The Beckoning Silence (8 page)

‘Yeah, but there’s not as many people doing it as mountaineering.’

‘Quite, but you also have to remember that our experience of climbing isn’t really the norm,’ Richard pointed out. ‘I mean we came from a community of climbers, many of whom were climbing at the very highest standards. In the end we experienced a far greater loss of friends than someone who came from a less competitive climbing culture. That made it seem more dangerous than it is.’

‘Well, yes, I see your point,’ I said. ‘But the climbing didn’t
seem
more dangerous. It
was
more bloody dangerous.’

‘Yes, but by choice,’ John said. ‘This doesn’t happen in flying accidents. Pilots don’t suddenly get banged on the head by rocks, or struck by lightning, or inexplicably buried under tons of snow …’

‘No, you just fall out of the sky and hit the ground at a stupendously painful speed.’ I finished my pint. It was my round and I wandered towards the bar.

I thought of what Gaston Rebuffat had written in
Starlight and Storms
: ‘I like difficulty. I hate danger.’ To his mind testing the very limits of his climbing skills, pushing the ‘outside of the envelope’ as test pilots say, was the essence of climbing. Dying had nothing to do with it. Rebuffat understood that danger was a component risk and did his best to avoid it, but he never embraced it for its own sake and never chose to do something simply because it was very risky. He had put up countless bold and difficult ascents all over the world and had survived to a ripe old age, outwitting the mountains, until cancer eventually stole him away.

John and Richard, often in tandem with Tat and Les Wright, a fellow Sheffield-based pilot, had been extolling the wonders of paragliding for the last few years and encouraging me to give it another go. Often, as they sat drinking beer after a good flying day, they would chatter away excitedly, demonstrating with flailing hands and arms whatever heart-stopping manoeuvres they had experienced, laughing at moments that had, in truth, been terrifying. They had that same manic edge about them with ‘heads full of magic’ that great days on the hill gave to climbers. I could see in their intense and passionate enthusiasm exactly the same reactions that I had seen in the company of climbers and it fascinated me.

Clearly there was something enlivening about this sport they loved, something vital that touched them deeply. As a sport it was difficult to learn, obviously dangerous, had no practical purpose and was potentially very expensive. It wasn’t developed as an offshoot of some military or commercial function. It had no point other than being a source of fun. To be a good pilot one needs to be a fanatic, a completely obsessed control freak, and be prepared to put in a great deal of physical, mental and financial effort. The rewards are intangible and transient. Many hours could be spent sitting on a hillside waiting for the right wind conditions. Excitement levels were intense and draining. Situations could change with alarming speed. A gentle wafting flight on smooth air could rapidly become a frightening battle with vicious turbulent thermals hurling you around the sky. The adrenalin rush of a two-hour cross-country flight requiring intense concentration and intelligent, high-speed decision-making could leave the pilot drenched in sweat and physically exhausted even though the muscular input was relatively low. It was a scary, exciting, beautiful and downright idiotic thing to do. It made them live. I was very tempted.

There is something primeval in man’s urge to fly. Anyone who has stood on a hillside and watched a hawk rise silently aloft, borne up effortlessly without a beat of its wings, cannot fail to admire the graceful freedom of flight. Who wouldn’t want to join the hawk and swing in lazy circles rising above the world, riding the wind? There was something magical about the ability to harness the power of the sun, to step off this earth into a fluid and powerful medium, play games in the sky, to walk on the wind and read the clouds like a road map. If you watch the movements of smoke from a chimney, spot insects and grass rising on invisible currents of thermic air and see birds wheeling in circles above them, it is like colouring the air. If you are a good pilot you can read these invisible signs and then gently step off the world.

The forces involved are immense. Understanding them and applying your skills as a pilot to the dynamics of this slippery, restless force is far from easy. Flying had changed enormously since I had quit nine years earlier and I felt anxious that it had left me far behind. I half suspected that I knew how to fly myself into trouble but I didn’t know enough to fly out of it.

