A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  TAPE FIVE, SEGMENT TWO

  SEPTEMBER 16, 20021

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  The mountains have always said: this is the point beyond which you cannot go. This is your limit. The moral is that your limits narrow and you don’t realize until it’s much too late. I wanted the walking guide and there it was right in front of me all the time and all I had to do was make the realization that, at some point—same for everybody, really—your horizons begin to narrow, your route is shorter and you move along it with ever-decreasing speed so the point is to set the destination someplace within reach or you finish up like this, beyond your limits. And then you say: but that’s how it always was. That’s what I always wanted to do. I wanted to set my limits far and wide and I did. I ignored limits. I repudiated limits. I denied their existence. So that, now, just when you needed a walking guide, you ignored what it was telling you. It was telling you to go peck shit with the chickens and you wanted one more chance to soar with the eagles. And you did. You soared to the very summit of England.

  —

  Angie Cartwright was pushing them too hard for absolute safety but it was a calculated decision. Her radio told her that Ken Gill had reached Esk Hause without locating the errant walker. So the teams had reunited there, at his camp, and would begin moving back in relays now down towards Styhead, searching and whistling as they went, but primarily with the intention of regrouping. In the comms loop, she heard Ken Gill asking the team on the Corridor Route for a progress report but of course it was negative because, Angie Cartwright knew, the man would either be up here, on the high ridge, or not too far below it. At some stage his energy would run out and that often happened just after summiting with the grim realization that it was all downhill from there on out. If he had summited.

  She would like to think he had, just as she always thought that her husband knew when he fell that he had achieved what he set out to do in some more abstruse way that the people who condemned him never understood. There were some people, she believed, who were destined to strive for excellence, to shun mediocrity, and for them the attempt was almost as important as its outcome. So if her husband had fallen and died because he was climbing solo and unroped, then the truth of his demise—the truth to be cherished for Jemima—was that her father had perished knowing that he might well perish as he pushed himself to overcome that risk, to overcome fear. He had died because he was striving for a goal beyond that of normal mortals and that was good and essential, because if no one made those efforts, if no one set courage before humdrum concerns, then the world would be a tawdry place, robbed of ideals, of goals, of purity of spirit.

  They had reached Broad Crag col when the omens began to look bad. Close to one another, lying in the snow, were a walking pole and a glove. This was two hundred feet below the summit. Why had he removed a glove at this stage? How could he have lost so vital a piece of equipment as his pole? To her right, slightly to the northwest, she saw a potential answer—a bright dash of blue and yellow, the packaging of a disposable camera. What did they tell her? Was there anything more to them than the Irvine ice ax she had seen in an exhibit, an abandoned oxygen tank on the north ridge, the detritus of a broken altimeter found in Mallory’s pocket? What did forensic evidence say about the striving that claimed her husband, or Mallory or Irvine or even this poor deluded cripple she was searching for? Did her findings mean he had or had not been to the summit? And how did you define summit? She ordered a halt. She radioed her findings to Ken Gill. She made her arrangements. She thought that from the way his lost equipment was strewn about it was impossible to conclude whether he had been to the top of Scafell Pike, or summited Broad Crag, or achieved neither. But the main thing, she figured, was to find him.

  Eva Kimberly sat hunched in a folding chair in the barn where the rescuers had set up their base. She had been offered, and had accepted, a mug of tea, sickly and sugary, with condensed milk. The rescuers had set up a gas heater around their equipment of radios and cables. There was no signal for mobile phones, but a satellite phone trilled occasionally as radio stations and newspapers called in for an update and were told: nothing yet; stay in touch. Along the lane outside, an outside broadcast van had pulled up, but the rescuers had kept Eva’s presence secret from the television crew. Alongside the dry stone wall, a live camera had been set up on a tripod to run automatically, without the tending of a technician, so that, every half hour or so, the reporter would emerge in a miasma of warmth and cigarette smoke from the outside broadcast van to speak earnestly into the solitary camera, broadcasting live to a nation in warm living rooms from a bleak, cold valley in the Lake District. Sometimes, Eva Kimberly caught the reporter’s words. “Day wearing on and rescue still in progress” . . . “no sightings so far and hope must by now be fading” . . . “team close to a decision whether to call off before nightfall.” She was disturbed by another voice, crackling on the rescue radio, as Angie Cartwright reported finding a walking pole and a glove, a throwaway camera. But no Joe Shelby. And the drifting snow had made his tracks difficult to follow. Eva Kimberly drew her coat closer around her.

