Summit Fever

by Andrew Greig

  I considered him. A blue-eyed, fair-haired, compact, Anglo- Saxon boy. Prickly and intelligent. He lived in Bloomsbury – unlikely address for a climber – with his parents. His father was chaplain to the University of London; his mother had written several books on housing the aged. A very pleasant English upper-middle-class household, yet Jon spoke in a quasi-cockney accent and was the scruffiest of the bunch of scruffs we were. I wondered if his background was a reason for his defensive– offensive attitude.

  He went on to tell me that in an expedition it’s everyone for themselves. ‘No one’s going to look after you.’ Though that was undoubtedly the bottom line, his attitude was so different from Mal’s that I wondered how much I was being told about expeditions and how much about Jon.

  Over the next few days we relaxed with each other somewhat. In many ways I had more in common with him than any of the others; he had a degree in politics, made a point of having nonclimbing friends, and was strongly interested in books and modern music, the more obscure the better. When we got onto that common ground he was quite a different person, open and enthusiastic, one I liked and found interesting.

  And then suddenly one would be back to first base with him. I’d see a hesitation come over him as he remembered that I was a writer, that I might be studying him, and his eyes would twinkle with malice as he prepared one of his remarks. His desire for privacy seemed strong and genuine. He said he liked London because of its anonymity, and mountaineering because of the private nature of the experience.

  He struck me as a competitor who went to great lengths to show that he wasn’t. I think of him always as lounging back, legs sprawled, hands stuffed in anorak pockets, a position of exaggerated indifference. He loved to accuse other climbers of ‘secret training’ and to protest how lazy and uncompetitive he was.

  Maybe that was the basis of the antipathy that seemed to exist between him and Tony, for Tony was so openly intense and enthusiastic about climbing. He didn’t brag, but saw no point in self-denigration and pretending to be less committed than he was. He loved climbing and didn’t disguise it; he seemed to have no interests outside climbing. And Jon on the surface was exactly the opposite, yet I suspected that underneath he was the same, ‘a real revver’ as Mal said. Maybe that was why Tony seemed to irritate him.

  I was there when they met at the Clachaig for the first time in a year. Yes, a definite tension there. Even Tony was less buoyant than usual, and Jon even more indifferent and uninterested. While Tony talked on about his latest doings to Mal, Jon lolled back as if oblivious and entered the conversation only to say ‘I’ve got nothing to prove, mate,’ with just sufficient emphasis on the ‘I’. And when Tony asked him directly if he’d done anything recently, Jon answered, ‘Don’t try to wind me up, Brindle – you can’t do it.’

  I asked him later what bothered him about Tony. ‘He’s so wound up and intense about it all. I just like climbing,’ he replied. Which was exactly what Tony had said to me about Jon. I began to agree with the prediction that their relationship could be an interesting part of the Expedition.

  We treated each other a lot less warily after I came into the chalet happily drunk in the early hours while he was dossing on the settee. ‘Great to see you, Jon,’ I bellowed, and proceeded to demolish his resting place and his Walkman set-up as I blundered about in the dark. I was being natural for once, and he responded.

  Jon was as pessimistic as Mal was optimistic. He gave us a 5 per cent chance of climbing the Mustagh Tower, and less with Gasherbrum 2 – yet he was utterly determined to go and give them what he called ‘maximum pastry’. The phrase quickly entered Expedition vocabulary, as did the ‘shuffling dossers’ coinage of a friend of his, which evokes perfectly the whole hand- to-mouth, day-to-day peripatetic lifestyle of so many climbers. Being free to do serious climbing tends to mean lacking visible means of support. Mal got by with guiding and the help of his wife Liz’s job; Tony was at college on a student grant; Jon worked for little more than pocket money in a climbing shop between trips. Only Sandy Allan, who I hadn’t yet met, made serious money during his spells on the oil rigs. Borrowing, cadging, hitching and sleeping on floors, spending what we had on drink and climbing, shuffling dossers is what we were. It indicated more than a lack of finance; shuffling dossing is a state of mind, unselfconscious existentialism.

