My
first rock-climb was on my 20th birthday, October 7 1952. My last was
on May 19 2011, when I was 78 - although I'd had a
gap (to put it mildly) from 1952 to 1973. I know I won't climb again
and I'm not being all stoical or mellow about it. Really, inwardly,
I'm groaning and keening as all that long experience of effort and
delight has reached its terminus at last.
In
1952, on a moist and overcast morning on Lochnagar, I went up Black
Spout Buttress, led by two good lads I've never seen since, Gavin
Alexander, who looked like a colonial civil servant circa. 1910, and
Ian MacPhail, who was lean and self contained and edited the
Aberdeen student journal. As we geared up on the scree, in the
enclosing gloom of the corrie, a voice said out of the air, 'Davey'"
Fancy seeing you here " It was Bill Brooker; his invisible
partner (I worked out many years later) was Tom Patey. They were
putting up a route they named The Stack. Our route I can't quite
identify. It took a mole‑like
crawl through a squeeze between the pinnacle and the massif, then you
stepped out into what felt like the misty air itself and crept up an
exposed slab while the great ribs and faces gleamed dully all around.
The
last climb was a trio of wee gems on a cragette in the jaws of
Patterdale above Ullswater. The outcrop is called Oxford Slabs -
unfortunately, because who wants a reminder of, say, Professor
J.H.Clapham and his little circus of acolytic students when you're in
the wild heart of Cumbria? The lines we found are not in any
guidebook. They must be well frequented because there's an iron stake
at the top and the scree is trodden through to gravel-probably by
learners from the Outward Bound school not far away. Just for fun we
named our routes: Sere, Slant, and Trident. The first had a single
yellowed holly leaf lying at
its foot; the second followed the diagonal grain of the rock (and
Slant is also a distant echo of Slape and Brant); and the third was
gouged near its top with a natural triple scar.
'We'
was myself and Chris Culshaw, who taught me technical climbing in the
early 70s and has come with me up dozens of routes ever since. Mostly
in the Lake District. He taught Remedial English at my children's
comprehensive in Morecambe and
has written many brilliant pioneering schoolbooks: a patient,
humorous man and the best conceivable partner on rock. We put a top
rope down Oxford Slabs because we know that we're both near the end
of our physical tethers - and in my case have just passed it. Trident
was gruelling enough: secured from above, I found myself committed
to a steep, sheer passage with no resting place and I had to do a
mantel which made my arms feel as though I was trying to lift a grand
piano with a piece of string.
Some feelings
are much worse than that and they're what has
grounded me at last. Colour drains from the scene, a sparkly effect
sets in like the blizzard on TV when no channel has been and
all power of upward or forward movement drains away. This is because
my heart, with its narrowed valve-and arteries, is failing to pump
enough oxygen-rich blood to my brain. This had nearly killed me in
November 2005. A daily cocktail of pills keeps me going - up to-a
point. In 2009 I was climbing a route called Jomo in Trowbarrow
Quarry near Silverdale (North Lancashire) with Dick Renshaw, now
a sculptor, once a high-altitude climber until the rarefied air got
to him high on K2 and the expedition doctor told him not to go up
there again.
Jomo has two pitches, easy lumpy slabs up to a platform,
then a delicate creep up a gangway abutting on a wall and a
wonderfully precarious swing around a jutting beak, leaving a
lay-away and using an ever-shinier limestone nodule for the right
toe. I've soloed it and climbed it with my wife. Today I lead the
slabby start and leave the gorgeous climax to Dick. After a minute or
two, colour drains, sparkles take over, energy collapses to near
zero.. I have to pause and spray clove-flavoured glycerol tri nitrate
under my tongue from a little bottle I've put in my pocket for the
past four years. In minutes full consciousness steals over me again;
I step on up and fifteen minutes later, following Dick up the crux,
I complete the route - not frightened-
chastened, even humiliated. Dick is understanding and unworried -
steadiness personified.
I'm
left thinking what good is this, medicating my way up steep rock?
where's the glory, the unalloyed delight, the sense of being at home
in this fierce element, of being as equal to it as an orangutan is to
the forest.?
This
realization creeps over me like frost for the next two years, thawed
briefly by that joyous session on the wee outcrop in Patterdale. In.
the meantime I develop a fantasy with one of my climbing sons, Neil
(first.free ascensionist, with Rick Campbell, of Thor on Shelter
Stone Crag above Loch Avon) that he'll take me up a nice long
mountainous Diff. or V.Diff, once I'm eighty. What a milestone that
would be, what a happy defiance of old age. He and his elder
brother Peter had taken me up Grooved Arete on the Rannoch Wall of
Buachaille Etive Mhor for my 70th. A perfectly happy outing:
technical edging up
the first slim pillar - airy step out onto the face - frictioning up
a huge slab with a macro-grain like sharkskin - hefty heaves up the
final corner; and to end the day a feast of curried puy lentils down
at camp in the stony, water-rustling darkness of Glen Etive.
Ten
years later... the arteries have not magically shed their fatty
furring, the valve is still too narrow (and really needs to be
replaced by an artificial one that looks like an inch
of complicated macaroni), my thumbs and shoulders are rusting up, my
bowel is so much obsolete plumbing, my gait and balance are slow,
uncertain, no longer to be taken for granted with the naturalness of
an organism in its prime. I could get up to the crag (so could an
aged slug) - if my partner had the patience of a saint, or a
psychiatrist. I could manage the rock technically, if the spray was
there in my pocket. No freedom of release in that, or revelling in
wild beauty, or sense of enhanced belonging to the physical world.