There seemed to be so many things to learn that we had never bothered with before. Indeed it was worrying how ignorant we had been in the early days, flying blindly in dangerously strong winds, blithely unaware of quite what could happen at any moment.

I remembered standing on a col at the top of the north face of the Aiguille du Midi high above the Chamonix valley one winter’s day with my canopy laid out in the snow, wondering whether I had the nerve to run off the edge. There was a cold wind blowing into my face from the depths of the 3000-foot drop, but that was not why I was shivering. When I ran forward, arms outstretched above me with the front risers against my palms, the wing came up smoothly as the steep snow slope dropped away beneath my feet and suddenly I was off into space and swooping out into frosty winter air, marvelling at the precipitous sight of the mountains as I had never seen them before. It had been so simple.

Years later I sat and listened to my friends talking excitedly about what they had done and inevitably the subject of close shaves and dangerous moments came up. Exactly as with climbing, the stories, many of them seriously alarming, served as lessons to everyone else. Pilots were forever making mistakes, some minor and some major, and their errors created a wealth of hilarious tales, yet there was usually a reason and therefore an understanding gained of what had gone wrong. The more frightening the story the better the lesson was learned. Like climbers, pilots had a black sense of humour not as a wayward disregard for danger but a way of coping with it.

It is easy to get lyrical about the aesthetic beauties of flying, but the elemental power of the air can also smash you down with frightening force, punching your floppy fragile wing into little more than a bag of dirty washing. It has the power to pull you up into the sky at 2000 feet per minute and it can drop you in sinking air with equally violent rapidity.

I heard stories of pilots being sucked into thunderstorms that have the power to wrench the hapless soul up to 30,000 feet and more. Wind shear and downdraughts create extreme winds within the cloud. If these don’t get you then there is a very good chance of freezing to death, being struck by lightning, or rendered unconscious by the pounding of huge hailstones. These clouds are best avoided.

A friend of ours had been caught in the ‘cloud suck’ beneath a thunderhead when flying in central Spain. She had done everything she could think of to lose height, but in desperation she was eventually forced to put her wing into a full stall. If this manoeuvre had been executed in still air she would have found herself free-falling instantly. If she kept her brake lines fully extended and maintained the stall she would plummet earthwards.

As she instigated the stall she was alarmed to realise that far from free-falling she was still slowly being pulled upwards. After ten frantic minutes she dropped slowly out from beneath the cloud base and once free of the sucking power of the cumulo-nimbus she was able to fly away to safety, chastened by the notion that there was enough power in these aerial monsters to lift her bodily upwards, despite having no wing flying above her.

I was fascinated and repelled by the sport. Strangely enough that was exactly how I had felt when I had read Heinrich Harrer’s
The White Spider
at the age of fourteen. I was appalled by the grisly stories and the black and white photos of doomed climbers while at the same time fascinated by what they were trying to do. I was certain that the last thing I would ever do was try and climb the north face of the Eiger, yet at the same time I was inexorably drawn to the experiences of these remarkable men. It seemed that they must live in an extraordinary world. They must see things and sense emotions that few others would ever wish to experience. There was something mesmerising about climbing extreme mountain faces.

It was the same with paragliding. I could sense the lure of it dragging me forward like the hypnotic attraction that great drops induce when you stand close to the edge of a chasm. I wanted to go with it and see where it would take me and I was scared of where it might lead. It had an irrational attraction. The heady mixture of anticipation and anxious dread was common to mountaineering. I kept reminding myself that I had experienced enough frights in the mountains to last me a lifetime and it didn’t make a great deal of sense to swap the known dangers of climbing for the unknown alarms of flying. I had continued to resist the urge to start flying again but my resolve was crumbling. I found myself thinking about the advantages of taking up the sport and studiously ignoring the disadvantages.

