I sat, stunned with the news, remembering the last time I had seen Tomaž. It was in Dundee, Scotland, a couple of years earlier. He had arrived in that northern city on a drizzly December day looking worn and tired. His eyes were sunk more deeply than before and the lines on his face were more pronounced. It seemed to me then that a part of Tomaž—the most important part, his soul—was in trouble.
After the initial shock of his death wore off, I realized that this was a message I had always been expecting. I remembered an earlier conversation, when I challenged him on the dangerous nature of his climbs and asked him whether he was courting death. “Do you have any intention of growing old?” I asked. He became angry. “You know how I love my children,” he yelled. “I want to be a grandfather.”
Maybe. But his actions didn’t match his intentions. As always, he seemed at odds with himself. Sometimes a party animal, sometimes a mystic. He rarely spoke straight; more often in parables. He was either in love with the public or a complete loner. He yearned for recognition but refused to conform. He courted journalists but, when his mood shifted, would simply shut off his phone and go mushroom picking. He could be cruel, as well as kind and generous. As he freely admitted, “I’m only predictable in my unpredictability.”
Searching for Tomaž had been a wild ride. His personality was explosive and I often caught the shrapnel. During one long, frustrating Skype call, he yelled that I was no better than Margaret Thatcher, but moments later, he fondly called me “Lady B.” Throughout it all, I remained convinced that Tomaž had a huge heart—at least as big as the south face of Dhaulagiri. And despite the risks and setbacks that had come with the task of writing his life story, I’d survived. I only wish he had.
Christian Beamish
UNDERWAY
An extract from the memoir, The Voyage of the Cormorant
I HAD TO tack a few times to work my way out of the cove at La Bufadora, but once in the open water I ran free and swift before a good and helpful wind. I set the next headland off the bow and let Cormorant ride the swells, and sailed on for two or three hours until at last the point at Santo Tomás was less than a quarter-mile off the port rail. As I came on to a port tack to sail in to the cove, the wind swung before me and gusted, suddenly much stronger than it had been all day. I sailed on, as close to the wind as I could get, but the daggerboard and rudder got fouled in thick kelp outside the anchorage, holding me fast.
I first dropped the main, then furled the mizzen and shipped the rudder. The last step before going to oars was to pull the daggerboard in, but when I did, the wind took Cormorant swiftly across the water, the daggerboard having been our last hold on the kelp. We were in open water in less than ten seconds and heading seaward fast. Even pulling with everything I had, I could make only the barest movement windward, but I managed to edge into another stretch of kelp and grabbed at a handful of strands and wrapped the bow line around to hold us steady. The little pangas and a lone house on the point looked far away in this blow, the water a series of tight rows of ripples driving at us from the shore. Cormorant strained at her kelp tie as if the wind were leaning against her, forcing her bow upward in an effort to pry her free.
I put all three reefs in the main, unfurled the mizzen and re-hung the rudder, then undid the kelp tie and sheeted in the sails. The wind took us tearing off across the bay. I put the daggerboard down and came about to try to tack against the wind and regain the cove. We made progress, fully reefed and sailing close-hauled, bucking through the chop, through two or three tacks. But closer in to the cove, between the outer bay and where the pangas lay at their moorings, the kelp once again seized Cormorant by her daggerboard and rudder, putting me right back in the fix I was in before.
A bow wave appeared inside the cove, close to shore, then closer to me, more distinct—it was a panga, with three men motoring out. I had just cut my way free of the kelp, and was again fighting to windward and making progress, when they reached me. The pilot put his boat about and came across to my bow and the men in front motioned for me to throw a line. They caught it and tied Cormorant off, but the panga hit my bow with a splitting sound, and one of the men in front made a wincing face as he glanced at the stem of my boat. From where I sat amidships, I could see a thick, ugly splinter sticking sideways out of the stem like a badly broken finger, but that was the price of the rescue.
The men hunkered in their boat, motoring back to the cove with Cormorant in tow as plumes of spray shot overhead off the bow. They were nearly expressionless as they pointed out an empty mooring can that I could tie to. I thanked them profusely and called them hermanos del mar—brothers of the sea—as I shook their hard, work-scarred hands. They nodded as if it had been their duty to help me and that was all, and then motored the last fifty yards to shore.
I sat and felt Cormorant pull to the solid hold of the mooring in the strong evening blow.
AFTER THE MEN left me on the mooring I set up the boat tent, and then put a pot of rice on the stove to boil. Retrieving the burlap sack with the bass I had caught that morning (and which I’d swept overboard from time to time throughout the day to keep cool), I cleaned the fish and fried the fillets and head in a pan with oil, onion, and garlic. I chopped a yam and put the works in the half-cooked pot of rice with a bouillon cube, and covered it to cook a while longer.
The stew was hearty and tasty, the best meal of the trip so far, and I felt re-energized for the journey—warm food so essential to one’s sense of well-being. An orangey glow came over the cove and the rock-strewn hillsides, but even so it was a somewhat dust-filled and desolate-feeling place. The transistor radio did not pick up any signal, and the dial moved stiffly, salt crystals already accumulating under the face. Once the sun went down, I snuggled into my bag and started in on Leaves of Grass by the light of my headlamp, Walt Whitman an appropriate companion for my nineteenth-century mode of travel.
