Why I am Here...

So, I am very happy to report that friends from all parts of my life are reading my blog (thank you facebook)! An old friend requested more information regarding why I am here in Rio...who is this guy? Why is he so great? What made you move to Rio for him? So, in this post, I'll explain. If you already know the riveting story, you can enjoy the gory details again. If not, here they are:

I met Fred last October when I was rock climbing here in Rio de Janeiro. He was recommended to me by a travel agent, so I hired him to be my guide. Of course, as soon as I got out of the taxi at the base of Pao de Acucar mountain, I noticed that he was quite cute! But over the course of the climb, I developed a little crush on him, and when he shared his apple with me, I knew it was love. Right before we got to the top, he asked me if I wanted to go samba dancing with him the next night (my last night in Rio), and of course I obliged. A funny sidenote- when he asked me if I was in Rio alone, I told him that I was there with a girlfriend (holla DG!!) - he thought I was a lesbian for the first few hours. Girls do not refer to their female friends as girlfriends here!

So, we went out the next night and had a total blast! I met all of his friends, drank somewhere between 2 and 30 caipirinhas, and attempted to samba with him (though I think much of the time it was a pee-pee dance in an effort not to "break the seal.") Anyway, we had an amazing time together and when I left to come back to NYC the next day, I had Fred on the brain. We began to exchange emails, then progressed to Skype (video IM, for those of you who are still in a vacuum and don't know Skype), and then decided to plan an amazing New Years getaway. We would meet in Monterrey, Mexico and after a few days there, go to Potrero Chico, the mecca of all rock climbing. It would be tons of fun, with no future committment because we lived so far away from each other.

On Christmas day, I left for Mexico and when I arrived in the airport and saw Fred waiting for me, my heart started beating a mile a minute! We spent the next 3 days in Monterrey, getting to know each other a little better (and taking photos of ourselves making obscene gestures with the artistic statues all over the city). We left for Potrero, ready to have the climbing adventure of our lives. On the third day of climbing, Fred was ahead of me leading a route, and I was belaying him when disaster struck. Here is the email I sent to everyone on January 2, 2008:

"I spent my New Years Eve in Mexico this year. The plan was to be in Potrero Chico, a rock climbing mecca, riding a mechanical bull and throwing back Coronas with Fred, my adorable Brazilian climbing partner. Instead, I spent the big night in the Sheraton Ambassador Hotel in Monterrey drinking hot chocolate, watching the Tom and Jerry cartoon marathon, and playing Florence Nightingale (and not in the sexy way)...

On December 30th, Fred and I were climbing an amazing route called Dope Ninja. It was a 6 pitch climb with a really cool variety of difficult and technical moves. At the top of the 4th pitch (roughly 250 feet off of the ground), I anchored myself in and Fred unclipped his anchor, prepared to lead-climb the next pitch. For you non-climbers, this requires me to stand on the ledge and feed him rope as he goes up and gets the route ready for me to climb after him.

He climbed about 10 feet and went over a protruding rock face, where he was no longer visible to me. No big deal- this happens all the time in climbing and partners communicate with one another via loud screams or pre-planned tugs on the rope to signal different things. I was enjoying the scenery around me and waiting for him to tug the rope 3x to tell me he was ready for me to start climbing.

All of a sudden, I felt a violent pull on the rope as the slack slipped through my hands. Instinctively, I "locked down" by pulling the rope downwards and behind my back. This allowed me to catch him and keep him from falling. He let out a terrified shriek and because we were in a canyon, it reverberated off of the rock and filled the air like surround-sound. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something that looked like a body go flying past me and tumble into the canyon. Horrified, I decided that Fred's equipment had malfunctioned and he had fallen off the rock face. Or, a boulder had fallen onto him and severed his rope, sending him barreling down.

Hysterically, I started screaming for him. I was completely by myself and there was nobody around. I had to stay in the locked-down position or else the rope would go loose and he would fall. I still felt weight on my rope, so I thought there was a chance that he was still attached and it wasn't his body that I saw flying past me. However, the rope was not moving, so I was fairly certain that if he was still tied in, he was dead. I kept calling him over and over again, asking if he was ok, and got no answer. It was windy, so I had a hard time hearing anything, but finally I got an answer: "No, I am not ok." After what seemed like hours, I finally felt him moving on the rope and he started to climb back down. Somehow, I slowly lowered him down to me, and realized what had happened: as he was climbing up, he had attempted to hoist himself up onto a giant boulder. However, the boulder was loose, and he succeeded in pulling the rock out and directly onto his head. It slammed into his face as he fell and then the small-car-sized rock fell into the canyon. That was what I saw go flying past me.

His face was an absolute bloody mess and he couldn't move his left arm. I will spare all of the gory details but suffice it to say that if I was not in the medical field, I would have passed out looking at him. He was completely out of it and his eyes, almost swollen shut already, kept rolling back into his head. I had to keep grabbing his head and telling him to stay with me, to focus on helping me get him down. Fortunately, he was coherent enough to guide me through tying the knots and preparing his rappel. After he was tied in, he slowly began to lower himself down and once again, he dropped out of my sight. I had no idea if he was actually moving down or just hanging on the rope - I was still convinced that he would go into shock and pass out or die from blood loss on the way down. Due to the short leash that was anchoring me to the rock, I was able to lean out only far enough to see 3 climbers about 100 feet below us. I screamed to them to help him. Unbeknownst to me, he was so disoriented that he had veered way to the right and was lowering himself completely off of the route. Thankfully, they heard me, took one look at him, and immediately began to ascend to help him.

As for me, I was stuck on the ledge and starting to panic. Having learned the proper way to rappel myself down only the day before, I was not too confident in my ability to do it safely on such a steep and uneven rock face. And, since he was in the ambulance, there was nobody on the other end of the rope to control the rope should my rappel fail. Furthermore, even though he was off the rope and in the ambulance, the rope was still taught and appeared to be tangled in some trees.

Out of nowhere, this amazing girl climbed down from above and told me she and her partner had seen the boulder fall and they were there to help me. I broke down and started sobbing with relief. We watched from the ledge as - after what seemed like hours - Fred finally was helped to the ground and put into a waiting ambulance. And after another hour, I was back on the ground and on my way to the hospital.

Fred suffered several fractures in the frontal lobe of his skull (or, as he told me, "baby, I broke my brain"), a severely broken nose, fractured right eye socket, and needed 50 stitches in his face to close up all of the wounds. His shoulder is not fractured, but I think he may have done some damage to the rotator cuff. But otherwise, he is miraculously ok and he returned to Brazil yesterday to undergo facial surgery today.

I spent my New Year's Eve in the hotel room taking care of him, cleaning his wounds, and giving him medicine. As I helped him into a bath, he broke down and started sobbing. I asked him why he was crying and he said, "Because I am alive. Because I felt myself falling and thought there was no way you were going to catch me. I am so heavy and I had the boulder on top of me. I was falling and was sure I was dying. But you saved my life and you caught me - you are my angel and my hero." Obviously I started crying too, as the magnitude of it all really hit me.

So despite the fact that Tom and Jerry replaced the mechanical bull, it was a damn good New Years Eve. I think there was a lot to celebrate."

After that, our relationship went into high gear, and we spoke everyday, at least once per day. I went back to Brazil 3 times to visit him, and decided to finally do my "semester abroad" in Rio from August - February! Fred is doing much better, though he will have his final (of 4) facial surgeries in a few weeks. His nose still looks like he was in a bad fight, and he needs some titanium plates to repair fractures that didn't heal. But hey, where else are you going to find better plastic surgeons than in Rio????