A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  Chapter Nineteen

  BORROWDALE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

  The messages went out early, spreading along a prearranged sequence of onward calls and crackling radios until the rescue team members were all apprised of the call-out and, part grumbling, drove their cars and Land Rovers to the assembly point at Seathwaite to which they had been summoned. The drill had been established and practiced in many exercises and real emergencies over the years.

  In the village of Rosthwaite, the team leader, Ken Gill, had risen and was drinking tea in the warm kitchen of his granite-and-slate cottage. The radio was burbling news noise—the litany of England rising—and the local weekly newspaper carried a leading article asking sternly when the use of speedboats on Windermere would be outlawed once and for all. The team leader had stepped outside into the darkness beyond his back door and hastily retreated. The snow lay thick on his gravel driveway and sat on the hood of his Land Rover like a bright, white foam mattress. The sky that should have been lightening was hidden by a low wall of dense fog that seemed to have settled almost on the valley floor. It was one of those days when people familiar with the mountains did everything they could to persuade unfamiliar offcomers to stay down in the valleys. It was one of those days when the extreme weather would make a search difficult and a rescue challenging or even impossible. For most people, the Lake District was either rainy days in tea shops or benevolent strolls on worn trails. But for people here year round, or caught out by a fluke of meteorology, the hills could turn into something completely different—vicious and unforgiving, merciless. And now the word was that some fool walker—a cripple, no less—had chosen this day to get himself stranded in some of the least hospitable terrain the mountains had to offer.

  —

  Ken Gill dressed quickly in his warmest gear, topped by the distinctive red parka of the rescue team. The big rucksack carrying medical equipment was already packed. The physical preparations for a search and rescue—SAR as they called it—were reflexive. They would assemble at Seathwaite, probably forty of them at this time of year. All were volunteers and supremely fit, trained to traverse these mountains in all conditions, carrying loads designed to meet all eventualities. They would have ropes and space blankets. Stoves. Bivouac shelter. Crampons. Ice axes. Emergency rations. Medication for hypothermia and frostbite. Radios for communications. That much was all automatic. That was what they did, what they practiced for on the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team. What concerned him was the location. Esk Hause was a broad, tilted plateau. It could be reached from Borrowdale either from the Grains Gill path or via Styhead, where the Mountain Rescue Service had a prepositioned stretcher and other equipment in a container. Technically, two other teams—in Langdale and Wasdale—would need to be alerted because Esk Hause was equidistant from all of them. And if Esk Hause was the last known—or, at least, suspected—whereabouts for the walker, then the team would best split into two, one group heading directly via Grains Gill, the other via Styhead. It had to be assumed that, if the walker had camped on Esk Hause, he would either remain in his camp or seek a descent to Borrowdale, which he had given as his ultimate destination. So the search would focus on Esk Hause and its approaches. No one in his right mind would consider for one moment going higher—for instance, to the Scafell Pike summit which he was apparently aiming for—not in this weather. For that would be the height of folly.

  TAPE FOUR, SEGMENT TWO

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  . . . Summit close. Feel it, sense it. Fall didn’t help. Slipped on boulders and my leg hurts. Bad leg, of course . . .

  . . . Sitting, see ice form on rocks. September, for Chrissakes. Know it’s there, the summit—only have to get up and push on and I’ll get there. Started from Camp Two—haa haa—at first light. Weather awful. Big wind coming up over the col. Horizontal sleet. Barely drag myself out of the sleeping bag. But soldier on. Right? What we do. Soldier on, take it on the chin. So out of the tent. Compass bearing from the map. Tricky, because I wasn’t sure I’d camped in the right place. Weather indescribable. Freak storm. If I hadn’t fallen, it would have knocked me over. But I fell. I did. Just when I needed my leg to work, it didn’t. And it’s cold.

  . . . No one else around. But I wanted it that way. Solo bid. Dawn start. Summit alone. And there won’t be anyone else around. Not up here. Not in weather like this. Color note: gray rock, encrusted with ice like salt deposits. No. Like crystals. Visibility zero. The cloud has descended like a blanket. No, scrub that. The cloud has fallen here and come to rest, wrapping my world in its frigid grayness. Even worse.

