Climbing tales

On July 15, I spent a few hours at The Reach collecting climbing stories. Here are a few:

 L’s first climb was at the age of 12 or 13, as part of the Sea Rangers, in Swanage. She was terrified of the idea of climbing; in fact, everyone was scared as the minibus drove to the cliff top. They had to lean back and abseil down, the sea below them. There was no way out but to climb up and out of there.

When she finished, she felt an amazing sense of achievement; the feeling of being hooked. That said, when the leader offered that they could have another go, L froze on the spot, unable to find the courage to do it all again…

She recently met one of the leaders of that expedition, now in his mid 60s, at a funeral and had the opportunity to tell him of his influence, and that she is still climbing today.

M’s first climb was in the crags of North Wales, off the A55, in late Autumn. He remembers the flat rock; it felt almost polished, beautifully weathered. He can still picture two perfect pinches on that climb, and how they felt between his fingers. To this day, it feels like the perfect moment, and it remains his favourite climb ever.

A used to climb a lot in Italy, near Ferrara. One climb stands out in his mind as he had to go over an edge in darkness, while soaking wet. Mountain rescue were involved; he’ll never forget the bright pink of their raincoats…

L and J are regular climbing partners, and brothers. They told me their stories of the Peak District: scree on the way up, situations where it was scarier to hang on than to let go, factor one falls …

They described one of the characters they used to climb with, N, who would climb with a ridiculous amount of gear, making a racket as he went along, clumsy on the way up and down, but somehow he almost made it out alive…

R got hooked on climbing at Goldsmiths, on the mobile climbing wall at fresher’s week. He remembers his first session at The Reach’s bouldering area, getting stuck for ten minutes on a route, then finally cracking it. He was so keen, he started a climbing group at his university to get others involved.

Two young climbers, a brother and sister, gave me their impressions on climbing:

Sister: ‘It is so scary when you find yourself upside down…’

Brother: ‘My favourite thing is to climb a 6c. I can do a 6b+ easily now, but now I love a 6c’

Our reasons for climbing

(As a researcher/writer by profession, I am drawn to reading widely on the subject at hand before creating my own work. Partly, this has to do with wanting to connect with the canon, but it also stems from not wanting to duplicate efforts or write too close to what has come before. This, I expect, will be the last of my so-called literature review for this project.)

A friend recently lent me Coronation Everest (Faber & Faber, 1958), by Jan Morris (formerly James Morris), correspondent of The Times, a memoir of the confluence of the Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953. The account is clearly and compellingly told, recording moments of fear, doubt, strength and beauty. As a work of adventure fiction, it engages the reader fully; as a ‘little book’ of ‘historical romanticism’ (as described by Morris), it provides an insight to a time and a place dear to climbers, outdoorspeople, and perhaps most patriotic English!

In my search for literature that might speak to me as a predominantly indoor climber, two observations in the book struck me as interesting for their possible overlap, their relevance to the sport, regardless of venue. Morris attempts to contextualise expedition leader John Hunt’s attitude to the project by stating that ‘[t]he thing might only be the climbing of a mountain, but under the touch of his alchemy it became immeasurably important.’ While it might be absurd to compare the Everest expedition to my own weekly sessions at The Reach, I have decided to persevere with the parallel. Most climbers I know treat each climb as such: they feel disappointment when they don’t finish a climb; they focus intently on the route; they pay attention to improvement and challenge themselves; they treat each climb with a seriousness and importance that at times could seem disproportionate to the task. I include myself in this judgement; my day is often coloured by the success of my climb.

A second passage fascinated me for its attempt at categorisation. Morris states that he ‘composed a formula’ that ‘might be applicable to most mountaineers’. I have, in turn, begun to think of this as possibly true of all climbers. Morris explains that: ‘I believe their reason for climbing is partly pride[…]; partly ambition […]; partly aestheticism[ …]’ partly mysticism […] ; and partly masochism. Perhaps, with indoor climbing ‘aestheticism’ is less a factor, but I think we could argue the other four.

I’d be interested to hear what other climbers have to say on this! Please leave your comments below.

