The Joy of High Places Page 11

  I stood up, shrugged on my pack, and stepped out into the misty air, ready for the Mountain. I glanced back a few times as we left the chalet to try to fix its romantic image in my mind, but the conscious locking of moments in memory rarely works – it’s the random moment that stays.

  The weather was too damp for the heart-lifting early morning thrill which usually arrived when I started out. The path was steep, up past ski runs, and my calf muscles, not yet warmed up, felt the strain. The drizzle kept me silent. The hair escaping from my rain-hood turned to rat-tails. I plodded on upwards, the dampness starting to strain my determination to be happy, but soon the sun sparkled on puddles and turned raindrops on boughs into rainbow prisms. I swung along through upland meadows and dappled forest, birds I didn’t recognise darted and twittered sweetly. By mid-afternoon we reached Le Ferme de Bon Papa. Cathy, whose grandfather had owned the farm, gave us a room and dried our socks and backpacks in front of her fire upstairs. She told us that when her grandfather had owned the farm, during winter the animals were kept downstairs where we were sleeping.

  By the time I’d had breakfast next morning the weather had clouded over. We headed through town, crossed a torrent and then entered a birch wood, following the torrent up the valley. Further up, the cobbled path – it was a Roman road – led steeply upwards through chestnuts, birches, cypresses and larches shivering in the cool air. Out of the woods we stopped by a meadow dancing with wildflowers: yellow, pink, blue, mauve, white; cows with bells; patches of sunlight; and more unknown birds singing. I was in a children’s book. Shortly though, the terrain became steeper and rockier and soon pines and larches and meadows were left behind, leaving a bare heath-covered landscape.

  We came to the first patch of snow, about 20 metres across, and traversed it easily. There were several more patches, each one bigger than the last, but none of them worrying. Between each patch of snow, wildflowers oddly burst out of the marshy tourbière or bog: deep blue bells, creamy edelweiss, little pink stars, yellow arnica and white aconite.

  And then there was more snow and patches of dark green tourbière crisscrossed with streams. The weather was closing in, mist blotting out the mountains ahead, and the path disappeared, leaving only boot prints and pole pricks in the snow to follow.

  A young man passed us coming down and said there was a lot of snow ahead. ‘Three hours at least,’ he said.

  ‘Can you see the path?’

  ‘There’s a lot of snow,’ he repeated, as if I hadn’t understood.

  I realised later that I hadn’t understood. I had no context for knowing that ‘There is a lot of snow’ was shorthand for a whole set of dangers and difficulties anyone who had grown up with snow would immediately foresee.

  ‘But it is still possible to follow footprints?’

  He shrugged. ‘It is possible now but may not be possible later. There could be rain or more snow.’

  Anthony and I looked at each other, but there was no question of stopping. We would never circle the Mountain if we kept stopping at mentions of snow. But soon there was only snow, thick and powdery, covering an upland valley where the prints in front of us were clear but often along multiple tracks heading in various directions. There was no sign of the actual path.

  The mists swirled and revealed the Mountain sloping upwards towards the passes, first the Col du Bonhomme, followed by the Col de la Croix du Bonhomme. We discussed the multiple tracks and decided on the most well-trodden path, leading up an incline of perhaps 55 degrees. That angle would be hard work on any slope, but with metres of soft snow, it soon became Sisyphean. Each step upwards sank down almost as far as the previous step; the advance for almighty effort was a few centimetres. I stopped every few steps, exhausted by the effort of getting nowhere.

  We trudged on. Step, sink, step, sink, rest. It was a kind of torture to the spirit. My heart was beating too hard, straining. At the top, the mountain flattened out to the Plan des Dames, marked by a large pile of stones in honour of a lone English-woman who perished here in a blizzard 200 years ago. I placed a stone on the pile. Snow must have swirled around her, obscuring her path, freezing her to death.

  You can easily die up here. The fear was beginning in my stomach but I hadn’t acknowledged it yet.