The
high episodes of those years from 1973 to 2011 are peaks in a range
that seemed as though it would ripple on indefinitely. The elastic of
the stretch through the overhangs on Haste Not (White Ghyll,
Langdale), as you keep keep your fingers clutched on the point of a
shield and wonder if your toes are ever going to reach lodgement in
the neuk at its foot. The gibbon-like swinging from one rattling
spike to another on the big traverse on Snoopy (Mainreachan Buttress,
Fuar Toll, Wester Ross). The ledges on Moonshadow (Blouberg,
Transvaal), eight hundred feet above the early morning polyphony of
the baboons down there in the bush,while Alpine Swifts arc and whirr
a few yards out from the ochre and cinnamon planes of the rockface.
Even our failure on the Rock of Gibraltar, when Neil and I roped back
down from three hundred feet or so (from a sling on an iron stanchion
left by the British gunnery engineers in the 1780s), while cracking,
bursting stones hurtled down into a scrapyard patrolled by dark-maned
Alsatians - even that failure was an episode to revel in, and breathe
again in relief at our escape, as we looked out from our hotel
balcony towards Algeciras and Morocco.
All
peaks - sunlit peaks - revisited a hundred times between 1 and 5
a.m., and their fellows in Buttermere and Wasdale, on Scafell and
Rivelin Needle, in Glen Etive and Coire Etchachan, on Stanage and
Mingulay and Beinn Eighe. It's a peculiar way to get to know the
world, blood on the knuckles, birdlime in the hair, uncertain of your
safety for hours on end, making journeys where the going is
everything and arriving is an anticlimax. It's a natural way, as
we see in the lives of rock-doves and ravens and peregrines. It's a
wholly human way, as we alternate between the weird aloneness of
yourself staring at an embedded rung of brownish rock and wondering
if its upper rim juts enough to give purchase to your finger ends
(the 5a pitch of Swastika, Trilleachan Slabs, Glen Etive) and the
togetherness of reunion with your partner at the finish, knowing you
had both.been through the same ordeal, won through it to the same
contentment.
While
climbing was continual, there had always been something to keep the
imagination simmering: memories of the last climb, as vivid and
improbable as a dream; a climb in prospect in an unexplored back dale
somewhere, or even in a new country. Doing the legwork for the 1987
F.& R.C.C. Buttermere guide had me combing Newlands and Birkness
Combe, Fleetwith Pike and upper Ennerdale, with eyes wide open and
alert as a hunting buzzard - an earthbound raptor carrying only a
pair of glasses, the old
guide, a notebook, and some chocolate-covered Kendal mintcake.
Three-quarters of the way up the Fleetwith Ridge, a slot opened
deeply into the rock - a flurry happened - something shot out and
away - a peregrine bolted eastward towards Green Crag, its image
shrinking suddenly in reverse zoom as it zigzagged past Haystacks and
left a clutch of olive eggs on the dust of thy, ledge. The moment
could hardly have happened if I'd been rattling gear or shouting to
a partner. I was alive, the bird was alive.
Such
moments were always about to happen. It was like a vista that kept
opening out indefinitely - always another crack to fit the fingers,
another overhang to muscle up boldly or (more likely) to creep round
cunningly, another gnarled cliff reaching skyward which might or
might not 'go'. Climbing was always more or less there - inside us,
ingrained. In the mid 70s, when all this was starting, I used to look
down at my feet,, as they stepped over cobbles or setts or the
patterned PVC on the kitchen floor and imagine that they were fitting
themselves to edges, gauge friction, avoid unsteady rock. As
experiences grew and layered themselves, it was as though the crags
were one complex, many-bodied creature to which we related, with its
nervous and vascular systems, its skeleton, its flesh. Or as Richard
Fortey the fossil expert (author of Life and The Earth) puts it, 'The
rocks beneath us are like an unconscious mind beneath the face of the
earth, determining its shifts in mood and physiognomy.'
So
the intimacy of connection between rock and self began to seem like
molding. I was the malleable stuff poured into the contours of the
rock, replicating its shape - which is what we do when we stretch an
arm the exact 27 inches along a face to grip a hold, curl the finger
ends 2 inches round an edge or bend the torso out and up and above an
overhang.
One
of the most tantalizing things about being grounded at last, and
robbed of that close keeping with the rock, is that I can see the
Langdale Pikes from the garden. Harrison's Stickle rises clear and
salient thirty miles north-north-west across the Vale of Westmorland
and the Kent estuary, across Windermerere and Grizedale Forest and
Elterwater - all invisible, of course, bedded down in their leafy
channels -until at last our vision reaches out to the Stickle, its
left flank angling steeply up to the abrupt flattening of the summit.
I last climbed there in the depth of foot-and-mouth. We had to walk
up the fell between red-and-white tapes that kept people off ground they
might contaminate as though we were trespassing on a crime scene. The
goal was Porphyry Slab, first climbed in the middle of the Greatest
War (August 11 1942).
What will never leave me is the start of pitch
3, a step onto and past an arete of cleanest rhyolite, buffeted by a
dry cold airflow from the southwest. No fear or worry, just that
stride out into a racing, cleansing element, like entering the ocean
for a swim. Now that jut of land has become one of the most
tantalising focal points among
many blue or grey skylines that I can no longer reach, except in
these words - in fantasy.
David Craig: 2013. (Previously unpublished)
