Eastern Arthurs

Disabled but not Unable in the Eastern Arthurs
An adventure that appeared in Outdoor Australia in 2001.


Awaking from my fevered dream I pushed my attackers away. It took me a moment to recognise this place and to understand why I was lying in the dirt.


Looking about me the climbing gear reminded me of by what convoluted route I came to this place… The world climbing tour… Australia… Tasmania… The accident on the Totem Pole… The rock crushing my skull… The Royal Hobart Hospital… The year in Rehab … Making a home in this place that had scarred me so deeply.


This trip was the first roped climbing I’d done since the accident and although I was enjoying every minute of it I wasn’t finding it easy, dragging a useless arm and leg up with me. But that was precisely why I was doing it. I had been to many of the world’s mountains in my career as a climber, the Karakorum, the Himalaya, Baffin Island, Khirgizistan, and I had never gone for the easy option on a mountain.

In my hands I cradled my swollen knee. After a week spent towing my leg across the Eastern Arthur range I needed a rest day.

***

It seemed an age ago that Wak, Jane and I had set off along the Yo-yo track full of optimism. Then the Southwest National Park, an area of wilderness which covers almost half a million hectares, was all new to me.

There were big fallen trees lying across the path every hundred meters or so. Scrabbling onto one, with Jane hauling me by the scruff of the jacket, was like trying to climb onto the roof of a VW combi that had been smeared in Vaseline. At times I would have to crawl under a series of fallen trees with Jane pushing my sack, and hers, before her.

Whilst dredging one thigh deep pool with my right boot I stumbled in the cold gravy. Even with my light rucsac I couldn’t extricate myself so I just sat there with water lapping at my nipples. All Jane could think of was taking a photograph of me in my sodden predicament.

At first all the filth upset my sensibilities. It just didn’t seem right to get this dirty. I had spent all my life being told, “One has to be clean.” But as the days went by the muck began to have an emancipating effect on me.

The Huon River was kept well hidden from us by a dense hedge of Myrtle, sassafras and Huon Pine. The following two days we averaged ten kilometres a day. We were striking camp just after dawn and walking until dusk, about eleven hours.

Late on the third day we arrived at Cracroft Crossing, a place I felt deeply anxious about. The Cracroft river was infamous for its propensity to flood and I knew the bridge had been washed away sometime earlier. I needn’t have worried though as the level was low and, with my two companions aiding me, I had few problems.

The alarm woke me with a jolt half an hour before dawn and we shovelled soup-like porridge into our mouths whilst putting on cold, wet socks and boots. To an English person this is very strange behaviour. The reasoning is pre-emptive; you are going to get your feet soaked anyway so you might as well get it over with from the outset. Jane then packed the tent away and stuffed items in our respective rucsacs while I struggled, single handed, with my laces.

The day was dawning as we broke out of the woods and onto the button grass plain, with its heavenly duckboard. We made good time on our ascent of the Razorbacks and stopped to feed and water on the brow. Hearing voices on the plain below we soon enough encountered several women and men led by two older, bearded men.

“Well hello,” one of the older men shouted.
“Good morning,” said Jane.
“Which way did you come?” asked the man.
“Oh, the Yo-yo Track,” answered Wak with a smile.
“Oh yeah? Us too. Bloody horrendous wasn’t it? How long did it take you guys.”

There was a brief silence before Jane blurted out, “Three days.”
“We took eleven hours and thought that was slow,” piped up a young guy.
I should point out that when I am sat down I appear able bodied. It is only when I am up and walking that one sees just how disabled I am. I didn’t mention my disability. The last thing on my mind was the need to prove myself to anyone else, anyway since when did going into the mountains become a race.