I made coffee in the morning as I do every day, and these cups aboard Cormorant—fine grounds boiled straight in a pot of water, cowboy style—have been the best cups of my life. The men who had given me a tow the evening before motored past and idled for a minute to say good morning. They were divers also, like the men up at Punta Banda the previous morning. The oldest fellow had a coarse black beard and a boxer’s scarred face creased by sun and salt air. He smoked a cigarette and nodded sagaciously when I admitted that I had gotten myself in a bit of a fix the night before. “Que te vayas bien,”—go well—he said to me, which, with its quality of a blessing, is always heartening to hear, and they were off.
The morning unfolded slowly, the sun warming the cove as it rose higher. I hung my damp sleeping bag from the halyard on the main mast after folding and stowing the boat tent. Getting underway each day involved a precise system of shuffling, repacking, and then restowing my gear, since in such a small craft each space had multiple uses. The sleeping platform had to be taken down to place the packed dry bags, the pots washed before I could stow them away with the stove.
I gave the divers a beach towel I had brought; it had been soaked from the first day out and I saw that it would never dry out enough to serve its purpose. The radio no longer even registered static, the dial refusing to turn past 103.9 and the little screws holding the body in place already encrusted with rust. I wanted to pitch it overboard, but my conscience wouldn’t allow it, and I packed it deep within one of the dry bags.
By mid-morning I was hungry again, and with the boat pretty well squared away, I heated the rest of the fish stew and finished it off, enjoying it even more this time as the flavours had settled throughout. With a quick scrub out of the pots over the side, I finished stowing my sleeping bag and galley. I untied from the mooring, stood up and waved to the empty houses on the beach and then bowed in thanks, and set off under oars through the thick kelp for the open water beyond.
A light wind had already started up and my best guess was that the time was near eleven as I hung the rudder and hoisted sail, running about a mile off the coast
and keeping an eye out for kelp beds that would impede our progress. Not two miles on we got mired, which forced me through the awkward process of first cutting away the kelp and then bringing the rudder aboard, switching to oars, and then redoing the process in reverse once free.
The afternoon turned out to be another day of gentle sailing, the rolling hills leading down in ravines to wide, sloping beaches. The winds were steady and light enough to allow reading; holding the tiller under the crook of my knee, I continued with Whitman, channelling him to the occasional pelican or gull—“Swift wind! Space! My Soul!”—so consumed that I sailed right past the cove I had thought to shelter in.
With a sailing guide for Baja, I had some information on good anchorages—or anchorages that would serve—and I regularly spread out my charts and noted my location off the more prominent headlands and points. But as night began to fall, I realized that I had still to push on through twenty-five miles of darkness to the next possible anchorage. This loose reckoning was not at all in keeping with my generally focused approach to my journey. I had been lulled into complacency by Walt Whitman, the fine breeze, and soft winter sunshine.
I sailed to the edge of another vast kelp bed that looked to be three or four miles long and two miles across and surveyed my situation. A little town was perched on a rocky bluff, and although I scanned the coastline carefully through my binoculars, I could not see any place that seemed like a landing—no place where pangas sat in rows on the beach, no obvious ramp down to shore. I was not overly concerned at first, and decided to sail on into the night, as I was running easily enough before a twelve-knot northwesterly breeze and keeping well offshore.
A FULL MOON rose over the arroyos, the desert held a pinkish glow, and stars shone down like a complement in a million points of light all across the water. I sailed along, swaddled against the cold in a parka and outer shell, drifting in my thoughts deep into the night. Eventually, the wind fell away, and the ocean settled into a broad, glassy sheet. I smelled the clean desert scrub on the suddenly warmer air. The lines and sails and my outer jacket seemed to crackle in the dryness.
I knew that this was all the warning I would get.
Lashing the tiller in place with a bungee, I scrambled forward and dropped the mainsail. Not one minute later, I saw and heard the wind line across the water behind, roaring down and tearing at the surface like a swarm of locusts: the dreaded Norte. People call it the Devil Wind because of the fires it breathes to life, and, I suppose, for the madness, too; it is a terrible, mindless thing.
The wind did not slam into us so much as gather up and consume us, then sling us forward with spindrift and foam flying all around. Both hands on the tiller, I pulled hard to keep Cormorant running before the short and steep waves, surging ahead on the bigger swells with a strange vibration shuddering throughout the hull. A couple of steep lurches put us right on the beam-ends—the very scenario of capsizing in a raging sea that I had imagined—cold water slurping in over the rail and filling the boat to her bilges with a frigid footbath. But the danger was too immediate to think of anything beyond keeping the boat upright, even if somewhere in my consciousness lurked the image, inevitable it seemed, of going over.
How long did I run like this? It seemed a lifetime, as the intensity of the flashing spray, the points of starlight dancing weirdly, and the moon gleaming off the waves kept my gaze locked just ahead of the bow—the steeper swells catching my peripheral vision as they swept alongside and hurled us faster on.