'Across the ceiling': a new poem by a member of The Reach

As part of my residency at The Reach, I have asked climbers there to respond to their own experiences on the wall. Some people are established writers trying the sport for the first time; some are seasoned climbers with little or no publishing history. 

Over the next months, I hope to elicit more work like this from regular Reach members. Please get in touch if you have a climbing story to tell in verse, or prose.

Here is a poem by member Catherine Riney:

ACROSS THE CEILING

Hanging where the lights reside

Supported by my friends

Another clip, another hold

Gravity complies but, like me, reaches for a grip

Beginning to slow now, any minute I will stop

Just one more clip, hook that leg, pull the rope

Fingers frozen, unable to obey

Nothing left to give

Let go, a gentle swing, lowered to the floor

Down (and up) from the journey across the ceiling

Relishing the burn, pumped arms, slowly thawing fingers

Next time, one–more-clip

Where the lights reside

Women climbing: Helen Mort, Jane Eyre and me

No overview of creative writing and climbing would be complete without an exploration of Helen Mort’s poetry. In her 2016 collection, No Map Could Show Them, Mort writes of female mountaineering, expressed powerfully in ‘Dear Alison’, one of a sequence of poems inspired by the late Alison Hargreaves. Hear Mort reading here:

http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=8937#17

(You can also view the slideshow containing interviews and additional poems via this link.)

This video, produced by UK Climbing, documents Mort’s tribute to Hargreaves, a British mountaineer whose achievements include all of the great north faces of the Alps in a single season. Hargreaves died in 1995 while descending from K2’s summit.

Mort’s verse is lyrical and exciting, moving in many ways, including its contribution to the intersecting worlds of climbing, female sport and feminism. Reading it, I am simultaneously awed and, frankly, worried. You see, I can’t help but question, again, whether indoor climbing is too mundane, artificial, simply a poor cousin of sandstone and granite in comparison to mountaineering, set in the natural landscape, its original home. And yet, indoor climbing doesn’t seem simply a substitute for me; getting to The Reach is what I can manage, it is my workout, my sanity, and it satisfies me.

This past Saturday, with Women’s Marches around the world, I am drawn to the collection’s focus on the female experience. Within Mort’s Hargreave’s sequence is ‘Home’:

Home

‘Oh, a woman is so missing snow, ice, rock …’

-       Entry in Alison’s diary, early 1978, after breaking her leg

Even in your house you aren’t at home –

your blue raincoat collapsing from its peg,

teacups abandoned in the kitchen sink.

In her interview on the collection, Mort touches on the fact that Hargreaves was subjected to criticism for leaving her children behind to pursue her sport. The poetic text, ‘you aren’t at home’ and ‘abandoned’, arguably alludes, on one level, to these themes. For women, perhaps especially mothers, with the pursuit of sport, adventure, indeed any activity without monetary compensation (and sometimes, even those attached to a paycheck!) there can be accusations of selfishness, and associated feelings of guilt.

Coincidently, I am reading Jane Eyre for the first time, finding parallels with these emerging themes. Brontë writes from the perspective of Jane Eyre:

‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.’

This long passage seems appropriate here. Published in 1847, these fundamental desires for equality are arguably still often unmet in 2017. Many women still live with these sorts of expectations, and some societal thinking promotes female ‘restraint’ and ‘stagnation’ over freedom. In a sense, then, climbing, for women, can be all about the escape, the ‘exercise for their faculties’, whether that ‘exercise’ takes place on K2 or in a gym in Woolwich. The climb takes on layers of meaning: aspiration, ascent, advancement, a rising.

My regular climbing companions and I are all mothers. We steal time from our work and families in order to climb. We rush back for school pick-ups; we boulder and belay while talking, often, about our kids. We’ve dreamt of an outdoor climbing trip, to the Lake District, or Italy. These plans have been put on hold until our children are older. This weekend, some of us marched, bringing our kids; we aspire. And next week, we will climb; we will make our ascents, indoors, and then hurry home. 

