by Andrew Greig
Mal is saved from further roasting by the arrival of more friends I recognize from the wedding. A big boozy night that was; the climbers there all gravitated towards the corner of the room and spent the night talking about the only relevant subject at such occasions – climbing. They’re obsessed, but it’s an interesting obsession, for the first couple of hours at least.
And so that first night at the Clachaig rolls on. Red faces, swollen knuckles, diminishing pints, growing excitement and anticipation as hopes and plans build for tomorrow. At least they don’t train on orange juice and early nights. Their regime seems to be one of alcohol, nicotine, late nights and systematic abuse, both verbal and bodily. Suits me.
I stand outside our chalet door for a few minutes before going to bed. The air is clear and cold, smelling unmistakably of snow. Clouds move across a three-quarter moon and sweep enormous shadows over the glimmering slopes across the glen. Passing voices ring hard in the frost. Orion is rising, the wind whispers over the snow, distant echoing water. I feel uplifted and self-forgetting before the irresistible forces of moon, shadow, mountains, snow. This alone was worth coming here for. I shake my head and go inside. See what tomorrow brings. Hope I’m up to it. I’ve been training two months for this.
The wind’s gusting spindrift into our faces, but my new gear keeps me surprisingly warm as we plod up through soft, deep snow into Lost Valley. We go over ice-axe braking and the placing of ‘deadmen’, which are in effect snow anchors. Then the fun’s over. Time to do some climbing.
My heart thuds wildly as we gear up, I have to force myself to breathe slowly and deep. Concentrate. I buckle on the harness, tie in the rope, get the knot right on the second attempt. Then strap the crampons onto my cumbersome rigid-soled double boots. The cramps are like heavy-duty running spikes, with two additional fangs projecting out in front. Then I sort out my two ice axes. Both have sharply inclined picks with teeth notched towards the tip; the head of one ends with a hammer for knocking in and removing pitons, while the head of the other ends in an adze for cutting steps. Apparently this is largely redundant, as the combination of front-pointed crampons and inclined picks make step-cutting unnecessary in most situations.
I feel absurd and overburdened, like a deep-sea diver in a paddling pool, as I follow Mal up the steepening slope. It’s not steep enough – he says – to merit belaying. I keep my gaze determinedly at my feet. Slip, flurry, recover. Continue. Untangle these stupid axes. Stop tripping over the crampons. Up and across, don’t like traverses, getting pretty high now. Don’t look, watch your feet, time for doing, not thinking. How clear the sounds are: scrape of crampons on rock, scrunch of boots in snow, jingling harness, echoing wind, a faint mewing cry …
We look up and spot a figure waving awkwardly further up John Gray’s Buttress. ‘Looks like he’s got gripped,’ says Mal. ‘Kick yourself a ledge and wait here.’ I feel a moment’s pleasant superiority over the incompetent up ahead, then a surge of fellow feeling. Mal tries to persuade him to climb down, but the shake of the head is vehement even from here. I look down. Safe enough really, but just the same … Mal climbs further up, secures a belay. In crabbed, awkward movements the man picks his way down. When he finally passes me, he’s white-faced and embarrassed. ‘Snow’s tricky in patches,’ he mutters apologetically. I agree politely.
A shout from Mal. He’s waving me up towards a ledge on the left beside a steep drop into a narrow gully, then adds something I can’t catch. By the time I reach the ledge, he’s disappeared. The rope runs over the edge into the gully, then drops out of sight. I wait. And wait. And wait.
Thirty minutes later there’s still no sign of him and the view downhill is beginning to impinge on me, nagging like a toothache. I shout tentatively, feeling foolish. No answer. Adrenalin wears off and muscles stiffen. Now what? Don’t think. Wait. Odd feeling alone up here …
He finally appears below me, plodding up the hill looking puffed and not very pleased. ‘Dropped my glove belaying that wazzock, it slid right to the bottom of the gully.’ I ask what had happened to the man he’d rescued. ‘Gripped,’ he says shortly and indicates our next line. A traverse right across a distinctly steep snow slope. He sets off. Looks like I’m not going to be belayed. I’ve had a lot of time to get nervous and don’t like the look of it, but follow on gingerly, thinking about avalanche, about falling …
I reach his stance, a narrow ledge beside a boulder, panting hard. Nerves, mostly. ‘Right, better clip in now, Andy.’
