Psychovertical Page 19

  The sense of vertigo was instantaneous the moment my bum left the edge of the portaledge, inching out into space as Andy let out the rope, the overhanging wall putting far out of reach the illusory safety of being able to touch the rock. I thought about what would happen if the belay above failed, how each piece would unzip below it, and I’d fall, the shock on my jumars cutting into my single lifeline.

  Then the belay ripped out.

  I was falling. My stomach did a roller coaster flip.

  Then I stopped.

  A peg zinged past. My belay.

  Every molecule of my being attempted the impossible, to weigh nothing as I tried to work out what had happened.

  I hung on the rope trying to work out why I wasn’t dead yet.

  The rope stretched up out of sight. All I could think of was the rope had been held by one of the birdbeaks I’d placed in the flake scar the previous night.

  I worked out my options. If Andy or Ian pulled me back to the portaledge he would put further strain on whatever had held me and it could fail. I could hang here and wait to be rescued, but that would be a long wait. Or I could just climb the rope, the most scary option, but also the most promising one.

  ‘OK Andy,’ I said, trying to hide my fear, my voice cracking, ‘I’m going to jumar up slowly.’

  The choice in the end was easy. I would either make it or fall.

  Feeling like a man defusing a bomb, I inched my jumars up the rope, trying to minimise every gram of extra strain on the rope.

  As I climbed the wall grew closer and closer, until I could touch it, something that brought a strange comfort considering there was nothing to hold on to. I said a little prayer, and asked almighty El Cap to spare me.

  On I went, my boots now scuffing against the rock, scared to look up and see what held me to the world.

  I moved over a small roof and saw it. A single small flexing skyhook wrapped over a flake no bigger than a biscuit, the one I’d clipped my rope into for some reason the previous night.

  I reached the hook and clipped in, then set about preparing myself to finish this difficult pitch.

  As I clipped my karabiners and hardware to my harness I felt a sense of shock at what had just taken place. Where had I found that courage? Would I ever have imagined myself so brave? It was as if I was someone else, someone much stronger than me, someone I’d give anything to be.

  I started climbing.

  On the final day on the wall I led the crux of the route as the sun came up, a pitch named ‘Fly or Die’ by the first ascensionists, a bulging barrier to the summit split only by a copperheading seam. As I set off, moving slowly and milking everything I had learnt so far, I thought about my chances. The pitch had gained its name after the leader shouted down that if he fell he would have to ‘fly or die’, any mistake sending him splashing onto a hanging slab beneath. I thought about how I had come so close to dying at least three times in the last two weeks, half a dozen times this year, maybe twenty times in the last five. All these epics meant so much to me, but I wondered how long it would be until it wasn’t me telling the story and I was the story itself.

  But as I moved on, the wall and the sun at my heels, I felt no fear at all, only an immense joy at being in such a position, the exhilaration of my life in that moment burning through the fear of a death that could perhaps come to me at any moment.

  For Emily

  Pitch 5 Reticent Wall

  I BROUGHT UP the second bag slowly, my thighs and waist bruised after a week of hauling, my fingertips ragged and my feet throbbing. I noticed that I was moaning involuntarily each time I squatted. I was knackered, exhausted, wiped out, but happy that another day, another pitch was over.

  Only nine more to go.

  The day had started a little sombrely. I’d woken and my first thought had been to wonder if I’d be alive at the end of it. This had been nothing more than a simple question, like ‘I wonder what I should have for breakfast,’ or ‘Should I have a shower?’ I’d noted the night before that on the topo a flake on the next pitch was marked with a skull and crossbones. After the flake on pitch four I had doubted I could handle anything worse. In the end, however, it had gone by with little fuss. I wondered if I were becoming braver, or maybe one can only have so much fear and I’d used my ration the day before.

  I thought it was strange how I could become so accepting of danger and of dying. It reminded me of a story about Evel Knievel and his attempt to jump thirteen London buses at Wembley Stadium. The moment he arrived on his bike, high on the ramp that shot down towards the pitch where the buses were all lined up, he knew he wouldn’t make it. When asked why he did it anyway, his reply was, ‘What else could I do?.’ Knievel crashed, breaking his pelvis.