  Ahead, I could see the two passes, with a long slope and climb between them. The rain was slushy, halfway to snow, but not heavy. I was exhausted already.

  ‘Can we do this?’ Anthony asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s only been half an hour in this snow and I’m already …’ I stopped. I didn’t want to be the one to make the decision.

  We both looked at the two climbs ahead of us. There were three small figures struggling up the farthest pass. To my surprise, Anthony said decisively, ‘We’ll go back. Those people passed us hours ago and they are still climbing that hill. With this rain, their footsteps could disappear and then we’d be stuffed.’

  I gathered up my pack and turned down the slope I had just climbed. Descending was difficult; I had to stamp back on my heels into the snow with each step to avoid tumbling down the mountain, but it was a relief not to have to struggle upwards.

  We stayed back at Le Ferme de Bon Papa and arranged a ride around the spur of the Mountain to the beginning of the next stage. I sat in the cosiness of the bedroom and wrote lists of new geographic sights: aiguilles, glacier, moraine, torrent, cataract, col, peak.

  Next morning we were dropped off near Les Chapieux. We crossed a bridge over the Torrent des Glaciers and turned up the zigzag path leading to the pass into Italy. I felt a steely determination to make it, to push on through whatever came along, disallowing the idea that I could be beaten. There was something blind about my attitude, a wilful obliviousness to the realities. Looking back on it, it appears that I had the same stubborn determination as Barney as he tried to learn to walk again, but that’s giving me too much credit. His determination was against medical expectation and practice, but it was based on knowledge, the biomechanics of how to walk, whereas mine was a kind of bulldozer determination, not informed by anything.

  I walked steadily, pausing to look back over the bright green valley, the scattered farm buildings, and then forward to the rocky snow-shawled mountains. Anthony pointed out a bird of prey, a hawk, circling above the valley. There was startling beauty in every direction, the kind that seems to belong in stories, not daily life. I stopped to take pictures of wildflowers, hoping to identify them later: intense blue campanula, alpine forget-me-not, violets and buttercups, purple crocus flowering straight out of the ground, St John’s wort and blue northern dragonhead.

  We soon came to snow again. Anthony crossed first and I followed in his footsteps, although his stride was longer than mine and sometimes I had to shuffle my feet to ease into his safe boot-print. I realised that I was doing an instant risk assessment of what would happen if I slipped. At first there were only three categories: getting wet and bruised, having a minor injury, suffering a major injury. It wasn’t really a thought process – more a quick flick of the eyes noting angle of slope, iciness of snow, proximity of cliffs and torrents.

  We came to a steep snow-covered slope with a circular hole in the snow revealing a torrent. The torrent was visible for a metre or two before disappearing again, plunging in its icy tunnel down the mountain. Metres of snow must have covered the stream when it was frozen, but now that it was running again, the snow vault was falling in. There were two sets of footsteps, which stopped at the edge of the hole. I realised there was a fourth category: if I slipped, it meant certain death. It came into my mind that that was what Barney had faced every time he flew. If something went badly wrong up there, two kilometres above the earth, death was a likely outcome. He had to have known, I might die this time, every time.

  I stopped, panic speeding my heart rate. I could slip and fall into the hole, or the snow ceiling of the tunnel could give way under me and I would fall in. Either way, the torrent would sweep my body away in an instant.

 
Anthony crossed, digging his boots in sideways to create a few centimetres of flatness on the slope. I followed, digging my poles into the snow and leaning up the slope in an effort not to overbalance. I glanced down at the snow-hole and torrent; my heart thumped. It didn’t feel real. It was as if I’d slipped into an action movie, the wrong story, by mistake.

  Anthony stood on the other side, watching me. Each step took forever, the space was stretching. I could feel the hollow of my stomach. I finally stepped onto safe ground.

  ‘Are you okay to keep going?’ Anthony asked.

  ‘Well, I’m not going back over that.’ I walked on ahead for a short while.