Wak and I helped Jane to shoulder her monster pack, then Jane and I aided Wak in putting hers on and then Wak helped me with my little bag. To anyone spying on us this would have seemed an exceedingly farcical affair but it took place perhaps ten times a day.
After a few hundred metres of stumbling across a plateau I halted, “Could that be?” I was stuck for words. Filtered by cloud was the unmistakable point of Federation Peak that I had been studying in photographs and books for almost a year. Yet again I had developed an unhealthy obsession with a mountain that now, to me, appeared distant and aloof.

The Arthur Plains Track was definitely the most punishing so far. Often there was only swamp, where the only way to tell if you were on route was to feel with your boot for the deepest mud and stick to it. When the water was only shin deep bauera, a dense thicket with small razorblades for leaves, ripped the thighs until they bled, a little like fighting through a tangle of barbed wire with shorts on. This is possibly the weirdest of all Tassie bushwalking behaviour. They insist on wearing the very shortest of shorts for all bush walks and after a day or two of this kind of attack the thighs are red raw.

The following morning we wound our way up Luckmans Lead, a ridge that led to the plateau of the range. I put on my body harness and Jane roped me up a section of almost vertical path. We were expecting two extra members of our team and, sure enough, we spotted the tiny dots on the plain below. It wasn’t long before Emma and Damon had climbed up to us, emphasising just how painfully slow we were travelling.

On seeing me struggling up a sheer cliff Damon kindly offered to take my sack. This was a portentous moment for me. I believed that I was going to carry my own sack all the way but it was getting late in the day now. I realised that I was less jeopardising a worthy conclusion to the day, but risking a night out wandering on the mountain.

Slipping the bag off my shoulders I passed it to him saying meekly, “Thanks a lot.”
On one cliff a smooth wall, almost three metres high, lay directly in front of my nose. I could just reach a ledge on the top but pulling up was too much for my one arm to manage without anything for my feet. I fell repeatedly onto the rope and a wave of dejection flooded over me.
“Oh, what the bloody hell!” I lamented.
“I’ve got you good,” came a distant shout from above.
“Can you heave when I ho?”
“Okaaay.”

And so we overcame this one of many obstacles.
On cliffs of this nature I have a fear of projections pointing down that might spear the ten centimetres by three-centimetre hole in my head. It is precisely for this reason that I wear a helmet most of the time. In the accident I had failed to wear a helmet, preferring to follow fashion rather than safety.

“There’s a boy under that boulder,” Jane pointed up to our left, “He’s called Stuart. Died in the 50’s. Do you want to meet him?”
“No, not really,” I remarked wearily.
“So that’s why this place is called Stuart Saddle,” Damon giggled nervously.
My mind rested firmly on finding the platforms, which we did just as night was falling, fifteen hours after we had set out.

When I found myself standing on the duckboard of Thwaites Plateau it was all I could do to take a photograph of my feet; the most important photograph of the trip. Now that I was directly below ‘Feder’ I allowed the first seed of doubt to creep into my mind. I didn’t realise it was going to be this imposing.
On the final few metres to Thwaites campsite I studied the now familiar yabbie holes. To a Pommie these creatures must seem a figment of the Aussie imagination, like the Yowie or Drop Bears. I mean, little blue Lobsters that live in burrows and come out at night to roam around the moors in search of food. Really. “Wait ’til I tell the guys back home about these.”
***
Which brings us to the place I am in now, sat on the forest floor in the dirt nursing my swollen knee. Growing ever more tense about the following days climb. But when Liz’s flaming red hair and Ant’s smiling face come bursting through the trees any nervousness soon dissipates. They had come in the opposite direction with food and chocolate.
Liz said wearily, “I’m glad that I’ve done bloody Moss Ridge but never again.”
Moss Ridge I had been warned against as being near impossible for me because of the steepness and sliminess. But it could be as short as four days to the road compared with the original plan of retracing our steps, the whole long ridge, the Arthur Plains and the Yo-yo Track. And not comprehending your fate is always preferable to knowing what is going to be around each painful corner.
The new day brings a light wind and an ominous mackerel sky. I begin limping towards the rock that, I now realise, has guided my life for these last months. I limp with a fear that I have never known before, but I hide it well.
On the top of a knife edge ridge I clip the rope into my body harness and we walk along a narrow track with a drop of several hundred metres by my side.
When we arrive at the base of the climb I crane my head up to see a series of leaning, vegetated ledges zigzaging up to a summit chimney. I am terrified.
With twenty-five metres of rope, three slings and three carabiners we are woefully ill equipped for such a climb and my knee was flicking painfully back into hyperextension with every step. It also began to rain for the first time in ten days.
“Frankly I don’t think I can do this,” I say to Jane.
So, after watching Wak, Emma and Liz climb for a while I wander off on my way with relief and regret all rolled into one.

