Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick
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Reaching easy ground, easy in comparison to what it took to reach it, I race up a hanging corner, sacrificing protection for speed. I pop up onto a narrow foot ledge, a grassy escape route into an easier climb on the left. I hesitate. Above, the wall looks compact and steep. It would be so easy to avoid what waits there. Plenty of possible excuses. The dark. The storm. I look down at my partner Dick and think of the hollowness of giving up now. I know he doesn’t care as long as I get a move on.
With a nut placed at my feet I boulder out the moves above the ledge until I’m committed. I can see where I’m headed: across the wall to a ledge on the arête. Sweeping away hoar as I go, I try not to think about getting pumped as I scratch until I find one good tool placement on round edges, crampon points poised on sloppy holds that look like flattened chicken-heads. Matching tools together I look down at my partner far below as he tries to stay balanced in the wind, his flapping red jacket barely visible through the blown snow. The two ropes arch, plucking out questionable protection, but the big one stays put. There should be great fear, there should be great doubt, but all I see is possibility.
The teacher looked up from his marking and removed his glasses. ‘Remarkable. You’ve scored 99 per cent in the spatial test. I’ve only ever had one other person score so high. He was a headmaster. As for the other test . . . I’m afraid you only scored 16 per cent.’
My overwhelming joy was quickly crushed: the second test was much more important to real life. Being able to recognise what boxes look like opened out would get me a job in a cardboard box factory.
‘You’re a classic dyslexic,’ he said. ‘One side of your brain doesn’t work as it should, so the other half compensates.’ He told me the symptoms of dyslexia and my pieces finally fitted.
Lateral-thinking gets me below a small ledge. Holding my breath on nothing foot-holds I tickle at a frozen tuft of grass with my pick. The pick bites with a dull, shallow thwack. With time running out, I blindly swap feet, then hang off one tool as I bring the other across to join it. I feel the dice roll. Will they rip out when I pull?
My brain does some quick calculations and says no. I do. They don’t. I’m there.
I mantle up onto the arête. I’m so aware of everything around me: the snowflakes blowing across my face, the line of sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades, a twist of frozen heather emerging from the snow, the wind, the darkness, the cold. My body is hot, my brain burning as I suck in the speeding snow. The next thirty feet is unprotected. If I fall I’ll die, but there is no time for melodrama; this is where I have always wanted to be. I think how strange it is that brain power can get me here, yet it still fails to do so many other things. I know now that all things are balanced, but on the mountain such details no longer matter. There is no need for words here. With the pieces together I can see the picture. Who needs to know its name?
Hooking both axes onto a flake I pull off the ledge and head into the darkness.
The doctor showed me to the door and handed me a brown envelope containing my results. ‘Andrew, with a score of 99 per cent you should find something you enjoy that involves three-dimensional problem-solving, something creative, where you can turn these things into an advantage.’ I shook his hand and I said thank you, then walked home through the snow, wondering where such a strange gift would lead me.
ALL RISING TO GREAT PLACE IS
BY A WINDING STAIR.
Francis Bacon
ONE
Hard work kills horses
The taxi came at 6 a.m., beeping twice. It was a Sunday morning early in June 2001, the beginning of my journey to solo one of the hardest climbs in the world, certainly the hardest climb of my life.
And my life was falling apart. I was running away.
I’d lain awake on the settee most of the night waiting, my mind a mess; in part this was the usual jumble of worry and doubt about the climb, and in part it was the presence of darker clouds, the worry of what it meant to be sleeping down in the living room alone while my wife slept upstairs.
Did she sleep?
All night I’d tried to order my thoughts, put things in perspective, get my life straight in my head before I left. It was impossible. I thought about writing her a letter to try to explain why I was going, why I was so compelled to climb. But I just knew those words would be transparent and wouldn’t come close to how I really felt. No words could explain why. Nothing I could say would make her understand. There was no sense to it, only the absurdity of travelling halfway round the world to climb a lump of rock.
You don’t have to go.
A pendulum swung within my thoughts, one moment making me feel invulnerable, the next draining away all my self-belief, making me just want to stay here forever with my wife Mandy and my daughter Ella.
How can you leave them?
It would be easy to send the taxi away, to creep up the stairs and slip into our bed. I could hug Mandy and whisper that I wanted to stay. For once she would know that I put her first. I could still be here when Ella woke up. See her smile.
But what about tomorrow?
You have to go.
I lay and imagined myself lying in a pool of my own blood, shattered bone sticking out of me at crazy angles, slowly dying on the climb, imagined the feeling of loss, knowing I would never see them again, their world shattered like my body.
What will you find there that will justify risking everything you have here?
The taxi beeped again.
I wished it was still dark. In the night I would often feel the most levelheaded about climbing hard routes. Getting out of a warm bed to go to the toilet, I would stand naked in the dark, shivering with cold, knowing all I wanted to do was get back under the covers with the woman I loved. The thought of being anywhere else, sleeping in a snow hole, perched on the side of an icy north face, or forced to abseil through the night would seem ludicrous. Pointless.
You sound like her.
There is a point.
I could think of no rational reason for climbing anything. I just knew I had to do it.
The climb is the question.
I would be the answer.
I was about to leave and travel halfway across the world to solo one of the longest routes on the planet, a climb only a handful of people had ever dared to attempt, one which had taken one of the greatest climbers in the world a staggering fourteen days to solo. I knew the route was out of my league. I knew I could die, or worse, yet I slept alone on the settee.
You might never come back.
The taxi beeped once more.
I stood up and, already dressed, began lifting the huge vinyl haul bags that held my climbing gear out of the house and to the taxi. Each one was the size of a dustbin, made from indestructible material designed to line landfill sites and adapted to withstand being scraped against rock for miles of climbing. For the next few weeks they would be my only company. Half carrying, half dragging them out of the back door, I went round the side of the house to where the car waited. The taxi driver got out slowly and helped me lift the first bag into the boot, then pushed the second one sideways onto the passenger seats in the back.
Each bag was the size of a small person. It weighed around fifty kilos and contained the equipment I’d need for my coming climb: ropes, karabiners, slings, pegs, nuts, storm gear, sleeping bag, my portaledge and a hundred other vital items, a decade’s worth of accumulated climbing equipment.
The