Psychovertical Read online

  I stood, unable to move, just waiting for the moment to pass, for whatever would happen to happen and resolve itself. If the baby was dead, we’d get over it. There would be time for other babies.

  God, what was wrong with me? Why was I so detached? SO scared.

  Did my father feel like this when I was born?

  Fourteen hours since the hellish descent began, I climbed down alone, too cold to wait my turn on the endless rappels. Barely in control, slipping and arresting, my headtorch almost as dead as my brain, I heard another pulse of wind break against the face. I stopped in my tracks, as I waited for it to pass. The sound was utterly terrifying, bringing back dark memories of being washed into the sea as a child one stormy Christmas.

  I leant into the slope to rest my back, pressed my head into the snow for a second and wondered how far I was from the bergschrund. Without warning a spindrift avalanche poured over me, choking and blinding. I panicked, slipped, and disappeared into a soft helter-skelter of snow that swooshed me down into the darkness.

  I came to rest just over the bergschrund and crawled away, too exhausted to think myself lucky. I kept trying to stand, but each time the wind kept hitting me, knocking me over; all I could do was crawl away, utterly defeated. Jim caught me up and passed on by, wrapped in his own sense of survival. Then the others.

  I got to my feet and staggered along behind them into the night.

  The midwife began to say ‘Wait’, but it was too late, the baby escaped into her hands. I turned to see it – I couldn’t help myself. The midwife’s head was bent down, stroking this grey dead thing. She was crying.

  I thought for the first time about what sort of person this baby might be … might have been. I’d never thought about it as a person before. I wondered about who it would have most resembled, the colour of its eyes, its hair, its laugh, its smile, its first word. I thought about who I might have grown to be. I thought about it loving me and me loving it.

  I’m hallucinating now. I see Napoleonic soldiers staggering along beside me, rifles dragging in the snow. I am tortured by the thought that I’ll never make it home, no matter how hard I try.

  Your family. They are waiting for you.

  I plunge down through the snow, glad of the tracks left by the others, although they are filling quickly. Every few metres the wind knocks me over, but I know it has lost, it can’t kill me any more, I’ve won.

  I’ve rationed my energy well, I’ve had to do it many times before, but now I’ve never felt so empty. I’ve been purged of emotion; there is no more feeling of self; my insides have shrivelled into knots of muscle. I’m totally empty. I’m about to stall, but the wind blows me on now, back towards our base camp. I think of our nylon oasis, of tea and biscuits, of light and laughter. I think about home.

  * * *

  I blinked, hardly believing this was happening. Then I blinked again as I saw a change, wanting it to be true. The baby was turning white, then pink. It opened its mouth, its hand jerked, its tiny body wriggled in the arms of the midwife, who raised her head and whispered, ‘She’s a girl.’

  My daughter.

  Ella.

  Midnight. We kneel in a circle in the snow. This was where our tent had been. Now it’s rolling out somewhere on the Patagonian ice cap. There is nothing left but some scraps of material that flap wildly like severed limbs. I’m too dehydrated to cry, and I know that frozen eyes would only add to my pain. I think about Ella, too young to know where I am, but old enough to know I’m not there. I want to be with her, not here with these strangers. I think about those phantom soldiers I’d passed, and of lives, new, old and changing.

  Wino

  Pitches 6 and 7 Reticent Wall

  I HAD BEEN on the wall alone for seven days, alone but not lonely. All my life I’d been a loner, finding my own company was company enough. As a child I would often wander off by myself, even when out with a group, walking on ahead, just thinking. I would cycle out of the city, or take the train and go camping. I never once felt alone. I was always there.

  As I grew up, the world seemed to bewilder me: people, emotions, the past and future, destiny and fate, who I was, how I got this way. I often wondered if that was why I became an obsessive; science fiction, drawing, bikes, climbing – I filled up my mind with junk, cramming it so full of clutter that there wasn’t any room for any other thoughts, any other emotions.