I put him on belay through the descendeur as we rehearsed on his stairway a lifetime ago. He checks my gear, goes over the call sequence and disappears round the corner. One day all of this will seem normal. I peer round to see where he’s making for and find myself looking down the throat of an apparently sheer snow chute. I look away, feeling ill. How did we get so high? This fear is like seasickness, invading mind and body. Hands tighten, stomach lurches, legs feel weak, stare fixedly in front … ‘Gripped’ is the right word for it. One grips and is gripped by an enormous fist of fear. I can’t do this. I’ll have to cry off the Expedition. What a farce. Then angry at myself, at this instinctive fear and revulsion. A clinking sound drifts faintly back. He must be putting in a runner. Good man. Put in a dozen. Stare at the weave in my gloves, the powder snow caught in the cuff of the windsuit. All sharp and vivid, too clear. ‘I’ll put you in controlled freak-out situations,’ Mal had said. ‘You freak out and I’ll control them.’ He knows what he’s doing. You trust him, don’t you? Yes. So nothing to worry about, just don’t make an ass of yourself …
The rope stops paying out. I start untangling myself, take off the descendeur and clip it to my harness. The slack’s taken in, then tugs come down the line. If only we had to face just one moment of truth, not many. Here goes …
‘Good enough, youth.’
I arrive at Mal’s stance and subside, jittering with adrenalin. I’ve just learned that waiting is worst; climbing itself is too novel, too demanding and intense to leave much room for anxiety. Or for memory. Already the last twenty minutes are reduced to a floundering through whiteness, stinging knuckles caught between axe shaft and rock, a flurried impromptu tango when my crampons interlocked, a hurried pull-up, the surge of satisfaction when the pick thuds into frozen turf. All so clumsy and unfamiliar, but something in this lark, perfectly safe really …
Then I look down and that anxiety that is like drowning rushes up to my throat. We’re poised out on the edge of space. Horrible. Unnatural. I shrink back into the slope. Mal points out matter-of-factly that the crampons can’t grip properly this way. Clinging to the slope actually increases the likelihood of falling. I point out this may well be true and would make a sound Buddhist parable, but every instinct in my body shouts at me not to stand upright.
By now the weather’s deteriorating fast; a greenish-grey sky and each gust fiercer than the last. And the pitch above us isn’t filled in with snow and ice – Mal points it out, I shudder and try to sound regretful when he decides we’ve done enough for today. And oddly enough, I suddenly am. He belays my descent along a ridge and down the sheerest slope yet. Perhaps because down is the right direction, I enjoy it and even find the blinding spindrift exhilarating. Then turn outwards and step-plunge down, feeling positively elated. Great to be in the hills, feeling oneself so physically immediate, so simple … And there’s something pleasing in the essence of winter climbing; a rope, axes, crampons, things to wedge in cracks, and with these one can go almost anywhere, in reasonable safety. Pointless maybe, but satisfying. And I like the way in which, quite unlike rock climbing, routes appear and disappear, may only exist for a few days every other year, are never the same twice.
In the valley we find an ice slab and mess around on that, reluctant to pack in for the day. Vertical and all of 12 feet high. My first fall of the day leaves me dangling helplessly from one axe wrist-loop, unable to go up or down, feet six inches off the ground, cursing a Duff helpless with laughter.
As we plod ba
ck, the wind redoubles. The combination of spindrift and fresh snow forms drifts in minutes. A couple of gusts simply knock us over. It’s exhilarating. We do not know this is the beginning of the worst blizzard for years in the Highlands and that five climbers will be dead before it’s through.
That evening in the Clachaig the sense of siege and drama mounted like the storm outside as one group after another staggered in, red-faced, dazed, plastered from head to foot, head torches making them look like negatives of miners. I floundered through chest-high drifts to our chalet, passed two tents reduced to mangled poles and shreds of material. And this on the sheltered floor of the valley. Rumours spread rapidly. All roads out blocked … sixteen head torches still on the hill … Mountain Rescue team on four calls at once … Hamish MacInnes stranded in his Land-Rover … someone’s taken a fall, broken his collarbone … We drank on, increasingly aware of Tony and Terry’s absence. They’d left at 5.00 a.m. to go to Ben Nevis. Mal was quite confident in them, but still kept glancing at his watch.
