Butt Crack And The Sacroiliac

Yesterday afternoon, I walked out to one of our storage sheds on the edge of the property to see if the guy who just installed our DSL (yeah!), left his sunglasses there. I looked around and grabbed a wheelbarrow and moved it a bit to see if maybe they had fallen between cracks of things.

I didn’t find the sunglasses, but turning back toward the house, I found myself limping in a particularly common fashion. I now had a knife stuck up the left side of my arse, and no matter how hard I wanted it to stop being a knife in the left side of my arse, it wouldn’t agree with me.

I limped back into the house, took 800 mg of Motrin, ate a small bowl of cereal to protect my stomach, and then came right after about an hour.

Sometimes it is my left side, sometimes my right side, but it is always in my arse.

I’ve never broken a bone, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t banged a few around. I fell on my head and shoulders once, curing my dandruff but forcing my clavicle to hyper-stress the joint near the right side of my Adam’s apple, that bony bit where it attaches to the sternum. I drove a motorcycle over a small cliff- silly me!- and I had a helmet on. I probably would have been fine (I only fell upside-down , head-first about fifteen feet) but the motorcycle landed on top of me. The added weight drove my shoulder into a creek bed with just enough water in it to make me wet and piss me off, forcing the clavicle to try and escape its strap-downs. Our family doctor (who I bumped into at a BBQ) told me I was lucky nothing seriously broke. Seriously. He said the clavicle should have snapped. He asked me if I drank lots of milk and had Fluoride in my water… seriously.

These days, my hands and toes and spine are crunchy from me beating them about too much.

But it is my sacroiliac that gives me the most trouble- the one area that actually slows me down and limits me, at times, in what I can or cannot do. I can’t hike or jog when it acts up. I can’t sit normally. I can’t walk normally. Sex isn’t nearly as much fun (It’s like sleeping with another man’s woman, you thrashing about while he walks in and stabs you in the buttocks over and over. Seriously. Just like that).

And it was a woman who caused all this butt-ache. Every time I hurt, I think of her. (That’s quite the legacy for a young woman-now aged as much as I have- who I never even thought about “in those terms“.)

I honestly can’t even recall her name, but her impact on my life has probably been the most severe of any woman to date. I mean, there are times when I cannot function whatsoever, and it is all because I wanted a second cup of coffee and a poo, and she wanted to stare at my ass- which at the time, was fully functional, and, I might add, a real gay-boy magnet.

There have been so many times in my life when I have had to say “No. I can’t,” because I wasn’t ready and because this girl was preoccupied with things of a posterior nature, and because of my “can do” attitude, those times have really sucked.

And before I bore you with anymore prologue about knives in the buttocks of my sorry existence, here is what transpired, more than ten years ago.

I was on a climbing trip to Pinnacles National Park, with a friend I had made on a previous climbing trip. I went to climb somewhere alone, needed a partner, met Randy, and then went on other climbing trips with Randy.

On this trip, he brought a work-mate who was also a girl, and the three of us spent a nice day climbing around the big conglomerations that give Pinnacles its name. We had a nice night around a camp fire, and the next morning, got up early, had coffee, and then went off to go climb something fun before the day got too hot.

I am not a morning person. Mornings are for reading quietly and drinking coffee. Mornings are for reading quietly and drinking coffee and waiting for the bowels to move. When all that has transpired, the day is ready to accept me- and no sooner.

But on this particular day, on this particular trip, I got a little ahead of myself. I was excited about being out in nature and the prospect of climbing something, and perhaps a little too eager to strap on the climbing harness and get started. I had a route picked out, and I had my gear on. I carefully set up an anchor across a hiking trail near a log, so that my weight, if I fell, was anchored into a large rock and log and not reliant on the weight of a much smaller girl, who was going to “belay” me, and keep me safe from harm. If I fell, the girl would cinch the rope and let the large rock hold me.

Rope management was always my specialty, and this whole set-up was perfectly set up. The girl could sit comfortably on a soft, moss covered log. If I fell, my weight got handled by a monstrously heavy rock.

Good humor abounded, and I set off. The climb started out perfectly vertical, and I was careful the first ten feet, because if I fell, I was sure to hit the ground, which was a large, uneven bit of solid rock. Ankles could easily be turned.

I placed a few pieces of “protection” into the rock as I went. These were attached to carabiners which I clipped my rope into. If I fell, the highest of these anchors would act as a fixed point to arrest my fall, the rope going from my waste up to this fixed point, and then down through all my other anchors to where I had tied it all off in an anchor I set up across the path next to the girl sitting on the soft log.

All she had to do was cinch the rope and let it bite, and the rope would catch me.

Which would have all worked fine except that my sweat pants had one of those little black button clips holding the drawstring tight, and it was suddenly and for some unknown reason, broken. Which meant that my sweat pants were loose around the waste, and every little movement I made allowed them to weasel down beneath the harness I wore. Which meant that right around the fifteen foot point off the ground, half my arse was hanging out of the back of them.

And this would have all been fine, except that I hadn’t really done all my business for the morning yet, and the climb turned into one where there was an actual overhang that needed climbing out and over. I set another piece of protection above me, as high as I could reach, and then made one attempt at climbing out and over a three foot overhanging piece of conglomeration. I soon found myself with one of my feet above my head, hooked onto a ledge of some sort, one hand jammed into a crack full of sharp stone and gravel, windage in what I now surmised was my exposed butt crack, and a bowel that was ready to move.

Quite the predicament, I must say.

But it was all OK, because I had set up the ropes and I knew if I just let go, if I just said “fuck it” and released myself, I would fall maybe seven or eight feet and then be caught by my rope, and then I would be lowered to the ground which wasn’t all that far off, and I could run real fast for some bushes. Then, when the world was ready for me, I could come back, having pulled my pants up properly, and start over.

That’s what I did. I said “fuck it” and just let go. And I fell like gravity intended. Only about the time I should have felt the rope tightening up and the jolt of being caught in mid-air, all I felt was air rushing past me. There was air rushing. There was the “oh shit!” sound of my friend Randy as he saw what was coming, and then there was the sound of my arse (my right buttocks cheek) hitting the ground from a fall of about eighteen feet or so.

People all throughout the canyon (including a ranger who hurried up to check on me) heard the “thud”.

That’s what it was. A “thud”.

And it hurt too.

But I was so happy to have landed on my arse and not on an arm or knee-cap or head.

I took the full force of me hitting a rock on my right butt cheek.

How cool was that?

I got up and limped around and walked off the severe Charlie horse, and then went and found a place to squat in the bushes and finish what I had meant to start.

The girl who was charged with keeping the slack out of my rope was in complete self-induced inner turmoil.

She knew she had messed up. She told me what had happened.

It was my crack, you see, that had taken her mind off of what she should have been thinking about. What she should have been doing, was keeping my rope free of the twelve feet of slack it had when I fell.

Slack! Not crack!

The bruise I had was deep purple as you can imagine, and the size of a soft ball. The impact had transferred force through my hip bone (stop looking at that picture and finish reading this!) and into the sacrum.

Now, more than ten years later, I suffer on and off with the results of that one moment in time.

An exposed butt crack, and a girl who found herself mesmerized by it, long ago, proved to be my biggest pain in my arse.

See?