  I remember when my mother was seeing a policeman for a few years, his place in my life slowly turning from my mum’s boyfriend to a new dad. His own home and kids were out in the countryside, far removed from our home and the kids we were brought up with. He offered us a chance of a better life. Then one day, out of the blue, my mum told us they were splitting up.

  I was probably eleven. I felt a pain inside me, as if a plug had been yanked out and every ounce of happiness was being sucked away, until nothing was left. It hurt. Then I thought about buying a model plane with my pocket money, an Airfix Harrier, and how I’d paint it and set it on an old breadboard that I’d paint to look like an airfield, and how I’d buy some little figures to set around it. In that moment I felt the pain subside. I never ever wanted to feel like that ever again.

  You think too much.

  While I was climbing there was no time for loneliness or rambling thought. There was no imagining of what it meant to be adrift by myself on this wall. My thoughts could only be focused. There was only ‘what next’ and the ‘what if.’

  Focus. Focus. Focus.

  There were seemingly endless days of action alternating with exhausted sleep, the transition from one to the other often blurred; I would fall asleep with a mouthful of bagel, and wake with my hands already scraping up the wall.

  Then slowly I began to want company up there, another team close by to take my mind off what I was doing, another team that would make this space a little less blank. The nearest team were way over to my right, climbing a route called Pacific Ocean Wall, their actual location hidden from me by the overhanging nature of the route. Only their shouts could be heard in the dark as they joined each other at their last belay and set up camp. I missed the camaraderie of being a team of two or three, sitting together at the end of the day, laughing and joking about life, the pain, hardship and fear shared and so reduced, putting on a front.

  On my piece of wall there were now no other teams. Every few days climbers would nibble at the foot of the wall, on routes such as Mescalito or New Dawn, only to bail after a day or so due to a storm, the heat or just bad juju. Now, after a week alone, I woke to see a team climbing up the wall, moving higher than any others had, giving me hope that I might have some company.

  I set off to climb the next pitch. This part of the wall was almost featureless, with compact, small, loose flakes and vague seams that took copperheads. It was as hard as all the rest, but with care I made steady progress. Over a week of climbing had fine-tuned my skills, steadied my nerve. I hooked and beaked up the blank wall, taking my time, enjoying the space around me more than I had since I’d begun. Place a piece, test it, get on it. Place another piece, test it, get on it. I felt that I was actually getting somewhere.

  You’re soloing the fucking Reticent!

  After a few hours I reached a point where the route made a rising traverse over an area of granite that looked like layers of onion skin. Each layer allowed a birdbeak to be tapped in, giving me height to reach the next.

  I balanced across the wall, bouncing my beaks hard to make sure they wouldn’t rip out once I was on them. Each aggressive bounce increased my confidence until, after a few hard yanks, I moved up and looked for the next placement.

  With one flake to go until I reached the safety of a bolt, I tapped in the tip of the beak with my hammer, slowly and gently at first, then harder as it began to slip in between the wall and the flake.

  CRACK!

  The flake fractured, creating a large chunk of loose rock about two feet high. I shot out my hand and held it in place, fearing it would topple away and c
ut my rope, leaving me hanging from just a single beak. My reaction was instinctual and free of fear.

  I took a few seconds to realise I was safe: the wall was so steep, the flake would miss my ropes and haul bags. I could just let it go.

  But what about the team beneath me?

  Looking down I knew the people climbing up five hundred metres below would be in the firing line, but there was nowhere else to push the broken chunk of rock. I had to let it fall.

  From this height it would kill anyone it hit.

  I began to shout ‘Rock!’ as loud as I could, knowing my words would be lost in the updraught long before reaching them. I shouted again, waving with my free hand. Maybe they were foreign climbers, so I shouted ‘Attention!’ followed by ‘Shit’ and a line with every expletive I could think of.

  All I could do was remove my hand and allow the flake to topple off the wall, and tumble down into the void. I watched it spin slowly as it gathered speed, until its missile-like shape stabilised it and with a terrible air-ripping hum it shot away, disappearing out of sight under my feet.