On the southeast side of the peak there is a chute with a giant chockstone wedged in it - Chockstone gully, down which I am lowered. Jane climbs down to me and sets off climbing up Geeves’ gully. She takes a stance at the end of a long leftwards traverse. After climbing up a way I then have to make the traverse from the right side to the left of the gully. Studying the rope looping down to my left and then peering into the void below, I am thinking, “If you fall now you’ll break your legs.”
But by the end of this infamous gully I am quite enjoying myself, popping from hold to hold and experimenting with the moves that my new body can perform.

On reaching the tent platforms Ant reaches into his jacket and produces a plastic water bottle full of whiskey. We pass the evening in a relaxed haze.
The following morning, after choking down lukewarm porridge, the track falls of into the abyss, down into the tangle of roots, branches and, of course, mud.

Jane slings trees and lowers me through the ooze. Eleven hours to descend two kilometres makes Moss Ridge our hardest day.
When we get into Cutting Camp I fall in the river and there, scratched in the sandy beach, are the words, “YOU’VE MADE IT.”
It is all I can do to shed a few tears.

Writing as Catharsis

It was difficult to recognise the moment when I came round. It could have been two minutes or two days ago. I didn’t know where I was. Where was up? Where was down? Where were all these tubes and wires going? Up my nose. Into the jugular vein in my neck. Into the vein in my arm. Onto a peg on the end of my finger. Nurses kept coming over to my bed to administer drugs and I could feel their icy trickle flowing down my neck or up my arm. Then, as if by magic, my pain would disappear.

I regained consciousness again and felt down below my waist with my left hand, as my right arm felt like wood, well there was no feeling in it at all. I felt down past my cock, which had a tube coming out of it as well, stretching it. I then felt lower down the bed. My left leg was intact, all the feeling of a normal leg.

But where the hell was my right leg? I franticly felt around the mattress groping, unseen. I couldn’t sit up to see what they’d done with my leg. A thousand thoughts ran through my head. They’ve amputated my leg! Am I going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life or could I get by with a wooden leg? “WHAT IN FUCKS NAME HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY LEG!” I screamed out silently to a passing nurse.

Why do no words come out of my mouth? Not even an unintelligible sound. I became desperate. Then, all of a sudden, there was Celia’s face, full of compassion and sorrow. She shed a tear and hid her face behind her hands. Again, I tried to speak. I wanted so much to comfort her. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right. Just fine".
I hadn’t a clue what had happened to me. I couldn’t even remember the last place we had been.

“And by the way, I love you.”

Nothing came out. I couldn’t even ask the nurse whether I would be like this for the rest of my life.

Celia is attempting to communicate with me. She is saying that I am in Tasmania, in the Royal Hobart Hospital, and that I was trying to climb the Totem Pole, on the Tasman Peninsula. “You had a rock hit you in the head and you have just gone through a six hour surgery".

It doesn’t make any sense. How can I be on the Totem Pole one minute and then here, in hospital, with all these tubes coming out of me the next. There’s a huge, squishy hole just left of the centre on my skull and I can feel metal staples through the tape.