  . . . In the middle of the boulder field. Ice Fall. Khumbu Glacier. The ice crystals look as if they have been here forever. But I have to move . . . get frostbite. Or hypothermia. You slip away in a dream world, feel warm and happy and your eyes start to close. Want to sleep. Should sleep. In the cradle of the angels.

  . . . More scared than I ever was. More scared than Beirut, Sarajevo, Grozny, Gaza . . . in the war zones, you could hide in a cellar or a bunker or behind a wall. You could call in on the sat-phone and hear a voice at the comic back in New York. But there’s nowhere to hide up here. No one to talk to. Wind always finds you. And cold.

  . . . don’t want outsiders coming to the rescue. Want to rescue myself. Want power to flow from within that will enable me to stand up on these treacherous, snow-gray, white-out, gray-out boulders and move myself into the right direction to that great round cairn that I remember as the summit. You pray for many things. Forgiveness. Help. You pray on behalf of other people. You pray so that you can imagine you are communicating with those in the parallel life. The ancestors. The spirits. But you pray for specific things, too. Strength. Fortitude. And you never know whether you will be heard until you have been heard. Goodness is the base line and evil is an aberration—that is the core of faith. And anyone who says they cannot believe in good because of the existence of evil is missing the point. The only weapon against evil is belief in good. And goodness is what will certainly not get me up onto my feet again. Dear Lord, if there is one prayer now in this cold, dead core of where I came from, it is this: please help me to get up, to grit my teeth, to stop myself drifting away in thoughts and dreams and half-sleep to walk and reach the summit without which all these efforts and preparations will be in vain. Just now I know I think I slept. My eyes closed and then opened and I don’t know how long they were closed and isn’t that the danger sign—when you start drifting off and in that sleep of death, what dreams? None, or sweet ones. Warm days and friends and no hard choices and E and F redeemed and reconciled. And perhaps this is what they mean when they say: your number is up. This is the appointed moment for the transition to the parallel world so maybe this is my day. But, dear Lord, Our Father who art, I do not wish to die here so close to the summit but not yet on it, and if it is your will that this day should be my last, allow me the one final single grace of reaching that place higher than all others in this realm before I am transported to the next. My eyes opened again so I guess they must have closed. All the time, in the wars, I never really believed—even when I was most terrified—that I wouldn’t make it. But now I can see that it’s for real because I’m not an observer in all this, I’m a player, a participant, at last. It’s for real and in the real world there are no easy ways up, down, out.

  At breakfast there was no sign of him. She had showered, dressed ready for the long wait while the rescuers went to look for Joe Shelby. She had imagined that Jeremy Davenport would be at her side to give her strength, support her and show that—whatever it had been between them—it had been with love. But there was no sign of him and his rental car was gone from the parking lot.

  In London the rain in the neon over the black streets reminded her of swarms of insects she had seen in African street lamps, gusting and crowding but never ceasing. The train left in the darkness and it seemed the darkness had vanquished all before it. Even when a technical dawn sou
ght to lighten the sky, it succeeded merely in exchanging the darkness of night for the darkness of low, solid cloud. Faria Duclos had known Joe Shelby in many places. They had snuggled in round clay houses in Zululand, luxurious hotels in the Middle East, tawdry, ex-communist establishments in Tashkent and Samarkand. They had been alcohol-free together in Islamabad and Kuwait, and they had soaked in the stuff in Cape Town and Harare. But she had never associated him before with the places she passed through that provided the route map to his roots. What on earth was Milton Keynes? Maynard Keynes, yes. That she understood. And John Milton. But why a town named for a poet-economist? And Rugby. A game? A school? A town? And all these places were concealed from her, behind the curtain of rain, focusing the view on windswept railway station platforms where commuters shivered for the southbound trains to London but no one headed north from Stafford or Crewe. They called it the western mainline and her ticket told her she was riding first class, but the arm fell off her seat and the rattling trolley of supposed breakfast seemed to bear only tawdry fare. The coffee was a vile, national insult to anyone of French origins. Welcome to Britain, where late dawns and early dusks shouldered aside the half-light, as if, with his condition, the brightness was draining away, leaving him to confront perpetual darkness at his core. And she understood that darkness, so she would remain with him until the end came, and lay him to his final rest and celebrate the final days or weeks or months. It was not just Du Plessis’s goading. She owed him the life he had plucked from the brink in Rwanda.

