by Andrew Greig
We finished up by building a snowhouse. It was more of a beehive than a classic igloo, but the shelter it provided was impressive. Absolutely silent and windless inside. ‘If those missing Army blokes have made one of these and stay in it, they’ll be all right for days.’
Back in the gloaming, in high spirits, for tea and the latest disaster stories. A few casualties, but no fatalities in Glencoe. In the evening I borrowed a guitar and sang a few songs I’d written years before to go with my Men on Ice. Mal was very taken with them, insisted I put them on tape, and spent much of the rest of our time in Glencoe wandering about with the earphones on, bawling out the lyrics. When he was over in the pub I wrote some new verses to Throw me down some more rope, and a middle section. Mal was amazed on his return. ‘How can you do that?’ ‘How can you solo Grade Five?’ I replied. It was good to be reminded there were things I could do competently.
‘We’ll try a harder route tomorrow,’ he said as I crawled into my bag. I lay thinking about that as he muttered over a new verse and the chorus, trying to memorize the words:
Halfway up ‘Whitesnake’ when the blizzard hits,
Can’t feel your nose or your toes, everything goes
And nothing grips (except you);
It’s a funny desire, wanting to get higher,
Sometimes you wish you’d stayed below,
Sometimes you know that it’s right,
Sometimes you know that it’s wrong,
And sometimes you just Don’t Know –
Throw me down some more rope (throw me down)
Throw me down some more rope (hey, youth!)
Throw me down some more rope ’cos I’m falling,
Yes I’m falling …
We set out in the half-light. No cloud, no wind, blue sky filtering through. The high ridges slowly become three-dimensional as we plod up the road in silence, our senses sharp and clear as the air. A flock of sheep freshly out of a snowdrift are encrusted with icicles; as they move, a delicate tinkling like wind chimes sounds across the valley. A buzzard circles into high sunlight, drifting on invisible currents. Three crows beside a frozen stream tear at a dead rabbit. Glencoe goes about its immemorial business.
It was a long day that, on the north face of Aonach Dubh, but only fragments of it remain lodged in the memory, like slivers of ice caught in a windsuit’s creases. I was too caught up with what was happening to record, too present to stand back, too scared to take photographs.
The first pitch up a narrowing snow-choked gully made the first day’s efforts seem child’s play. Relief and exhilaration on arriving at Mal’s stance, then half an hour clinging to a stunted rowan tree, fighting off paralysis and panic, hating it. Sitting still is the worst. Time to take in where you are, time to think, time to fear. I look down – too far, too steep, too empty. I glance up – too high, too steep, too endless. Contemplating going on this Expedition is absurd. My body hates this. Don’t look, don’t think. Keep the rope going. Where’s Mal got to? If you think this is bad, imagine the sense of exposure on Mustagh … Extraordinary clarity of lichen on this branch, the precise angle of this fork …
It’s a relief to be climbing again, traversing onto a buttress of steep rock, soft snow, patchy frozen turf. Gloves off, treating some of it as a rock climb, half-remembered techniques from childhood scrambling. Chunks of knuckle left on rocks, arms with all the resilience of blancmange. Concentrating hard, each movement dreamlike in its intensity. I call for tight rope and get it. Thanks, pal. Over a bulge, there he is …
Another anxious wait on belay, then another pitch. It’s beginning to feel more natural. I cease tying myself up in Gordian knots of slings, rope, krabs and ice axe lines. Even relax enough to snatch a photo as Mal works his way up an angled cleft above me. After two hours fear starts to lose its urgency, and though I know this pitch is tricky by my standards I push up through soft snow, cross onto rock, find some lovely frozen turf and almost shout with satisfaction as the picks thud home. Hold an elephant, that would. Now pull up … Something in this lark, after all.
Until you pause and catch a glimpse of below.
An hour and two pitches later we come out on top of the ridge. I’m shattered, puffing like an old espresso machine, arm muscles like wet newspaper from working above my head all the time. In addition to the long approach plod, then the physical effort of climbing, I’ve put out enough nervous energy to light up Glencoe village for a year. But the weather’s menacing and the light starting to go, so Mal hurries on and I plod after. We pause on the summit of Aonach Dubh – briefer than a kiss is this final pay-off, that’s the joke of it.
