If I were to ask you what footlocking was, what would you say?

Here’s what I would say, “footlocking is a method of climbing up a rope.”

Yes, but what is it, what are the components? What is the actual substance of footlocking?

Well, you use a footlocking prussic, which is a piece of cordage that connects you safely to the rope and arrests a fall in the event that you need to stop or can’t hold yourself. And you need to carry another device with you, a figure of 8, that can’t be on the rope because it will impair the actual act of footlocking, and it will make it difficult to move up the rope smoothly, but you need it in order to get to the ground safely. It needs to be installed midline, as you hang on the rope by the prussic. If you drop it you’re pretty much screwed. And also, the physical challenge of being able to wrap your feet smoothly around the rope to create friction in order to project the prussic up the rope, along with the hundred and some pounds that is yourself. If you mess up the actual action of tightening your core and athletically wrapping your feet around the rope and powerfully projecting yourself upward, it exponentially increases the uncomfortable nature of the motion. It’s very difficult and not many people can do it extremely well or extremely competently. It actually has it’s own event at many ISA Tree Climbing Competitions. In fact, it actually has a sub-cultural following that many people in the tree climbing world are torn between because it’s existed so long in the context of tree climbing competitions and tree climbing in general, and it represents a clear perforation between the strong and the weak, and if you can’t footlock extremely proficiently you will not accumulate enough points to make masters and have a successful perception of yourself a tree climbing competitor. Footlocking plagues my conscience from the moment I wake in the morning until I lay down at night with visions of raw hands warmed up by dyneema or polyester or some other damn thing.

“You want to use this rope, or trade it out” echoes constantly in my mind.

“I’ll trade it out,” I say at the dinner table under my breath by accident sometimes.

“What did you say,” my wife asks, confused.

“Nothing,” I reply. “I’m sorry.”

Footlocking poisons my veins and cramps my forearms and makes my knees sore for many days and many nights. Footlocking poisons every good thought I’ve ever had about tree climbing. It hurts when I think about it and it hurts when I don’t think about it because, like a real enemy, I don’t trust it and I feel as though if I ever loose sight of it is when it may be most terrorizing. The only people that are good at it will be remembered in history as a pure representation of the classical western perception of success: naked and perfect and golden or granite, high upon a pedestal. Footlocking is for people that walk the world not as wanderers and tinkerers, but as champions and perfectionists. Footlocking can easily break a soft heart. Footlocking can easily break a soft tie. Footlocking can easily break a soft quarrel between friends or between lovers. Like the deep brittle cold of winter, I wonder when it will go away, and like the unbearable heat of summer, I wonder when it will have some kind of mercy. Footlocking has no mercy. I know if there is any way out of hell, it will be by this method, and this method alone. Because you can’t get out of hell, the same way you can’t get out of footlocking. It is an endless, painfully delightful reality for the wicked, and a sick, twisted addiction for the insane.

Footlocking, with a capital F.