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Climbing Life
Mill City founder and builder Mark Sousa
A Portrait
Spring 2007
by Jeffrey Zygmont
Mark Sousa says he opened Mill City Rock Gym either in the
autumn or winter of 1994. He can't begin to guess which month, and he
is not even certain about the season. For that matter, he can't say for
sure if the year was really 1994. It might have been '95. But, no, he's
pretty certain it was '94. Then, with characteristic informality, forthright,
clutching one raised knee in his two clasped hands, dangling the other
leg, rocking backward as he sits on top of his desk, he dismisses the
issue entirely. Autumn or winter of '94 is close enough and let's move
on.
So we have Mill City Rock Gym built maybe about a dozen
years ago by a guy who continues to wander through life without a discernible
map or plan, but with a traveler's oddball interest in side-road attractions.
We have a rock center opened by a guy with expressive impulses that strive
to represent cosmic order and form in mere homey constructions: beadwork,
polished stone, shaped walking sticks, a fence. It's run by a guy with
a simian physique that makes his movements on vertical surfaces appear
effortless, ordinary, ineffably graceful, no matter the difficulty. We
have a hand-built climbing gym that to critical eyes would seem dingy
and disrepaired, but which earns devotion and even endearment from a disparate
group of casually dedicated climbers, oddball adventurers ourselves, who
consider the gym a retreat and a social haven as much as a serious climbing
center. How did all of this come about?
Mark is well matched to rock climbing both by his temperament
and by his physical form. But he is not particularly well suited for the
gym business or, for that matter, for any other kind of commercial adventure.
He runs the gym as an adjunct of his personality. The character of Mill
City is an extension of Mark Sousa's character. He is what brings us here.
Mark wandered quite a while before he discovered the calling, even though
early hints of his on-the-wall abilities emerged in high school in the
1960s.
As a teen he got into gymnastics: controlled motion,
obstinate grip, steeled torso, sustained balance. The interest arose spontaneously,
without any sort of official sanction or organized, adult encouragement.
At the time, organized gymnastics did not exist in Dracut, Massachusetts.
(Born in Lowell on September 19, 1948, Mark moved with his family to neighboring
Dracut at age 12.) But the high school let Mark and a handful of friends
use some gymnastics gear that the phys-ed department had pushed in a hole
years before. These were independent, semi-outcast kids who created their
own sub-cultural klatch by separating themselves from the football roughs,
the band tweets, the soccer dinks, pom-pom queens, science boffs, yearbook
gads and every other pat, established club that authority blessed. Later,
the Lowell YMCA adopted the group out of its mission to serve oily youth.
The Y bought equipment. It brought the boys to an organized meet. Mark,
having practiced leaps, dives, bends, bounces, twists, turns and swoops
with his characteristic, silent intensity, earned ribbons in several events.
For about 25 years after that, Mark engaged in a long,
broken run of terrestrial pursuits. After high school he fixed cars at
his father's garage in Lowell. He moved on to other repair shops, and
stayed in the car trade for about five years. He married. Together his
wife, Fay, and he ran off casually to live in the northern pine hills,
abandoning Lowell's static clutch around 1971 and renting a house up in
Northwood, New Hampshire, a speck east of Concord. To make rent they shared
the house with another couple. Mark clerked at a head shop on Salisbury
Beach. The store shut down when its owner abandoned it to become a shrink.
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