  One thing was certain: I was no Evel Knievel. I had never been so scared on a climb. This was probably caused partly by the fact that I was alone, with no one else to bolster my darker moods or share the fear of leading, and more importantly that this WAS one of the most scary climbs anyone could choose to do.

  How was it that I could continue on against so much fear? The route seemed to be growing harder by the day. Perhaps that was why. Perhaps each pitch overcome made it possible to plough on to the next one. After all, hadn’t the first pitch seemed impossible? Hadn’t so many moves seemed beyond me, yet each time I had found myself beyond them?

  This had always been the problem with me and Mandy. She was normal. She wouldn’t and couldn’t accept the fact that the thing you loved could be the thing that killed you. She knew me better than anyone, and knew that the harder I climbed, the harder I would want to climb, so she feared that one day I wouldn’t come back. Every year we would come to the brink of splitting up. I wanted the guilt-free life of having no one else’s worry, to be free to climb what I wanted, not to negotiate for time away as if she was my boss. She wanted a normal husband, a teacher, a lawyer, someone who washed their car and looked forward to city mini-breaks and holidays on the beach. She wanted a normal life and what I wanted was abnormal. Yet each time, when it came to it, we stayed together. We had met when we were kids. We didn’t know anything else than each other.

  But now I was a dad, I had a job I had to do to pay my mortgage, I was soon to be thirty, and another child was on the way. My climbing partners were moving on – months away in the Himalayas; training to be mountain guides in the Alps – while I sold boots and sat on the beach in Scarborough every weekend. This climb scared me, but not as much as knowing I’d made the wrong choices and lost a better life for all of us.

  Are you so scared to face up to what you really want that you’d kill yourself up here?

  The sun was low in the sky by the time I’d hauled up the last bag, clipping it to the belay, and backing it up with its haul line to a second karabiner. I was mindful of the story of the three climbers who died when their haul bag came unclipped and, falling to the end of the rope, broke their belay, sending them tumbling down the wall for thousands of feet. A friend who had been on El Cap at the time described how he’d heard a loud noise and seen objects falling down the wall, only realising what they were when he saw arms and legs flailing. Then he heard the sound of them and their bags hitting the ground.

  Remembering stories like this kept you alive and on your toes.

  I reached down under the haul bag and unclipped my portaledge. I was desperate to flake out. Once the ledge was set up, I lay down and just let the fabric take my weight for a minute, my body relaxing. Then I sat up and took off shoes, gloves and knee pads, clipping them to the edge of the ledge for the morning. Next I slipped off the leg loops of my harness, to let some fresh air get to my thighs. This meant I was only attached by the waist belt, which would reduce the amount of time I could hang before blacking out if I were to fall off the ledge, but I knew I was safe enough: this kind of exposure was no worse to me now than sitting on the top deck of a bus.

  I pulled on my fleece, and took a wet wipe from my first-aid stuff-sack to clean my hands and face where
the grime was thick and black. My skin felt good, the breeze blowing its dampness dry.

  My eyes were heavy with fatigue, but I pulled out my food bag and rummaged around for a can of Coke and an apple, then sat with my legs hanging over the edge, my back against El Cap.

  The evening is always the best time on a wall. The climbing is over for the day. Wounds can be licked and food shovelled down. Tomorrow is too far away to consider. There is only the relief of making it to the now. Appreciation of the moment is one of the best aspects of climbing, something that I find missing from normal life, with its countless worries. On a wall there are no thoughts of savings, promotions or pensions. Your future only stretches as far as the next two shiny bolts at the belay above.

  I knew I should have a crap, as I’d not gone since leaving Lay Lady Ledge, but the thought was too grim. I always found it hard taking a dump on a portaledge. I remember Andy Perkins telling me that you should practise having a crap in a paper bag at home before going on a big wall ‘because although you may think you know where your asshole is, you don’t till you’ve crapped into a bag.’

