For Emily

Pitch 5 Reticent Wall

I BROUGHT UP the second bag slowly, my thighs and waist bruised after a week of hauling, my fingertips ragged and my feet throbbing. I noticed that I was moaning involuntarily each time I squatted. I was knackered, exhausted, wiped out, but happy that another day, another pitch was over.

Only nine more to go.

The day had started a little sombrely. I’d woken and my first thought had been to wonder if I’d be alive at the end of it. This had been nothing more than a simple question, like ‘I wonder what I should have for breakfast,’ or ‘Should I have a shower?’ I’d noted the night before that on the topo a flake on the next pitch was marked with a skull and crossbones. After the flake on pitch four I had doubted I could handle anything worse. In the end, however, it had gone by with little fuss. I wondered if I were becoming braver, or maybe one can only have so much fear and I’d used my ration the day before.

I thought it was strange how I could become so accepting of danger and of dying. It reminded me of a story about Evel Knievel and his attempt to jump thirteen London buses at Wembley Stadium. The moment he arrived on his bike, high on the ramp that shot down towards the pitch where the buses were all lined up, he knew he wouldn’t make it. When asked why he did it anyway, his reply was, ‘What else could I do?.’ Knievel crashed, breaking his pelvis.

One thing was certain: I was no Evel Knievel. I had never been so scared on a climb. This was probably caused partly by the fact that I was alone, with no one else to bolster my darker moods or share the fear of leading, and more importantly that this WAS one of the most scary climbs anyone could choose to do.

How was it that I could continue on against so much fear? The route seemed to be growing harder by the day. Perhaps that was why. Perhaps each pitch overcome made it possible to plough on to the next one. After all, hadn’t the first pitch seemed impossible? Hadn’t so many moves seemed beyond me, yet each time I had found myself beyond them?

This had always been the problem with me and Mandy. She was normal. She wouldn’t and couldn’t accept the fact that the thing you loved could be the thing that killed you. She knew me better than anyone, and knew that the harder I climbed, the harder I would want to climb, so she feared that one day I wouldn’t come back. Every year we would come to the brink of splitting up. I wanted the guilt-free life of having no one else’s worry, to be free to climb what I wanted, not to negotiate for time away as if she was my boss. She wanted a normal husband, a teacher, a lawyer, someone who washed their car and looked forward to city mini-breaks and holidays on the beach. She wanted a normal life and what I wanted was abnormal. Yet each time, when it came to it, we stayed together. We had met when we were kids. We didn’t know anything else than each other.

But now I was a dad, I had a job I had to do to pay my mortgage, I was soon to be thirty, and another child was on the way. My climbing partners were moving on – months away in the Himalayas; training to be mountain guides in the Alps – while I sold boots and sat on the beach in Scarborough every weekend. This climb scared me, but not as much as knowing I’d made the wrong choices and lost a better life for all of us.

Are you so scared to face up to what you really want that you’d kill yourself up here?

The sun was low in the sky by the time I’d hauled up the last bag, clipping it to the belay, and backing it up with its haul line to a second karabiner. I was mindful of the story of the three climbers who died when their haul bag came unclipped and, falling to the end of the rope, broke their belay, sending them tumbling down the wall for thousands of feet. A friend who had been on El Cap at the time described how he’d heard a loud noise and seen objects falling down the wall, only realising what they were when he saw arms and legs flailing. Then he heard the sound of them and their bags hitting the ground.

Remembering stories like this kept you alive and on your toes.

I reached down under the haul bag and unclipped my portaledge. I was desperate to flake out. Once the ledge was set up, I lay down and just let the fabric take my weight for a minute, my body relaxing. Then I sat up and took off shoes, gloves and knee pads, clipping them to the edge of the ledge for the morning. Next I slipped off the leg loops of my harness, to let some fresh air get to my thighs. This meant I was only attached by the waist belt, which would reduce the amount of time I could hang before blacking out if I were to fall off the ledge, but I knew I was safe enough: this kind of exposure was no worse to me now than sitting on the top deck of a bus.

I pulled on my fleece, and took a wet wipe from my first-aid stuff-sack to clean my hands and face where the grime was thick and black. My skin felt good, the breeze blowing its dampness dry.

My eyes were heavy with fatigue, but I pulled out my food bag and rummaged around for a can of Coke and an apple, then sat with my legs hanging over the edge, my back against El Cap.

The evening is always the best time on a wall. The climbing is over for the day. Wounds can be licked and food shovelled down. Tomorrow is too far away to consider. There is only the relief of making it to the now. Appreciation of the moment is one of the best aspects of climbing, something that I find missing from normal life, with its countless worries. On a wall there are no thoughts of savings, promotions or pensions. Your future only stretches as far as the next two shiny bolts at the belay above.

I knew I should have a crap, as I’d not gone since leaving Lay Lady Ledge, but the thought was too grim. I always found it hard taking a dump on a portaledge. I remember Andy Perkins telling me that you should practise having a crap in a paper bag at home before going on a big wall ‘because although you may think you know where your asshole is, you don’t till you’ve crapped into a bag.’

It could wait. Using all my will power, I leaned over the edge of the portaledge and pulled up the bags that contained my evening meals, finding a bagel and some cheese, too tired to eat anything else. Lastly I found my Walkman in its stuff sack and clipped it to the suspension of my portaledge, to listen while I munched away.

I had set off with about twenty tapes, but unfortunately, on the first day, a tube of sun-cream had exploded in the bag and destroyed every tape apart from one: Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ – not my first choice of album for such a climb. In fact I had no idea where it had come from – but I was glad of it.

Usually, on a wall, upbeat music works best, making you believe for half an hour that it’s the soundtrack to your epic, a drummer boy’s beat during battle. Nevertheless, Simon and Garfunkel were good company. My only company. As the sun set, I pressed Play.

Music always sounds amazing on the wall. Combined with exhaustion and adrenaline it enhances your senses. I can hear things I have never heard before, notice subtle notes and key changes, back beats and melodies I have never appreciated. Most of all the music is a welcome escape for a little while.

I lay on my ledge in the dark, bats swooping around me, listening to the gentle harmonies. I felt like a character in one of the songs, strung out and heart-broken, the loneliest man on El Cap. I looked up at the stars, now bright, and made out the shape of the rock against them; the odd glint of a headtorch visible on the wall made it look as if the night was spilling onto it.

The next track began: ‘For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her’, a beautiful and haunting song. Garfunkel’s words drifted in my ears and into the night. Always a militant atheist, I could believe as the music began that a god existed.

Garfunkel began to sing his love song, which made me think of home, and Mandy and Ella. I wondered what they would be doing right now, and if they missed me. I missed them. I thought of Ella, who no doubt wondered where I’d gone. For a child a week is a lifetime, and a month is an eternity. I would have given anything to have seen her right then. She was perfect. Wasn’t all this empty and pointless when compared to her? How could I possibly imagine that a life spent climbing, guiding, and spending months in the Himalayas would make me happy? In a few months my son would be born. Imagine the fun things we could do. The adventures we could have. Wouldn’t their company, their smiles and questions and laughter, be immeasurably more valuable than climbing alone on a worthless lump of soulless stone? I lay back and thought about Scarborough, Filey, Robin Hood’s Bay, seaside towns on the east coast, of sitting on the sand and watching my children play. Mandy by my side, smiling …

I woke in the dark to the click of the tape finishing.