The Beckoning Silence

by Simpson, Joe

  A solid axe placement high and to my right enabled me to pull myself up to a point where I could lock my right elbow. I instinctively pushed the elbow out to my right. In an instant it had slid behind an adjacent leaf of ice and by pressing outwards I found that I could hold myself easily in balance. When I made the same move with my left arm I found myself perched on the overhanging ice with both elbows shoulder high at right angles to my body jammed behind convenient slivers of ice. Good God! I thought. I’m chicken-winging. So that’s what the guy was on about. It was an astonishingly stable and restful stance despite the spectacular position in which I was poised. I let out a whoop of glee and Ray called up to ask me if I was OK.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I yelled. ‘Bloody superb.’ I looked above me and was disappointed that there was not the second band of overhangs that form in some years. Until that point the very prospect of such an increase in difficulty had filled me with dread. I knew that having overcome the first band of overhangs it would be extremely difficult if not impossible for me to retreat. Yet now I was looking forward to finding the way ahead blocked by another seemingly insuperable barrier. I knew I would be able to climb it with ease. So long as it was water ice, I felt sure I could climb 6+, even grade 7. It wasn’t vain boastful pride; it was simply true. I had learned that I was better than I had thought, at least on that day and at that time, and it made me feel wonderful. I knew then that we were going to succeed.

  It was not about being a ‘hard’ climber, not a challenge to prove to others how good we were, but a pure and simple test of ourselves. That moment when I knew I was strong enough and powerful enough, mentally and physically, to overcome the obstacles in front of me came as a rushing exultation, a joyous realisation that this was why I was here. George Mallory once wrote after succeeding on a climb, ‘We’re not exultant: but delighted, joyful: soberly astonished … Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves …’ I was meant to be there. This is who you are; why you do this, I thought, and grinned broadly all the way to the top of the pitch, delighting in the intricate mixture of power and subtlety, the delicate balance between gymnastic dance and thuggish strength. I became entranced, absorbed in the game of reading the ice. The feeling of invincibility was infused with the wondrous irrationality of what I was doing – immutable, anarchic living, the essence of climbing, of simply being.

  Whether it was on a towering granite headwall, a Himalayan behemoth, an Alpine north wall, or a fragile lacy confection of towering water ice, the feeling was the same.

  All my depressed thoughts had become meaningless. There was only one reason for my being there – to climb into the unknown, pushing my limits to discover how far I could go. I knew it would fade rapidly once the climb was done, and I wanted to luxuriate in the feeling. I hadn’t felt like that for a long time. I had missed it.

  The outcome needed to be uncertain, the prospect frightening, the potential for injury high, otherwise there would be nothing learned and nothing proved. I didn’t want to die but if death hadn’t been ever-present then I doubt I would have been there. It set the parameters of the game. What we stood to lose was everything. We were fugitives from reality and yet things never seemed so real, so clear and sharp and right.

  When I reached the belay cave near the top of the Falls I fixed three solid ice screws and shouted down to Ray that I was fine and he could come up. I leaned back on the slings and looked out over the plunge of the frozen ice falls. The snow had cleared from the air. Telluride lay huddled in the valley far below. The air had a bright translucent quality, a tangy, crisp perfection, cool on the lungs. The clean, gin-clear winter sky had an almost solid feel to it, like a polished wine glass that you could reach out and ping with your finger. I pulled hard on the ropes as Ray began to move, slow and stiff from his long wait beneath the icy overhangs.

  I looked at the main stream of the waterfall plunging into space in a rushing white stream, ice crystals glinting in the afternoon sunlight and clouds of steamy vapour blowing back into the sky. I listened to the calculated dissonance of the thundering water as it rose and fell in swells of sound like a heavy symphonic weltering sea, so resonant that the crashing of the water in the plunge pool was a memory of the oceans with the surf calling its crying song. I wondered why we had ever been menaced by the sight of it and not transfixed, mesmerised by its beauty as I was now. Part of me knew that I was seeing with exultant eyes deceived by the chemical rush of excitement. But it was true for the moment and I would happily accept it as such.

  Soaking up the spectacle, enjoying the experience of being there, happy and alive, reading it in my mind in a tumble of breathless metaphors, I tried to capture it in my memory for ever. I knew it would fade. It always did and the thought saddened me. What a strange, inexplicable misfortune it is, to come to this edge of perfection and then let it slip through your fingers.

  I wanted to hold the moment for as long as possible before the inevitable lurch back to grey reality. The French have an expression for feelings such as these, le petit mort, the little death. The post-coital depression, the fleeting saddening loss when it is over. It seemed about right to me then. The bitter-sweet, heady ache of ecstasy and loss. The half-lost, half-won game of life that we could never quite finish. It seemed, sometimes, fleetingly, you could come close to the ineffable edge of perfection when it all goes to glory for the briefest of moments, an inarticulate moment, that leaves you with a vulnerable shattered sense of wonderment. It was life enhancing: pure emotion.