  “Don’t you worry,” one of the rescuers told her. “If anyone can find him, Angie Cartwright can.” It struck Eva Kimberly that there always seemed to be another woman ready to find a man she did not realize she had lost.

  Ken Gill wanted them reunited before nightfall and radioed Angie Cartwright’s team to retrace their footsteps to Esk Hause so that the rescuers could begin to regroup. He ordered the Corridor Route team to pull back to Styhead. The emphasis now was on the safety of the team. With only two hours of daylight left, they would be hard-pressed to cover the ground, at least as far as Stockley Bridge, before dusk made the going treacherous. The immediate weather forecast, relayed from Seathwaite base, suggested that the storm had not blown itself out and would intensify before peaking overnight. That meant they would be able to search the following morning with far better visibility, although they would probably be searching for a frozen corpse by that stage. On an impulse, Ken Gill ordered that the walker’s tent be left in place and stocked with a ration of food and water, a stove and fuel. In case the man found his way back there. Just in case.

  Angie Cartwright had already struck out to the summit of Scafell Pike and returned to Broad Crag col and made her own point on the radio that it made more sense for at least some of her team to descend via the Corridor Route to check out its upper reaches. Ken Gill said he was not sure that wasn’t risky. Angie Cartwright said it was risky whichever way she went, but it would be plain wrong to avoid ground where the lost walker might still be. Eva Kimberly heard the disagreement from Seathwaite base and prayed that the woman up there on the mountain would prevail. But she could tell that the signs were looking bad. The old-timers had lost their jollity and their jokes and had taken to standing outside the barn, in the swirl of snowflakes, peering up towards the mountains, smoking their cigarettes with a slight bitterness. After a conversation with one of them, the TV reporter broadcast live to say it was now increasingly likely that the search would be called off in the failing light and terrible weather. And, after apparently listening to a question from the studio, the reporter said: “Exactly. It would indeed take a miracle for anyone to survive the night out there.” Spoiling the broadcast, a brown hen pecked a way across the road and a small dog yapped somewhere off-camera.

  TAPE FIVE, SEGMENT THREE

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  So that’s it, I guess, my story. The last chapter. I can’t quite believe this is really it, but it must be. I just can’t go on anymore. I have given of my best and it’s time.

  Not just balance you need, but a certain elan, flexibility, the ability to hop and maneuver. And I’ve got neither now. So just sit down for a moment. Like to roll one and difficult because left hand white and feel a bit sleepy. Kill for a hit of Johnnie. Prisoner’s last request. Death Row. Didn’t think it would necessarily come to this, but there
was always the chance. Followed the route down from the summit heading northwest then found a trail going north-northeast so must be on the right route. But it’s difficult to see because of the snow and the cold makes my eyelids feel as if they’ve iced up. Getting darker now and the storm is quite strong but it’s odd that I feel so warm considering that everything else is frozen. Found this flat rock and when the snow recedes I can see a big black hole in the mountain side and I suppose that is the gateway we all fear and in the end all welcome when the struggling is over. Like now. I think of them, Eva and Faria, and I want to say goodbye, farewell and thank you and good night. Thank you for putting up with me. Thank you for loving me and letting me love you. Don’t want to weep. But I am weeping and the tears are freezing because I’m sorry, sorry that I let you down, failed you both when you needed me. Betrayed, really, is the word for it. So forgive me if you hear this, forgive my treachery and know that I meant no harm and meant to love properly. I want to be angry. I want to rage against the dying of the light but I have no strength to rage against my broken nerves any longer so if it could be gentle into that good night then that’s fine by me. For I see now that the mystery is redeemed and I have been granted my triumph in this realm as a final gift before passing to the next, so the faith is confirmed in my soul and the Lord has guided me and sent an angel to be my guide from this mountain to the parallel universe. Only, I didn’t take the moment to take her face in my hands and look the last time into those eyes and say in my way I loved you the best and forgive me, dear Lord, forgive me, all the failings that came with it. And I wanted so badly to have this solemn parade around the paddock but I never realized it would be the last forever and ever amen so there is no chance now to say all those things you store up for the last moment, the final testament you offer to the people you have loved and hurt and damaged. And there’s no time or place now to look for the absolution you crave from them when you say to the ones you loved the most: please give me your blessing at this last moment and forgive me my sins and crimes and selfishness, for the ego is a great corrupter, and tell me, please tell me, that I was not all bad and did some good and finally that you were proud of me sometimes and thought me worthy. When I look into your eyes I can read the hurt there, my darling, and I want my tears to wash it all away and I want you to forgive me more than anything or anybody and I want you to draw a cross of tears on my forehead and release me with your benediction. Dearest one. My only love. The temptation to sleep now is quite strong so I guess that must be—

  —

  It made the national television news. The camera showed what looked, at first, like a necklace of lights strung out across the snowy, blustery lower slopes. The lights turned out to be the headlamps worn by the thirty-two members of the Mountain Rescue Team as they pulled back from Styhead Pass and down towards Stockley Bridge. Between them—heavy and awkward to manhandle—they carried the stretcher from the wooden box at the summit of the pass. On it, a bundle, a bulky, human form, strapped in as the team descended to prevent it from falling.

