My Corona

Death, Death, Death! More Death!

I hope your immunity is up.

Governments are happily publishing loads of data on the pandemic, but not really telling you what to do with it, other than use common sense. For a recovering PhD, that can only mean one thing: spreadsheets.

This chart should update daily as more data rolls in.

While the numbers published by governments are not confusing, they are not useful. Number of deaths? Who cares! Ask Stalin.*

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

What I need to know is: how risky is it to go bouldering? Here's my attempt at common sense, to try and answer that.

There is some Death rate, which I guess is 1%. And there is some average time between catching the disease and dying. I guess 20 days. Why do I guess these numbers? They seem reasonable and fit with some notions like, "lockdown started in late March".

We can now work out the detection rate 20 days ago: for example: if 13 people die today, they've taken 20 days to die. 20 days ago, we measured, for example, 530 cases, however there must have been 1300 cases (1% of 1300 is 13 deaths). Out of the 1300 cases we only measured 530 cases, meaning our detection rate is 530 divided by 1300, or 40%. With more data, we can fit the detection rate and predict what it is today. That means I can guess how many people are currently out there, contagious with the disease, but do not have a positive test for it. For example, say, 71 people are found to test positive today, but detection rate is only 40%. Therefore 177 people have it. I subtract 71 from this, because if someone tests positive, it should be safe to assume they are extremely isolated (known as the Cathy Correction). So that would be 106 new cases. I add up the previous week of undetected new cases to get the total number of contagious people currently in the population. Divide by the total population and multiply by 1000, and ta-da, you have (what I'm calling) the Danger Level.

You can see the Danger Level for different populations in the graph, above. I interpret it as:

Above 5:      Do not leave the house!
Above 1:      Exercise extreme caution, go bouldering alone or not at all, avoid everyone.
Above 0.5:   Bouldering in small groups (one or two others) is ok, once or twice a week.
Any Lower? Larger groups, more regularly!

Obviously, I am no authority on the matter, in case anyone reads this (in that case, Hello! I hope you're well (if I am reading this again, Hello)). I'm aware I conveniently set these levels to fit my climbing patterns, so, blah.

Well, Maine is currently at 0.74, meaning safe for occasional bouldering. I keep a close watch on it as it's trending upward. While the assumptions are very sweeping (and wrong), the method lets me make predictions that are about 20% accurate, one week ahead - compare that to your weather app. They are the best I've come up with so far.

Scotland and UK should be commended for the heroic lockdown they have endured, and are now less dangerous than the generic USA. Maine, off the map, as always, avoided the worse of it, however Tourist season has just begun so we'll see....😬

* Quote not actually attributed to Stalin.

Force of Fate

One year.

Let me tell you something. It has been a year since our immigration status in the USA changed and I have become unemployable. It sucks; unemployment is the worst job. You cannot do only one thing, so between feeling sorry for myself, I started climbing again...

There are few boulderers here, but there is one called Tom who finds boulders walking Homer between the trails in Camden's Hills. He eagerly points me at steep ones and we try to climb them.

The first one I couldn't do was a 50 degree roof with three crimps spaced like campus rungs, too slopey to campus though. We had two sessions on it, and I thought I was close. I went to Europe and climbed some Font 7bs, tried to speak French, and went to a wedding is Croatia. When I came back, I bruised my knee, then I seem to have no memory, then I injured most of my fingers hanging on the finger board, I tried the traverse, and a pandemic happened.

Eventually, yesterday, we got back. Was it going to be easy? No. I was stronger, I knew that I was not close previously. The last move needed to be done almost static in order to have any hope of controlling a great swing when feet cut off. The landing disappears, once I flew past the mats and slid down the hillside. Once, I stuck the second degree move to the lip and scraggled my feet over. This is hardest problem in Camden (as far as I know), so I give it V9 and name it "Force of Fate" after a line in Homer's Iliad, vaguely to do with accepting your circumstances:

But even for me, I tell you,
death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
when a man will take my life in battle too—
flinging a spear perhaps
or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.

Mid Coast Classics

The Traverse... 30 moves of power endurance. I've fallen at the last move, and tried it 50 times at least. Seven months of failure.

Time for something other.

Classics. Mid Coast Classics.