I remember the day now. Waking up in the tent and walking the eight kilometres out to the Totem pole. I remember the rope traverse onto the ‘Pole’ itself and rappelling down it. There, I can hear the roaring of the waves like distant bombs exploding. I can still smell the seaweed, like iron tastes. We were alone.

No sooner had I got to the foot of the ‘Tote’ than I was up to my waist in the sea. Soaking wet. I shouted to Celia to come on down, but to stop at the ledge, and to tie the rope off there. I remember putting my rope ascenders on and making two moves on it before swinging wildly to the left… Then nothing. I don’t remember anything else about the next fifteen minutes.

I am now upside down and shrugging my rucsac off into the sea. Celia is shouting at me; “You’ve got to help me here if we’re going to get out of this.” I’m being held upright in slings, the grunting and laborious haul up which I’m told took three hours. I am making noises that sound nothing like me. I lost half my blood as I lay, shaking, for ten hours on that ledge, as Celia climbed out and ran the five miles for help.

***

Over two years have passed since I had that life-changing occurrence. Some would say I am gathering up the scraps of a life torn apart by a terrible accident but I would prefer to call it progressing on life’s pilgrimage. If there’s one physical act that has helped me more than the interminable physiotherapy it is writing.

Writing about, dissecting and studying my misadventure has aided me beyond reckoning. It helped me make sense out of what, at first, seemed not to have any sense at all (there was no nurse trying to kill me. That was all a twisted hallucination). That nurse wasn’t a complete figment of my imagination though. She really existed and by writing about her, amongst other more important subjects, I found I could well and truly lay her ghost.

By placing every little fact out on the page I have seen that I do have mental strength after all and that has given my weakening self-esteem a much-needed boost. Analysing the altered relationship with my family and my ex partner, Celia, has been essential to my present disposition as has the whole exploration of my changed mind (head injuries really mess with the way you think).

Perhaps most importantly writing about what happened to me has aided me in seeing more clearly my place in human kind as no more or less trivial than anyone else’s. In the words of the wise neuro-scientist V.S. Ramachandran:

If you think you’re something special in this world, engaging in a lofty inspection of the cosmos from a unique vantagepoint, your annihilation becomes unacceptable. But if you’re really part of the great cosmic dance of Shiva, rather than a mere spectator, then your inevitable death should be seen as a joyous reunion with nature rather than as a tragedy.

There are many others throughout history who have used the same tool as a way of coming to terms with loss or acceptance. Two obvious examples are Helen Keller with her ‘Story of my Life’ and Christy Brown with ‘My Left Foot’. Another historical figure who may have found healing in the form of writing is Seigfreid Sasoon.
Sasoon’s poetry is well documented as having changed radically after the deaths of his brother Hamo and best friend, ‘Tommy’ Thomas in short succession of each other in WW1. After being given the nickname of ‘Mad Jack’ for a series of death defying missions into no mans land against the German army Sasoon wound up in a military hospital with shell shock. It was there that his whole philosophy on the war swung antipodal, as did his poetry.

Geoffrey Withrop Young, the greatest of pre-great war mountaineers, lost his leg whilst in charge of an ambulance on the Italian front. Despite the surgeons having to amputate above the knee he didn’t give up and went on to climb the Matterhorn on his prosthesis. He published many books but this verse from ‘I Hold the Heights’ in ‘April and Rain’, penned in 1923 shows mental healing at work most poignantly.

What if I live no more those kingly days?
Their night sleeps with me still.
I dream my feet upon the starry ways;
My heart rests upon the hill.
I may not grudge the little left undone;
I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.

In 1997 Australian Warren Macdonald lost both his legs at mid-thigh when a massive boulder fell on top of him whilst climbing Mount Bowen, on Hinchinbrook Island, in far north Queensland. His book, ‘One Step Beyond’ reads like an ode to his lost legs. At first he consoles himself with the positive memories of having been places “that most people have never been, given me experiences most people had never had.” One can sense the sadness in those words. But by the close of the book he has quite accepted what he has become.

