of public cement.
“Because I got an important message to tell people,” he was saying. “And I got these posters I’m gonna put up on the other side of the wall.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at me expectantly. “And I don’t want anybody messing with my stuff. And I won’t mess with your stuff. Because this message I've got is important.”
“Really,” I said again. Finally I rolled my eyes. “What’s the message?”
His eyes lit up. “Raaah.”
“Raaah?”
“Yeah. Raaah’s the leader, man. “ He looked at me closely. “You know about the zombies, man?”
“The zombies?” I had to admit, he’d caught me off guard with that one. “Well, no,” I said, “not really. Who are the zombies?”
The bum’s orange eyes glazed over, and his face tightened into flaming, fused lines, and he began to rock back and forth slowly as he launched into his spiel. “Oh yeah, the zombies, man, I’ll tell you right now over 60 percent of Montanans are zombies already. They work in the back rooms of the supermarkets and restaurants, and that’s where they put the worm eggs into people’s food.”
“Worm eggs?” I was getting into it now.
“The worm eggs get into people’s brains, man! George Bush is a zombie!” He gave me his super-expectant look again, as if I should be terrified that big, important, former President George H.
Bush is a zombie. “And all those other guys in the government, they’re all zombies. They’re running the country! Man, people don’t know what’s going on. Montanans just don’t realize what’s happening, but they’re taking over here too, man; they've already been everywhere else. That’s why I've got to put these posters up. To tell people.”
“Well, man, “ I said, trying to recover from the shock of having suddenly learned of this nasty zombie-takeover plan, “I guess I can buy the part about George Bush, but I don’t know about Raaah and the worm eggs.” I was beginning to get the feeling that I wanted this guy off my back, so, turning away, I donned my headphones and cranked the volume on Soul Asylum’s “Made to be Broken.” This guy could undoubtedly go on all day about this zombie stuff, and I had better things to do.
He stood there, though, behind me, and between songs I could hear him prophesizing in an increasingly alarming tone of voice. Finally I flipped off the headphones and looked at him, just as he was turning to leave.
“—don’t care, you’re probably a fucking zombie too,” he finished. Then he was gone, headed around to the other side of the bridge support, no doubt, to get his important message glued up, so all remaining “normal” humans in Montana—or at least those who happened to frequent the riverbank path—could be enlightened as to what was really going on.
Later that evening, however, when I was getting ready to leave, I saw him on his side of the wall, not gluing posters, but sitting in a crude chair made of tires and plywood, opening a piece of foil
that looked to have some sort of food in it, dumpster scraps or something. He moved his hands slowly over the shiny, greasy-looking meal and spoke softly for several minutes, rocking as he had before. Unbeknownst to him, I stood witness to his private ritual, the exorcising of worm eggs.
Man oh man, I said to myself as I pedaled for home. This guy is bent.
* * *
The full magnitude of the truth behind this thought did not clearly reveal itself until the next day, when, sliding down the trail into the riverbed, I was suddenly confronted with not just a few weird posters, but at least 150 Xeroxed pieces of legal-sized paper covered with teenie-tiny, yet somehow perfectly legible, handwriting—an insanely encyclopedic history of Raaah and the evil
doings of his race of zombies. It was all in order, all full of crazy but neatly designed charts and graphs, all of which were cross-referenced in a manner that made absolutely no sense at all. I’m
no psychologist, but I’d managed to plow my way through Psych 101 in college, and to me it all appeared to be the looney, stream-of-consciousness thinking of a genuine paranoid schizophrenic.
According to the posters, the zombies were everywhere; they had invaded our society from every angle. They were responsible for the mysterious deaths of people ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Marilyn Monroe to Liberace. Place a finger anywhere on one of the posters and you were likely to come up with something like: “If your minister does not wear a cross, get one who does! All these are called ‘major called ones’—and they are frequently copied (see section ‘zombie monkeys’ and ‘zombie gorillas’).” It was a garbled mess. It was out of control.
The orange guy was nowhere to be seen. Soon I grew bored with the monumental task of reading the wall and went around to my side. True to his word, the guy hadn't glued any posters where I was working.
* * *
A couple of hours and about ten holds later, I heard a strange noise coming from the other side of the wall. Walking around to investigate, I saw that a huge, hairy, transient-looking type was
methodically ripping down the posters and throwing them to the ground. He was muttering angrily to himself.
“Say, there,” I said, stepping up to the guy’s side. “Say, man. Um . . . the guy who put those up asked me not to mess with them. You know?”