  The land and the sky were white, with a dark smudge of braided footprints here and there, and sometimes, a drift of pink on the snow, apparently dust from the deserts of Egypt. It was a world I didn’t know. I looked back and through the misty whiteness Anthony looked like an Arctic explorer. His lips were cracked too, adding to the effect, and I called him ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ until I remembered what happened to Scott.

  We headed upwards all the time, but it wasn’t too steep now, just steady trudging towards the cairn marking the top of the pass. This was where the guidebook had promised spectacular views – ‘A revelation of a new world … Standing on the borders of Italy and France, the views are magnificent …’ – but all we could see was white sky, white land. We took photographs of each other at the cairn, standing in front of a bleak pile of stones.

  It took longer than we thought it should to reach the refuge, at least another two hours, and then a wall of snow blocked the final ascent. We had to scramble up a steep crag on all fours, like mountain goats, to get around it. Afterwards I sat on my bunk bed and made a list of what I had been afraid of in the last few days: twisting an ankle, falling, being lost, being too exhausted to keep going, having a heart attack, failing, dying.

  Anthony sat on the lower bunk with me, his back leaning against the wall. ‘Do you want a bit of Ulysses?’

  I said okay and I put my notebook down as he pulled his mobile phone out and found the place we were up to and started to read. The words flowed as they always did but I couldn’t listen. Bloom was still coming back from the funeral – he was coming back from the funeral all day in Ulysses – and the rich words slipped off the sides of my glassy brain.

  My stomach started to feel queasy. Something was wrong. I excused myself and jumped up and went to the smelly bathroom to wash my face with cold water, then, back in the room, slipped into my sheet bag and pulled up the doona. I felt unsettled in my skin. Nothing in me was in its right place. I started trembling. I tried to quell it but it only got stronger. I called out to Anthony on the top bunk.

  He swung down and crawled onto the narrow mattress and wrapped his arms around me. I trembled more violently. The more I tried to stop, the worse it became.

  ‘Do you want to keep going?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely. I’m just not doing another certain-death crossing, that’s all.’

  In the morning it was bitterly cold and the sky was spitting sleety snow. We had to keep going, no-one was allowed to stay at the hostel except in blizzard conditions. I put all my layers on, but my hands were painful and within minutes my fingers felt as if they were burning. I remembered our fingerless host on the first night. I stopped in the lee of an abandoned stone barn at the bottom of the crag and rifled through my backpack until I found a pair of thick, dirty socks. I pulled them on my hands and felt immediate relief. They would soon be wet, but it was better than nothing.

  There was a steep snow slope, straight down with scree at the bottom – a minor-injury crossing. Anthony plunged down in front of me, long strides, heels dug in, and I followed, crunching and sinking through the powder.

  At the bottom, there was a glacial valley and a wall of moraine; above, a glacier that had retreated from the valley after crushing trees and rocks in its path. Now it didn’t look powerful; it was dirty and shrinking; it wouldn’t be there at all in another few years – in fact, at the current rate of global warming, all Alpine glaciers will have disappeared by the end of the century. Cataracts tumbled down the cliffs, milky green-grey against the dark rock, a nineteenth-century painting come to life. The floor of the valley was covered in lateral moraine, with torrents and pools threading through blackish tourbière. There were disturbing plants with succulent dark-red stems and alien-looking flowers, resembling desert plants, without woody stems or leaves, as if the response to harshness – snow and ice, or dryness and heat – is the same.

  There were two paths to choose from. Continue down the valley to Courmayeur, or turn up to the right along the high path. The guidebook advised, ‘In the Himalaya, one would need to walk for many a long day to capture such a vision as you will see from this high path’. There was no question which path to take. I might never get to the Himalaya.

  The path was narrow and steep and soon there were snow patches several hundred metres across, but I was resigned to them now. I strode across with care and some confidence. There were a few torrents to cross too, but I felt a rising sense of elation. I had done it yesterday – despite the after-trembles – and I was doing it today. The rain was gone, clouds swirled away leaving a brilliant sky. I slid the socks off my hands – all fingers intact. I bubbled with energy, my body was light. Anthony and I exchanged glances and smiled.