At the beginning of his story he likens himself to a baboon he saw once in an African wildlife documentary on the TV. The baboon is trying to get to a water hole that is writhing with crocodiles. In the end, dying of thirst, the hapless primate risks everything and approaches the pool. He finishes up with his head in the jaws of a crocodile but miraculously wriggles free. Macdonald recounts how the rest of the troupe stares at him as if he were a ghost, “because it forces them to face their own mortality.” He likens himself to the baboon as, now in his wheelchair, he feels the eyes of strangers boring into him.

Immediately after the accident he thought “that part of my life has gone forever.” But by the close of the book, just two years later, he has climbed a mountain and, mischievously, can’t wait to pick up his first hitchhiker in his car. Moving on from ‘One Step’ he has climbed Federation Peak, a remote mountain in Tasmania’s wild Southwest. The approach alone involved a three week crawl through dense rainforest and bogs.

I sent him an email asking him if he felt that writing the book had helped him heal at all and his immediate response was; “I didn’t, and still don’t see my writing as a kind of therapy. I saw it more as a chance to tell my story in a way I wouldn’t be able to tell in that kind of depth in general conversation. So I saw it mainly as a huge relief rather than a purging of my soul so to speak.” I didn’t ask him why it was ‘a huge relief’.

Obviously it takes a strong willed person to be on the end of the pen. But you can tell that plenty of this stuff would have just been forgotten if he hadn’t started writing and that would have made healing a longer, more painful process.

Joe Simpson, mountaineer and author, made headline news when descending off a mountain in the Andes, in 1988, with Simon Yates. He fell and badly broke his knee whilst still three thousand feet from the bottom. Yates commenced lowering him down the face for two long days until, in a white out, he lowered him off an ice cliff. After an age Simpson’s weight was threatening to pull Yates out of the snow seat he had created for himself so he did the only possible thing. He cut the rope. When Yates went down the slope and saw the yawning crevasse that Joe had fallen into he naturally believed him to be dead and staggered back down to camp. Meanwhile Joe was having his own private nightmare crawling through the caverns underneath the glacier, over rubble-strewn slopes and eventually into base camp. A very traumatic ordeal to say the least.

When I interviewed Simpson for this piece he said of ‘Touching the Void’ that “digging all those skeletons up only served to scare the hell out of me but that spending twelve years lecturing on the same story, telling it repeatedly, almost fictionalised it somehow, distanced it from my mind.” He continued “That’s the way that the survivors of the Kings Cross fire or the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster were told to deal with it. They told their psychologist and friends the same story over and over until it just didn’t seem real any more.” I ventured that writing a traumatic story down was surely the first step in just such a process. “My second book, ‘This Game of Ghosts’ was definitely a cathartic exercise. An exorcism of the ghosts of friends I’d lost to the mountains.”

With compassion, in ‘Void’, Joe writes himself into Simon’s shoes and in doing so explores what it must feel like to play the part of a killer.

“I had never felt so wretchedly alone. I could not have won, and began to understand the reason for my dreadful sense of condemnation in the snow-cave. If I hadn’t cut the rope I would certainly have died. Looking at the cliff, I knew there would have been no surviving such a fall. Yet, having saved myself, I was now going to return home and tell people a story that few would ever believe. No one cuts the rope! It could never have been that bad! Why didn’t you try this, or try that? I could hear the questions, and see the doubts in the eyes even of those who accepted my story.”

It could be a yearning for what you once were (and could have been) and an acceptance of what you have become that impels one to write, as in my case or simply a preparation for death as was the case with Jean-Dominique Bauby. The author of ‘The Diving bell and the Butterfly’ suffered a massive stroke and consequent Locked-in Syndrome. Completely paralysed and unable to speak, he only had the use of his left eyelid. His speech therapist developed a communication system by way of which he could use his eye to ‘dictate’ these beautiful words:

"My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for king Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realise your childhood dreams and you adult ambitions.”