I stood there for a moment but was not obliged with an answer or even a sideways look, just more muttering. Great, I thought. Another goofball.
“Look, man,” I said, moving a little closer. “I kind of made a promise to the guy who put those posters up that I wouldn't mess with them. What do you have to rip them down for? What difference does it make to you?”
Finally the hairy bum turned to face me. He looked at me like he wanted to squash my head right there on the rocks. He looked at me like he had every reason in the world to rip these posters down, and all the reasons he needed to hate me at the same time. “We don’t want this guy in town,” he grumbled finally.
I was taken aback by his harsh tone and thought a physical confrontation might ensue. Without another word, though, he just turned around resumed his muttering as he ripped and tore at the posters. He didn't seem to notice at all when I backed away and slipped around to my side of the support. Christ, I thought, these guys are occupants of a completely different realm. Better to just let them fight their own battles. No reason for me to get involved to any degree whatsoever.
Later, however, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt when the huge hairy guy came around the corner, dug the cardboard bedroll and crusty jeans out of the bushes, and dragged them off into the evening. Obviously it was his bedroom I’d stolen, and the deliberate manner with which he ignored my presence gave me the uneasy feeling that, like it or not, I was somehow involved with these guys and their crazy world.
But I blew it off. “Relocation, pal,” I said aloud to the bum’s back as he shuffled away. “That’s what it’s all about. “ I shook my head, tried to laugh and stared for a moment at the rock I held in my hand. I had a big jug smeared with epoxy, ready to go, but instead of taping it to the wall, I chucked it into the bushes and began to gather up my stuff. Suddenly, I felt as though I’d done
enough for one day.
* * *
“You tore down my posters.” He was pissed. I climbed down from the step ladder and set the glue and tape on the ground off to the side. I held onto the putty knife.
“No I didn't, dude, but I was here when it happened. Some other guy ripped them down a couple of days ago. I told him not to.”
The orange guy didn't believe me. “What’d he look like?” he snapped.
“I don’t know,” I snapped back. “He had a beard.” This was getting out of hand. I was starting to get a little pissed myself, having to deal with this bullshit, and I decided it was time to tell this guy to get lost. I was just about to really lay into him when something about the way he was staring at my holds made me pull up short.
“Hey, look, buddy,” I said, trying to be calm but forceful. Definitely forceful. “I didn't tear down your posters. I don’t give a shit how many posters you put up. We have an agreement, remember? You don’t mess with my art, and I won’t mess with yours.”
But before I finished speaking, he was gone. And a few days later, so were the majority of my holds.
* * *
Video
Click below to watch a YouTube video of rock climbers climbing on the underside of a bridge.
The orange guy had become a presence around town. One of those bums that people chuckle at and point out to visiting friends, remarking how transients lend color to this small Rocky Mountain city, and masking, perhaps, a somewhat embarrassing uneasiness that most people feel in the presence of bums and the uncertain circumstances that surround them. The transients often walked around the streets with a confrontational air, and they always seemed to be saying something, just jabbering, trying to push their loneliness off themselves and onto others because they had nothing else to do. When you’re that bored, why not bother everybody? You’ve got nothing to lose, and it’s even kind of amusing to watch the faces of the “normal” people when you speak to them and scare them. They’re so soft it makes you laugh.
Over the past several weeks, the orange dude’s prophesies and paranoias had sprung up on hundreds of telephone and power poles around town, and it began to seem like almost every time I drove somewhere I’d see him walking around briskly with his unique sense of purpose. The day after he discovered that his posters were ripped down, I saw him in the library, sitting at a four large table with papers spread everywhere, busily scribbling away in his tiny handwriting, carefully piecing it all back together, diligently setting the record straight for an ungrateful and doomed world’s benefit.
On that day, in the library, I’d felt a sort of grudging admiration for the guy’s dedication to his task; two days later, however, surveying the smashed remains of a week’s worth of my own hard work, I seethed inside and could almost taste the bum’s orange blood. It looked as though he’d beaten on my holds with a pipe or a large rock or some-thing, until either the holds had shattered or the bridge’s concrete had simply pulled off.
As I stood there fuming, an orange head poked its way around the comer of the support and then quickly pulled back. Oh yeah, I thought, he knows what’s up, all right. Furious, I ran around to the other side, his side, and grabbed him roughly by the back of his green jacket as he tried to scramble up the trail.
“What the fuck, you ASSHOLE!” I screamed at him. “You knocked my rocks off, didn't you? Didn't you?”