  But the phrase that really stuck to Jon came out of a heated argument one evening in the chalet between him and a climber who was going on what was reckoned to be a lightweight, no- hope Everest expedition. The climber in question had only a reasonable Alpine record, had never been higher than 19,000 feet, but was quite confident that with sheer determination and ‘going for it’ he had a good chance of making the summit.

  ‘You’ll die,’ Jon said brusquely.

  ‘I’m going to go for it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you go for it – you’re going to die with that attitude.’

  ‘What’s going to stop me?’

  ‘Altitude. Weather. All-round deterioration. You don’t know anything about it. If you’re lucky, you’ll all be driven off early. If not, you’re going to die, old son,’ Jon repeated with evident satisfaction.

  ‘Well, I’m still going to go for it,’ the climber replied defensively. ‘I think I can do it.’

  Jon, lounging back, flashed his most sardonic smile. ‘It doesn’t matter what you think. You’ve got a squaddie’s mentality, mate.’ The room seemed to quiver with hostility. Jon sprawled back even further and added the coup de grâce. ‘You deserve to die.’

  And since then ‘You’re going to DIE’ became a chorused catch phrase, one he accepted with good grace. It was only later that I learned part of his vehemence stemmed from his experience on Annapurna 3, when one of the small team died during a five-day blizzard that drove them off the mountain. And it was a long time later that he confessed to me that on his return to Kathmandu he had stumbled round the town for a day, blinded by tears.

  A complex character. Mal and Tony are just themselves, they don’t change according to their company. But there are at least three Jons – the prickly, laughing, abrasive one, the casual, sardonic Jon among climbing friends, and the disarmingly enthusiastic, open and interesting Jon when relaxed and outside the climbing ethos.

  ‘You really think I’ve got a chance?’

  ‘Of making the Col on Mustagh? Should be no problem, if the weather behaves and you can take the altitude. You’re not going to set the climbing world alight, but you seem to have taken to it well enough.’ Pause. I consider Duff’s perennial optimism. ‘Your biggest problem may be the scale of things out there,’ he continued thoughtfully. ‘You haven’t even been to the Alps, and Himalayan scale is a different thing again. It can be pretty daunting.’

  This on a cloudy, wet day, sitting halfway up Dinnertime Buttress in Glencoe in late March, smoking cigarettes. The nicotine constricted the circulation at my fingertips and they felt cold. Himalayan scale … I shivered, certainly daunted already, yet a new composure made itself felt deeper down.

  ‘See how it looks when I get there,’ I replied. My voice sounded surprisingly matter-of-fact. I wondered if I was changing, and beginning to pick up as one might a disease, certain climbers’ attitudes.

  He nodded. ‘You’re going to spend a lot of time on this trip being totally hacked off. Headaches, sore throats, the cold, all that hanging around in the middle of nowhere, you’ll think, “This is utterly pointless.” And it is.’ He seemed to be addressing himself as much as me. He was coming to the end of his winter guiding season and looked worn down. ‘There’s no reason for it at all,’ he continued. ‘Going up a mountain and coming back down again doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t affect anything. Well, except you. It doesn’t do anything.’ He gazed gloomily down into the valley. ‘At those times the only thing that keeps me going is the thought that I could be sitting on that 8.10 train with my eyes glazed over.’

  We’d become close in the last six months, during days
in the hills and evenings in the Clachaig or the pubs of South Queensferry With Kath and Liz. Because I was not a dedicated climber, he could air his doubts, worries and reservations with me. Malcolm had my father’s fascination with information; his sober level-headedness was like my elder brother’s, while his impetuous enthusiasm and fondness for flying a kite in argument reminded me of myself a few years back. He seemed at once older and younger than me, and our relationship oscillated between those two poles. Turning up at the foot of the north face of the Eiger, seventeen years old and fresh from his Edinburgh public school, with a sleeping bag, an ice dagger and a couple of screws, ready to do battle with the big one – that was pure Malcolm. (He got as far as ‘the Difficult Crack’ – some 2000 feet up – and had to turn back. ‘I realized I wasn’t quite ready for this.’ ‘You George Watson F.P.s are all the same,’ I retorted, ‘you think all you have to do is show up at the hill and it’ll roll on its back and say, Walk up me!’)

