Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
|
|
|
Topic Author's Original Post - Apr 20, 2018 - 08:29pm PT
|
The “I am no longer a 5.whatever climber” threads set me thinking about the whole thing. Not what it means to be a 5.11 or 5.7 climber, but what it means to be a climber. I thought about spewing my thoughts in one of those threads, but then remembered that Bill Murray had written something about it seventy years ago that pretty much summed the whole thing up. So I dug it out, typed it up, and paste it in below.
But first I suppose I should answer the question that a lot of you will probably be asking: “Murray? Who the hell is Bill Murray?”
Most of you will probably never have heard of him, because he wasn’t American and didn’t climb in Yosemite, but that is your loss. He was a Brit who discovered climbing as young man and went on to pretty much invent hard winter climbing. He made a living as a writer – of history, fiction, and climbing – and you can find his work if you look for it. But the bottom line is that, when it comes to climbing, he was, despite being a very quiet and unassuming guy, as badass as anyone who ever set hand and foot on rock or ice.
So, with that out of the way, here’s something he wrote about the game we play…
The Undiscovered Country
By W.H. Murray
The exploratory urge moves every man who loves hills. The quest of the mountaineer is knowledge. He is drawing close to one truth about mountains when at last he becomes aware that he will never know them fully – not in all their aspects – nor ever fully know his craft. Like the true philosopher, the true mountaineer can look forward with rejoicing to an eternity of endeavor: to realization without end. I have climbed for fifteen years and have hopes of another forty, but I know that my position at the closed of my span will be the same as it is now, and the same as it was on that happy day when I first set foot on a hill – the Scottish Highlands will spread out before me, an unknown land.
The yearning to explore hills was born in me in 1934, when I, a confirmed pavement-dweller, overheard a mountaineer describe a weekend visit to An Tealach in Ross-shire. He spoke of a long thin ridge, 3,000 feet up, with towers and pinnacles and tall cliffs on either flank, which fell to deep corries. And from these corries clouds would boil up like steam from a cauldron, and from time to time shafts would open through them to reveal vistas of low valleys and seas and distant islands. That was all he said, but the effect on me was profound, because for the first time in my life my exploratory instincts began to stir. Here was a strange new world of which I had never even dreamed, waiting for exploration. And unlike so many other dreams, this was one that could be realized in action.
At the first opportunity, then, I went to one of the few mountains I knew by name – the Cobbler at Arrochar. It was a fine April day, with plenty of snow on the tops. When I stood by the road at Arrochar and looked up at my first mountain, the summit seemed alarmingly craggy and blinding white against blue sky. How I should ever get up I could not imagine. I picked out a route by the line of a burn, which vanished towards a huge corrie under the summit rocks. And what then? I felt a nervous hesitation about my fate in these upper regions. Had I been entering the sanctuary of Nada Devi I could have felt no more of the sheer thrill of adventure than I did when I stepped off the road on to the bare hillside.
Later in the day, when I entered the Cobbler corrie, I recognized that I had entered what was, for me, true sanctuary – a world of rock and snow and glossy ice, shining in the spring sun, and for a moment at least, laughing in the glint and gleam of the world’s joy. I too laughed in my sudden awareness of freedom. Had I thought at all I should have said: “Here is a field of free action in which nothing is organized, or made safe or easy by uniform regulation; a kingdom where no laws run and no useful ends fetter the heart.” I did not have to think that out in full. I knew it instantaneously, in one all-comprehending glance.
And, of course, this intoxicated me. For it was a great day in my life. And at once I proceeded to do all those wicked things so rightly denounced by gray-bearded gentlemen sitting at office desks in remote cities. I climbed steep snow slopes by myself. Without an ice-axe or nailed boots, without map, compass, or warm and windproof clothing, and, what is worse, without a companion, I kicked steps up hard snow, going quite fast and gaily, until near the top I stopped and looked down. The corrie floor was now far below me, and black boulders projected out of the snow. If I slid off nothing would stop me until I hit something. I went on with exaggerated caution until I breasted the ridge between the center and south peaks.
At that first success a wave of elation carried me up high walls of sun-washed rock to the south peak. That rock had beauty in it. Always before I had thought of rock as a dull mass. But this rock was living rock, pale gray and clean as the air itself, with streaks of shiny mica and white crystals of quartzite. It was joy to handle such rock and to feel the coarse grain under the fingers.
Near the top the strangeness of the new environment overawed me a little – nothing but bare rock and boundless space and a bright cloud sailing. Nothing here by myself and the elements – and a knowledge of my utter surrender to and trust in God’s providence, and a gladness in that knowledge. On the flat rocks on top I sat down, and for an hour digested all that had happened to me. In being there at all I had, of course, sinned greatly against all the canons of mountaineering. But I did not know that. This was my Garden of Eden stage of purest innocence. It was not till later, when I plucked my apple in search of knowledge, that I read in text-books, “Man must not go alone on mountains” – not when he is a bootless novice. Meantime I looked out upon the mountains circling me in a white-topped throng, and receding to horizons that rippled against the sky like a wash of foam. Not one of these hills did I know by name, and every one was probably as worth exploring as the Cobbler. The shortness of life was brought home to me with a sudden pang. However, what I lacked in time might in part be offset by unflagging activity. From that day I became a mountaineer.
Upon returning home and consulting books I learned that there are 543 mountain-tops in Scotland above 3,000 feet. They cannot all be climbed in one’s first year. This thought made me feel frustrated, but I was reminded of another similar experience. I once received a book after waiting long and eagerly for its publication. Like a wolf coming down starving from the mountains, I gulped the courses in any order, reading the end first, snatching bits in the middle here and there, through the pages in uncontrolled excitement. I wanted to know it all immediately. In the end I was sufficiently exhausted to read whole chapters at a time.
That was exactly how I felt about mountains. In my first year I sped all over Scotland – going here, there and everywhere. As it happened, I could not have made a better approach. The best and natural way of dealing with mountains is the way I luckily followed
In succeeding years, the wider my experience grew the more clearly did I see that however much I might explore this unknown country called the Scottish Highlands, I should never plumb the Unknown. To know mountains we must know them at the four seasons, on the four facets, at the four quarters of the day. The permutations are infinite. For the variations in snow and ice and weather conditions are inexhaustible. No winter climb, say, on the north face of Nevis, is ever the same twice running. If we go to the Comb of Arran in autumn frost, on a day of still, crisp air when distant moors flame red through a sparkle of hoar, we shall not recognize it as the mountain we knew when clouds were scudding alongthe crags and the hail drove level. I have been a hundred times to the top of Buachaille Etive Mor in Glencoe. In unwise and sentimental moments, I am inclined to think of it as an old friend. But I know full well that the next time I go there the Buachaille will surprise me for the hundred and first time – my climb will be unlike any that I’ve had before.
Treasures of reality yet unknown await discovery among inaccessible peaks at the ends of the earth, still more on the old and familiar peaks at our very doorstep, most of all within each mountaineer. The truth is that getting to know mountains he gets to know himself. That is why men truly live when they climb.
|
Let us know!