THE ACHIEVER

MARICELA ROSALES HAD EVERYTHING AGAINST HER. SHE BECAME A CLIMBER ANYWAY.

- CHARLIE LIEU

ON A STARLESS SPRING NIGHT IN 1999, a 9-year-old girl opened her window, popped the screen, and swung her legs out. Brushing against the siding, she watched large flakes of peeling paint fall 15 feet to the ground. “This is it,” she muttered. “Now or never.”

Diagnosed with scoliosis two years prior, Maricela “Marci” Rosales had been periodically bedridden. While a back brace hindered her mobility, it was not the greatest limitation to her exploration. Since their neighborhood bordered Los Angeles’s housing projects, where drugs, gangs and stray bullets posed ever-present dangers, Marci’s parents enforced strict rules about when she could leave the twobedroom unit they shared with Marci, her brother, her sister, a nephew and a great uncle.

The moldy, dilapidated structure that sheltered Marci felt like her prison at times; the brace that supported her back, her shackle. She found solace thumbing through second-hand copies of National Geographic her father had bought for pennies at estate sales. Losing herself in images of faraway lands, Marci longed to see the world from all its angles.

From her windowsill perspective, Marci surveyed the landscape: the neighbor’s old trailer and a skeleton of a garage, charred black from a long-ago fire, loomed across the driveway. Just then, a distant shot rang out, and like a runner at the starting line, she was off. Marci manteled out and stemmed between the roof, the wall and a tree to land below her window.