Finally, round 10.30, a small and a tall figure pushed wearily through the door. They looked as if they’d been tested in a wind tunnel, a mangle, a car wash, then hit repeatedly over the head for hours with a particularly substantial edition of Being and Nothingness. Which turned out to be pretty much the case as, drinks in hand, eyes still unfocused, they recounted their epic day. They’d succeeded in doing Vanishing Gully in appalling conditions (‘Very vertical,’ said Tony, eyes wide at the memory of it, ‘very’), abseiled off Tower Ridge where their lowered ropes flew straight up in the air like snakes charmed by the banshee howl of the wind, and made it to the CIC hut, mostly on hands and knees. There, unbelievably, they were refused shelter because they were not members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, so they had to continue. From the hut to the road, normally an hour’s walk, had taken them six and a half hours of tumbling, rolling, swimming, crawling, through a world gone berserk. ‘I once took two and a half hours on that walk,’ Mal said, ‘and the conditions were desperate. For Tony to take six and a half hours …’ He shook his head. Terry was slumped back, pale now, staring into his pint, completely drained. Tony was starting to recover, and entertained us with the absurdity of nearly being wiped out crossing the golf course (‘Thought we might set a new record’), finally being slammed up against the fence (‘I thought I was going to come out the other side as mince!’), getting to the car and realizing they’d have to dig it out. Then they’d driven through the blizzard, abandoned it on the road, and battered their way through to the Clachaig on foot.
A definite epic, a tale worth surviving for the telling of it. And sitting in that besieged inn in the wilderness, packed with dripping, excited, exhausted climbers, thinking back on the day and listening to the stories go round, I began to see something of what brings them there. Anxiety, adrenalin, physical endeavour, the surge of exultation; a day locked into the mountains, evening in the company of fellow nutters – after this, any other way of spending the weekend would be simply dull.
And one doesn’t have to be a top-level climber to feel this. At any level the rewards and apprehensions are the same. This is what makes them risk life and limb, scrape, borrow, hitch, neglect work, lovers, family, the future. The moment you commit yourself to the next pitch all those ghostly chains of everyday worries fall away. Lightness in the midst of fear; all that exists is the next move, the mountain, and your thudding heart.
Come closing time we are invited into the Snug bar among the late drinkers. Something of a ceilidh starts; guitars come out and the songs go round. And looking round I suddenly see how this was the original bar I’d walked into sixteen years before. The door must have been here, the fireplace there. I see again the dartboard, the Pale Ale, my Glasgow nurse, myself singing out my teenage years into the hubbub of men. The place is recognizable though overlaid with changes. Me too. For a moment I long to go back, to have that night again, though I know I carry it inside me. Then one of the women’s voices, trained and beautiful, lifts in a haunting Gaelic lament, and in the moment’s silence at the end we are all briefly bound together by the silken, invisible rope of her song.
Next morning I helped Tony and Terry dig out their car. As we slithered towards Glencoe Village the car radio spoke of 2000 people trapped in Glenshee, marooned trains, three climbers found dead in the Cairngorms … Tony and Terry glance at each other, the slightest shake of the head. Nothing is said. It could have been them but it wasn’t.
At the village I waved them goodbye and plodded to the monument to the Massacre of Glencoe. It’s a simple pillar of stone on a hillock near the river. The inscription was unreadable, being plastered with spindrift. I thought of the sign in the Clachaig: NO HAWKERS NO CAMPBELLS. Life was precarious enough in those days, no need for mountaineering. Climbing has some of the adrenalin, the release, and the self-discovery of combat; the difference is you’re not being asked to kill anyone, and you take no orders but your own. But war and climbing partake of the same odd quirk in our nature – only when our survival is at risk do we feel how precious it is to be alive. Tony and Terry’s silence came not from callousness but an acceptance of the risks involved.
