The Beckoning Silence (12 page)

In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and

Gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of

the thing!

5 The coldest dance

The plane was descending into Newark Airport, New York, on its final approach and I sat peering out of the window at the lights of the city and the last flare of the sun on a darkening horizon of gold-layered clouds. As the runway came into view and the airport lights sparkled against the night sky I braced myself for the landing. I had never been a particularly keen air traveller but in recent years I had been forced to do so much of it that now I only became fraught during take-off and landings. There was a hum of surprised conversation as we climbed back into the air and began a series of wide sweeping turns above and to the east of the airport. I assumed that we were in a stack of other aircraft queueing above the airport awaiting their landing windows. I presumed that our aborted landing was due to some shuffling in this queue allowing a flight with a fuel shortage to get in before us. It was a fairly common occurrence so for forty-five minutes I thought no more about it.

At last my hangover was beginning to recede and the liverish nausea induced by a night of tequila and beer was fading. I was thinking wistfully about the last week of lecturing and ice climbing in Colorado and planning a return visit to Boulder the following year with Ray and Tat when the pilot interrupted my thoughts.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking,’ he announced in a languid Texan drawl. ‘As some of you may have noticed we did pull out of a landing attempt and we are now running a little late this evening. I assure you there is nothing to worry about.’

That made me sit bolt upright. When the captain of the plane who hasn’t uttered a word in the entire flight from Denver International Airport suddenly announces that there is nothing to worry about it is usually time to get seriously worried.

‘As we made our final approach, an undercarriage warning light was indicating a problem,’ he continued congenially. ‘It is not something to worry about. Just a slight technical hitch, probably a circuitry problem, that’s all. We believe the wheels are down and locked but this little ole light keeps saying it ain’t. So we’re just being careful up here tonight, folks, and as you can see we are circling to bleed off fuel.’

Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
I muttered.
You don’t bleed off fuel unless you have got a problem worth worrying about.

‘So, ladies and gentleman, we are going to make a low pass across the tower so they can get a good look-see at our wheels. Don’t be alarmed when we climb back up. This is not an attempt at landing. Relax and enjoy the ride and we apologise for the delay this has caused.’

Relax! He must be barking mad!
 I glanced around the cabin and was not reassured. No one was looking especially relaxed, I noticed. There was a buzz of conversation and I saw people glancing around surreptitiously just as I was doing, trying to work out how relaxed they should really be. Not very, by the looks of it. I pulled my seat belt tighter and pressed my face to the window. We began a long gliding descent and I felt my stomach tighten.

I switched on my personal stereo. Bob Marley was singing ‘No Woman, No Cry’. 

My fear is my only courage

So I’m going to have to push on through …

Everything’s go’n’ to be all right, Everything’s go’n’ to be   all right …

  
Is it buggery!
I thought and turned the machine off. I tried to un-worry myself by thinking of some utterly useless facts by way of a distraction. I had read somewhere that they had once used aircraft to try and prove Einstein’s theory of relativity. Apparently in a transatlantic flight time warps by about 49 nanoseconds, whatever that was. This has been timed by flying atomic clocks around the world to prove that Einstein was correct. In effect his theory means that the faster you travel, the slower time moves. Is this why, when you are falling to your death, it seems to take a very long time? I tried to ignore this unwelcome diversion. To put it into perspective, if you live for 100 years and spend your entire life flying around the world in an airliner then you can expect to be one 100,000th of a second younger. Wow! So that means if you live fast then you die older? And the whole notion of living fast and dying young is therefore completely wrong, in fact the whole thing is counter-intuitive; it is not what we would think. Where does that get me?

We swooped across the airport and then rose smoothly into the sky again. Everyone waited expectantly for the captain’s words of wisdom. He cheerfully came back on air.