Mal points down No. 2 Gully. ‘Follow me as fast as you can – but concentrate.’ I sense a certain urgency in his voice, and follow him down in the half-light. It seems steep, but I haven’t the energy to care. Step, plunge, axe, step, plunge … It becomes endless, unreal, hypnotic. I begin to stumble, stuff snow in my mouth to stay awake. Somewhere along the line a crampon disappears. No time to look for it, carry on … I seem to have been doing this forever, stepping down through the gathering dark. In the distance Mal swings right and up onto a buttress. Eventually I join him. ‘Well done,’ he says briefly. Must have been harder than it looked. It’s getting very dim now. We start feeling our way down over rock, scree and snow towards the yellow lights in the valley.
Finally his urgency relaxes, the rest is straightforward. We sit for five minutes on Dinnertime Buttress, munching biscuits and looking over at the glimmering slopes across the glen. We say nothing, but it is many months since I felt so at peace. ‘What was that route called?’ ‘We can decide that in the pub,’ he replies casually. Understanding comes slowly. ‘You mean you … we …?’ I splutter. He nods. ‘I’d been saving that one up for a while.’
A new route for my first route. I’m outraged, flabbergasted, and not a little chuffed. Of course it wasn’t hard – Grade 2 or 3 he reckons – and all I did was follow on, but the sense of delight and absurdity sustain me on the rest of the trudge back. ‘Two Shakes’ I say finally. ‘Why?’ ‘Well, there was two tree belays on it, there’s two parts to it – the gully and the buttress – and I’m lying about the amount of shaking I did!’
Finally, we push through the door of the Clachaig into a gust of warmth and light and laughter. Then the simple wonder of sitting down. We’ve been on the go for eleven hours. I slump back against the wall, totally blank.
‘Tired, youth?’ Mal asks.
I search for the right epithet.
‘Massacred,’ I say briefly, and with some effort raise the first pint of the night to my lips.
We left Glencoe two days later. I was relieved yet oddly regretful as the old blue van struggled out of the valley. Five days in this place had been a month of normal time. Grinding and slipping past abandoned cars, cottages up to their eyelids in snow, a snowblower moving across the wilderness of Rannoch Moor, followed by a tiny man in yellow oilskins …
We were silent as we worked our way south toward civilization and its dubious benefits. What had happened to me here, what had I learned? The extent of my fear, for one thing. It hadn’t miraculously evaporated over the intervening years, like teenage acne. I felt weakened by that fear, yet strengthened for having coped with it. Perhaps one can never overcome fear completely – after all, it is often a sane and appropriate response-what counts is that it doesn’t overcome you.
Being a novice climber is like having a weak head for alcohol: people may laugh at you, but you get high more easily. It didn’t take much to get my heart thumping, whereas Mal has to push it a long way to get his kicks. Both novice and expert have the same experience, despite the huge gulf in their capabilities. Both know fear, exhilaration, satisfaction, relief. Both have to persist through discomfort and utter fatigue. Both have to recognize their limits, then push a little further. And both experience the great simplification of one’s life that is the reward of all risk activities …
But I was thinking most of all about the t
wo Army lads who were found dead today in the Cairngorms, and of the half-buried monument to the Massacre of Glencoe. Our ‘massacre’ by the elements is a self-imposed one, a piece of personal theatre. When it is over, all but a few get to their feet again and feel themselves, behind their fatigue, somehow stronger and more alive than before.
For those who do not rise again, there remains the unyielding pillar of stone, the inscription obliterated by drifting snow.
3
Sit-ups and Setbacks
We prepare to bottle up and go
November 1983–May 1984
I trained for our Expedition from late November till our departure in early June. I had not trained for anything in fifteen years. It was hard work. Sit-ups, pull-ups, press-ups, toe-ups, Bullworker, stiff hill walking with a weighted backpack. And, above all, running. Between three and eight miles, five days a week.