  PIERS GILL

  looking down from the corridor route

  Chapter Twenty

  BORROWDALE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  They assembled at Seathwaite, thirty-two of them, all volunteers. Some abandoned jobs as teachers or store managers, handing over their classes and till passes to understanding colleagues. Some jettisoned writing projects, canvasses, drama groups. Many sent children to babysitters or prevailed on partners and spouses to stay home with infants. But all of them responded. The call was not something to be ignored by people who understood the fells.

  In the billowing snow that cascaded down the valleys and into the small, gray, invisible village, they shook their heads at the folly of it. They had one clue—a suspected campsite at Esk Hause, almost 2,500 feet above them.

  Had the missing walker even made it that far?

  He—or was it she?—might never have crossed Crinkle Crags and Bowfell. For all they knew, he—yes, it was he—might well have slipped somewhere on that treacherous, knuckle ridge long before reaching his projected campsite. For all they knew, he might at this moment be lying, quite still, beyond any help they could give, at the base of some precipice crossed in error. And even if he had reached Esk Hause, was he still there? At the back of everyone’s minds, men and women, young and older, was the unspoken thought: was he still alive? Were they risking their own necks for the sake of a corpse, as stiff and lifeless as Mallory’s, but with no significance at all other than as a statistic?

  Ken Gill, their leader, placed calls to the other mountain rescue teams in Langdale and Wasdale, requesting them to be on alert as backup, in case the first sweep over Esk Hause and Styhead turned up nothing. The Langdale team could strike easily up The Band, or via Red Tarn, to reach the Crinkle Crags–Bowfell–Esk Pike axis. Wasdale lay directly below the summit of Scafell Pike and, from the valley formed by Wastwater, the deepest of the district’s lakes, rescuers could strike up by the steep, short tourists’ route via Brown Tongue and Lingmell Col if it came to that, if the first search of Esk Hause and Styhead failed to turn up the cripple—dead or alive. Of course, they had no beacon, no locator number, no code or satellite bearings to home in on. When Ken Gill called the RAF commander to inquire about the chances of a helicopter, the duty sergeant simply laughed and told him to look out of the window, laddie, and tell him what he could see. Nothing. Right? Nothing. So if there was zero visibility what miracles did he expect from the pilots?

  It would be the old-fashioned kind of search, the establishment of a central command post and the quartering from there on very definite grid references to ensure that the rescuers themselves did not become the rescued. They would establish temporary camp at Esk Hause and Styhead, radiating the search out from those points, maintaining a forward headquarters for the rescuers to work in relays, resting between forays, maintaining adequate levels of hot liquids, sugars, soup. No general likes splitting armies, but here there was no choice. Ken Gill would divide his team into two, sending one to Styhead and the other, via Grains Gill and the ravine of Ruddy Gill, direct to Esk Hause. They would search those areas, hoping to find the man at or near his campsite, or already descending on one of the two available routes. They would not search the summit ridge of Scafell Pike. In this weather, that was lunacy, an unlikely location for the lost man, the target, and an unacceptable risk for the team. They would leave three men—older men, not likely to grumble beyond token complaints at being spared the blizzard—to run the radio base station at Seathwaite. Operating from inside a farmer’s barn, out of the worst of the weather, it would be their job to maintain communication with other emergency services, anchor the operation. They would be responsible for arranging backup—ambulance, a chopper if the weather lifted, press liaison with Cumbria newspapers and broadcasters, nationals, too, if the drama merited. Then there would be liaison with the mortuary services and the coroner and the next of kin if the worst came to the worst. They had one contact name on that list—Eva Kimberly, lodging at one of the fancy hotels. Wife? Girlfriend? Not clear. Just a mobile phone number and a hotel room number. She had been responsible for the call-out. She had insisted that the man was not safe, that he was a cripple playing out crazy dreams. The coroner was already on alert, just in case someone had to make the call between accidental death and suicide—a narrow distinction sometimes among the romantics who came here to die and succeeded in spite of themselves. The rest of the team would be SAR: search and rescue.

