‘Scandinavia Airlines?’
Sometimes you can take a joke too far.
The room filled up with fit blokes with short hair holding pints, and the odd fit-looking woman, also with a pint and also fit, but with shoulder length hair. The chairs were set up as if for a séance, which is often a bad omen, but you felt these poor guys were just happy to sit down without being shouted out for an hour. I tried to spot anyone from Hereford as the instructors marched in, but guessed they must have been lying in the back among the stacked chairs for the last week anyway, their rifles trained on the door.
Then I spotted them at the back, a scruffy bunch, dressed like climbers rather than soldiers.
The officer jumped up onto the small stage and introduced me like he was my headmaster and I followed him up to well mannered applause, feeling like a magician in a talent contest, standing between the bingo machine and the bakelite mixing desk complete with eight-track cassette slot.
In the dimly lit room they looked like by far the scariest audience I’d ever had, trained killers and sadists every one, except their sadism was meant for their own side, dressed in well ironed jeans and ordered to come and listen to a scruffy northern bloke talk about his holidays.
‘Right, is there anyone here from Hereford tonight?’ I said, my voice echoing around the room via the cheap speakers.
Silence.
I felt like Gerry Adams.
‘Now, anyone can be good if they’re successful, but how many people are good when they fail?’
As the final slide faded I slipped off the stage for a sly drink of water, glad it was over. The room was full of laughter, with the usual look – ‘What the hell is he on?’ – on a few of the smiling faces. We shared the same language, all of us interested in pushing physical and mental boundaries, them being physical, me being mental.
As a civilian, I’d tried to make some connections, with my dad being an ex-PTI and my brother serving in the RAF, suggesting I knew a bit about how they ticked, which seemed to help.
A few people came up and asked if I wanted a drink and shook my hand, then I saw something large coming towards me from the shadows at the back of the room, a guy so big and scary I had the urge to run, but knew that like being faced with a bear, there was no point. He looked fierce, like a fist on two legs, and no doubt boasted a Hereford post code.
I braced myself for his attack.
He shot his hand out, but not to rip out my heart.
‘Great talk mate,’ he said, shaking me by the hand. ‘You’re bloody nuts aren’t you, I don’t know how you do it.’
I laughed off his compliment, which I guessed it was, coming from someone with perhaps the riskiest job in the world.
‘What does your brother do?’ he went on.
‘He’s a loadmaster on the Hercules transports,’ I said. ‘He’s probably chucked you out of a plane.’
‘We don’t get chucked,’ he said quietly and I believed him. ‘They’re good blokes those loadies, we do a lot of stuff with them. Is he over in Afghanistan?’
‘Yes, and Iraq. He’s never on the ground long.’
‘Not a bad idea when you’re a big target. What’s his name?’
‘Rob.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for him,’ he said.
I suddenly had the urge to make a joke about how I thought his eyes would be blacked out, but thought better of it.
‘Do you do much climbing yourself?’ I asked, guessing these guys must be from the SAS mountain troop.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I like climbing in Scotland mainly.’
Hanging on to something we had in common I asked if he’d done anything that winter, with conditions that year being so good.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been over in Iraq.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Before I left the CO grabbed me. For a moment I thought he was going to shout at me for being so scruffy, or about making a joke about how a PTI motivates people – the answer being to ‘hit them harder.’
‘Andy, we’re running a symposium on combat training for the Royal Marines, and I’d like you to tell them what you told us tonight,’ he said.
Life is so strange sometimes.
The following day, with no kids to wake me, I woke up late to the smell of curry, went down to the kitchen, and found my dad eating.
‘Sleep well?’ he said smiling.
‘Dreamed I was being buggered by Andy McNab, so not too bad.’
Over breakfast he showed me some photos from his India trip, lots of desperately smiling kids, each clinging on to life. He’d told some of them that they had to wear seat belts in the centre’s minibus. They’d found that hysterical. Later he found out they’d spent parts of their lives sitting on top of moving trains.
