Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick
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but even when I felt my knees were about to buckle or my vertebrae compress down like an empty Coke can, I enjoyed carrying them. Pain like that is simple, honest, and feels invigorating as muscles and mind are pushed beyond their norms. Carrying stops you thinking.
The longer you go without thinking the better it feels when you experience it again.
Each bag made the car sag further, and the taxi driver’s eyebrows rose as his wheel arches dipped towards the gutter.
‘You might need another taxi, mate,’ said the driver, kicking his tires with concern.
‘Only got one small one left,’ I said, as I nipped back down the alley to my house.
I walked through the back gate, past Ella’s frog-shaped sandpit and small red scooter, and in through the back door of our tiny Sheffield terraced house.
My last bag lay on its side surrounded by Ella’s toys.
There was one more thing I had to do. I crept up the steep narrow stairs and slipped into her bedroom. She lay on her side, her thumb in her mouth. Perfect. Nothing in my life seemed to fit together properly any more, my marriage, work, climbing. Nothing but her. She was the only thing in my life that I didn’t doubt.
But even she wasn’t enough.
You have to go.
I wanted to kiss her, but knew if she woke up I wouldn’t be able to leave.
I spent a lot of time wondering what she would think when she grew up, if I were to die climbing, and I thought about it again now: the selfishness of what I was about to do, risking my life once more, and in turn, risking her life and future. Many climbers, or people who do dangerous things, give it up once they have kids, but for me her birth had come at the start of it all.
At that time, people made judgments about me as a climber and a father, often asking me how I could do it. I didn’t know, all I had was excuses. I’d said that you shouldn’t sacrifice who you are for your kids, but I wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t it be me sacrificing them for what I wanted? But I knew that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be a person worth having as a father, and in a way that was why I was here now, about to set off on another climb. The more I tried to quit, the more the pressure built inside me.
What if you never see her again?
I told people I didn’t want to die before she was born, just as much as after she was born. But the truth is dying is never in any climber’s plan.
She made sense, but she also made what I loved even more senseless. Mountains don’t care about love.
I wanted to stand there forever. I could. But I wouldn’t.
I crept out of her bedroom, closed the door, and turned to see the stairs leading up to our bedroom, where Mandy probably lay awake. She would be angry with me, leaving her again to go climbing. She wanted so little: a normal life, a normal husband. I couldn’t give her that, but we were both stubborn and we’d been together for ever. We didn’t quit, so here we were. Still fighting. We also loved each other.
I knew she would be lying in bed hating me now, yet wanting me to climb the stairs and say goodbye, or even to say I’d stay—not because she was weak, but because she loved me.
I was about to solo a climb so hard only the best had attempted it, a route I doubted I could do. Yet in that moment the thing I most feared was climbing those stairs, climbing up to face her and say goodbye.
What if you never see the baby growing inside her?
I went out to the garden and tried to compose myself, not wanting the taxi driver to see I was upset. I was everything I despised.
They will be better off without you.
As I’d done so many times before, I opened a box in my head and placed the feelings inside, closed the lid, and moved on.
‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asked as I sat next to him and clipped in my seat belt.
‘The station, please.’
We drove down the hill, and through the empty streets.
‘Where you off to?’
‘America, to a place called Yosemite.’
‘Oh aye, I’ve heard of that. Are you a climber, like?’
‘Yeah . . . sort of.’
‘Are you going by yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘No,’ I lied, ‘just more work.’
‘You want to be careful with those bags of yours, they’re bloody heavy.’
‘Oh, they’re OK, they keep me fit.’
‘No mate,’ the driver said, looking at me with concern, ‘remember, hard work kills horses.’
TWO
Bird rock
I was hanging in space, my fingers clamped tight, holding on, above a new and startling world of light and sound. People often ask me how long I’ve been climbing and I suppose it all began here. It was 1971 and I had just squeezed my way out of my mother.
The doctor held me above my mum, my tiny untested fingers wrapped around his and hanging on in terror, something that is often mistaken as strength.
‘My, Mrs. Kirkpatrick,’ said the doctor, dangling me before her like a zoo keeper dangles a baby chimpanzee in front of a TV crew. ‘You have got a very strong baby here. He’s as strong as an ox.’
My childhood was full of high places, of holding on, hanging, swinging, and falling, and so it’s no surprise that as an adult I would be drawn towards the heights and a life off the horizontal.
My first high place was a hill named Bird Rock, a mountain carved in half by some geological fluke, exposing a limestone face set in a valley not far from our house, and visible from our tiny garden. It always seemed strange and exotic, always there on the horizon, mysterious, its summit seemingly inaccessible amongst the more pedestrian rolling green hills that surrounded the Welsh village where I grew up. I’d seen films like King Kong, Tarzan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, where strange rock faces yielded prehistoric lands and lost species. I wondered if Bird Rock was the same, its craggy face perhaps hiding dodos, pterodactyls and giant eagles that would have to be fought off.
I was five and it was my first mountain, and my dad always promised that when I was a little older we would climb it together.
My father was a mountaineering instructor in the RAF, based at a Joint Services camp in the Welsh seaside town of Tywyn, running courses for the army, navy and air force. That is the perfect job for a sadist: running poor recruits around the hills in the rain, making them shimmy across greasy ropes above ponds of vile green liquid, pushing them to near hypothermic death in foaming rivers, all in the name of training. My dad threw himself into the job with gusto, thinking up increasingly devious ways of scaring and stretching recruits in the outdoors, always setting an example by going first. I can still remember creeping into my parents’ warm bed on dark winter mornings, as my dad got up to take a load of recruits down to the sea for an early morning swim, his face grinning with the craziness of it all. You could say he was very pre-health-and-safety.
He was pretty unconventional for someone in the RAF in the 1970s. Rather scruffy and prone to bend the rules, he never went too far in his long career, generally being placed out of harm’s way in the outer reaches of the RAF: mountain rescue teams, officer development, and outdoor education. His only advice to me growing up, apart from how to tie knots, roll kayaks or light a stove, was ‘Only work hard when people are looking.’ No doubt this tongue-in-cheek approach didn’t serve him well when it came to making air chief marshal, but fundamentally all he wanted to do was to go climbing.
He