The guy cowered like a beaten dog. “I told you I didn't touch your stupid posters, you crazy bastard,” I said. “I told you I don’t give a shit about your posters!” I’d gotten caught up in my own tirade. With both arms, I pushed the guy backward and pinned his neck against the concrete wall.
“Listen man,” I spat, “if you touch any of my holds again, I’m gonna beat the shit out
of you. Got it?!” I threw him to the ground and had to stop myself from kicking him for added effect. He scuttled around in the dirt for a few seconds, his huge orange eyes twice as big as usual, then coughed and choked as he tried to get up. He looked at me sideways with fear and hatred. Boy, I thought, if this guy ever had any doubt as to whether or not I was a zombie, this just settled it.
“Well, screw him,” I said aloud, back on my side of the wall, livid with rage at the prospect of spending another twenty dollars on glue and tape and several more afternoons putting up rocks. “Fucking orange asshole got off easy.”
* * *
I smelled smoke. Stopping in mid-slide as I negotiated the loose dirt trail down into the riverbed, I held my nose up to the wind and sniffed like a dog, and at the same time, cocked an ear toward the wall. For a moment, I just stood there, still.
It had been nearly three weeks since the completion of my glue-up, and, in that time, it had already seen a considerable amount of use. Various local climbers had learned of it through
the grapevine, ever since the day I’d taken my roommate Mark and a couple of our buddies around to the wall and said, casually, “Hey, check this out.” They’d had no idea I was even working on it. That was the way I’d wanted it.
So we’d started hanging out at the wall after work or classes, sitting by the river in the late evening sun, putting back a Foster’s oil can or two, and, after a few days, people somehow got wind of things and began showing up on a regular basis. The colorful graffiti gave everybody a kick, as did the orange guy’s zombie posters, and the reviews of my work came in mostly on the positive side, although Mark took it upon himself to lead the gang of critics who complained loudly about the “slippery, micro-turd worm moves” I’d slapped on the far end of the traverse. I told him I’d designed it with him in mind. Of course, when he finally figured out the moves his thinking began to come around, and, instead of bitching, he would spew massive Beta at people as they pinched and paddled their way across what really were a sorry bunch of holds. Then, after somebody fell off, Mark would sigh, put on his shoes, and show everybody how to do it,
the big bridge-support stud.
As for the bums, they had been making only rare appearances. Usually they’d show up in the distance, back in the trees or behind the bushes on the sides of the riverbed, looking at us strangely, this new crowd of normal people who had suddenly decided they were going to hang
out down here in a place that had never had normal people in it. They kept their distance, and we kept ours; we climbed on the wall, and they slept and lived somewhere else.
So it had been something of a surprise when Mark walked into our kitchen one day with his shoes and chalk bag, shirt off, sweat dripping, and proclaimed with finality, “Man. Those guys are tweaked!” Briefly, he related to me what had gone on that afternoon at the bridge. Apparently there’d been some kind of a confrontation between the orange guy and the hairy guy, Mark said, because when he’d arrived to do a workout, he’d found the orange guy lying next to the wall, bleeding and looking like he’d been beaten up.
“I asked him if he was okay,” Mark said, “but he just looked at me and said he was being ‘forced
out’ by ‘them.’ He said the zombies knew where he was, and they knew he was onto them, so
they were trying to kill him. I didn't see any zombies, but I did catch a glimpse of that big hairy guy ducking off into the bushes. I think he’d been watching me, actually, so I didn't even climb. I just got the hell out of there.”
At the time, I’d more or less blown it off. Who the hell cared what kind of problems these guys
were having between each other? If the orange guy had gotten kicked around a bit, it was
probably his own fault. After all, the hairy guy wasn't the only one who’d seen fit to knock some
sense into the paranoid freaker. I’d had to do it once myself.
Still, I’d avoided the wall for several days until tonight, when I was alone. It was almost twilight on a summer evening so beautiful that a bike ride and a quick pump seemed the perfect warm-up to a night of quaffing beers downtown. I’d thought I might run into another late-evening climber, or perhaps one of the fishermen who occasionally made their way along the river beneath the bridge, and now, sure enough, as I stood on the trail that led to the riverbed, I heard voices drifting up from the other side of the wall. But they were strange, guttural voices.
And I smelled smoke.
I crept slowly down the path and listened intently to the activity on the other side—my side—of the wall. My heart sped up as I heard the universally ominous sound of glass breaking. Quietly, I
walked to the corner of the bridge support, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I took a breath and peeked around the corner. And then, in the approaching darkness of that summer evening, I was witness to what had most assuredly been going on underneath this bridge for years, long before I ever showed up.
