Bright Air (14 page)

The rain was heavier the next morning, uncomfortably so at first, then more alarmingly as the track led along an exposed ridge and the wind picked up, lashing us as we laboured under our heavy packs. At one point Anna lurched against me, blown sideways by the stinging wind, and I had to catch and steady her to stop her falling down the scree slope. Again we should have had a sighting of Frenchmans Cap from there, but could see nothing until we approached the Tahune hut, almost at its base, when the peak suddenly loomed out of the cloud, huge and scary. I had been told that these were the highest cliffs in Australia, four hundred metres of sheer white quartzite, but the immensity of the climb hadn’t hit me until then, and I felt queasy all that evening, guiltily hoping that the rain would keep falling.

But it didn’t. The next morning was cloudy but dry, becoming brighter as the day went on. We decided to limber up on some of the shorter routes on the north-west wall, an array of pinnacles and buttresses on the lower side of the mountain. I was paired with Luce, and after a slightly shaky start I began to get a feel for the hard, crystalline rock surface, and gain a little confidence.

The skies kept clearing until by evening there wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and the others decided that the following day would probably offer the best chance to attack the long routes on the high cliffs on the other side of Frenchmans Cap, which would need a whole day’s climbing. There was a lot of debate over maps and diagrams about which route we should try, and in the end we decided to go for the east face. They selected
three parallel routes, just as at the Watagans, except that now the climbs would be three hundred and eighty metres long instead of twenty. Luce and I would take the middle one, rated 20 on the Australian scale, 5.10d on the American, and much tougher and longer than anything I’d attempted before.

We set off early the next morning for the hour’s hike to the base of the east face, then we split up into our pairs. Luce and I climbed to the top of a grassy ramp, where we roped up and Luce set off to lead the first pitch. We had planned to take the climb in seven pitches in all, with Luce to lead most of them, establishing the belay anchors at the end of each pitch. These were long stages for me, forty or fifty metres each in length, and my heart was thumping when I finally heard Luce’s cry, from far above, ‘On belay.’ I set off, focusing on the glittery surface immediately above me, making steady progress until I joined her in the lee of a jutting prow of rock. I was breathing heavily, my arms and legs shaky, but I’d made it, and I grinned and turned to see the view, already a broad panorama across the national park although we’d barely begun. While I rested, Luce described the next stage, pointing out the features I needed to recognise up to the next belay point, fifty metres above our heads.

We continued in this way, stage by stage, through the day. Our climbing styles were very different, Luce free and confident, swinging out into space on the end of a sling, while I stuck as close to the wall as I could. Anyone studying us would have wondered what a natural climber like her was doing with a dunce like me, but at least, slowly and doggedly, I was getting there. At each belay point the views became more breathtaking, and the sense of being suspended on a vast white vertical surface more intoxicating. By the time I climbed up to join Luce at the head of the fifth pitch we were three-quarters
of the way to the top, and I was finally confident that I was going to make it, weak as my body felt, and terrifying as the void beneath me looked. She said something about leading the next pitch again, but I felt it was time I showed some initiative, and I waved her aside and moved to the first hold. She spoke again, but there was a singing in my ears and I didn’t hear her properly. It was late afternoon now, and the wind was sharper up there, and cold. She repeated something about a tricky corner about fifteen metres above us, and I nodded and set off, muttering to myself, ‘Balance and rhythm, focus and momentum …’

When I came to the tricky corner I suddenly realised what she’d meant. I looked down, and saw that it was bottomless. I had to step from one face to the other across a thousand feet of void—the height of the Empire State Building. I hesitated, trying to clear the giddiness from my head, and then my legs began to shake violently. They call this ‘sewing machine leg’ or ‘disco leg’, when your weight concentrated on the edges of your feet causes the leg muscles to spasm and convulse uncontrollably. Afterwards Luce told me that as soon as she saw it she knew I was going to fall. I urged myself to move forward, but I simply couldn’t. For a breathless moment I was suspended there, and then, gripped by sick panic, I felt my feet give way, my fingers drag across the rock, and my body topple backwards off the wall.