Picture one of those montage sequences used in films to indicate continued effort through time. At first we see an unfit, ungainly figure running through falling leaves, the last rags of autumn quivering in the trees. He emerges, panting and staggering, onto an open beach. Then the trees are bare, the light low and brief; it’s a world drained of colour and sound; no birds sing, but the runner now seems to be moving more firmly and rejoices in the frozen sand as he turns for home in the half-light of 3.30. Then clots of snowdrops appear on the forest floor, then crocuses, birdsong, movements in the undergrowth. The runner has removed his gloves, then his sweater. He is moving faster and lighter than before, more upright. And suddenly the light is fresh and green, it is May, and as he turns for home at 8.00 on a sunlit evening – wearing only shorts and running shoes – he is running not towards his home and a cool shower but towards a tower of snow and rock some four and a half miles high, on the roof of the world.
I’d noticed the sudden proliferation of runners in the last few years. I could only shake my head and wonder at them. It all looked too mindless and too painful: an exercise in masochism. To my surprise it was not like that at all.
Not only did I stick to my schedule of running five days a week, but I found myself looking forward to it. After a couple of days off, I’d be edgy and irritable, obscurely dissatisfied. ‘For God’s sake, go for a run,’ Kathleen would say, and her diagnosis was correct.
It was often uncomfortable, often painful, particularly for the first month, but other days were pure joy, a revelling in the sensation of movement, of strength and wellbeing. My regular headaches stopped. For the first time ever, I got through winter without even a cold. I felt incredibly well, began to walk and hold myself differently. When friends asked ‘How are you?’, instead of the normal Scottish ‘Oh, not too bad,’ I’d find myself saying ‘Extremely well!’
How obnoxious.
On other days training was pure slog, the body protesting and the will feeble. The mind could see little point in getting up before breakfast to run on a cold, dark morning, and none at all in continuing when it began to hurt. Take a break, why not have a breather, why not turn for home now?
It is at times like that that the real work is done. It’s easy to keep going when you feel strong and good. Anyone can do that. But at altitude it is going to feel horrible most of the time – and that’s what you’re really training for. So keep on running, through the pain and the reluctance. Do you really expect to get through this Expedition – this relationship, this book, this life for that matter – without some of the old blood, sweat and tears? No chance. That’s part of the point of it all. So keep on running …
The real purpose of training is not so much hardening the body as toughening the will. Enthusiasm may get you started, bodily strength may keep you going for a long time, but only the will makes you persist when those have faded. And stubborn pride. Pride and the will, with its overtones of fascism and suppression, have long been suspect qualities – the latter so much so that I’d doubted its existence. But it does exist, I could feel it gathering and bunching inside me as the months passed. There were times when it alone got me up and running, or kept me from whinging and retreating off a Scottish route. The will is the secret motor that keeps driving when the heart and the mind have had enough.
Mal would call it commitment. He’d said there was no point in going to a mountain with a ‘let’s see how it looks’ attitude. One’s commitment and self-belief had to be absolute. And yet that had to be balanced by clear, objective assessment of one’s capacities and limitations. That balancing act is at the very heart of climbing. I noticed that most climbers didn’t value bravado and boldness unless it was tempered by good judgement. One of the lads at Mal’s wedding said, ‘The hardest and bravest and probably the best mountaineering decision you can make is to say No.’ I looked at Tony. The diminutive innocent nodded vigorously. ‘That’s right. Mountaineering isn’t about getting to the top – it’s about mountaineering.’
To call mountaineering a sport or a pastime is like calling monastic life a hobby. For those who become serious – though seldom solemn – about it, it is the core of their lives. Everything else is arranged around it. It affects their attitude to everything else. As time went by I gradually exchanged one obsession, writing, for another, climbing – though I denied and derided it to the last. I picked up the elements of Good Brit Style: not to be seen training, not to have gleaming new gear, to play down all but one’s fears and fiascos. To drink too much too late, to get up reluctantly and late next morning, moaning and groaning, to arrive at the foot of the route with three hours’ daylight left and still climb it: that was considered Good Style. I had little problem in acquiring that.