It was a party. A party for bums. A party of bums and by bums and nobody except bums was
invited. It was menacing and out-of-control and spurred on by hunger. There was no one to hear them, no one to stop them. No one to tell them that they couldn't hold a rabid celebration of their hopeless lives, of the freedom and drifting anonymity and supreme next-to-nothingness they lived with every day.
A fire was burning against the wall, and several bulky silhouettes moved in and out of the light
with quick, frantic motions. The hairy bum, the guy who’d ripped down the posters, was holding a huge boulder high above his head. He was poised to smash it down. . . right onto the foothold that marked the skull’s front tooth. At the same moment the boulder descended upon the glued river rock and demolished it with indignant impunity, an empty wine bottle, tossed by somebody else, exploded high on the wall and showered the hairy guy and the surrounding rocks with shards of glass and splatters of wine. This screeching, simultaneous combustion of rock and glass sent the entire gang headlong into a frenzy of violent drunken howling and pushing and grabbing and wrestling. They played the way they lived—rough, expecting no sympathy and doling out none.
Thoroughly creeped out, I jerked my head back around the comer, lest I somehow become the
unlucky object of the pack’s destructive attention. My throat tightened and one of my legs started shaking, as if perched on a dime edge, at the thought of being descended upon by them. Breathing hard, I grabbed my mountain bike and beat it the hell out of there. Behind me, I could hear it happening—the Zombie Traverse was being destroyed.
* * *
After several months, as fall and winter blew into Montana and my attention turned to skiing and road trips south, I came to realize that the paranoid fellow, the orange bum, wasn’t around
anymore. It seemed he’d left town, chased out, perhaps, by the other bums, by the climbers, by
the zombies, or by whatever it was that was going on in his head. The posters he’d glued to the
phone and power poles eventually got covered with other announcements, and, with no one to
keep up the maintenance on the bridge wall, the great manifesto became tattered and yellowed
beyond legibility. I never touched a single poster, this mostly due, I suppose, to an obligatory
respect borne out of guilt for the orange guy, whom I’d mistakenly accused of messing with my art. It wasn't him. He’d been telling the truth. I never got the chance to apologize.
It was months before I went back. I stopped by on a winter’s day as gray and thick as the
concrete itself, a cold day, a day on which there could be no doubt that most transients had long since headed south.
The first thing I noticed when I walked around the corner was that some slob with a dripping roller full of red paint had obliterated the Jeannies and the smoking skull; they were lost forever behind a millimeter of toxic spread. I walked around a little and felt out the few remaining holds, but I didn't even get off the ground. The loss of the graffiti conspired with the awful day to weigh me down. On such a day, the meaning of climbing, and all the reasons we have for leaving behind the flat old earth, was reduced to nothing. On such a day, the ground was good enough. For some, it was all they had.
I wondered all winter if I would muster up the motivation necessary to give the traverse another
shot. Christ, the cost of glue and tape alone was enough to break a fellow who got by on a fairly
modest budget. It was true that the transients were an inescapable and presumably valid part of this community; but shit, I thought, so am I. I was willing to exist in harmony with them, but the angry and surprised looks they shot us when we were hanging out at the wall were unmistakable evidence that they tended to view the whole thing as a battle for turf. I knew the bums didn't have a whole lot of discreet places left in a fast-growing town that was threatening to run them right over. I knew there were very few places within the city limits where they could still hang out, have a fire, drink some wine, and maybe roll out a cardboard box to sleep on. Places where they are insiders—barely but crucially attached to the community of so-called normal humans. Maybe the bums needed that attachment like we all need it.
Me? I had a nice home with carpeting and a shower, and I had a whole city I could roam around in and, just as importantly, blend into. I knew I could give the hairy guy and his buddies their one place back, their riverbed, this one single spot. I knew that the unselfish thing to do would be to disappear, like the orange guy, the one person who’d wanted everybody to live in peace and leave one another’s art alone. I could disappear from their world, leave it behind, and go pull plastic at the university climbing wall every night. Do my training inside, surrounded by annoying posers.
That’s when I realized what I really had in common with the bums: I too was willing to fight for the broken glass and graffiti world underneath the bridge. Like the bums, that’s where I felt most comfortable. So I picked up my wallet one warm spring day and headed for the hardware store to stock up on epoxy, putty knives, and duct tape. I decided to buy some paint this time, maybe try my hand at crafting a smoking skull. Decorate that wall the way it was the first time I saw it, and bring the Zombie Traverse back to life.