Paragliding opened up a whole new world of adventures at exotic sites all over the world. One of the things I knew I would miss if I stopped mountaineering was the sheer fun of travelling off with a group of close friends and having an adventure together. It seemed to me that the essence of these trips was not necessarily the climbing or the summits reached but the laughter and friendship and story-telling that they generated. Paragliding might be the sport that could fill the emptiness that giving up mountaineering would leave. Having said that, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to give up mountaineering.
Why not cut back on how much you do?
 I reasoned.
Just climb a few selected routes you always admired. Make a sort of tick list of the last few objectives you feel you should experience.
It had the advantage that if the day came when injuries or doubts meant that I did stop climbing I would have the flying to take its place. I’d always wondered about being unable to climb.
What on earth would I do with myself?
Well, now I knew. I’d take to the air. I would fly over the mountains instead of climb them.

It was hard to accept that I was seriously contemplating giving up the mountains after all I had experienced in them, but it seemed that with the deterioration in my legs it was a decision I would inevitably have to make some day. I had osteo-arthritis and in the winter the knee hurt. In fact my left ankle, shattered on Pachermo, was now causing more pain than the knee. I knew that some day soon I would have to get the ankle fused.

I had had fourteen years of climbing all over the world which the doctors had said I would never have, so I could afford to be philosophical about giving up something that had been at the centre of my adult life. It had enhanced it immeasurably, defined who I now was, something for which I would always be grateful. It would be very hard to leave.

In my heart I knew that I was less enthusiastic about climbing than I had ever been and Tat’s decision had made me think about why I was doing it. Simply to be asking myself such a question was an admission that much had changed. On a practical level there were fewer and fewer friends of mine still in the climbing game. Those who hadn’t died had taken up paragliding. Apart from Ray Delaney, and more recently Bruce French, there were no other climbers I especially wanted to go away with.

When I wrote
This Game of Ghosts
in 1994 it had been an attempt not simply to explain why climbers climbed but also to explore the strange paradox that climbing presents. It was, after all, a passion for me, something I loved fiercely, and yet it had hurt and unnerved me so much and had killed so many friends. I tried without much success to understand this conflict between pleasure and attrition. I recalled a conversation with John Stevenson about the attrition rate and he had guessed that it was about a death a year.

When I had finished the book I had thought that perhaps this was an exaggeration and that the passing of the years would prove me wrong. Sadly, it was, if anything, a conservative estimate. In the six intervening years seven more friends had died.

In the same period three people, whom I had met briefly, also died. Although not close friends they were inspirational role models for whom I had immense respect. I was in awe of their climbing achievements yet all three were killed by the sudden, random rush of avalanching snow slopes. In 1996, when I was trekking into the Annapurna base camp with Tom Richardson to attempt the south ridge of Singu Chulu, I met the famous French mountaineer Chantal Maudit. There had been a time when Chantal and I were to be filmed climbing together in the French Alps for one programme in the six-part television series called
The Face
which was aired on BBC2 in 1997. Her work commitments meant that this never happened and I climbed instead with Ed February in the Cederberg range in South Africa. Richard Else, the producer for Triple Echo Productions, hoped that Chantal and I might be able to climb together on camera at a later date and I looked forward to it.

We chatted briefly and she mentioned that she had enjoyed reading
La Mort suspendue
, the French edition of
Touching the Void
. She was charming and friendly company and we exchanged news of mutual friends in Chamonix as we drank tea and rested at a lodge. She told me of her plan to make an alpine-style ascent of the south face of Annapurna and I was astounded at its boldness. She made a joke about me being accident-prone. We parted company with a cheery wave and I watched as she walked briskly up a forested track. I hoped we might meet again in Kathmandu but it was not to be.

I never heard how she fared on Annapurna but eighteen months later, in mid-May 1998, I received a phone call from Richard Else telling me that Chantal had died on Dhaulagiri. She and Ang Tsering were found buried in their tent at Camp 2 on the Normal Route. It was never clear whether they had been hit by a small avalanche, or simply buried by fresh snow, which they neglected to clear, and had been asphyxiated as a consequence. However, Chantal was later found to have a broken neck which suggested the crushing impact of an avalanche was the likeliest explanation.