  It could wait. Using all my will power, I leaned over the edge of the portaledge and pulled up the bags that contained my evening meals, finding a bagel and some cheese, too tired to eat anything else. Lastly I found my Walkman in its stuff sack and clipped it to the suspension of my portaledge, to listen while I munched away.

  I had set off with about twenty tapes, but unfortunately, on the first day, a tube of sun-cream had exploded in the bag and destroyed every tape apart from one: Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ – not my first choice of album for such a climb. In fact I had no idea where it had come from – but I was glad of it.

  Usually, on a wall, upbeat music works best, making you believe for half an hour that it’s the soundtrack to your epic, a drummer boy’s beat during battle. Nevertheless, Simon and Garfunkel were good company. My only company. As the sun set, I pressed Play.

  Music always sounds amazing on the wall. Combined with exhaustion and adrenaline it enhances your senses. I can hear things I have never heard before, notice subtle notes and key changes, back beats and melodies I have never appreciated. Most of all the music is a welcome escape for a little while.

  I lay on my ledge in the dark, bats swooping around me, listening to the gentle harmonies. I felt like a character in one of the songs, strung out and heart-broken, the loneliest man on El Cap. I looked up at the stars, now bright, and made out the shape of the rock against them; the odd glint of a headtorch visible on the wall made it look as if the night was spilling onto it.

  The next track began: ‘For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her’, a beautiful and haunting song. Garfunkel’s words drifted in my ears and into the night. Always a militant atheist, I could believe as the music began that a god existed.

  Garfunkel began to sing his love song, which made me think of home, and Mandy and Ella. I wondered what they would be doing right now, and if they missed me. I missed them. I thought of Ella, who no doubt wondered where I’d gone. For a child a week is a lifetime, and a month is an eternity. I would have given anything to have seen her right then. She was perfect. Wasn’t all this empty and pointless when compared to her? How could I possibly imagine that a life spent climbing, guiding, and spending months in the Himalayas would make me happy? In a few months my son would be born. Imagine the fun things we could do. The adventures we could have. Wouldn’t their company, their smiles and questions and laughter, be immeasurably more valuable than climbing alone on a worthless lump of soulless stone? I lay back and thought about Scarborough, Filey, Robin Hood’s Bay, seaside towns on the east coast, of sitting on the sand and watching my children play. Mandy by my side, smiling …

  I woke in the dark to the click of the tape finishing.

  Hell freezes over

  Patagonia. June 1999

  MIDNIGHT. THE FOUR of us stood in a circle and prepared our equipment. I glanced around at Paul, Jim and Nick, watching their eyes dart nervously from behind the narrow slits in their fleece face masks as they attached hardware to their harness, uncoiled ropes, clipped on crampons. No one spoke. I felt a deep sense of unease, almost panic.

  A four-man team is designed more for comfort than speed, and there under Mount Fitzroy’s 5,000-foot Super Couloir, a fearsome route on its vast North-West Face, with the temperature way beyond cold, comfort was what we needed. Why was I standing with these men? Paul Ramsden, Nick Lewis and Jim Hall were a tight team who’d put up lots of hard first ascents in places like Alaska, Antarctica and the Himalaya. They were gnarly. Hard men. I hardly knew them. I certainly didn’t want to climb this route. What were we about to do? It was suicidal, but I knew I wasn’t strong enough to speak my mind. They’d asked me to come, had seen something in me they’d liked or needed, and I couldn’t back out now, even if I wanted to. As ever, I didn’t realise that each of us thought the same about the others.

  It was June in Patagonia, at the tip of Argentina, midwinter in the southern hemisphere. This was my first proper expedition – and what an initiation. You could count the number of teams who’d tried to climb here in winter on one hand, unsurprising when you consider the fearsome reputation Patagonia has even in summer: hurricane winds and storms that last for weeks.

