The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  We got off lightly. We woke that first morning with our water system frozen solid; this is normally such a mild climate that nobody bothers to bury their pipes. I got up before dawn – Chloë has to be on the school bus at eight o’clock – and put the kettle on. The cats, a good indicator of temperature, were lying in a heap in the warm ashes of the fire; the dogs, curled up with their noses up their arses, didn’t even move as I came down. Outside, the stars glittered bright in the icy air and the moon shone with a terrible pallor over the white valley. On dark winter schooldays, I light candles for Chloë as she eats her toast and honey. It’s a little thing, and foolish perhaps, but candlelight lends warmth to the dark of early morning. That morning, I left Ana in bed conserving some warmth, grabbed some brush and kindling and built a blazing fire. Then, to warm us all from within, I made a pot of thick, hot porridge.

  As Chloë and I headed down the track I could see the sheep huddled together and steaming in the deep straw of the stable. Normally they sleep scattered about beneath the stars, in the yard. Reaching the fields down by the river we saw the scarecrow, immobile with his wooden gun, staring across a glittering field of alfalfa, each of the thousands of plants white with crystals of frost. At the mouth of the irrigation pipe was a small glass mountain of icicles. We had never seen anything like it before.

  Halfway across the river, Chloë cried out, ‘Look, Dad! There’s ice forming on the edge of the water!’ I couldn’t see it, being too busy steering out of the ford, but on the way back I pulled up on the hill leading down to the river, and got out to look. I stepped onto the muddy hummock that goes down to the water and promptly crashed down onto my back as my feet slipped away from under me on the ice.

  I shot down the bank until I was in the water up to my knees, and howled curses as the bone-gnawing cold washed into my shoes and up my trousers. I struggled up, halfwinded, onto one elbow. To my right there came a groan and, seemingly in slow motion, the car, with the driver’s door open, slid slowly into the river and headed across to the middle. The handbrake had got frozen and hadn’t engaged properly. The river was about to pour in through the open door, so I staggered to my feet and plunged in pursuit of the car, hauled myself in and slammed the door. With my legs and feet numb I drove on up to the house and crawled back into bed with my sleeping wife. This is something really nice to do: get up, get really cold, then go back to bed and enjoy the wonder of the warmth of a human body. Your partner won’t like it a bit, but it’s only fair if you’re the poor schmuck who has had to get up and get the family ship underway.

  Later, Manolo turned up wearing a black fur Red Army cap with a red star badge on it that Bernardo had bought for him on one of his periodic visits to the world outside the Alpujarras. He came bearing a frozen branch of retama. The sprinkler had been playing on it in the night, and as it froze hard the fronds had become more and more thickly encrusted with ice until it looked like a great glass chandelier.

  ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ he said with a great smile of delight.

  This was an entirely different sort of winter from any we had known in our time in the mountains. And even the old folks, whose constant refrain is ‘This is the way it used to be back in the old days’, had seen nothing like it. The temperature on the north side of the Sierra Nevada stayed below fifteen degrees for weeks, causing thousands of hectares of olives to freeze and die. The whole harvest was lost. There was snow on the south coast, and even across the Mediterranean: the population of Algiers, most of whom had never seen snow, woke up one morning to find their seaside city cloaked in white.

  On that day, there was a heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada, which gave a little hope for water later in the year, and for the first time the snow reached the hills around our farm. I took the dogs for a walk and ten minutes up the track we were walking in a thin crust, which soon became a deep white blanket. The branches of the mountain shrubs drooped low and heavy with the weight of frozen snow, giving the landscape a surreal look; these Mediterranean plants were not conceived to bear snow. Soon it was knee-deep. The dogs had never seen snow and were wild with excitement, Bumble ploughing through it like a bulldozer, while Big leapt along in her footprints like a porpoise.