  I continued to shout, with both hands now cupped around my mouth, knowing that it was too late. It would either hit them and kill them or miss. They were sitting ducks.

  It took several seconds for the sound to reach the climbers, the sound of air being ripped apart as the rock came towards them. The moment the sound reached them, they began to move, pushing themselves closer to the wall, ducking behind their haul bags, and trying to get as much of their bodies as possible directly below their helmets.

  I wanted to turn away, but I was transfixed, expecting the falling grey shape to strike one of the climbers, a puff of blood exploding from them, smashing and tearing them apart. I would have killed someone.

  Then I saw the trees shake. The boom of the flake’s impact, far out from the base of the wall, came up to me. It had missed the climbers; the steepness of the wall had saved them.

  Now I had their attention.

  I sank back in my harness with relief, and shouted ‘Sorry’. They weren’t taking any chances. Minutes later I watched them begin to retreat back to the ground. I was alone on the wall again.

  Several hours after starting the pitch, I climbed up below my first ledge since leaving Lay Lady five days ago. I felt like a man adrift for weeks seeing palm trees on the horizon. An island in the sky. I grabbed the edge of the ledge, threw my leg over and rested there, savouring the special moment. Ledges on El Cap are as rare as islands in the Atlantic, and so, like Lay Lady, this one had its own name – Wino Ledge. It was the size of a double bed, the wall falling away for hundreds of metres on two sides, and was unexpectedly littered with shards of glass.

  The ledge had been named by the first man to reach it, a legendary climber named Warren Harding, or ‘Batso’, famed as much for his doggedness, hard drinking and woman-chasing, as for being the leader of the team that first scaled El Cap.

  He had put up the ‘Nose’ route in 1958, a climb that took forty-five days, spread over several years, to complete. The team chose to besiege the rock, going up and down hundreds of metres of fixed rope, slowly pushing their route as they went, returning to the ground each day. The crowds that gathered to watch this defining moment in American- and world-climbing history grew so large that they began to block the roads, forcing the park service to ban the team from climbing during the summer months. Finally, Harding and his companions left their fixed ropes and made a push for the summit, committing themselves to the longest, steepest climb ever undertaken. Big-wall climbing was being invented by them as they did it. The only people qualified to rescue them if they got into trouble were themselves.

  Almost out of water and food, hanging higher than the tallest building in the world, Harding began hand drilling a line of bolts over the final blank overhangs as night descended. On he drilled in the dark, his partners Wayne Merry and George Whitmore hanging below him. It was almost dawn when Harding shouted down, ‘Have you got time for one more bolt?’

  After eighteen long months of effort, 600 pegs and 125 bolts, Harding, Merry and Whitmore scrambled to the top of El Cap.

  The current speed record for the Nose is two hours and forty-five minutes.

  After the Nose, Harding went on to make the first ascent of the Dawn Wall in 1970, a climb that the Reticent bisected at this point. On that ascent, Harding and his partner Dean Caldwell were sponsored by a Californian vineyard, which no doubt contributed to the fact that twenty-seven days were spent on the wall, the longest time anyone had taken on a climb without returning to the ground.

  Harding, renowned for being tough and hard headed, had climbed the route in the days before portaledges, hanging every night in cramped and claustrophobic hammocks called ‘Bat tents’ which would fill with water when it rained. So no doubt reaching this ledge had called for a bit of a party. Even here things hadn’t gone smoothly, as they were stuck in a storm for four days, surviving on a ration of cheese and ‘a fine Christian Brothers cabernet’.

  The park service became so worried about the team that they started a rescue at one point, lowering a long string of tied-together ropes down the wall, even though Harding had thrown down messages in tin cans to tell them they were OK. After much hollering and cursing, Harding convinced them he wasn’t going to allow himself to be rescued.

  The glass on the ledge was no doubt the remains of that fine cabernet.