  I was here, gearing up for the longest, coldest, most dangerous climb of my life. It was beyond my wildest dreams, yet now I knew I didn’t want to go. I had thought I lived for moments like this, but something was different. I knew I was going to feel different, too.

  Soon we began to chill, reminding us it was time to go. We couldn’t put it off any longer.

  Picking up my ice tools I followed the others and began climbing into the black void under the wide starlit sky.

  All I could think about was her.

  Mandy had always been determined to have babies. In one of the first conversations we had had, she told me she just wanted to have loads of babies.

  I managed to avoid the whole baby-making part for nearly ten years, arguing that it was never the right time. I didn’t realise that there is no such thing.

  I suppose I knew the game was up when she told me how, when she saw mothers with their children, she wanted to cry. We agreed that we’d give it a go.

  Ploughing upwards through knee-deep powder, we were soon swallowed by the narrow boilerplate-sided couloir, which cleaved its way up the dizzying wall. All around us, in the weak beams of our headtorches, we glimpsed the relics of other attempts. Bleached strips of disassembled rope hung frozen and stiff from flakes like old battle flags. Pegs, cams and wires sprouted from the walls, a gallery of lost climbs. I thought about the story of a climber finding a body sticking out of a crack, here, on this wall, its hair blowing like the ends of a tattered old rope as they moved past. I kept my head down and climbed.

  Midnight. The contractions began. Mandy woke me up and asked me to start timing them, but by the time the next one arrived I’d fallen asleep. Frustrated by my lack of interest, she pushed me out of bed and told me to ring the hospital – and to put on The Sound of Music to take her mind off what was happening.

  With phone in my hand, I sat naked on the stairs and shivered, waiting for someone to answer. I felt unmoved by the coming birth. I wondered if something was wrong with me.

  It was too cold for the snow to melt and then transform into ice, so we moved together up snow-covered slabs for the first thousand feet.

  My fear and doubt were quickly replaced by the strain of heavy rucksacks, worries about cold feet, and, surprisingly enough, the simple pleasures of climbing, of moving quickly through such a place.

  The alpine horror stories which surround it began to recede as we came to grips not with the myth but with the reality of the route. As my hands and feet grew numb, and my eyelids stuck to each other when I blinked, I reminded myself how much I love the cold. Bits of my face stung around the edges of my balaclava.

  The light from the moon, silvery and dead, shone down o
n the blank walls all around us, illuminating the toothy towers and ice cap beyond. It felt unreal, reminding me of an airbrushed sci-fi poster, so harsh and alien. Another world.

  I’ve always found that I had to be pushed into everything: getting married, buying a house, learning to drive. Perhaps having kids was no different? I hoped that as with all those other things, I’d eventually shrug my shoulders and think, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as I thought.’ Mandy once asked me what I wanted most in life, and without thinking I answered, ‘For you to be happy.’ She wanted a baby more than me and I suppose I knew it was inevitable. It was that simple and I knew it.

  Each pitch was harder than the last, with snow giving way to old, fragile ice. The couloir became narrower; the ice running down it was no more than a delicate vein of possibility. With one foot on ice, the other balanced on a vertical band of loose diorite, we cautiously tapped our picks into the thicker smears and hoped for the best, never sure we’d reach a solid belay before the rope ran out.

  Anchored to a poor ice screw and an old peg, I stood on my side-points, trying not to put any weight on the belay as Paul made slow progress up a 70º corner. With no protection between us save for the belay, I forgot about my cold feet as I watched him scratch at the ice, carefully piecing together a shaky sequence of delicately balanced moves up a foot-wide, inch-thick strip of ice. Jim and Nick eyeballed us from below, both cut and bruised from the ice we were sending down. Neither of them said anything. We knew what would happen if he fell.

  All eyes were on Paul’s crampons.

  Without warning, a foothold broke as he weighted it, knocking me onto the anchors as it whizzed past. They held.

  Paul wobbled on one front point, the weight of his rucksack trying to tip him. Then with extreme care, stacking his feet one above the other, he moved up, and regained his balance.