Once I realised that I was gone, that there was absolutely nothing I could do, my terror faded. In a kind of appalled calm I watched the cliff face accelerating past me and then jerk to a violent stop as my rope caught in the highest of the three wedges I’d driven in on my way up. But the brutal force of gravity wasn’t going to give me up so easily, and with a sickening
ping
the wedge flew out of its crack and I continued down, moving faster. The rope snagged the next wedge and it too failed—
ping
—and the next—
ping
. All my protection was gone now, ripped out of the rock by the accelerating momentum of my fall and I was tumbling free, past Luce who was desperately trying to haul my rope through her belay brake.
Too late
, I thought,
the belay anchors will go and then she’ll be pulled off too. We’re going to die together on Frenchmans Cap.

But the belay anchors, solidly implanted in the rock by Luce, didn’t give way. My rope jarred abruptly tight and I bounced and spun and smacked my head against the rock, and finally was still, dangling fifteen metres below her. I’d dropped the height of a ten-storey building.

I hung there, dazed and shocked, and gradually became aware of distant shouts. Then I made out Luce’s voice. ‘Josh? Are you all right?’

I opened my eyes, groggily trying to orientate myself, and saw a distant haze of dull green. It took me a moment to realise that I was staring at the tree canopy far below. I was hanging upside down.

‘Josh!’ Luce called again.

I called back, ‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘Not much.’ Blood was running into my eyes from a cut on my cheek where I’d hit the rock face, but my bones seemed intact.

‘Can you climb up?’

My first thought was, how? Even if I could get myself the right way up, we weren’t carrying Jumars for climbing the slender ropes. Then I remembered I had a prusik loop somewhere in my gear, though I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to remember how to use the bloody thing. It took a while to twist myself upright while the others shouted questions and advice to each other. Should they try to get help? But the mobile
phones didn’t work. Should they try to lower me to the ground? Three hundred metres? I thought, no way. So I rigged up the ascender and began to inch my way painfully up the rope.

The evening sun had set the forest ablaze in golden light and purple shadow when Luce finally hauled me onto her ledge, and I thought how cruel of nature, indifferent to my fate, to put on such a show at a time like this. The others wanted to lower ropes and haul me up, but Luce was worried about the condition I was in, shaking with cold and shock, and also about the approach of darkness.

‘We’ll spend the night here,’ she said.

‘Sleep together?’ I stammered through chattering teeth. ‘Is that all you think about?’—for it was true that our lovemaking had taken on a certain intensity of late. She laughed, and began shouting instructions up to the others. One of them, Owen I think, had abseiled part-way down and about twenty metres away to the left, and Luce gave him a list of things we needed, as we’d come up with the minimum of kit. He climbed back up to the top and a couple of them set off on the summit walking track back down to the hut to fetch them for us.

I looked at the narrow ledge we were on, only a few centimetres wide, and wondered how the hell we were going to sleep on that—like bats perhaps, hanging upside down with our toes jammed into cracks. But Luce was placing wedges and flexible friends into the rock all around us, and lacing rope between them to form a sort of cradle. When she was satisfied, she perched beside me and held my hand, and we watched the great shadow of the mountain creep out across the wilderness. The dark was absolute by the time the backpack came bumping down the cliff on the end of a line—a sleeping bag, thick jumpers, a flask of hot soup, water, a couple of
packs of dry rations, a first-aid kit and a torch. With them we built our nest safe inside Luce’s rope cobweb, had a meal, then zipped ourselves inside the bag and fell deeply asleep.

We woke to a gleam of golden light. It was the dawn sun, rising directly in front of us. We were pressed very close, our bodies warm despite the chill wind on our faces.

‘My nose is freezing,’ I whispered.