  Harding, short and stocky with raven black hair and crazy eyes, was an icon and hero of mine, the opposite of the athletic norm – ‘fitness be damned’ as Harding would put it. He was known to be a mess when he climbed, his sheer force of will propelling him on. Once, his climbing partner, a visiting British hotshot, exclaimed that the shambolic Harding couldn’t do anything right, to which he replied, ‘I know, but I can do it for ever.’

  Many climbers would have been dismayed at the apparent mindless vandalism of the broken glass, but I had grown up with glass-covered streets and playgrounds and it didn’t bother me, merely adding to the sense of history. It’s rare to find yourself sharing the same fears and reliefs as your hero, knowing just how he must have felt, hanging on the wall, then climbing up onto the ledge, feeling solid ground under his feet for the first time in a week. I had one other thing in common with him. I could have done with a stiff drink.

  I stood there for a while, feeling the weight being taken by my feet, then noticed a bottle of yellow liquid and a bag of white powder, looking like a litre of piss and a kilo of cocaine. A present from the Russians. In fact it was a bag of Gatorade drink powder, with a bottle of the stuff already made up, a fine gift to a climber on El Cap, a place where no amount of money can buy you a drink once your bottles go dry. It was a fine gift for anyone but me; my bags were still bursting with water.

  After I hauled the bags and set up the portaledge, I took the risk of taking off everything I had on – clothes, shoes, even my harness, attaching the rope to my ankle just in case. I laid out my sleeping bag on the ledge, sat down and felt sun boring into my skin. I looked at my body, changed already, thinner in places, muscles bigger in others. My thighs and hips were a patchwork of bruises, my feet swollen and battered. My shoes were too soft, meaning that the constant standing in aiders had created bone spurs on the outside of my feet, and crushed my toes. Nevertheless it felt so good to be here, to have made it this far.

  How would I have been feeling now, if I’d wimped out earlier?

  I’d come further than I ever thought possible. I had done amazingly well to overcome my doubts and fears, to overcome myself.

  I still had the hardest to come, however. Tomorrow I would have to climb the second most dangerous pitch on the route.

  Tomorrow I might die on this very spot, my blood mixed with old dried-up wine and broken glass.

  Truths and lies

  Yosemite. October 1999

  IT SEEMED THAT no matter how hard I climbed, the thing that was pushing me on could not be satisfied. On the summit I would feel free of it,
but in the days that followed it would creep back. Some people have described it as a rat that gnaws away inside you and must be fed. For me it was something else, it was a rat that denied ever being fed. No matter how hard I climbed, I seemed to have the inability to just be happy with what I’d done. I was always undermining my own achievements.

  After my two trips to Yosemite with Paul and then Andy, on paper at least, it looked like I had pulled off some pretty hard routes, but soon the initial joy and satisfaction faded and old doubts crept in. Had I pulled my weight? Was it Andy who’d climbed the hardest pitches? Was I just a bullshitter?

  There was really only one way to tell, and that was to have a whole climb to myself. To solo a big wall.

  The moment I had the idea, standing at the climbing counter at work, I began to giggle. It was so stupidly crazy. It was also just about possible. I giggled some more. It was as if I had been given a million pounds and all of a sudden I could do anything I wanted, only it was a million pounds worth of potential that excited me, the realisation that no one but myself could stop me. There were of course so many reasons why not to try, just to dismiss the idea as ludicrous. But at the heart of it there were those two important words; ‘why not’.

  I began as I usually did, by thinking about this plan. I needed a wall, and I needed to learn how to solo it. Soloing the Droites and big alpine routes was simple, just grab your axes and go. Soloing a big wall was something more akin to learning to sail, requiring a whole gamut of complex techniques. I began reading all I could, which wasn’t that much, the art of big-wall soloing being as exotic and niche as cave diving. I knew of only four other Brits who had soloed significant big walls and two of them had come close to dying, one breaking his leg, the other getting rescued after having almost died of exposure.