‘Well, folks, the good news is that the wheels are down.’ There was a general hubbub of exhaled breaths and excited comments. ‘However,’ he continued, silencing everyone instantly. ‘We still have this little ole light telling us the gear is not locked.’ There was an ominous silence from the cabin and the passengers generally shuffled around, fiddled with seat belts, put shoes on and then took them off again, peered out the windows, and avoided all and any eye contact.

I tried to get back to the ‘useless fact’ distraction ploy. Most people would think that hard-core porn or a sadistic and violent video nasty would be the most common source of fantasy material for serial killers but no, it is the Bible. In fact, the Book of Revelations is a special favourite. Now who would have thought that and aren’t some folks just plain weird?

I noticed that the plane seemed to be lining up with the airport. Did you know, I asked myself, distractedly, that basking sharks take about fifteen years to reach sexual maturity at which point they are just about the right size to be worth hunting? So just when they are looking forward to losing their virginity they get harpooned and turned into pet food. The liver oil of a basking shark is so fine that it is used in the lubrication of precise navigational instruments in modern jet airliners.
I wonder how many livers of horny basking sharks we are about to splatter over the runway?

‘Ladies and gentleman,’ the captain drawled in his relaxed and inanely cheerful manner. It was beginning to irritate me. ‘We are on our final approach now and should be on the ground in about ten minutes’ time. There is nothing to worry about so if you’ll just make sure that your seat belts are securely fastened I’d like to thank you for flying with us this evening and wish you a very pleasant onward journey.’

Fat chance of that,
I thought.
And why is he so damn cheerful?
Remember, when someone annoys you, it takes 42 muscles in your face to frown but it only takes 4 muscles to extend your middle finger. I glanced hopefully down the aisle to see whether the pilot would make an appearance.

It occurred to me that he hadn’t referred to the ‘little ole light’ again, so maybe that meant it was all sorted out. But if it had been sorted out wouldn’t he have told us, so we didn’t have anything to worry about? Maybe he didn’t mention it because it wasn’t sorted out and we did have something to worry about but he didn’t want us to do that so he didn’t mention it?
God, I hate flying.

The airport lights swung into view and as we lost altitude I noticed that we were not approaching the same runway as before.
So, that’s your plan. You’re keeping us away from aeroplanes full of people and fuel and concourses and hard things we don’t want to go bumping into when our undercarriage collapses and the wings fall off, eh? Very clever. Then we turn into a giant fuel-filled toothpaste tube and worrying will be the last thing on our minds. Stop thinking that way, idiot. Think of something else!

Did you know that a pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes? In my next life I want to be a pig. Some lions mate over 50 times a day. If a pig did that it would need a 25-hour day. I still want to be a pig.

The plane’s engines rose in pitch as the pilot adjusted the approach speed to the runway. I gripped the arm rest with tight, whitened knuckles.

The plane dipped slightly and ran parallel with the runway no more than 50 feet above the tarmac. I stopped trying to distract myself and peered fixedly out of the window. The pilots were bringing the plane in on a very long and shallow glide.
So they are worried about the wheels collapsing.
Even as the thought occurred to me I saw a fire engine flash past the window travelling at high speed along an adjacent runway, then another and another. I watched the flashing orange lights recede and counted another six emergency vehicles zip past the window. It was clear that somebody was doing a great deal of worrying about something.

I once learned that a cockroach can live for nine days without its head before it starves to death, which always seemed to be a bit pointless. It was even odder than the male praying mantis which cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping his head off. It seemed nastily familiar. I made a mental note to troll back through some of my past relationships.
What the hell! If I die in this plane I’m definitely coming back as a pig.
I kept furiously thinking about pigs in the hope that it would favour my chances of reincarnation.

I breathed deeply and continued clutching the arm rests in a vice-like grip, waiting for the wheels to touch down. I glanced down the aisle and counted the seats to the nearest emergency exit. Three rows down there was the red exit sign above the oval door. The three seats beside this left hand over-wing exit were unoccupied. I wished I had thought of it earlier and changed position. At least I knew what I was going to do if anything went wrong.
Get to that exit fast.
I had the strength and agility to open the door without any problems. I pulled out the emergency exits brochure from the seat back and tried to study it.