New draft poem

I've been researching, reading and, of course, climbing. The student in me feels I should wait to finish this sort of literature review before I begin attending to creative work. (I am currently reading Helen Mort's most recent collection No Map Could Show Them, based on climbing/mountaineering; more on that in a future post.) But then I saw 'Slimfast' setting a route at the auto-belay area and the seed of a poem was sewn. 

This is a draft only; it needs more work, but I'm happy to put it here and let it settle.

The Route Setter

I’ve seen the look in libraries.

I know, too, the the nervy wait

within me when faced with a big

nothing on the empty page.

He has that look now, staring

at the pocked wall, stripped

of holds, holes where screws

had once held them fast.

He steps onto the cherry picker,

flicks the switch that lifts

him toward the ceiling, in fits

and starts, rising above it all.

This slab is his blank page; his poetry.

He works alone, occasionally gazes

out the window to the industrial park

and the line of sky, parked cars.

What enters his route setting:

the smell of coffee from the roaster

a unit away; the taste of chalk;

our shrieks when we lose our grip?

He holds the drill at his hip; a gun-slinger

for the day. He chooses a colour

for a line and plots the moves we will try

next week. We are his characters

and he decides today how we’ll later toil;

how we’ll ascend toward the rafters,

feeling strong and smart; how we’ll fall

little enough to want to try again.

The Spectator & The Times Literary Supplement

2016 has been a challenge; no question about it. At this stage of the game, politics seems to darken every endeavour; with every appointment, every tweet, the dignity of the post of POTUS seems to be devalued. One wonders how low things will go.

And yet, some good news, albeit of a somewhat selfish nature: one of the poems from You've Got To Wait Till the Man You Trust Says Go was featured in The Spectator in August, and the pamphlet was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement this week. Paul Batchelor writes 'Page achieves a compellingly dreamy sense of immediacy. She sends her long lines out with confidence...'  

Enough to keep me going into 2017. I pick up my pen and begin to write: of climbing, homelessness, Brexit, the state of things. 

Bouldering

Poet Judy Kendall, in her 2012 Climbing Postcards, writes of bouldering, a type of climbing I’ve only recently reunited myself with:

Holding out

waiting for my partner

I boulder past the boredom threshold

jigging my feet in a dance

from hold to hold hoping

she hasn’t quite come yet*

The Reach recently reset both its upstairs and downstairs bouldering routes, putting the areas on my radar. Generally, I really only consider bouldering if waiting for a climbing partner to arrive, like Kendall, or it our group contains an odd number, and I am taking a break from ropes to allow someone else to have a turn. Last week, however, a climbing friend, Catherine, took her father, who was eager to get on the wall after a year away; I was happy for a mid-week climb and a ride to Woolwich. The auto-belay area was out of action for resetting, and, rather than wait it out, in the cold, I took to the upstairs caves.

The thing about bouldering is that, like auto-belaying, you can get in a lot more climb-time; with bouldering, you are working on both the ascent and descent, getting more for your money. After an hour bouldering, I could easily call it a day and feel satisfied and physically spent. Kendall mentions ‘the boredom threshold’, and I get this: bouldering can seem like an appetiser for the main meal on the rope. Some prefer the props, the greater height, the connection to the other person belaying you. The sense of achievement associated with an average top rope or lead climb can seem far more note-worthy than a short, hop-on/hop-off bouldering problem. Contrary to what many beginners think, statistically, the overall risk factor is actually greater when bouldering as there is no support equipment; it is you, the wall, and a thick crash mat below. Landing improperly, or climbing above your ability, and higher than you can safely fall, is the greatest cause of accidents at a gym. It is a dangerous to wear a harness, as falling on its metal bits could cause injury. In this way, bouldering is both high-risk, but also free and unfettered.

Bouldering is essentially a solo activity, although many do it in the presence of others, trying out new routes, helping each other with tricky sequences, competing to see who can master a difficult grade first. I love climbing with friends for the camaraderie, the chat, the shared experience; but I needed thinking space last week, with the recent US election still troubling me. I had the upstairs to myself, and I applied myself to the task of completing all of the green routes with a single-mindedness that made me forget all about politics. I discovered the pink ‘improver’ routes, and worked through them from number one, to twenty, never finding number nine (!), and getting a bit suck on fourteen. (I am chicken on some of those overhangs, and my mind starts telling my hands and feet ‘no’! My friend, Cecilia, stops herself from going too high by picturing herself in a leg cast at Christmas!)