Mal spent most of the day in his sleeping bag, looking haggard and listening to Frank Sinatra on his Walkman. Apparently last night’s session went on long and late. We ate and slept, marking time. Climbers came, gossipped, picked up their gear and left. Towards evening the snow came down again, thick and swirling.
We went over to the pub for one beer, had several, and found ourselves having a long and surprisingly personal talk about our lives. Our paths have been so different, yet there are parallels. It’s hard to imagine now, but Mal worked in insurance in London for five years. ‘Then one day I looked around me, a long, slow look at all the familiar faces reading the papers or looking out the window, and I saw they were only existing, not living. And if I carried on, I’d be like that in another five years. I thought, screw that for a lark. I handed in my notice to quit that day.’ He stared down at his lager with his characteristic frown, part impatience, part perplexity. ‘That’s why I could relate to you from the beginning, because somewhere along the line you’ve chosen not to live like most people.’
I nodded, knowing the unlikely kinship he meant. The turning point in my life had not been as sudden and clear as his. My dissatisfaction with the life I was leading some years ago grew slowly and unnoticed like an overhanging cornice until finally I fell through. I kept on writing because there was nothing else.
And the unhappiness we spread around us on the way makes it all the more important that we do it well.
Climbing and writing seem poles apart, but we had both rearranged our lives round a supremely satisfying central activity that seems pointless to many – sometimes to ourselves. We were both now doing what we wanted. That was our basis for mutual respect.
That night he called out in his sleep, ‘It’s too late now.’ And then, ‘Better put some more runners in, Andy.’
Next morning loose snow still ruled out serious climbing. We spent it working on setting up runners and belay stances, and abseiling. There’s something absolutely unnatural in walking backwards off a cliff. I found it also – when you’re sure of the rope and the belay – surprisingly enjoyable. Just lean back and walk down, paying out rope through the descendeur. Pleasingly ingenious.
I spent some time on placing aids. Hammering pitons (blades, leapers, bongs, angles, channels, pegs, the wonderfully named RURPS – Realized Ultimate Reality Pitons) into cracks; wedging nuts (wedges, wires) into fissures. ‘I lost a couple of friends here last year,’ Mal remarked conversationally, fumbling with something on his harness. I didn’t know what to say, made some sympathetic sound. ‘They’re worth nearly twenty quid now,’ he continued. I stared at him. I know this is an age that sets a price on everything, but this is ridiculous. ‘And even this one is a bit knackered,’ he said, and held out a strange object to me with just the faintest hint of a grin.
It
looked like a piece of particularly nasty dental equipment, like an adjustable wrench with its jaws turned inside out. They were spring-loaded so one could pull them back, shove them into a crack and then let them expand to grip the walls.
‘It’s called a “friend”. Not totally reliable, but very useful at times.’
We went through the belaying sequence on the floor of a quarry. I was cumbersome and ponderous as I stumbled along pretending there was a 1000-foot drop on my right, placing runners along the rock on my left. When I shouted ‘On belay!’ my voice sounded absurd and lacking in conviction, like the first time you try to hail a taxi or call ‘Waiter!’. Mal followed on round the corner, walking slowly, treating this charade with elaborate seriousness. He came to the first runner, removed the peg – then abruptly fell back. I instinctively pulled the rope back on the descendeur and he was held. He came on again, head down. When he arrived at my stance he looked up, shook his head. ‘Whew, that was a bit thin, youth!’ We laughed. It was a game. The whole activity is an absurd and sometimes delightful game.
He led through and we did a couple of pitches on genuine slopes. It’s clever and simple, this whole procedure, each climber alternately protecting the other. I was still getting tangled up and several times hit myself on the helmet with an ice axe, but it was beginning to feel more natural. Finding out what crampons can do, working out different moves, reading the slope ahead. The last pitch was a scramble; the snow deep and powdery, no purchase in it, then loose and shallow over rocks. Spindrift blowing up into my face, balaclava slipping over my eyes. The left axe pulled through and I was off balance, hacking away wildly for purchase, slipping … An internal voice spoke very clearly, ‘Slow down, look for it.’ I spotted frozen turf, the inclined pick went in and held. Lovely. Pull up, across, come out on the top and find Mal sitting patient and immobile as a Buddha, wrapped in a cloak of spindrift.