  At an abandoned stone hut above a lake, we stopped for coffee. We were at 2303 metres, already higher than the highest mountain in Australia. I could see Mont Blanc, Aiguille du Combal, Glacier de Miage – I was up there with them. An eagle, two eagles, circled across the valley below me. The white peaks and ridges were cut-outs against the brilliant blue. Wreaths of clouds dangled lower down like lacy collars folded over layers of rock that had been heaved upwards and twisted and laid down again when the African and Eurasian tectonic plates collided.

  I slung off my pack and leaned it against a rock and sat cross-legged on the grass. Anthony passed me the metal cup from the thermos and poured me a coffee. On the peaks in front of me there was fresh snow, fallen overnight, but now the sun was warm. I took off my hoodie and stuffed it in my backpack. I was as tall as the mountain, my soul was in the sky; I was as pleased with myself as I have ever been, higher than hawks and eagles, as high as Barney had flown over the hinterland of Queensland. Laying claim to the territory of eagles. Barney told me that once an eagle had swooped down and clung onto the top edge of his wing and screeched at him. It was huge, its talons 11 centimetres across – he knew this because it had pierced the fabric of his wing and he had measured the holes afterwards. It had flapped its giant wings, keeping up with him, letting go, grasping the fabric again, screeching its mighty warning at him again. Get out of my territory! Then I was afraid, Barney said.

  We packed up, then walked to the top of the ridge, following the path above the abandoned hut. The Mont Blanc massif stretched in all its glory as far as we could see to the left. In the face of its soaring slopes and sheer cliffs and, to me, unclimbable white peaks, I was uncharacteristically silent. I knew this was what I had come for. To drink beauty, to devour it with every step.

  After walking for half an hour, fierce with greedy success and still bursting with energy, I rounded a spur and came face to face with a solid wall of snow. It rose several metres straight up from the path. We were both shocked, not quite able to believe it was there for several seconds.

  We retraced our steps and walked up the spur. The other side of it was a basin with a slope of nearly 80 degrees, covered in snow and ending in cliffs. Anthony stared at it, reckoned we could traverse the side of the basin, digging our boots sideways. I looked at the almost sheer slope.

  ‘No way on earth,’ I said.

  We went back to the path and by then a group of young Czechs had arrived on the spur.

  ‘There is a crossing,’ one of the women said. ‘It’s down there, around the side of the snow wall. It’s above a cliff, but it’s short. It can be done.’

 
; We scrambled down the path again and saw, down to the side, the snow-covered crossing about four metres in length. It was centimetres from the cliff edge. At first, I was relieved to see how short it was, but as I approached it I realised it was a ‘certain-death’. My heart started thudding.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

  ‘You can. Just take it easy. We’re not turning back again.’ Anthony’s tone was different; for the first time he was putting pressure on me. I felt a bewildered sense of abandonment. He was always on my side. Now he wanted me to do something that terrified me and which could kill me.

  I looked at it again. Perhaps. I should be able to do it. It was only four metres.

  But it was on the edge of a cliff, an abyss that disappeared a hundred metres or more below. It was covered in icy snow, the path leading to it sloped steeply down and was slicked with icy mud. I couldn’t even get a sure step on it.

  Suddenly, Anthony stepped onto it, walked across and then was on the other side facing me. Confusingly, I have no memory of watching him cross, none at all, but I can remember him on the other side.

  ‘You can do it,’ he said. He looked impatient.

  I edged down towards it. My arms and legs were watery, heart and stomach queasy. No part of me, except will, wanted to do this. One more step and I would be on the snowy, icy crossing above the cliff. I wobbled.

  ‘I really can’t do it.’

  ‘Come on! It’s just a few steps.’

  I’m stepping, slipping, falling over the cliff.

  I suddenly squatted on the path.

  ‘I can’t.’ I felt stupid and ashamed.

  Anthony sighed, looked pissed off. I sat there. I couldn’t get up; my legs were too weak.