  As I walked through this unfamiliar, glittering landscape, my thoughts turned to the high southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. I had an urge to climb as far as I could into that new and untouched landscape and ski beneath the peaks and the startling blue sky, with only the swish of my skis breaking the muffled silence. Unfortunately I was hindered by two serious problems. Firstly, I hadn’t a clue how you got up there when the trails are covered with snow, and secondly I was a very rusty skier and not at all sure I could be trusted on my own. I put the case to my two friends, Jesús and Fernando, who run Nevadensis, a small company that arranges mountain-guiding for the Sierra Nevada.

  ‘You can come with us,’ they said. ‘We’re taking the mountain club from the university up there next week. We’re both going, and Gerardo will be leading us. You remember Gerardo?’

  I did. Gerardo, who had led an ice-climbing weekend I once went on, was the Sierra Nevada’s equivalent of Sherpa Tenzing. In spite of being nearly as old as me, he was the fittest and hardest mountain man I had ever met. He was utterly indefatigable, and expected the same from everyone else. In a sudden rush of casual machismo, I put my deposit on the counter.

  Ana was appalled when I told her. ‘You must be bonkers,’ she said, looking pityingly at me, ‘at your age and condition.’

  I was about to remonstrate about the injustice of the remark when Château, our fat black cat who lives on the kitchen work-surface and only ever raises himself to eat or hawk up a fur-ball into the cutlery tray, suddenly leapt through the door and shot up the jacaranda tree. It was a thing he had never done before (or since), so we watched him agape. The cat looked pretty nippy on the lower part of the trunk, but as he gained the topmost fork his enormous inertia began to overcome his momentum. He teetered for a moment, scrabbling for a grip, and then fell clean out of the tree with a great thump, knocking the wind out of himself. ‘There,’ said Ana picking up her astounded cat and stroking it. ‘Let that be a warning to you: you’re just too old and unfit for that kind of stunt.’

  This needled me, so off I went.

  The Nevadensis group consisted entirely of the university’s mountain club members, except for myself and a bloke called Paco, who was about the same age and level of fitness as me. We headed up the mountain to a refuge, then spent the afternoon practising the sort of skiing we were going to use to slide up from there – on through the snow towards the ominously-named Pico de los Machos.

  The exercise involved fixing sealskins – well, not actually sealskins, but a fur-fabric substitute – to the bottoms of our skis, to enable us to ‘ski’ uphill. With varying degrees of success we attached the skins and, in a long straggly line, slithered off uphill. Once we had climbed high enough, we clamped our heels into the bindings and zoomed down, then turned round and clambered back up again. Of course, it all seemed pretty futile in the way that skiing does, but it was a lot of fun going down – and going up gave a sense it was doing you some good.

  After we had climbed and zoomed a few more times, we returned to the refuge to gather heaps of pine logs from the forest to warm the place up. As the sun slipped behind the peaks, the temperature dropped like a stone, so we all tumbled in and slammed the door to keep out the bitter cold. Then, to kill the hours of darkness and help forget the cold, we had a party. It was a fairly static sort of a party, admittedly, as the refuge was tiny and there was no room to move – and in any case nobody fancied straying too far from the fire, which had been cunningly sited so that it heated only one corner of the room. But it was a talking, laughing and drinking party, with pasta and sausages, a lot of noise and a fair bit of booze.

  Deep into the festivity I crept outside to take a leak, shutting the door carefully behind me. The sound of conviviality vanished as I stepped towards the trees, my
feet squeaking and crunching on the frozen snow. The night was clear and moonless and the pines stood motionless beneath the frozen burden of snow. Returning to the hut, I noticed a figure standing in the clearing between the wood and the hut. It was Rafa, a student of astrophysics, and he was looking at the stars, which, it has to be said, were quite dazzling. I’m used to seeing some pretty bright stars at El Valero, where there is very little light pollution to obscure their shine, but these had a clarity all their own; they seemed to pierce the sky and hurtle towards you in the most vertiginous manner. ‘Do you know your way about the heavens, Cristóbal?’ Rafa asked. It seemed a surprisingly intimate question.

  ‘Well, I know the Plough… and the Pole Star… and the one that looks like a squared-off question mark,’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘That would be Orion’s belt.’

  ‘And isn’t that one Sirius?’