Then we were down with barely a bump and racing down the runway and slowing and the fire engines were catching us up and drawing alongside and I heard the relieved laughter in the cabin. It had all been for nothing. As I put the brochure back in its place and vowed to read them more often, I realised that my hangover had entirely disappeared.

One week later my slides of the Colorado trip arrived and I flipped through them on the projection monitor in my office. Despite having only four days to spare I had enjoyed the chance to climb ice with Jack Roberts, Clyde Soles and Eric Coomer. The thrill of steep ice and sun-baked rock climbs still draws me back into the hills. It was mountaineering that I was abandoning. The attrition on the peaks had killed off my desire to climb them.

On the last day we had climbed a few minor ice lines in Vail and then top-roped Rigid Designator, a spectacular free-standing 150-foot pillar of ice. I felt a bit guilty about not leading it but owing to an urgent medical condition called cowardice I had been unable to resist the proffered rope.

Earlier Jack had demonstrated the fiendish art of ‘dry tooling’. This mainly involved climbing mixed ice and rock using crampon and ice axe points to maintain adhesion on tiny edges and cracks. Mixed climbing was so called because although ice was generally present in some form on the route it was not in enough quantity to resemble a pure continuous waterfall type of ice climb. Sometimes it was dry rock, sometimes rock with a skim of ice covering the surface. Hooking the tips of ice axe picks delicately into wafer-thin ice, torquing the picks or even the shafts of axes in cracks, and teetering with mono-point crampons on fractional rock edges was the generally accepted form of progress. It was a lot harder than it looked, as Clyde and I found out by repeatedly falling off the bottom 10 feet of rock that Jack had just danced effortlessly up. His skill enabled him to cross otherwise blank sections of rock and reach the tenuous sanctuary of millimetre-thick ice weeps. Hopefully these led to a thickening ice formation and back onto good old plain ice climbing. It was strenuous, delicate, difficult to protect and downright nerve-racking.

I had given a slide show to a packed audience in Gary Neptune’s climbing shop in Boulder one evening. While waiting for people to arrive I had been flicking through books and magazines and had seen a stunning black and white photograph of Bridalveil Falls. I had heard of the route and the remarkable history of its first ascent but had no idea where it was. The photograph left an indelible mark on my mind. I had to climb it.

As always in climbing, some routes tend to capture my imagination in an immediate and distinctive way. It may simply be the aesthetic beauty of the line or its magnificent position; it may have a reputation as a classic hard and intimidating climb or it may simply have history. By which I mean the manner of its first ascent made it stand out as a famous landmark piece of climbing for its era. For that alone it would be coveted.

I remember as a young aspirant climber dreaming about routes such as Cenotaph Corner and Left Wall on the Cromlech, Point Five and Zero Gully on Ben Nevis, Right Unconquerable and Valkyrie on Derbyshire gritstone and the great Alpine classics such as the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and the Central Pillar of Freney on the south side of Mont Blanc. In the end I had climbed them all, turning dreams into reality. What inspired me to try them was the fascinating history attached to the climbs as much as the technical difficulty and specific beauty of the routes. The true classic climbs combined all these elements and Bridalveil Falls was high on my list of eligible classics.

Climbing Bridalveil Falls had all of these attributes – beauty, legend, class, menace, and that essential ingredient, uncertainty. Its first ascent was way beyond its time. At a time when Point Five gully was regarded as an ambitious climber’s dream, Jeff Lowe and Mike Weiss succeeded in climbing something that few people would have thought possible. Point Five has about 30 feet of seriously hard climbing in its entire length. Bridalveil Falls had 350 feet of sustained vertical and overhanging ice and was a good two grades harder. The hardest section of Point Five would be a short section of the easiest climbing on Bridalveil. When I had climbed Point Five I really had been naive enough to think I had succeeded on a classic hard route, and that was in the 1980s.