I had a few hours to kill and suggested we could go climbing. When I was younger my dad always wanted to go climbing, dragging me along to hold his ropes, then dragging me up after him. I suppose holding your dad on his first leader fall is a sort of rite of passage. Dad climbed E2s and E3s when I was a kid and to me he was the best climber in the world. Like fathers and sons who share a love of football, we shared climbing.
I idolised him. I wonder if he ever knew? I wonder if my kids idolise me?
As I got more into climbing the roles reversed, and it was Dad holding my falls. I could tell he was losing his hunger when one day after doing Pincushion and the Fang at Tremadog he suggested we go for a cup of tea when I asked him ‘What next?’ Even though we had hours of daylight left.
At the time I couldn’t believe that he didn’t want to just climb and climb and climb. Now I could see that it’s easier to sit and talk to friends over a cup of tea, rather than shout distant commands from a belay ledge. There may be some kind of partnership of the rope, but really you’re on your own.
We had a lot of time to make up.
Maybe it was too late.
‘Why don’t we go for a walk instead?’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
We left the house and walked up the lane behind his house, bordered by steep hedges, the kind of road where you expect to meet nothing but a tractor, the tarmac caked in animal crap and mud. We climbed steeply until we passed through an old gate and into the fields: rough and patchy, only good for sheep.
We talked about work, and future plans, but my dad was more of a listener than a talker, so I just blabbed on about my ambitions. We talked about Robin, and how my dad rarely saw him, but when he did he thought he looked knackered and stressed, the war stretching his unit to breaking point.
There weren’t enough aircraft to do the job and my brother was caught between the enemy and a government overreaching its capabilities. Last time they’d met, Robin had told him about landing in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan to re-supply some special forces, and how they were late. Local villagers had surrounded the aircraft, so Robin had stood there with a rifle at the back of the plane praying for some proper soldiers to arrive before the Taliban showed up. I thought about asking him how it felt to have two sons in harm’s way, but couldn’t get the words out.
What was there to say?
Eventually we arrived at an avenue of wonderfully tall trees, huge, like giant redwoods, their trunks thicker than any tree I’d seen before in Britain. They must have been centuries old, ostentatious in a tree sort of way, their bark like an old giant’s skin.
They were set in two parallel lines, as if they were intended as the entrance to a stately home that was never built, totally out of place among the native Welsh trees that dotted the hillside.
We looked at the trees and I had the urge to ask him why he’d left my mother. Had wanderlust consumed him? I needed to discover if the things I felt he felt too. Then it struck me that he had not simply left my mother. It wasn’t just a matter of my parents splitting up. It was his kids he’d left.
It was me.
He’d ran away from us. He’d fucked me up, that was plain to see. But how could I hold it against
him?
I knew how he felt. I wanted to escape as well.
The words died inside me, words I was too scared to say, words I felt would bring worlds to an end. I wanted to say:
‘Do you regret it?’
‘Was it worth it?’
‘I love you, but you’re a stranger to me.’
‘I love coming up here,’ said Dad. ‘I look at these trees and wonder who planted them, and why. They must have known they would never see them like we do, and yet they planted them anyway.’
We walked down the hill, back towards the house, past fields full of sheep with their lambs, fingers of wool blowing through the fences as we passed by.
‘Let’s look at the lambs for a minute,’ Dad said, stopping.
I watched them jumping around, giddy in the green grass.
‘When they’re born, they jump and play all day long, only stopping to drink their mothers’ milk. We like them because they seem so carefree and happy, they remind us of children, of our own childhood. Then one day, overnight, they stop playing and running about. They just stand there, chewing for the rest of their lives, turning from lambs to sheep.’
I looked at the sheep and their lambs and saw what he was talking about. I’d never really thought about it before.
‘You know what it is that changes in them?’ he asked, looking out at the field. ‘Their mothers stop feeding them and they have to stop playing. They have to eat to survive.’
Watching the sheep, I could see he was right and wondered if my dad was making a point. Perhaps he was, or perhaps he was just talking about sheep.