  He passed over another cigarette and we lit up. Duff’s diet is a dietician’s nightmare, I reflected. He seemed to live entirely on coffee, white sugar and cigarettes by day, and lager and cigarettes by night. He avoided fresh fruit and raw vegetables like the plague. And he had the nerve to be healthy! I glanced at him: leaning forward elbows on his knees, chin resting on clasped hands, frowning thoughtfully at nothing in particular – this was the way I’d always think of him.

  ‘Why did you really ask me on this trip?’ I asked casually.

  He grinned and snapped out of his mood as I’d intended. ‘I’d never met one of you writer chappies before. I thought it might be interesting to see how you’d react if I actually put you on the spot.’

  So that was it. I’m here and going to the Himalayas as the result of someone’s whimsical curiosity. Not just anyone’s – no one other than Duff would have come up with such a suggestion and carried it through. I laughed in delight at the absurdity of it all. Mal shook his head as if trying to shake the dust from his brains. ‘You showed you had the right stuff. The trouble is,’ and here he concluded the line of thought he’d been trudging down, ‘by the time you get to climbing in the Himalayas, you’ve forgotten why you started in the first place.’

  I was to think often of this conversation in the coming months. We went on to chat casually about Rocky Moss on Mount McKinley, the sex life of butterflies, suitable film, the origin of the Jesuits – and of the intriguing ménage à trois of the other three Americans on the trip. Burt Greenspan, Donna and Sybil lived together in a big house in Chicago, Burt and Donna downstairs and Sybil upstairs. It all sounded very decadent and American, and we were curious to see how it worked out in practice. Burt and Donna were coming to climb, while Sybil was part of the trekking party. Finally stiffening muscles, growing thirst and wet snow drifting out of the greyness sent us off downhill towards the lights of the Clachaig.

  I felt strong, ready and willing. Next stop Islamabad.

  Only it’s never as simple as that.

  I walked into the Clachaig the following Friday to find Mal leaning against the bar, looking pale and tired.

  ‘Here, read this.’ He thrust a newspaper at me.

  British climber killed on Matterhorn, the paragraph was headed. I looked up, read on. It reported briefly that Mr Brian Sprunt had fallen to his death on the mountain, and his companions Charlie McLeod and Malcolm Duff had been taken off by helicopter. I glanced at Mal, he managed a rueful smile. ‘I seem to be in two places at once. Trouble is, the rest of it is true.’ Brian Sprunt … the name was familiar. Hadn’t I met him, the first time I came up here? ‘Yes, he was sitting at our table for a while.’ I could picture him now, a face among many, drinking and laughing and planning the new season. And now a face among the many dead, written off in a brief, inaccurate newspaper paragraph.

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘Well enough. We were together on the Nuptse trip. You get close to somebody …’ He paused, looking into private memories. ‘Hell of a good bloke. Bit upsetting, really.’

  And with this massive understatement, so typical of Mal and climbers and Scots, he turned back to the bar. ‘What you drinking, youth?’

  But he was in low spirits all weekend, suddenly quiet and withdrawn, cracking a joke then forgetting to laugh and instead frowning into his lager, right knee jumping incessantly. His wife Liz was very protective, said nothing but quietly put her arm through his. Not for the first time I sensed how emotional he might be. Much of the joking, well-that’s-life attitude was part of the necessary protective mechanism, as are the endless death stories and prophecies of doom that climbers love to tell.

  And as we finally stumbled over to our chalet in the dark, he said quietly, ‘Brian’s the second person I had pencilled in for the Mustagh trip who’s been blown away.’ Pause. ‘Makes you think.’

