Climbing for their lives

MICHAEL AND COOPER ARE HEADED FOR THE rocks. Climbing companions for years, they scramble across the high scrub of Mt. Pinos, removed from Los Angeles by two hours on Interstate 5, 23 miles up the road into Los Padres National Forest and three miles on foot.

Shoes, rope, chalk, hexes and carabiners rustle in their backpacks. Bits of quartz glimmer in the granite boulders, and lichen clings in blotches of red, green and black.

“That face?” asks Cooper, scanning a big jumble of rock like a crook casing an empty house.

“That crevice?” asks Michael.

This mountaintop, about 8,800 feet above sea level, is not an ideal climbing spot. But this excursion is about more than that. There are skies to be scanned tonight, and newcomers to be entertained, and there is, perhaps, a snooze button to be punched on a certain biological alarm clock.

“I believe,” Michael is saying, “that we can run that face to the top.” Then he circles up the hill, behind the 45-foot-high boulder, to clamber up and set a top rope. Cooper waits below with me and Meghan.

Michael, about 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds, has a far longer reach than Cooper, who is 5-foot-5 and 110 pounds and far more flexible. But I’ve been withholding the salient fact on this mountaintop.

Cooper, who has just started ninth grade, is 14. Michael, a 56-year-old photographer and part-time college instructor, is her father. Any day now, Michael knows, Cooper is likely to slip into deep teendom, turning her attention away from home and toward friends like Meghan, who is also 14.

This isn’t so bad, really. Michael and his wife, Lynda, have watched Cooper’s brother, Byron, grow into a sharp 17-year-old who plays horn, says please and thank you and is willing to tolerate his parents’ presence providing the dosage isn’t excessive. But adolescence is what it is. At a certain point, the marketability of a weekend with Dad (without electricity or running water) goes the way of a loose pebble on a steep slope.

Back down the hill in the big city, as it happens, film critics are buzzing over the just-released “Thirteen,” the R-rated film debut of director Catherine Hardwicke. In the semiautobiographical story, co-written by the film’s 15-year-old co-star, one young teen girl introduces another to body-piercing, shoplifting, drinking, LSD, sex -- basically, trouble of the most harrowing kinds. The parents are overmatched. The setting is a Los Angeles public school. Nobody has challenged the plot’s realism.

With such trouble waiting at the lower elevations, who wouldn’t want his child clipped in on a strong rope, the better to reel her back from peril?

Back to the mountain. On the way up, Meghan has been rhapsodizing about the cute comic named Mitch she saw last night on Comedy Central and scoffing at the flurry of nervous grown-up phone calls provoked by the 14-year-old and 13-year-old who were caught making out at camp last week. Michael plays it cool, pretending only vague conversational interest. Fourteen. Making out. Hmmm.

Cooper, working safer territory, tells Meghan about the time she and her brother and a friend were climbing a brick wall at Marshall High School while her dad looked on. A man came out of the church across the street and beheld the father, calmly observing as three young persons clung to tenuous finger-and-toe perches at heights that might be construed as dangerous.

“You are the worst parent I’ve ever seen,” Cooper remembers the man hollering, a Bible under one arm. Michael remembers too. In the retelling, they beam with outlaw pride.

“I always thought that kids should grow up learning about risk,” says Michael later. “That we should teach them to live with risk early in life.”

An old hand at surfing and cycling, Michael took up climbing about a decade ago. By seven years ago, when I met him, Lynda and the kids, their home near Echo Park included a plywood climbing wall in the backyard and a pair of gymnastics rings dangling from the exposed beams of the living room. Risk to be lived with.

At the moment, however, we have emergent adolescence to be lived with.

“Let’s face it, you’re old,” Cooper will later needle her father. “I should get paid for hanging out with you.”

But on the rocks, they quickly drift into the insular patter of merry climbers everywhere.

He: “Be careful now. Talk to me all the way.”

She: “You wanna rap down it?”

He: “Yeah, I’ll rap down it.”

She: “This could definitely be a traverse. A dangerous, edgy traverse.”

More outlaw pride. About this time Meghan turns to me and says:

“Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”

Sure, Meghan. One of these two is hanging on by his wits and fingertips in defiance of inevitable natural forces, and the other one is rock-climbing.