  The base team, along with Eva Kimberly, had moved up to Stockley Bridge and the TV crew had followed them for this final act of the drama. They waited, now, quietly as the procession descended the last steep section of the Styhead trail and crossed from east to west. Ken Gill led the way and Angie Cartwright kept close to the stretcher, leaning over it as they bore it across the stone bridge.

  —

  “Did he make it to the summit?” Eva Kimberly asked.

  “Oh yes, certainly,” Angie Cartwright replied, thinking, yes, he made it to his summit.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THIRLMERE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  Angie Cartwright told Eva Kimberly that she found Joe Shelby perched above the deep ravine of Piers Ghyll on the Corridor Route. In the old days, she said, it had been called the Guide’s Route and that was quite ironic because he had been asleep on a flat rock, sliding towards oblivion, and, when she awoke him with a rough shake, he said to her: are you the walking guide? Are you my guide? Humoring him she said: yes, I’m your walking guide. And he said: good, that’s very good.

  —

  With the big lads in the team supporting him they managed to grapple him down the steep zigzags and slippery surfaces of the Scafell Pike flank to Styhead where the rest of the team huddled from the weather. There, with water warmed to exactly 40 degrees centigrade, they thawed out his frozen left hand and poured hot drinks full of sugar and cups of soup down his throat until at least the danger of hypothermia had passed. They kept him walking at intervals just to make sure that the worst was over and the medics on the team said he’d be fine so all he’d need now was a hot bath and a week’s sleep. They used the stretcher from Styhead pass to get him down the steep and tricky bits towards the valley floor because he was very weak, from exhaustion, not just from his condition. To have reached the point he had, Angie Cartwright reckoned, he must have been running on willpower alone but that, too, had finally fizzled out and he displayed all the signs that usually precede a hypothermia death. Right at the end, as they crossed Stockley Bridge, she said, he had tried to raise himself up from the stretcher to walk the last few yards, but had fallen back.

  —

  The team escorted them to the hotel, assuring her that while no bones were broken and while his core temperature had been restored to normal, he was a very tired, very fortunate man. Privately, Ken Gill thought him a very foolish man. Angie Cartwright leavened her assessment of his stupidity with a sprinkling of admiration for his courage: in his condition, to have gone up there, alone, that needed bottle, she said, and didn’t mind who knew it.

  Arriving back at the suite—advanced base—Eva Kimberly helped him peel off his wet cold boots and gaiters, leaving him with his privacy to struggle free of thermal underclothing, rank from three days’ uninterrupted wear. She helped him negotiate the treacherous descent into a hot, drowsy bathtub and the subsequent transfer to the big double bed, underneath the down comforter, where he slept immediately. But she did not sleep at all—not after she found his tapes and tape player in a zipped inner pocket of his parka and began to listen.

  At first, she was filled with fondness at his boyish enthusiasms, his keenness. She stirred guiltily at his expressions of faith in her, at his thoughts of abandoning the project in order to return to her. And, she wondered, how might that have changed the course of events if he had returned prematurely to advanced base to find her in wrestled embrace with Jeremy Davenport? He had called out to his Ruth, waiting in the valley below, but she had proved to be his Jezebel. She sipped steadily at her whisky, her chosen confessor, asking herself: where should the forgiveness begin? Who should forgive whom?

  Then, as the other disclosures unfolded with that insufferably self-absorbed arrogance of his kind, her mood darkened. The egotism spilling from the little silver machine was monstrous. The use of his malady as a justification and a cover for his failings was obscene. The illness was not simply a set of physical consequences, but the center of the entire universe, placed there for all to gyrate around in a dance of homage. Whatever crime or sin he committed, his condition absolved him.

  Over and over again she played back his crude justifications and definitions of betrayal, his gloating over the tryst in Room 5 of the American Colony after his appalling display on the television. If there was a parallel with her own behavior at advanced base, then it eluded her, for he had shown no remorse at all and neither had he behaved as if he meant a clean break with anybody.