My hands ached with the strain of holding the tiller, and then my upper arms and shoulders began to burn. There was no opportunity for relief. Steering through the steep troughs was the only way to remain upright, and although I was sailing on the small mizzen alone, it seemed even bare poles would have been enough for the wind to drive us dangerously fast.
I had come in closer to the shore and found myself a few hundred yards off a wide sandy beach. The wind here blew straight offshore over what appeared to be a series of dunes, and lumbering swells rose up with spray sheeting off their tops like fireboat hoses in full harbour display.
In the blue dark of the night, which, for all its violence, had a magical quality, I thought I saw a light in the dunes. The surf was well-shaped and eight to ten feet. I imagined a longtime surfer set up here in a camper, and the thought of an old bro and his dog made me smile. I was so sure he was there that I considered making for the beach through the big surf. But I read the conditions for a moment longer and realized I would lose everything if I tried to make it in. I sailed on.
The wind still hurled us down the coast, the occasional tendril of kelp wrapping the rudder blade like a tentacle and then breaking free with the inexorable force of our momentum. Though my hands, arms, and shoulders were knotted with fatigue, I was prevailing in the fight to keep the boat steering in line with the waves. I even got the hang of riding out the bigger ones, and actually hooted once with the fun of linking one wave with a second, and then a third, steep swell for a shooshing toboggan-slide of more than 100 yards.
I recognized that Cormorant was handling herself, and that her pointed stern split the waves like cordwood, allowing them to roll off to either side. I had only to maintain my course, and if I managed to avoid running up on a reef I would eventually make the sheltering cliffs of Punta Colonet. It was an absurd situation nonetheless—the roaring wind and desolate shore, this long winter night and the ghostly moonglow illuminating the whitecaps off into the distance, and me, completely alone in my open boat, 250 miles down the coast.
Then I sang. For the ridiculous peril I faced; for my folly; for grace and for a prayer. I sang an old Anglican hymn in praise of creation, and the wind became almost funny at that point—the absolute opposite, the utter rejection, of morning and calm. The fact that no one in the world had a clue about my predicament, or even knew, precisely, where I was—let alone that I had put myself here—struck me somehow as humorous. “Blackbird has spo–ken” I belted out in the rage, “like the first bhir-hi-hi-hirrrd!”
I had come in close now, spray blowing back off the crashing surf just a few hundred yards in and the high cliffs of Colonet looming ahead. As I had hoped, when I sailed to the base of the sheer walls the wind passed overhead, 300 feet off the mesa, and left the water calm and strangely still, even as the ocean went ragged not 100 yards outside.
I could have scrambled up the boulders to kiss that old cliff face for the shelter it provided.
I set anchor and then put booties over my wet wool socks, slaked my thirst with deep draughts of fresh water, and mashed handfuls of trail mix into my mouth. My body shook with fear, exaltation, and relief. I wrapped myself in the mainsail, too exhausted to arrange the boat tent and sleeping bag.
The moon and stars had burned into my irises, and light patterns swirled hypnotically behind my lids. With these strange points of light in my vision, I wondered if this was what dying might be like.
Helen Mort
NO MAP COULD
SHOW THEM
Six Poems
How to Dress
“A lady’s dress is inconvenient for mountaineering.”
— MRS. HENRY WARWICK COLE, 1859
Your fashionable shoes
might be the death of you.
Your hemline catches stones
and sends them plummeting.
Below the col, set down your parasol,
put on the mountain’s suit—
your forearms gloved with permafrost,
your fingers lichen-light,
your mouth becoming fissured
and your ankles malachite.
Slip on a jacket made of scree,
cold stockings from a forded stream.
Take off the clothes they want
to keep you in. The shadow of the hill
undresses you. The sky
will be your broad-brimmed hat.
An Easy Day for a Lady
“The Grepon has disappeared. Of course, there are
&n
bsp; still some rocks standing there, but as a climb it
no longer exists. Now that it has been done by two
women alone, no self-respecting man can undertake it.” — ANONYMOUS CLIMBER, 1929
When we climb alone
en cordée féminine,
we are magicians of the Alps—
we make the routes we follow
disappear.
Turn round
to see the swooping absence
of the face, the undone glaciers,
crevasses closing in on themselves
like flowers at night.
We’re reeling in the sky.
The forest curls into a fist.
The lake is no more permanent
than frost. Where you made ways,
we will unmake:
give back the silence
at the dawn of things.
Beneath your feet,
the ground
retracts its hand.
Tilberthwaite
“We had not known steepness ’til now” — DOROTHY PILLEY, 1929
I.
We dragged ourselves from an afternoon wrung dry
by heat and climbed into a darkness so complete
we couldn’t dream of climbing out of it.
The rocks became a mirror for the night
and soon our bodies were as well; the colour gone
from clothes and skin and hair and boots,
nothing left but this reflection of our element.
You moved invisible above. I took in slack,
your weight tightening the rope, the only proof
I wasn’t here alone. When you paused,
I could believe you’d climbed out of the quarry,
up and out of Cumbria,
lithe on a ladder of old clouds,
as easily as you stepped
out of your shoes and left them here below.
Rock, Paper, Fire Page 12