  The ropes jerked tight in my hands. Ray had fallen off. I glanced down and saw him swing out from the overhangs with an expression of alarm and irritation on his face. The ropes slackened. He was climbing again. I was laughing at the fun of it all and the memory of his surprised dismay. He had been rushing the pitch, hooking his axe picks into air bubbles rather then smashing them forcefully into the ice.

  Again the ropes went tight as one of his lightly hooked picks popped out of the ice, and I heard a stream of curses above the roar of the falls. He swung out into space in a gentle pendulum and his oaths swung out on the wind with him. I laughed again and shouted friendly insults into the winter sky.

  Ray arrived in the cave breathless and smiling broadly. I knew how he felt. I clapped him on the back, and squeezed his shoulder and grinned happily at him but we did not hug. That was what Tat had been good at.

  As we stumbled down the path in the gathering dusk we chatted excitedly about the climb, wondering at the audacity and skill of Jeff Lowe and Mike Weiss in attempting the climb nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

  ‘You know your idea about tick lists?’ Ray asked as we trudged down towards the car. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I’m not sure really. It was just an idea I had. You know, do a few classic lines, fill in the holes in my climbing CV before giving it all up.’

  ‘Do you still want to do that?’ Ray asked. ‘After this?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I replied and stopped to look at Bridalveil rearing up at the head of the canyon. ‘It was good, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Superb,’ Ray said quietly.

  ‘It would be nice to leave it like that, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose it would,’ he agreed. ‘But it would be nice to keep doing it.’

  ‘I know, but it has to end some time,’ I said. ‘And I’d like it to be on my terms.’

  ‘Like Tat, you mean?’ Ray said and laughed softly.

  ‘Yeah, like Tat,’ I said quietly. ‘He was right you know. He just got unlucky.’

  ‘OK, so what about this tick list then? Any more cunning plans up your sleeve?’

  ‘Maybe The Nose or Salathe?’

  ‘Yes, that would be good,’ Ray said. ‘I’ve never been to Yosemite. And it would be warm …’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Still we’ll never stop if we don’t get a final short list. And I mean short.’

  ‘OK, so Bridalveil was one of them. The ice climb. Salathe or The Nose would be the rock c
limb on the list. We need a mountain route. A real classic. What do you think?’

  ‘A new route somewhere, perhaps,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I’ll think on it.’

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ Ray said as we reached the car. ‘Come on, let’s go drink beer. We deserve it.’

  Joe cutting loose on Quietus Stanage Edge, Derbyshire

  Ian Tattersall on the summit of Alpamayo

  A ghostly face in the ridge watches over climbers following our tracks on Alpamayo

  Given wings to fly: Joe launches on a 56-kilometre cross-country flight in Brazil

  Ray on Bridalveil Falls, Telluride, Colorado

  Joe on steep ice, Bridalveil Falls

  Joe ice climbing in Vail, Colorado.

  Rigid Designator, Vail, Colorado.

  Joe climbing in Ouray Canyon, Colorado.

  6 Rite of passage

  On my return home I found myself at a bit of a loose end. I had recently moved into a new house in Sheffield. Well, new is an exaggeration. It was two hundred and fifty years old. It was an old farm labourer’s cottage with three-foot thick walls, not a single doorway square or a wall straight, ancient stonework with lime and horsehair mortar making hanging a picture a DIY nightmare. I loved it. It had character and individuality and a sense of the countless generations that had passed their lives beneath its roof. It had a garden, something I had always promised Muttley, my faithful bearded collie cross, and he peed all over it with delighted territorial abandon.

  The bidding and eventual signing of contracts was the usual nightmare that British house conveyancing has always been; probably the most idiotic and stressful way to try and part company with a great deal of money that has ever been devised.

  Some months earlier I had begun writing my second novel without a contract or an advance. I had assured my agent, Vivienne Schuster, that I didn’t need one and it would help keep away the pressure of a deadline.

  ‘But that’s the only way you write, Joe,’ she said. ‘You come over all Lapsed Catholic and guilty because you have signed the deal and that gives you the discipline to finish it.’

  ‘Well, yes, that was true in the past,’ I agreed. ‘But this time it will be different.’

  ‘A likely story,’ she said, accurately discounting any chance of seeing a manuscript within her lifetime. I vowed to prove her wrong and enthusiastically began tapping at my keyboard. I had completed 25,000 words, only to find that I had written myself into a cul-de-sac. There were only two characters in the novel and I discovered to my incredulous dismay that I had killed off both of them. This was a fairly major plotting error.

  The house move conveniently provided me with a mass of work-avoidance excuses, something which I have managed to become very good at. The kitchen floor had to be tiled, a wood-burning stove installed and the chimneys re-lined. The office in the attic needed two skylight windows fitting to let in more light, and planning permission for a summerhouse extension on the back had to be applied for. Far from being irritated by these inconvenient and expensive tasks I was elated at the chance to escape from my keyboard.