Bauby died five months later having perhaps through the writing of the book reached some kind of resolution.
It is well documented how Native American shaman or Indian aesthetes will take hallucinogenic drugs to visit that other world which few of us are ‘privileged’ to see. Through severe trauma one gets to places, sees things in the mind’s eye, which others have a morbid fascination in seeing but are, understandably, too scared. Bauby paid the highest price possible to see that ‘other’ side and he had no choice in the matter. He was going on a one way trip whether he liked it or not. He has left an extraordinary book which people can content them selves by reading without, hopefully, ever having to go there.

Victims (survivors) of child sexual abuse are counselled to write about their experiences. It is said to help them in remembering their experiences, exploring and expressing their feelings, facing up to their fears and accepting themselves more readily as who they are now.

"Now I think things out and write them down instead of pushing them down. Once I started writing I couldn’t stop. It really surprised me - I could write better than I could talk. It’s best to deal with things. I’m quite good at that now.”

Claire (survivor in Breaking free).

This has led to some remarkable pieces of literature also, ‘Cry Hard and Swim’ by Jacqueline Spring being, perhaps, the most intense. Described on the jacket as being a ‘beautiful and ultimately healing journey’ it documents in the form of letters and poems to her mother her immense bewilderment caused by her father’s sexual advances. By writing these ‘letters’ she has moved on from feeling psychologically mutilated and an all consuming self-hatred to seeing her father as an ultimately pathetic figure:

"I gather together all the known facets of my father, attempting to join the ragged edges that will not fit, to reconcile the inconsistencies, not, now, with a child’s understanding, but as an adult becoming free. The awareness settles upon me that he is not to be looked at differently, that he is not a different kind of being, that he was neither the hero nor the ogre of my childhood, but perhaps only a human being, beating blindly about in his distress.”

I have mentioned accidents, physical disabilities (which is the category I now fall in to), preparation for death and psychological scarring. You may never be able to change or, ultimately, heal completely but you can learn to live, or die, within your shell. If you are disabled by an accident it will take you some time to accept your new body image. It has taken me nearly two years and I’m still not all the way to accepting mine. But it does get better with time and by writing about it I am convinced that one can accelerate if not precipitate that process.
The question is still begged why Macdonald or Spring or Bauby feel the need to put down in print their very personal story of tragedy for thousands of people to read? We are social animals through and through and we need to share our story with others, compare notes or just tell the world what we’ve been through.

I think that apart from a healing process that is going on here there is also genuine want to empathise or help some one if we can. I have dedicated my book to all those who have had head injuries. As such I have had to be totally honest about my fears of not being able to urinate again and all consuming self-doubts about (at first) my inability to have sex. These are things that others with traumatic head injury will, as I have done, fret about to all heaven.

Oliver Sacks, whilst walking up a hill, alone in Norway was confronted by a bull and, as he turned to sprint, fell off a drop and tore his quadracep off his knee. After a dramatic rescue and long recuperation, when he had the pot removed, he was shocked to find that the leg had no feeling in it at all. Not only was it completely numb but, what was more, Sacks couldn’t call any movement into it. To all intents and purposes it was a corpse leg.

After extensive surgery feeling and movement return to the limb. As a neurologist Sacks had many interesting insights into what horrors await the patient with paralysis. He wrote in his 1984 book, ‘A Leg to Stand on’:

"Now I was free - morally free, as well as physically free - to make the long trek, the return, which still lay before me. Now the moral obscurity and darkness was lifted, as well as the physical darkness, the shadow, the scotoma. Now the road lay open before me into the land of light and life. Now, unimpeded, without conflict or blocks, I would run this good road, swifter and swifter, into a joy, a fullness and sweetness of life, such as I had forgotten or never known.”

