Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

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СКАЧАТЬ We were leaving the happiest period of my childhood behind.

      Everything was different; new school, new house, new friends and, worse still, new parents. I hated school. I felt like an outsider, starting from scratch. I was no longer at the center of my parents’ universe: Joanne took up much of my mum’s time, while my dad seemed to be away more and more. When he was around he seemed bad tempered, or not really there at all. He was about to go on a trip to Yosemite, a name I only understood from Yosemite Sam on the TV, and this further added to the stress, leaving my mum with me and Robin, both unsettled, and Joanne. I suspect that the pressure was too much for my dad: his happy and conventional life, a life where he could have the freedom to climb and still have a family, began to collapse. Demands began to be made of him. He was forced to choose.

      One night, Robin and I woke up and could hear noises downstairs. We crept down to the dining room where our mother was at the table with our dad. She was crying. There had never been crying before we moved from Tywyn, but now it seemed to be happening all the time. We had always been happy; we had never had much but at least we had that; there had never been room for sadness. This was all to change. He was telling her something. Something she was shocked to hear. Her world and future falling apart. Her heart broken. Another woman.

      The following morning we were bundled out of bed by Mum, quickly dressed, and walked down to the train station. It was early; a fog obscured the line. I wondered if this meant I didn’t have to go to school. My mum wasn’t talking. It took all her strength just to keep it together.

      The train appeared out of the mist and slowed to a stop.

      We stood, no longer the family we had once been, our bags all packed for a new life in Hull, a place far removed from my world of sand dunes and hills, from beaches and green fields full of sheep, and from my dad. I had no idea where we were going, or that we would never come back—that Dad and I would never climb Bird Rock together.

      THREE

      The valley

      Tired after my long rambling journey, passed backwards and forwards from taxis to trains, trains to planes and back again, my mind began to come slowly back to life as the final leg drew to a close and the tiny shuttle bus wound its way up into the Yosemite Valley.

      The valley had been carved in the Ice Age, a mighty glacier cutting deep into the perfect Sierra Nevada bedrock, its slow retreat leaving behind a 3,000-foot-deep, five-mile-wide valley of incredible walls and towers. The valley was a magical place of mighty faces, thundering waterfalls and giant sky-scraping sequoias. It had captivated the minds of all who had visited, made famous first by the words of John Muir in the 1800s and later in the definitive black-and-white big-wall shots of Ansel Adams. It was one of the wonders of the world and a Disneyland for climbers, with rides both big and small, fun and terrifying.

      The little vehicle was full of the usual flotsam and jetsam found on American buses: the poor, the desperate, the foreigners. It was packed with a mixture of seasonal employees heading back to their concession jobs, hotel clerks, swimming pool attendants and bus boys, all returning to the safety of the valley. Then there were the climbers, drawn from around the world, all buzzing with excitement at finally reaching the crucible of climbing, the danger of the rock faces.

      The landscape outside the window of the bus changed slowly as we went from sea level into the high Sierras, from the flat California grass lands, parched brown after a long hot summer, into thick forest as the floor of the valley rose, creating a space of rock, water, wood and shadow. It seemed timeless after the alarm-bell ringing of the modern world behind us.

      It grew colder and darker in the bus, light and warmth flickering less and less across the windows as we moved higher, among growing trees whose trunks expanded in size until they looked mighty and prehistoric. You could tell who was who on the bus by the way they reacted to the change. The valley workers slumped over in their seats with headphones on their ears, eyes closed or heads buried in books. The climbers pressed against the windows, jabbing and pointing at the increasing majesty of the views beyond, jumping from one side of the bus to the other as it wound up the valley, like kids on a school trip.

      An old hand at the trip, I played it cool. This was my fifth visit to the valley, but in reality I felt just as excited as the first time. This and every other trip was a pilgrimage, and like all pilgrims I had been nervous the first time that El Cap wouldn’t live up to the hype. I’d read and been told so many things about the Captain—that it was a mecca of climbing, an expanse of rock so huge and overpowering it almost had its own gravitational pull, well at least on climbers, and that I wouldn’t ever see anything as aweinspiring—that I had been afraid it would not live up to its reputation. Now I was afraid that it might let me down, that El Cap would be diminished somehow by the nine ascents I’d already made.

      It never had. It never would.

      Out of the trees appeared the mightiest, most beautiful wall on the planet.

      The first thought, on seeing El Cap springing up from a meadow and leaping into the sky, is one of disbelief. The scale of it is hard to set against anything else you’ve seen before. It is taller by hundreds of metres than the highest building on earth, three times taller than the Eiffel Tower. A ripple of excitement and gasps went through the climbers, those who had seen it before turning with smiles to their friends who had not, with a look of ‘I told you so’ splashed across their faces.

      Its hugeness was as hard to comprehend as the first time, a vast expanse so large it was impossible to fit it within the viewfinder of a camera, or to hold its scale within memory. I loved this piece of rock.

      When we reached the bus stop, we found the usual gaggle of tourists milling around. I stepped down from the bus and collected my bags, then began moving them in relays to Camp 4, the world-famous climbers’ camp site situated a couple of hundred metres away.

      Life on a wall is simple, there is no place for ‘why’, only for ‘do’. A climb can take many days, even weeks, distilling your complicated life back to Stone-Age simplicity: eat, crap and stay alive. This most of all was what I had come to find.

      I dragged my last bag across the dusty car park to the camp site, throwing my luggage into a heap in the closest space I could find that was free. I looked around at the picnic tables, and lines of washing strung up on old ropes crisscrossing from tree to tree, and listened to the faint chatter of resting climbers talking about ‘what next’, and the occasional power shout as a climber slapped the top of one of the world-famous boulders that lay on the edge of the camp site.

      For the first time in ages I felt almost relaxed.

      I began opening my bags and laying out my gear. Experience had told me that there were many reasons for failure—bad weather, ill partners, a lack of will—but the biggest of all was fucking around, not getting down to the task at hand.

      Most climbers would arrive and spend a few days getting used to the place, maybe doing some short climbs, and probably another wall before jumping on the ‘big one’. It is often nice to build up your psyche before embarking on a tough climb, especially if it’s going to be the hardest one of your life.

      You don’t have time.

      I do.

      You have to start tomorrow.

      I have all the time in the world.

      The longer you wait the greater the chance you’re going to bottle СКАЧАТЬ