‘Come on, then,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Let’s go home. I’ve had enough of this.’
Tat looked up in surprise. ‘You as well?’
‘It’s been bugging me for a while now. You just vocalised it.’
‘So that’s it, then? End of mountains?’ He seemed confused.
‘Well, it was your bloody idea,’ I retorted.
‘Yes, I know, but it was my choice, for me. I didn’t expect you to join me.’
‘It was a surprise for me too.’ I told him about the avalanche and the accidents and the deaths and the painful legs and began to feel that I was trying a little too hard to justify my decision. I felt as if I was betraying something special. It made me feel guilty.
‘I just don’t want to do it any more. Simple as that,’ Tat said firmly. ‘I’ve had a few close shaves but nothing like you, no injuries, and the deaths, well …’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘They’ve always been dying. We know that.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I’m just finding it harder to accept. And there’s so many of them, and they’re getting closer.’
‘Don’t let it bug you. It’s simply because we know so many people climbing at such high standards, pushing the limits. It’s not representative of climbing per se. I’ll bet there are loads of people who have never lost friends, let alone had a serious accident.’
‘I know all that,’ I snapped. ‘It’s an explanation, not a reason to accept it.’
‘Are you sure you want to quit?’ Tat looked suspiciously at me. ‘You’re not just doing this for me, making it easy?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. At least I think I am.’ I looked up at the summit of Condoriri bathed in sunlight. It would be good to be up there, I conceded, but then shook my head. ‘I’m happy to go home now. I’ll think about it when I get back. Maybe I’ll change my mind. There are still a few things I want to do, you know, loose ends to tie up, a few things on the tick list. After all, you’ve been doing it almost ten years more than me, you ancient old goat. I bet you change your mind as well.’
‘No.’ Tat shook his head decisively and I knew he meant it. ‘That’s it with mountaineering. I’m going to do something fun, something safe. I want to paraglide more. You should try it again. It’s different now.’
‘No, I don’t want any more broken legs, thanks.’
‘Less likely now,’ Tat said. ‘Why not give it a go when we get home? You’ll get your pilot licence back in no time.’
‘Maybe,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Sounds a bit like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire if you ask me.’
Within twenty-four hours we were on a flight home. Tat looked relaxed and content on the way back. He was at peace with his decision.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t make up my mind. I couldn’t shake off the uneasy sense of being a traitor for even considering giving up on the mountains.
I knew Tat loved the newly-embraced thrills of paragliding. His enthusiasm was infectious. John Stevenson had already given up climbing in favour of flying. Richard Haszko, now a paragliding instructor, had done virtually the same. Highly talented climbers such as John Sylvester and Bobby Drury were now world-class paragliding pilots who had taken their taste for extreme mountain adventure into the booming thermals in the skies above the Himalayas. Perhaps there was more to life than mountains, which was something I could never have admitted only a few years ago.
I wondered whether writing Dark Shadows Falling had made me cynical, a bit more jaded with some aspects of modern mountaineering. Certainly the ethics and morality of mountaineering on Everest in particular had nothing to do with the motivations that had spurred my friends and me on to our various climbing adventures. No, the Everest circus had no bearing whatsoever on us. We had no desire to be anywhere near that mountain. Most of our friends were making extraordinary ascents on spectacularly difficult mountains and climbing new routes all over the world – from big walls in Patagonia and Baffin Island to alpine-style ascents in the Himalayas and beyond. Standards in mountaineering had never been higher. It should have been a time of great anticipation and ambitious plans. What had made me lose the passion? The loss of friends, too many accidents, a cumulative building up of fears that I now found hard to deal with? As Mal and Brendan had been picked off I experienced a growing certainty that it was simply a matter of probability before I, too, would end up crushed beneath a mound of icy debris.
I looked out of the oval window at the blinding white beauty of the Cordillera Real wheeling past as we carved an arc through the sky above La Paz and wondered where it had all gone wrong.
3 High anxiety
‘Paragliding is totally different now,’ John Stevenson insisted as he passed me a pint of Black Sheep Special. ‘The wings today are amazing.’
‘Wings?’ I was puzzled. ‘I thought they were canopies?’
‘Same thing. It’s just that a wing is a better description. It is what it does. It flies like a wing, unlike a parachute canopy which simply lowers you to the ground …’
‘Not always so gently.’
‘But these wings go up. They want to fly. It’s not like those tanks we were flying ten years ago.’
‘Good God! Was it that long ago?’
‘Yeah, we’re getting old, lad.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I replied thinking of my fortieth birthday. ‘So how long have I been away from flying then?’
‘After you smashed your leg on Pachermo. 1990?’
‘1991,’ I said. ‘I decided that flying was a bit risky with two knackered legs and no undercarriage.’
‘There was more to it than that,’ John interrupted. ‘I mean, I gave up flying for a couple of years as well. The wings were useless back then and to get anywhere we had to sacrifice safety for performance. Some would collapse for no good reason.’
‘Yeah, a lot of people were hurt,’ I agreed. ‘I always thought it was like using a climbing rope that had a 50–50 chance of snapping.’
‘I know, but it was the only way for the sport to progress. Hang-gliders were lethal when they were first developed and it took a lot of risks to get them to today’s standards. When we were flying in the late 1980s we didn’t really have a hope of getting anywhere. We could only soar in gale-force winds and none of us ever left the hill. Now we can fly cross-country, moving from one thermal to another. We can stay up on the lightest breezes when before we would have dropped like a house brick.’
‘That was true,’ I said, remembering the high winds we used to try flying in. ‘I don’t know how we survived it all. We didn’t have a clue.’
‘Yeah, but it was fun, wasn’t it?’ John smiled. ‘I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever done. Remember our first lesson? Jumping off a chair to simulate a parachute landing roll and then Geoff just threw us off the hill and bang, we were flying.’
‘Not for long, mind,’ I added. ‘We used to hit the ground – fast.’
‘True, but put it into perspective. When we first started flying the British cross-country distance record was 18 kilometres, now it’s over 175.’
‘Bloody hell! I didn’t know it was that far.’
‘The world record,’ Richard Haszko added, ‘is 330 kilometres. And despite the limits being pushed so far, it’s still relatively safe.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I snorted derisively. ‘I’ve heard that one before. Anyway it’s not saying much is it? Within eighteen months of John and I starting we knew seven people who had crush fractures to their backs and Geoff Birtles had broken his neck. It nearly bloody killed him.’
‘I know, but it is safe now.’ John was passionate about his paragliding. It was about all he did, having given up climbing and mountaineering trips. ‘Well, as safe as any of these sports can be. I mean you choose the level of risk. You choose how much you want to push it.’
‘So it’s similar to mountaineering, then?’ I said. ‘Climbing is as dangerous as you make it.’
‘Exactly,’ John agreed, ‘the only difference being that
the fatality rate of the top fliers doesn’t compare with that of top mountaineers.’
‘So how many pilots get killed?’
‘Hardly any, really,’ Richard replied. ‘Most commonly it’s through mid-air collisions or low-altitude collapses, that sort of thing. It’s about two or three a year, I suppose.’
‘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 doome
d 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.