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue is a short essay I wrote about when I had a Cranioplasty in 2002

Looking in the mirror it is with some effort that I recognise you. The shaved head with the grotesque notch cleaved out of it; a flat, horizontal shelf indented into your skull for two inches and vertical for two inches - just as though a quarter segment has been chopped out of an orange. We shall have to get to know each other again.

This is the first time I’ve seen you bald and I can’t avert my eyes. I feel awkward for staring - one shouldn’t stare. It is with the unwholesome fascination with which one looks upon a ‘cripple’ (just glad that it isn’t you), something I know a lot about, that I now stare at you.

That huge scar makes excessive demands upon my mind, coerces it to take a trip back in time… all the way back to Tasmania…The Totem Pole. Like an indelible, long abiding stamp of misadventure that ditch in my skull serves the past and I am drenched in memories.

It aids the recollection my being on the same Neuro-surgical ward in the Royal Hobart Hospital that I was brought to on a trolley five years ago… The very same grey view out of the ward window, the same sterile white walls (and I assume the same sterile disinfectant smell though since my accident I am bereft of that function), the same sounds; alarms, screams of head injured patients and footfalls of nurses. Drip stand - shower chair - bath hoist - commode - blood pressure sleeve - pulse and temperature. And there, still, Moi, the same nurse whom I hallucinated was trying to kill me the last time I was here. Now it’s only good to see her.

To stare into your eyes is to look into the past, to that Friday the 13th… The tyrolean, the long abseil down The Pole, the water up to my waist, shouting up to Celia that you will have to jumar back up the rope, swinging in a pendulum, the whistling of the boulder through the air… and then… the black silence.

Gawping at that yawn in your skull makes you reconsider what you once were; a climber through and through. It forces you to evaluate your life over these past years - you don’t even recognise that bloke with the paunch and bald head (who’s staring at who here?).

But although your life with certain disability is hard you can’t help smiling at me, with pride etched in your crows feet, and thinking, “You really know how to go for it don’t you.”

As you study me, waiting for them to take you down to the theatre (to get a plate in your skull), I ponder what your being means to you now. You have traversed mountain ranges with a dodgy leg, slept on the ground and scrambled up rocks with one useable arm. Although you are using your body again, the reflections of your past life as an climber, full of agility, keep appearing, all grainy, at the most inopportune moments.

You used to say that the accident was the best thing that ever happened to you for it put you on a different life course; a one-eighty shift from the predictable existence of a professional climber. But now you realise this was you in denial. Although it gave you a beautiful wife and an imminent baby, after five years, you are more realistic. Nobody would wish what you went through upon themselves.

Whatever was to be was to be.

Then I hear a familiar male voice off to my left, “Paul it’s time to get on the trolley mate.”

Foreword from Extreme Rock and Ice

Extreme Rock and Ice - 25 of the World's Greatest Climbs by Garth Hattingh - is Published by New Holland 2000. This is Paul's foreword for the book:

When I had an accident on the Totem Pole the one question I was repeatedly asked by non climbers was, “Why did you do it? Why did you nearly kill yourself just to climb a rock?”

Because it’s there? Because it’s there? Nonsense!

What about the adrenalin rush? That’s a popular reason for climbing rocks, yet I don’t see it. You will get an adrenalin rush when B.A.S.E jumping or sky diving every time but not when climbing, even extreme climbing. It is much more complex than just a charge of chemicals to the brain.

The only activity I have found that comes close to the act of extreme climbing is yoga. The suppleness required to hold a single position for several minutes, the muscles screaming as lactic acid floods in and the nerves stretch and become taught as steel cables.

The mental agility and strength that is required to overcome the fear that is often engendered on these climbs is that of a yogi master. You are living in that moment and when that moment is gone there is the next moment to contend with. To climb routes of an extreme nature you must transcend your conscious mind, normally so cluttered with, “Have I paid my tax bill and mortgage.”