The substance was another matter. Due to poor weather I only had another four weekends’ winter climbing in Glencoe. Yet the promise and threat of these changed my entire winter, made it something to be enjoyed rather than just suffered. Weekdays were a time for recovery and appreciation of home comforts, with the weekend to both dread and anticipate. My social life was suddenly full of climbers, climbing talk, climbing plans and reminiscences. Much laughter, drinking, abuse and friendship, shared experience. And gradually, the beginning of some composure.
It was, quite simply, very exciting. It dramatized my life.
By the end of the season, I’d done a grand total of six Scottish routes, none harder than Grade 3 or 4, and an amount of yomping about on the hills. It was an absurdly inadequate background for going to the Himalayas – the norm would be several Scottish winters, then a few seasons in the Alps doing the classics and adding some new routes, then one might consider Pakistan or Nepal.
My anxiety at exposure didn’t disappear, but did diminish. I still disliked waiting on belay halfway up a route. And some days I had no appetite or nerve for it at all, when climbing was all slog and fear and trembling and wanting it to be over with, hating it. That too – and having to continue just the same – was valuable experience. But other days …
One day in particular remains with me, always will. A day when nervousness took the form of controlled energy, when I wanted to climb. When I had the appetite. A day of great intensity and joy. Then I rejoiced in the challenge of the crux of SC Gully; pulling up and over it and moving on, I was lifted up like a surfer on a great wave of adrenalin. The day was perfect: ice blue, ice cold, needle-bright. After two hours in the shadowed gully I finally pulled myself through the notch in the cornice overhanging the top, and in my eyes was a dazzling world of sunlight and gleaming ridges and all the summits of Glencoe clear across to Ben Nevis. Mal silhouetted against the sun, belaying me; a few climbers moving on the summit ridge; my panting exhilaration – in that moment I felt like a king, and what I saw in front of me was the earth as Paradise, blue, golden and white, dazzlingly pure.
The intensity we win through effort! In that pristine clarity of the air and the senses, the simplest experiences become almost mystical in their intensity. A cigarette smoked in the lee of a cairn, an orange segment squirting in the mouth and the smell of it filling the moment, making the world fr
uit, the patch of lichen inches from your face, the final pulling off of boots at the end of the day – Glencoe and winter climbing gave me moments of completeness. I will never forget them.
Though I still intended to pack it in after the Mustagh trip, it was hard to imagine what I did with myself before climbing came along. The company, the personal struggle and the intensity of sensation on the mountains are all highly addictive. And more than that, I found all my customary worries and concerns – money, love life, boredom, the future, the past, politics, whatever – ceased to weigh on me in Glencoe. Such things cease to matter. All that matters is this move, the next hold, keeping the rope running out, the approaching storm clouds and the beer at the end of the day. All other worries slip off one’s shoulders and slide away into obscurity, like the sacks we sometimes sent off down a snow chute, to be picked up again on our way back down.
The weight one takes on in committing oneself to a mountain or a route is considerable, but it’s nothing compared to the weight of the world one leaves behind.
It was at the Clachaig that I first met Jon Tinker, the third of our lead climbers. I knew he’d been out to the Himalayas once, on an unsuccessful but highly educational trip to Annapurna 3, and that he was beginning to make a name for himself with some bold Alpine ascents. ‘A bit of a headbanger,’ someone opined. ‘I don’t know,’ Mal said, frowning, ‘I thought he was pretty impressive when we did that new route on the Ben.’ At twenty-four and a couple of months younger than Tony Brindle, he was the youngest of the team. I’d been forewarned that he’d be the most awkward and abrasive member, and that there could be some interesting strains between him and Tony.
‘So you’re the author chappie who wants to poke about inside our heads’ were practically his first words to me. And then he laughed, just a shade too loudly. That was typical Jon: the remark that niggled, then the forced laugh that seemed to say he was just joking yet with just enough edge to make it stick. I was to see him do it many times with people he’d just met – with men, at least, for he was much more charming and at ease with women – and quite often with those he knew well. He seemed to always strive for the upper hand.