  ‘Actually no, that’s a satellite. See, it’s moving just discernibly. You need to go just a bit further on for Sirius,’ and Rafa helpfully manoeuvred my arm. ‘Interesting, isn’t it,’ he continued, ‘that the ancients could see pictures abstracted in these constellations? It’s an ability we seem to have lost.’

  It was indeed interesting but it was also ten below zero, with the beginning of a nasty wind whipping towards us, so I cut short the conjectures and returned to the warmth of the hut. The party ebbed and flowed for another couple of hours until there was nothing left to drink and the fire died down and the cold started to bite and we disposed ourselves around the hut in a grunting heap of sleeping bags, ski-boots and woolly hats.

  It’s hell getting out of a sleeping bag on an icy morning in an unheated hut, and I couldn’t help wondering why people ever come up as high as this. As I stepped outside into the blinding whiteness, I could see all the way down to where I lived. It looked warm down there, where there were oranges and lemons and even a banana tree. Here were only pines and snow and a couple of half-frozen choughs coughing in the woods.

  We made some hot drinks somehow, and then set out. In a long line we slid up through the pinewoods and out onto the bare slopes above the tree line. Gerardo, silver-haired and with an impressive beer gut, led the way, grinding relentlessly up the hill. He was, bar Paco and I, the oldest member of the expedition, the rest of the party being in their late twenties, yet he was by a long head the fittest man there, and he showed no mercy. Up we slogged, and up and up with no suggestion of a halt.

  As the bulk of the party hung limp, their muscles screaming, mouths open, gasping great lungfuls of icy air, Gerardo ground on effortlessly upwards – slip, slither, pole… The man was inhuman. Flesh and blood could not keep up this pace. Some of the party wept, some begged, a couple simply stopped and stayed behind. But Gerardo powered on up towards the peak.

  His reason for this unsympathetic attitude, avowedly, is not to humiliate or physically wreck his followers, but to challenge them, to knock them into shape and to get them up with a minimum of fuss to where they can start skiing, or ice-climbing or whatever. If you dropped back you had to catch up, and if you were lucky enough to catch up at one of the very few rest stops, then as soon as you crawled in, panting and on your last legs, the front group, who had already rested for two minutes and were now impatient to be on their way, would move off.

  This torment went on all morning, with Gerardo climbing relentlessly away at the front; those in the middle head down, doggedly following him; and several knots of disconsolates grumbling and puffing at the back. It was bright from the snow in spite of the greyness of the day, and bitter cold, though the heat we generated with the effort of climbing forced us to remove our outer clothes. ‘Maybe we should stop and eat our sandwiches here,’ someone suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Gerardo. ‘Better to push on to the top; then we can eat our lunch looking over the other side.’ We were high up now; we could see the valleys and chains of mountains below us swathed in cloud, but it was still an hour’s steep slog to get to the top. The awesome Gerardo turned and headed in a series of steep zigzags up towards the peak.

  When we finally reached the Pico de los Machos I felt too ill from the exertion – and perhaps the altitude of some 3,005 metres – even to think about eating. It was also too cold to hang about much, so we poked our heads up over the peak into the vicious wind to take a look at the lesser peaks and swirling cloudscape below, and then, clamping our heels into the skiing position, we turned to the descent. That was the moment when I realised my foolishness. I hadn’t skied on slopes like this for perhaps twenty-five years, and I hadn’t exactly been an ace back then. I found myself looking down a vast, broken plain of snow, steeply inclined. It seemed to go on down for ever until the slope itself was lost to view in a boiling sea of cloud impossibly far below. Now, I’m not a nervous person at all, but my legs and knees, which were already quivering from the muscular exertion of the climb, began at that point to quake, literally, with fear. Nearly everybody had already set off, and were little more than dots far below by the time I had steeled my courage sufficiently to launch myself down the slope.