With bouldering, I feel like I’ve discovered a new sport within one I already love. The category of bouldering can seem separate from top-roping/lead-climbing in action, accessories, and mind-set. The mental challenge is formidable, constantly bringing to mind injury, error and sensibility. And yet, it allows for space to think, to climb without conversation, words or post-game analysis. For a writer, it might seem antithetical to crave a space where words play no part; but this is exactly the sort of space where the solo mind can work through problems, where the random, inspired lyric can find silence in which to breed, and one can do and feel and move in anticipation of words, to develop in the muscle before making their way to the mind and mouth.

I wouldn’t wish my partners away, or even delayed, in order to get bouldering time in; however, I would, from time to time, welcome the ‘boredom’, for the workout, physical and mental. I may even get a poem out of it in the next days.

*Judy Kendall, Climbing Postcards (Cinnamon Press: Gwynedd), 2012.

Poetry and climbing

(It seems to me that a blog is the ideal space for the exploration of a project-in-process; as such, it should be honest, somewhat rough and true-to-the-experience, as well as polished enough to be readable. This post aims for this balance in content and tone.)

I haven't blogged since late September, although I have been busy with both climbing and writing. Trying hard to avoid the types of injury that come from over zealousness, I have been steady at The Reach this Autumn; I've climbed two or three times a week with friends, mostly top-roping, only pushing myself in small increments when I've felt strong and safe enough to go a bit further, to, say, a friendly 6b. The recent exception to this is my recent foray into lead-climbing. Although I've co-owned a rope for a year now, I've been wary of taking her out (yes, the rope is a 'she', named 'Betty'); lead-climbing has always seemed more time consuming, riskier, more serious than I've felt as a climber.

It turns out that lead-climbing has re-energised my afternoons at The Reach, opening up new routes and walls, and challenging my recent thinking about confidence, and fear. There are (sometimes) long moments in lead-climbing when you are on the wall without being held tight, when you are between clips, and any slip would result in a fall of, say, a few feet, rather than a few inches. In the past, this would have prevented me from climbing above a 5/5+ while leading; however, lately, nudged myself toward the fear, for some unknown reason. I wonder if I'm getting closer to it, to examine it better as a writer? Or is it that I'm better prepared to cope with a small fall? 

The other day, in preparing for a local poetry reading, I re-acquainted myself with one of my older poems, from my first pamphlet, smithereens. 

Rules

Before your body is on the wall

you've got to say to the guy

in the other harness, the one

who has checked your figure-of-eight,

who has locked the carabiner tight,

who will feed you rope,

who will take in the slack,

who will lower you foot by foot

down the fake mountain side:

I'm climbing.

And when up high, in the overhang's

shadow, chalky hands shaking, unsure

of what strength's left in you, unable

to see the holds, knowing nothing

of their size or contour, uncertain

of everything except the weight

of your own body:

I'm falling.

The poem, published in 2010, addresses the level of uncertainty that accompanies climbing, and the associated thrill that this affords those who take up the sport. And it means more to me now that I'm lead-climbing, with further to fall. 

I hadn't planned to write poetry on this residency; I have been bashing away at a short story/novel for the past months, based on some of my own climbing experiences. (I should point out that I've never written a novel before; I am learning how as I go!) But finding this old poem has got me thinking about the immediacy of verse and how it can reflect the act of climbing in presentation and sound. I feel myself turning to the idea poetry again; not actually walking toward it yet, but considering it seriously.

I am also making plans to take some poet friends climbing in January. They will climb, for the first time, and write about the experience. Meanwhile, there are adult and youth climbers who are working away at their own first-time writing based on their time at The Reach. I am plotting to spend time in the cafe, too, unofficially, as a coffee drinker/jacket potato lunch customer, but also as a writer, in my remote office, watching the climbers, and seeing what comes to the page.