With my dad you could never tell.
We walked slowly back down the hill, not speaking, leaving the sheep to drift into the shadows of the amazing trees.
FIFTEEN
Diamond
February 2004
Buried in a thick down sleeping bag, I woke slowly in the winter dawn, lashes sticky with frost as my eyes flickered open in the bitter Colorado cold.
I blinked away the frost, unsure where I was for a moment, having woken on so many beds and floors and backs of trucks over the past few weeks. I seemed to have slept next to a wall, which loomed over me black against a white sky, the white fading to a cold blue as my eyes came back to life, the wall turning dark grey, like concrete.
‘Where am I?’
My brain was getting up but my body seemed not to want to move, didn’t care where I was, only that it was warm in a cocoon of feathers, its comfort so finely balanced between cold and not cold that even the slightest movement would upset it. When you travel to cold places you learn that heat is not a given, but a finite resource, something that should never be wasted. A body, especially a body in a sleeping bag, only has so much heat it can give, and when it’s gone it will not return. If I moved my heat would spill out and be gone.
All I wanted to do was lay perfectly still, yet for some unspecified reason my mind was urging me to move.
Then I remembered where I was. The wall was not made of concrete. It was granite, a huge sweep of it five hundred metres high. I was under the Diamond, the wall we were meant to be climbing.
My heart sank.
We’d missed the alarm.
‘Ian?’
This single word conveyed an acceptance that the day was over before it had even begun, and that our frigid open bivy had been for nothing.
‘Did your alarm go off?’
‘No,’ he replied, obviously as awake as I was.
Actually, he just hadn’t heard the alarm. He’d been wearing earplugs to block out my heavy breathing. So I supposed it was really my fault. Plus, it was hard to blame him as I’d forgotten even to bring a watch. His sleeping bag was so thick – necessary since we were sleeping out at three thousand metres in Colorado in January – that the beeps of the alarm had been swallowed whole by the bag’s loft.
I’d also forgotten the bivy food the day before, but this turned out to be useful, since it was only our rumbling stomachs that finally woke us.
I sat up, pulling my duvet jacket out of my sleeping bag, which I’d used to boost its warmth, and put it on quickly against the savage cold. I’d slept in all my clothes.
The Diamond stretched above our heads, the most famous alpine rock wall in North America. It was a summer climbing venue rarely visited in the winter, the cold enough to put off all but the most masochistic. The wall swept up from Chasm Lake, now frozen solid, and at its top stood the summit of Longs Peak, four thousand metres above sea level. It was a hell of a spot.
I gave a shiver and pulled my bag up to my chin, like a man with a towel caught naked getting out of the bath.
Ian remained flat out, so I lay back again, all warmth now gone from my sleeping bag, the feathers dead.
We lay looking up, knowing we’d blown it yet again on our second attempt; the trip was one screw-up after another. We should be cursing each other, shouting about bad luck and fate, thinking of excuses, of why it was his fault and not mine. Instead we just lay there, while knowing we’d have to try anyway.
‘Oh, not to be so possessed by this obsession with struggle,’ I said in a mock Shakespearian voice. ‘To be happy. To live and want no more. Simply to… stop.’
Ian said nothing.
The invitation to talk at the Alpinist magazine party in Boulder Colorado had come out of the blue, a dream gig to a new audience in an exotic location, and the chance to mix business with pleasure. Alpinist was the Vogue of serious climbing journalism, and Boulder one of the main centres of American alpinism. Ian was quick to reply when I asked if he wanted to come out with me and do some climbing at the same time. He was writing a big piece for the magazine about his successful Annapurna trip with Kenton and John Varco, and said he fancied a holiday.
We arrived in Denver without a place to stay, but skimming through the yellow pages we tracked down the legendary Rolando Garibotti – alpinism’s answer to Julio Iglesias – who lived in Boulder. He hardly knew us, but I had met him once in Yosemite in 1997 for about fifteen minutes, when he’d taught me how to place a copperhead.