Mid Coast Maine, according to wikipedia, is the optionally hyphenated stretch of sea-meets-land from Brunswick to Belfast, 70 miles on the West side of Penobscot Bay.


Episode one... After another failed traverse attempt, I sit breathless. On a whim, I prop my phone on rock and hit record. This problem is V7; it has the smallest crimp on wall. I first did it in October last year after a load of attempts, so it was satisfying to get a retro-flash. Then another with the camera wedged in a sapling. The later is what you watch.



Episode two... Here, Cath climbs. We're at Tracy Shore, where granite domes from pine needle carpet. I think this is V1, and possibly the best problem here. It could be called Earn Your Ice Cream. It is! I have a brother who plays guitar so well, people have written Haikus about him. So that's where the music comes from, I hope I don't get copyright claimed.

The Lav Trav

Decline of the Blog, views against time.

We're gonna turn this around! Get ready. It seems like content creators are doing vlogs more so than blogs - why? - recording equipment is readily available, and youtube has fantastic reach compared to other platforms. Well, rather than going with the times, I'll stick with the blog and see.

That said I do have a Youtube channel, like the icing on a fruit cake. Remember though, the cake itself is where it's at even if you don't like sultanas.

The Lav Trav is an obvious challenge at a nearby stretch of coast called Laverna. It's a line of flakey jugs at head height with small footholds. At low tide, the landing is really bad - probably an ankle - high tide would be an adventure! The jugs run out for the last two moves, so there's a small crux at the end... no more than 5.11 in USD, or about 7a french. It has been on my radar for around 4 years, so it's great to actually do it. Doing things is very important. The rock is lovely in the late afternoon.

More, Laverna has a load of low-balls to climb on.

Low ball, obligatory squint horizon

Low ball, top out training

If you count all the low balls, there's probably 25 problems here. Nothing hard, but.

Alone

No one asked for bouldering poem, a bit like the pandemic. But here we are.

Years, days.

What better time to restart the old blog than the end of the world.

I've reread some of my old posts only occasionally. It's a lot of spelling mistakes, enthusiasm, pessimism, sometimes something to make you smile.

Smiling is underrated.

Where am I, where are you, what us changed between us, reader (which I realize probably me)? That's right, I'm living in America. Maine. Off the map. Dave Graham country, but he left a long time ago. We went to a lecture of his in Glasgow, I remember him saying, Maine it's just flat, it's just flat. Which is true.



Even the mountainous areas are pretty flat. It's quite similar to Coigach in that way. Except the forests are not cartographic, viz., they are real.

Endless trees. Why? Look at those trees. They're all pretty young. In the recent past these trees were clear cut. Recent is maybe 300 years... The trees were cut down for the masts of English ships, similar to Scotland. Then, people came and farmed the land - sheep - and you can still see the ruined dry stone walls of this livelihood, again, similar. Then the people left. This was after the American Civil War, so the story goes. The farmers who fought in the war realised the battlefields in Virginia were more fertile than Maine's shallow soil. So, Maine had a "Highland Clearances" of its own, but there's no Hallaig, or Empty Glen eulogising the lost people. This is because these farmers had only been here for a couple generations, and because they left by choice...

People rue the "Maine brain drain" which continues today, but they don't seem to write poetry about it.

Seemingly, the Maine farmers took the sheep with them and the trees came back. The forests are harvested, but there are no spruce plantations. I guess they just chop down whatever has grown. Land is cheap, particularly in Northern Maine: a few hundred dollars an acre if you can buy a million acres... and build a road to get there.

Along the coast of Maine the land is more expensive. This means people can only buy about one acre each, and on that acre they build a big house out of the cheap lumber.



The houses are in the wood. The entire coast of Maine is essentially a giant suburb, in which small town centres dot every 15 miles or so. This is great for the wealthy who own one of these parcels, but is terrible for the boulder hunter - my range is limited to public lands sandwiched between these low residential dough-fests.

Here's a few pic's of what I've found:



Tracy Shore, where to get started.



This is called "Tipping Rock," as yet unclimbed.



Looks better than it is! Pemaquid Point.



The Spot in Camden is really good. Other people boulder here, it's that good!



The local is Dodge Point. I've been trying the right to left traverse for 7 months! Epic.

All pics from Cath.

Stay tuned for more posts, you never know.