WHEN I MET JOSE MIRANDA at a local bouldering zone near Carbondale, I thought he might be homeless. In the climbing world, that’s not an insult—but that is how I meant it. Like he might be a crazy, jabbering vagabond. It’s just Jose’s look. Unkempt. Earthy. The missing incisor tooth. The oppressive beard of black barbs swallowing his face and neck. He looked like a young Osama, or rather King Leonidas from the movie 300, only he wore Crocs.
Real homeless people have no walls, no personal sanctuary, to cordon off their crustier edges. So they build up different walls. But Jose was as open as a wild field. He carried his daughter, Paz, in his arms, while his son, Kawak, tugged at his flowered board shorts. He absorbed their anxieties the way acoustic foam dampens noise.
Last year, Jose sold his house and his solar-panel business, and moved his family from Colorado to his native Venezuela. Before leaving town, he showed me some pictures on his iPod of the climbing. He told me that I should visit. I told him that I definitely would.
But that’s not what I meant.
Venezuela wasn’t a place one would just go—especially not a working climber with limited free time and the option to just as easily visit somewhere better vetted. Like Céüse or the Verdon.
People want to be told what’s good, where to go, what to think and how to do it. Within that thirsty hackneyed space, magazines play a venal role in many misunderstandings and false impressions. They deceive at the expense of aesthetics, art and sport. Beauty is airbrushed, and we’re told that our next adventure is right around the corner.
Here’s the thing about Venezuela. It’s a dangerous country of corrupt bureaucratic chaos that makes visiting it enormously challenging for Americans. This article affects or feigns nothing different.
The reality is you may never see the true grandeur of the crags pictured here for the first time, or know how deeply religious it feels to be at the entrance to La Puerta—a 600-foot-tall canyon of paper-white limestone sprouting an unreal tufa garden.
You may go your whole life without ever knowing the true succulence of the ubiquitous guavas, papayas, pineapples and mangos that grow in the coastal Andes, or the delicious air that circulates the mountains of El Caripe.
You may never feel the quickened pulse caused by being 60 feet above the sea on an insecure deep-water solo, or know what it means to tranquilize the visceral pounding out of urgent necessity.
You won’t get to experience any of this. Unless you know Jose.
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