  Ken Gill inspected their kit. Each was clad for maximum warmth, with down jackets in their rucksacks. They carried GPS devices, laminated maps and old fashioned compasses, even though all of them knew these hills and mountains with the familiarity of frequent encounters in most kinds of weather, on the trails and on the rock faces, along the streambeds and high on the fellsides. They wore snow gaiters over waterproof, padded trousers and, in addition to the extending walking poles, they carried ice axes and crampons strapped to their packs. They were trained, fit, not quite certain of the timing.

  “I don’t like it much either,” Ken Gill told the team, assembled behind a high barn wall made of Lakeland slate that sheltered them from the wind and snow. “The timing’s not perfect. But we have to remember what we’re here for—to save lives. We’re all trained. We know what we’re doing. We’ve rehearsed this a hundred times. We can do it and if we stick to what we’ve learned we’ll come out of this fine. But just remember. The two teams stay in radio contact at all times. Within the teams, we maintain visual contact whilst on the move. We report our whereabouts to Seathwaite base on a fifteen-minute basis. We don’t stray. We don’t do unilaterals. And we don’t do heroics. But if we don’t try now, in these conditions, our chances of a successful outcome reduce very quickly. And you all know what I mean by that.”

  They nodded and moved out, swallowed up by the gusts so that the bright colors of their parkas and gaiters and rucksacks were soon drained and absorbed, leached into the storm. For less than one mile, they moved in one single file, thirty-two of them, following the path along the broad valley where the beginnings of the River Derwent sluiced and cascaded through the glacial moraines. Then, at Stockley Bridge, they broke into two teams of sixteen each, one, led by Ken Gill, heading west and then southwest to Styhead, the pass leading from Wasdale to Borrowdale.

  Technically, the path to Styhead was called a bridleway and the stone bridge suggested that it had been designed for use by packhorse. Now the trail was a walkers’ gateway
to the high ground, striking obliquely across a rough hillside, passing through a gate in a drystone wall before penetrating an upland valley where travelers picked their way across awkward fields of rocks strewn arbitrarily alongside a rushing stream.

  The other group, led by Angie Cartwright, kept on almost dead south, following the streambed of Grains Gill that led to the steep, zigzag pull up a rocky flank of fellside below Esk Hause. If the weather had been clear, their route would have been dominated by the gullies and broken buttresses of Great End—the northernmost abutment of the Scafell summit ridge. But, with the storm gathering in intensity, it was all they could do to keep track of the rescuer directly ahead. As the path steepened, desultory conversation and the occasional gallows quip about who’d rescue the rescuers gave way to the silence of concentration and exertion. It was not quite 10:00 A.M. and they were already beyond the snow line.

  He had not quite risen. Risen would definitely be too strong a word for it. Using both aluminum poles he had more or less cranked himself to half height, then subsided into a baby crawl, using his gloved hands—now cold and soaked—to feel a way across the boulder field, dragging the poles behind him. It was not comfortable or elegant, and he would not have even attempted it had there been the slightest prospect of encountering another human being. In fact, if he had encountered another human being he would probably have wept for joy and relief and begged for help. But there was no one else, and when he tried to walk across the boulder field at full or half height, his balance betrayed him and his feet found no purchase on the boulders, hidden and glazed, that lay below the powdering of snow. Being on the boulder field—and this was the only, faint consolation—meant he had reached the southern flank of Broad Crag, at around 3,000 feet, as much a marker of the summit’s proximity—and deceptive distance—as the notches on the ridge before the summit pyramid of Everest. The heading now would be almost directly southwest and it was essential not to stray north or south into the ravine of Piers Ghyll or the steep trail to Little Narrow-cove that would lead him far from his destination, down toward Eskdale and a long, long hike for any salvation, far beyond his physical resources.