  I reckoned no harm could come to me if I just kept it slow, but within seconds I was rocketing down at breakneck speed. The slope was ice with the odd rock sticking through, and here and there swirls of fine powdery snow. I couldn’t get a grip on that ice. By turning uphill I managed to stop. I panted and looked in terror at the awful expanse of slope that still remained. A hundred metres below I saw Paco, who looked to be in a similar predicament. I stumped inexpertly round and slithered off fast on the other tack. I slowed and, almost losing my balance, managed another turn. Then I hit hard ice. My lower ski slipped away, I leaned over, flailing my arms, and fell with a heavy crump onto the hard-packed snow. Aah, bliss. I was unharmed and could sit and rest here for a minute, take respite from that awful downhill rush.

  But there came a time when I knew I had to bite the bullet. Off I went, and got in a couple of goodish turns, but then, hitting a great sheet of ice, I hurtled down faster and faster until I was completely out of control. My eyes filled with tears of cold; the world raced past in a blurred vision of white… faster and faster until suddenly I was airborne, feet and skis somewhere up over my head. An almighty blow and I was half-buried in cold soft snow… Ah, the peace; ah, the softness… But something was wrong. I did what I could to pick myself up, and only half of me responded. My left side no longer worked; the arm didn’t react to the commands I was sending it. It hung limp and heavy at my side. I sat up and rocked to and fro in the snow, clutching my injured arm and groaning. Dislocated shoulder… that’s what it had to be.

  What the hell was I to do now? There was pain, a huge aching pain, but it seemed lessened by the fear of the abnormal state of my body and concern about my situation. Further down the hill I saw Paco again. He too was sitting in the snow, clutching his upper body and rocking to and fro. Way down below I saw three figures detach themselves from the main group and move back up the hill towards us. Somehow I managed to haul myself to my feet. My skis had come off with the fall, and tucking them beneath my right arm, and with the right arm holding the left arm in place, I started trudging downhill. The jolt of each step was a shock of pain. I had the feeling that my arm was only held on by skin, and I was desperate to protect it so that it shouldn’t break that skin and fall off altogether. After a painfully long time I reached Paco. He was in a bad way, pale and drawn, groaning piteously. He couldn’t speak. I stood for a bit looking at him and wondering what to do.

  Finally Gerardo arrived with Jesús and Fernando. They unclipped their skis and fussed around us. Jesús tried to manipulate my arm back into its socket, but after I had yelled and cursed at him, and the arm showed no signs of going back in, he gave up. ‘I’m sure there’s supposed to be a way of straightening it out… bending it at a right-angle and popping it back into its socket,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t seem to work on you.’

  Paco was in too much pain to put up with such horseplay. A decision was made to call a
helicopter.

  ‘I don’t want a helicopter,’ I protested. ‘I can walk out on my own.’ I was worried that, having not taken out any insurance, it would tip us into serious debt.

  ‘No you can’t,’ they assured me. ‘With a thing like this, the sooner you get to hospital and get it back in, the better.’

  So they rang the helicopter with a mobile phone, which, by some miracle, had coverage. They gave careful directions as to just where on the mountain we would be found, and we sat down to wait. Paco, pale and drawn with pain, was moaning all the while. His injury was much worse than mine; I could at least keep a sense of what was going on around me.

  After twenty minutes or so we heard the sound of the helicopter. It drew closer, and then faded again and disappeared altogether. Jesús’s phone rang. He gave some more directions. The sound of the helicopter appeared again, increased a little, and then moved away. More instructions and yet more. Paco groaned loudly. I started to shiver. Suddenly we caught sight of the helicopter ferreting about among the ravines and valleys below us. Those of us with whole bodies leapt up and down and waved jackets. At last the machine veered and headed up towards us.

  It turned and hovered two metres above the ground, fifty metres away from us. Two big men in the uniform of the Guardia Civil Mountain Rescue Service jumped down, crouched and ran across the snow towards us. They assessed our wounds, telling us that the machine was unable to land on such a steep slope, so we’d have to get into it at the hover. The two Guardia helped poor Paco across and, with an unceremonious shove, heaved him into the back of the cockpit. It was then that I realised that they had sent us a four-man helicopter – with four men in it, for there were two pilots. How the hell were we all going to fit on board?