Psychovertical by Andy Kirkpatrick

Author:Andy Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407009445
Publisher: Random House

Black bites

Pitch 3 Reticent Wall

THE STORM RAGED all night.

I was alive.

I knew I could just as easily have been dead, hanging frozen on the end of my haul line.

I lay in my warm sleeping bag on my portaledge, the flysheet clamped down tight around it, listening to the hail rattling on its taut skin, knowing I’d been lucky.

In the morning I emerged like a mariner from his crow’s nest. My home, now suspended from two bolts, was a shipwreck of storm-battered rigging, ropes, bags, hardware hanging from every portion of my camp, clipped on in haste last night. I found a food bag of bagels and cheese, climbed back into bed, and waited for the sun to take the post-storm chill out of the air.

From now on every night would be spent in this bed. My harness would stay on until I reached the top – slept in, climbed in, even worn on the toilet.

I ate a bagel and thought about how close I’d come to hypothermia the previous day. The reality was that I could have died.

I also thought about my past close calls – avalanches, falls, crevasses and falling rocks – and how each time, because the outcome was positive, the experience was simply shrugged off.

Perhaps what worried me was the fact that yesterday the outcome was black or white: either get back to the belay and live, or be stuck and die, first by losing all motor skills, then by swift hypothermia as my core temperature dropped until I lost consciousness. The significance of yesterday was not that it was any worse than other close calls, it was that it was experienced alone. I had been a victim of my own incompetence, but also my own saviour.

I had to start taking this more seriously, and that was best achieved by not wasting my mental energy or thoughts on useless doubts and fears. I had to keep a cool head and stay rational. I had perhaps two weeks of climbing left, and countless opportunities to make a mistake that could cost me my life. Next time I would probably not get a second chance.

The sun was getting close, so I sat up in my sleeping bag and started to warm-up my aching muscles. The tightness and stiffness in my back and biceps felt good, but it had been a long time since I’d felt so wasted. How would I feel a week down the line? Could my body and mind take it?

My fingertips were already looking pretty ragged, my fingernails scratched and sore around the edges. I wore fingerless leather gloves to protect my hands, but whatever you did your fingers always got hammered. I also had a few mosquito bites from my time in Camp 4, that had turned alarmingly black. I thought for a minute about blood poisoning, lying on my ledge slowly dying of septicaemia, waiting for a rescue that could take too long. I shook the vision from my head, knowing that fear of dying was almost worse than dying itself.

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