‘Mine too.’ She turned her head and we rubbed our noses together like Eskimos, then lay there watching the world beneath us take shape in the gathering light. Small glinting lakes appeared through the dark forest, and crags, like the stumps of ancient teeth, caught fire in the morning sun. I felt enveloped by the natural world, in a way I never had before. When I thought about it, I was amazed to realise how totally insulated my life had been from this world until I’d started climbing with Luce. Nature to me had been no more than a marginal risk of hurricanes or floods that could be managed with a range of financial instruments. I had only ever seen true wilderness through the filter of a TV screen or an aeroplane window. And now I was about as fully exposed to it as one could be, suspended in a gossamer net high up a mountain face in bright air. Credit derivatives and hedging positions weren’t going to be much use to me here. For the first time I felt I understood about Luce. The wilderness absorbed her utterly; she studied it, experienced it, loved it. It was the one big thing this hedgehog knew. She’d often told me about it, its beauty and its tragedy—the decimation of its forests, the poisoning of its rivers, the murder of its species—but to me it had been just another rather boring greenie lecture. Now I felt I understood. Climbing was her way of addressing it, risking herself against it, gripping it close like a lover.

There was a shout from above us, and we disentangled ourselves, had a little breakfast, and climbed out, Luce leading, as I should have let her do in the first place. The rain returned soon after, and I was spared any further tests of my overstretched climbing abilities. I had been transformed by my experience on Frenchmans Cap. I felt that Luce and I were true partners now, dizzyingly in love, constantly touching, looking at each other. The others were in high spirits after their successful climb, too, and I heard Anna say something about ‘the highest ever’. I said, ‘But what about the DNB? That was even more, wasn’t it?’ and she confessed with a laugh that they hadn’t actually done the full ascent, just a short section.

I suspected that the good humour of the group was partly due to the absence of Marcus, as if we were on holiday from an admired but dominant presence. He was waiting for us at the prearranged time when we made our way back to the highway, and immediately began to reassert his influence, starting with his own students. He had to use a light touch, for we were still full of the experiences we’d shared in our week away from him, but gradually he drew our attention back towards the things that interested him. These centred on an ongoing protest against logging in the Styx Valley forest, to which we now headed. An area of pristine wilderness, but lying just outside the protection of the Southwest National Park, it had become a focus of conflict between the logging industry and conservation groups. Marcus made it clear that fooling around climbing rocks was a fairly trivial activity alongside the struggle to save this corner of the planet in which he had apparently become vitally involved.

That was all right, and so long as he kept it general I found it rather amusing, from my position of absorbed preoccupation with Luce, to watch him use this to manipulate the group.
But Marcus liked to make things personal. He really didn’t like how close Luce and I were now, so that she wasn’t giving him her undivided attention, and he started aiming barbed comments in my direction. This wasn’t entirely new; he’d poked fun before at the degree courses that Damien, Anna and I had chosen. In his scornful opinion, the law was venal, sociology was weak science, and commerce and business studies were beneath contempt. But now the comments became more personal. Money was the underlying poison that was destroying the environment, apparently, and doing an MBA was more or less equivalent to worshipping the devil. I tried to respond with humour, arguing that money was the greatest invention of all, without which civilisation and science would have been impossible, but it wasn’t really funny. When people like Marcus started lecturing me about the evils of capitalism I always heard at the back of my mind my father’s voice saying
bloody wanker
.

As we trudged through the Styx Valley forest with a cluster of activists, I began to feel a distinctly new antipathy towards Marcus. I disliked the way he basked in their deferential attention, bringing out just the right coded phrases and buzzwords to make them laugh and nod in eager agreement. Apparently he’d been interviewed on TV and radio in Hobart, and had been saying wise and supportive things about the protesters, calling for greater activism. I thought he was a hypocrite, remembering that in the past he’d been scathing about most of these groups, saying they confused ecological goals with principles of social equity, for instance, and suffered from the romantic delusion that Aborigines had possessed some idyllic empathy with the land.

We came at last to a protest camp, deep in the forest. There were tents pitched in a stand of enormous trees, and a kind of
ramshackle platform suspended high up between three of the eighty-metre giants (the tallest hardwoods in the world, we were assured, at least four hundred years old). Someone had been living up there for eight months in protest at the logging threat, and there was a general spirit of defiant enthusiasm, which I found hard to share. Maybe it was the melancholy damp gloom of the forest, but I found it all rather sad. So later when we all sat around a campfire with our hosts and Marcus began to hold forth about the world of money as the primary enemy of the world of nature, I began to feel apprehensive. Then he turned on me.