I was about halfway up the cliff when the fear stopped me cold. I had been doing just fine until I reached this overhang. My right foot was on the edge of a wide crack in the rock; my left foot was lower, resting on a tiny nodule of stone; my hands were flat against the granite wall. Up to this point handholds and footholds had been plentiful and I’d been climbing fairly quickly, thinking fast, letting momentum take me from one move into the next. But now, about 50 feet up from the base of the cliff, I was stuck. I stood there looking for my next move and saw nothing within reach.
     Craig, the Outward Bound instructor down there on the ground, couldn’t know precisely what I was seeing; he couldn’t know on which small bumps in the rock my eyes fell, but he was familiar with the shelf that was blocking my path and the routes across it. He also knew something I didn’t: he knew the nature of the decision I was going to have to make to finish this climb.
     The shelf was several feet above my head; it stuck out of the rock like a skewed mantelpiece, wider on the left, protruding further from the cliff-face on that side. I’d have to cover less distance to get over the top if I chose the right side, but I saw nothing above the shelf except smooth rock, nothing to grab hold of, nothing to keep me up there. I might be able to push myself over the right side from where I stood, but then I’d be scratching frantically for handholds before falling backward into space. (I could see myself falling when I looked up there.) If I went to the left, the initial effort would have to be greater, but I could see potential handholds above the shelf on that side; if I could get onto the top of it, I might be able to stand there for a moment and grab something.
     “What are you going to do?” shouted Craig.
     “I don’t know; I’m looking.”
     “Most people take the right side,” said Craig. “Can you see the route that way?”
     “No. I don’t see anything to hold onto that way.”
     “Okay,” he said. “You’re in a tough place. Where are your feet going to go? Look for some place to put your feet. You’ll find the handholds once you get up there. Find a place for your feet first.”
     This was the first time anybody had clued me in to that little bit of technique, and it didn’t seem to make sense. I was four-stories up a cliff, standing on next-to-nothing, and I was scared. To surmount this shelf, I was going to have to get close enough to the underside to reach up and over it, grab something on top and pull myself up. For some time, the duration of which I didn’t want to calculate, I’d be grasping a piece of the cliff I couldn’t even see from where I now stood, and the rest of me would be hanging in thin air over the edge of the mantel. The thought of taking both feet off the rock at the same time seemed ludicrous, but that was the nature of the problem; I was not going to be able to keep both my feet and my hands on the wall.
     “What are you going to do?” Craig shouted.
     “I think I’m going up the left side.”
     “You can do that,” he said, “but it’s tough. It’s a bigger move. What do you see?”
     I saw a foothold. It was a big stretch, but it was a relatively large outcropping several feet closer to the shelf than the tiny nodule on which my left foot now rested. If I could reach it, I might be able to push off of it with enough force to reach around the top of the shelf with both hands and pull myself up. But if I missed the handholds, if they proved to be out of reach once I got up there, I was going to take my first fall. (I could see myself swinging back and dropping, bouncing off the wall a couple of times as I fell, until Craig would be able to stabilize the belay rope. What would that feel like? How much would it hurt? Where would I get the nerve to try again?)
     I tried to clear my head and focus on the route I’d chosen. I lifted my left leg high, with my knee well above the level of my waist, and stretched it toward the foothold under the shelf. I hesitated as I felt a groin muscle begin to pull against the effort. All of my 175 pounds were resting on the ball of my right foot. I was going to have to get what power I could from the right leg at the start, but the left leg was then going to have to propel me across the shelf. I imagined myself standing on the left leg, reaching across the shelf to the handholds on top and pulling myself up, as I would pull myself out of a swimming pool. I saw it; it could be done.
     “You can do it,” yelled Craig when he saw me hesitate. “Go for it.”
     I went, pushing as hard as I could off my right foot, trying simultaneously to stand on the left. My left leg began to straighten and suddenly I was almost high enough to see over the top of the shelf. I reached both hands over the mantel and searched blindly with my fingers for something to grab. I tried to lean into my palms and pull my torso up, but my hands were slipping through fine sand and gravel until, without my knowing when it happened, my left foot slipped, too, and I began sliding down the cliff.  "Falling,” I shouted, as I dropped off the shelf and slid eight or ten feet down the rock, tearing skin from my fingertips and knees until Craig pulled the rope taut.
     I scrambled back to my previous position, startled and shaken. If I couldn’t make that move what was I going to do? I had already decided there was no other way up the wall. The route to the right, which Craig said was more popular, was invisible to me.
     “That’s a big move,” Craig shouted. “You can make it, but you have to commit to it.” He was explaining this very matter-of-factly. Outward Bound instructors typically provide only the bare minimum of technical assistance, but they are generous with motivational advice. “It’s a dynamic move,” he added, so I wouldn’t think I was fouling up something easy, I suppose. “You have to make a commitment to it.”
     As I stood there panting, slowly regaining my breath, I began to settle down. I wasn’t aware of any pain. My immediate concern was to get the bandana around my neck untied with one hand, so I could wipe the sweat out of my eyes. Then, looking over the route to the left again, I decided my mistake had been in delaying the first move. I had lifted my left leg into position, but had paused to visualize the rest of the action before shifting my weight to that side. By the time I'd been ready to go again, the momentum of the initial movement had dissipated and all of my weight was back on my lower, right foot; I simply couldn’t get enough power from that side to cover the necessary distance.
     Okay, now what? I figured out what I’d done wrong, and I thought I could see what had to be done next. So why was I hesitating again?
     “What do you see?” shouted Craig.
     I didn’t answer him. I stood there looking up at the underside of the shelf, wiping the sweat from my forehead and neck, buying time. What if it didn’t work a second time? (I saw myself falling again.) What if I got started, only to freeze and lose the momentum again?
     As I stood there I began to feel embarrassed. Why was I hesitating? I heard cheers off to my right, as somebody took another route up the cliff. What if I failed on this route, and somebody chose it after me and succeeded? Somebody to my left yelled “Climbing,” signaling that another student had begun an ascent. How long could I stand here looking up? Was I now just pretending to study the route?
     “What do you see?” Craig repeated.
     "Climbing," I shouted, pushing hard off my right foot with all the energy I had, then planting my left foot squarely in its new place before exploding from there toward the shelf. As I left both footholds behind and reached over the ledge, I was conscious of being in flight for a split second. When my palms hit the rock on top of the shelf this time, I leaned into them desperately, knowing my arms alone had to do the job of lifting me over the mantel. I felt the granite scrape both shins as they were dragged across the sharp edge of the mantel, and this hot flash of pain told me I was safe.
     I stood on the shelf and looked up at another 40 feet of rock, but the angle looked more gradual. The last several moves seemed so obvious that I couldn’t remember them later. The crew at the top cheered as I scrambled over the last, shallow ledge. As they tied me into an anchor, so I could take my turn belaying another climber, I looked out across miles of North Carolina mountains and quietly laughed.