‘Hi Rolo,’ I began, when he picked up the phone. ‘You might not remember me, but this is Andy Kirkpatrick. I don’t suppose me and Ian Parnell could stay at yours for a bit?’
Being a climbing bum himself, he said yes.
We arrived by taxi in a snowy suburban street. Rolo shared his tiny wooden house with Beth Wald, a brilliant climbing and wilderness travel photographer. Rolo was a striking guy, half Italian, half Argentinian, lean and smart, with a shyness that kept his achievements obscured.
He was perhaps climbing’s darkest horse, very often trumping the big stars and setting new and undreamt of standards in speed and difficulty, yet all the while remaining under the radar of magazines and free of the bullshit press relations departments spread around. He was the Carlos the Jackal of world alpinism, appearing from nowhere, climbing a hard line, then disappearing again, the only word of what he’d done coming from partners or witnesses. He lived by a moral code that few others could emulate.
Among the few ascents to have reached the outside world was a fast ascent of the Infinite Spur on Mount Foraker, a nine thousand foot Alaskan monster of a route. Rolo and his partner knocked ten days off the time taken by the first-ascent team, climbing it in twenty-five hours. He also set a record for the Grand Traverse of the Tetons in Wyoming, a ridge with a combined altitude gain of twelve thousand feet over fourteen miles. Most fast parties took two days, but Rolo soloed the whole thing in just six hours.
We went inside and shared some food and wine. Beth was reserved like Rolo and just as reticent about what she’d been up too. It was only after much digging that it turned out she’d been in Afghanistan for several months on assignment for National Geographic. Beth had been a great climber in her time, but photography, once just a way to help pay for trips, had become her passion.
Listening to her talk about her trips, trips without summits, I felt envious of her, of finding a life ou
tside of climbing, to have a skill that couldn’t leave you, or one that demanded so much of others. I often wondered if climbing was just an outlet for my creativity, as many good climbers are very creative people. Perhaps for some climbing is simply a performance.
As the wine flowed I found I kept digging holes with my questions. I am obsessed about knowing what makes climbers tick, about the stories and gossip surrounding them. Having an exceptional memory for pictures in magazines, and who had taken them, I kept asking Beth about climbers I knew she had photographed.
‘Did you know Anatoli Boukreev?’ I asked, remembering a picture of the late Kazakh climber taken by Beth, a striking shot of Anatoli standing at a train station with a bunch of red flowers. Beth blushed and Rolo coughed, which I took to mean: ‘Let’s move on.’ I changed tack. ‘What’s Todd Skinner like?’ remembering Beth’s pictures of the famous free climber on Half Dome. Beth blushed again. Rolo rolled his eyes.
The following day we walked into the centre of town to meet Christian Beckwith, editor of Alpinist, to run through the show, which was being put on in the famous Boulder theatre, a piece of Americana, my name emblazoned on its awning in lights. I felt I’d made the big time, for a day at least.
Ian took a picture of me stooping uncomfortably under the sign, thinking how strange life could be.
I’d met Christian a few times before, a climbing media heavy hitter, but still young and good looking. No doubt me telling some yarn at a previous meeting had got me this gig, although we were both a bit perturbed by the fact that no one seemed to understand anything I was saying, which I put down to a combination of my northern accent, speed of delivery and general overexcitement.
Every time I began to tell him a story a confused expression would fall slowly across his face until he’d look at Ian and say: ‘I have no idea what he’s on about.’
All we could hope was that the audience would.
I was sharing the stage with Michael Kennedy, yet another legend of the old school and someone I’d always wanted to meet, and Jimmy Chin, a young poster boy of alpinism, working as a photojournalist for Outside magazine and National Geographic. Michael would go first, me second and Jimmy last. I didn’t want to bring it up at the time, but past experience had suggested I’m a hard act to follow. Not because I’m good, but because my delivery is sort of Jerry Lee Lewis on speed. Being from out of town, I kept my trap shut.
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