  A glance at the overgrown garden confirmed that major work was urgently needed. Fences had to be repaired or replaced, the lawn dug up and re-laid, borders torn up and replanted. The 50-foot eucalyptus that some previous horticultural lunatic had planted close to the house had to be cut down before it crashed through the roof in the autumn gales.

  Within a year Bruce French, former Nottingham and England wicket keeper, passionate climber and expert builder, had reduced my new home to a building site. What he was eventually to build in its place was a superb testament to his building skill. Writing ground to an inevitable halt.

  There were other reasons for the disruption to my writing schedule. A chance connection with Marek Kriwald, who ran a corporate speaking bureau called Parliament Communications, had led to a suddenly burgeoning speaking career. Although I had given slide presentations all over the world it had primarily been to climbing audiences and those many non-climbers who had read Touching the Void. Through Marek and Parliament I suddenly found myself giving what were called motivational or inspirational corporate presentations. In truth all I did was tell the story of Touching the Void.

  I suppose it is inspirational in many ways, but to Simon and me it was only a reality and because we had experienced it, it never really had much shock value. As climbers we were a fairly pragmatic bunch and to some extent we regarded what had happened in Peru as an almighty cock-up from which we were both very lucky to survive. The fact that we had an accident came as no huge surprise, simply the fact that we had survived. We had already lost a number of friends in mountaineering accidents and had few illusions about the risks we were taking.

  I found it very intimidating to stand in front of large groups of successful, highly motivated business people and tell them what a mess we had made of our first mountaineering expedition. I found talking to chief executive officers of huge multi-national companies every bit as challenging as climbing grade 6 frozen waterfalls. To my delight the talks did seem to hit some sort of inspirational or motivational button to which I was never privy and demand for more engagements quickly increased. I had never realised quite how many company conferences are being staged on a daily basis world-wide and how huge was the demand for corporate speakers. It was a new, exciting and intimidating venture and, fortunately, also quite lucrative. Most of the fees earned seemed to be disappearing straight into Bruce’s back pocket as the hole he was digging at the back of the house gradually became bigger and bigger in direct proportion to the hole appearing in my bank account. My writing plans were now seriously stalled.

  Early in 1998 a phone call from Jonathan Sissons, the head of rights at Jonathan Cape, came as an incredible surprise. A production company based in Los Angeles was making enquiries about the film rights for Touching the Void. Jonathan had been trying to sell the rights for a movie for the best part of ten years with mixed results.

  I was dubious about whether a film of the book could ever be made. In the late 1980s I had visited Fred Zinneman, the renowned Hollywood film director and producer. As a child in the Austrian Alps he had been a keen hill walker and mountaineer and had never lost touch with events in the mountaineering world.

  Fred Zinneman had long since retired by the time he had invited me for coffee in his house in London and I was curious to know why he was interested. Expecting to see the walls of his room adorned with photographs of famous stars and legendary movies I was quite taken aback to see a predominance of mountain views of the Alps. We talked about the possibilities of making Void into a film. Zinneman pointed out that the story was very similar to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which I thought was quite a stunning compliment until he quickly made it clear that he wasn’t talking about the literary value of the work. He had been the director charged with making Hemingway’s great Nobel Prize winning novel into a movie and, as he explained, they soon ran into major difficulties.

  ‘The Old Man and the Sea makes a wonderful read but in movie terms it is extremely difficult to evoke the immense power of Hemingway’s writing,’ he said. ‘After all, what have you got? One old man and a big fish. Everything in the book happens through the eyes and thoughts of the old man and to portray this in the film was an almost impossible problem. Then we had the fish. Our great big mechanical rubber thing kept sinking and refusing to look anything like a marlin. I gave up in the end and John Huston took over the project.’

  ‘I’ve never seen the film,’ I said. ‘But I loved the book. I always wondered whether it was what killed him in the end. He must have known that having written something so brilliantly, not a word wasted, a perfectly crafted story that was unsurpassable, he would never be able to write anything better. It must have eaten away at him.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Fred agreed. ‘And from the point of view of a film you have the same problem. In your story there is only you and Simon. Very soon the rope is cut and you are separated and from then on eve
rything is seen through either your thoughts or his. How do you film that?’

  So I was sceptical about the chances of a movie ever being made and was astounded when Jonathan Sissons rang and told me that Fogwood Films were interested in the rights. Fogwood was the production company of Sally Field, the multiple Oscar winning actress.

  ‘They’re serious,’ Jonathan said. ‘They have got together with the Cruise-Wagner production company.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Cruise. Tom Cruise. The actor. It’s his production company. He’s read the book and wants to star in the film.’

  I burst out laughing. ‘Bloody Nora.’ I put the phone down and wondered what other strange paths this book was going to lead me down. Tom Cruise, the highest-paid male actor in the world, was going to play me. In some bemusement I tottered downstairs and poured myself a very strong gin.

  I was flown first class to Los Angeles. A limousine dropped me outside the Beverly Hills Wilshire Hotel on Rodeo Drive. I was checked into a suite that was bigger than my house.