  More typical of him and of mountaineers was the attitude he suddenly expressed a week later as we came off a route. ‘After all, when you get serious about climbing, you accept there’s a chance you’ll get blown away. There’s nothing tragic about getting killed doing what you want to do. Desperately sad, but not tragic.’ Then he hurried off down the hill and I followed more circumspectly, considering him with new interest and sympathy.

  A letter came from Sandy Allan who’d been with Brian on the Matterhorn. It was full of Sandy’s och ayes and hey ho but that’s life, but the pain behind it was evident through the brittle gaiety. He briefly mentioned what had happened. Brian had been belaying him and Charlie as they prepared to leave their bivouac that morning, on a ledge near the top of the face. He was clipped to an old peg left from an earlier climb. Then for some reason – the little, fatal action that always eludes explanation – he untied himself from the rope. Then the peg pulled. ‘Oh God …’ And that was that.

  It set Mal back for a time. For me it was a sobering reminder of the seriousness of this game, and of the importance of maintaining concentration at all times. It made Mal seem a little older. ‘It’s a wonderful way of life,’ he remarked once, ‘but every so often you look around and realize how many of your friends aren’t here any more.’

  That’s what gave the edge to the good company, to all the fine nights we had, the foolery and laughter, the meetings and partings. It was all precious because so fragile, like an eggshell- thin bowl. One night at the end of a rumbustious after-hours ceilidh in the Clachaig Snug, a straggly-haired northerner with round glasses sang an unaccompanied lament for lost good company, and touched something deep in everyone there. It was in the quality of the silence afterwards, and the stillness while he sang. When he finished we all dispersed unusually quietly to our bedrooms and chalets and tents, for there was nothing left to be said or done that night, and none of us wanted to spill the emotions we each carried inside ourselves, privately, like water brimming at the lip of the bowl.

  Then my father died on 24 April, six weeks before we were due to leave. It is still bewildering and strange to write these words sitting at his desk, and know he’ll never read them.

  There are very real consolations. His life was as long, varied and productive as anyone’s could be; he thought and felt himself extraordinarily fortunate; he died before his illness became more pain-filled and humiliating, and he had long accepted death in the dry manner of a Scottish atheistic doctor.

  As with Brian, there is nothing tragic here. The shock, the numbness, this physical wrenching I feel in my chest, is for the living, for us who live on. It is for the half-remembered yarns I’ll never be able to confirm, the humorous bloody-mindedness, the man himself.

  There are more cells in the human brain than stars in our galaxy. When a person dies, a universe collapses into a black hole. I have no notion as to whether it reappears in another dimension. Personally, I doubt it. (I think this and smile, shake my head at my dad’s picture, realizing where my scepticism came from.)

  So I’d never be able to come back from Mustagh and tell him about it, to show the photos, to in some oblique way say th
ank you for the life I’ve inherited.

  There’s nothing to be done but swallow, shrug and get on with it. To try to live honestly, with appreciation and flair. And the living obscurely rejoice at the news of a death, in the knowledge that it’s not us, that we’re still in the game.

  Kathleen came back for his funeral with news from Mal. Rocky had been struggling desperately on his McKinley warm-up climb, and finally gave up and went back to LA. There the doctors discovered his adrenal glands had packed in. Which meant he was simply not capable of doing two hard days back to back. Despite his quite phenomenal training, fitness and physical strength (we’re talking about a fifty-four-year-old who cycled from San Francisco to LA, some 450 miles, in thirty-six hours), there was nothing he could do about it. There was no chance of him climbing Mustagh or Gasherbrum 2.

  But he insisted we go ahead without him. He’d still back us.

  My first reaction was relief. I hadn’t realized till that moment how set I was on this adventure. I’d have been desperately disappointed had it been called off.

  My second feeling was sympathy for Rocky. He’d been so keen, so dedicated, so wound up for this Expedition. He hated ‘failure’. This happening just five weeks before departure would leave him devastated and disgusted.

  Then I felt gratitude – no, more than gratitude, respect—at his insistence that we press on and he’d still fund us. The trekking party that were going to accompany us dropped out, but we were still in the game. Again that selfish joy, the relief.