The climbs in this book are about pain and dread, whether it be the lung bursting agony of climbing in the Himalaya or the fear factor of soloing a big wall. These routes are enjoyed only in retrospect. When you are back on the safe, firm earth, then and only then can you appreciate the magnificence of the Great Trango’s rock architecture or the beauty of an alpine sunrise.

Yoga teaches one to appreciate the journey and not to look to an end. This doctrine in the climbing of such extreme routes might one day save your life.

Introduction to 2003 BMC Year Book

(BMC is the British Mountaineering Council in the UK)

As begins many assignments into the computer I tapped my key word, ‘ADVENTURE’. The search engine came up with four hundred and sixty five thousand seven hundred and ten links; all of them were advertisements for ‘adventure’ holidays, the whole lot. Between scuba diving on The Great Barrier Reef, canyoning in The Pyrinees, ski touring in Iceland, on safari in Africa or hangliding in Russia, you had the choice. Are these real adventures or does a more authentic manifestation lie out there waiting for us somewhere?

At one time I used to think that to live a life of adventure one simply had to live life on the edge, climb miles above ones gear, Shoot the hardest rapids and dive from the greatest heights. To jump headfirst into that unfathomable, dark hole. With a more mature hindsight I now realise that I had missed the point.

In Deep Play I wrote that the entirety of life was the adventure and the mountains were the mirror (with which to see the reflection of a life were anything is possible). Now I believe that the entirety of life is the adventure AND the mirror. That true adventurer Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

It doesn’t matter what one does with this life as long as it isn’t wasted. To fritter ones life away through torpor and sloth is perhaps the greatest sin.

My own experience may be a little different to other people’s as I hold that I have been on an unimaginable adventure without leaving the bounds of my, then immediate environment, which consisted of hospitals, ambulances, doctors and therapists. When I had my now well documented brain injury, I looked upon it as the longest expedition I had ever been on. That was 4 years ago and I am still travelling along that very same path, the path of healing, taking it one precise step at a time. This is the most vital adventure I have ever lived through and it didn’t involve traversing snowy lands or sailing vast oceans. Letting go of all earthly ties and abandoning my ego, that was what I did, to be taken by the hand to wherever that path led. The rock landing on my head wasn’t the adventure, that was just bad luck. But it did precipitate it, and it was at that point there began a whole lifetime of very different adventure.

Adventure is a journey of which one doesn’t know the outcome. Just as Doug Scott, with his legs broken, didn’t know if he was going to make it down the Ogre or Peachey Carnehan, in Kipling’s ‘The Man who would be King’, couldn’t fathom the culmination of his arrogant scheme. OK so he was killed; everybody knows that death is the ultimate adventure. Don’t worry we won’t go there.

I often look to eastern philosophy when I am having trouble understanding a problem. One would think that Buddhism would teach that adventure is for those who don’t want to look in on themselves, don’t want to face themselves. Simply a distraction. On the contrary: Even Buddhist texts advise us to live an adventurous life. Geshe Sonan Rinchen in the ‘Thirty-Seven Practice’s of Bodhisattvas’ urges us to, “Give up your homeland.”
Perhaps the untrue adventure, those holidays and other journeys were all the looking is done for you, do not allow you to grow, but are just yet another example of detached consumerism. Whereas on an adventure of which one doesn’t know the direction, a hard on-sight lead perhaps, or a new cave passage, there is plenty of deep searching and learning just who’s in there to be done.

The word adventure dates back to the fourteenth century French, which in turn originates from the Latin adventus – to arrive, when the Hundred Years War was in full swing. It is girdled by words such as danger, risk, loss and daring and these were definitely adventurous times that supplied all these elements. Yet the word has become stale like an old loaf of bread and its currency depreciated so that it would take a wheelbarrow of untrue adventures to pay for the genuine article.

In my mind adventure is the opposite of holiday, the two just do not go together. They are anathema. Assuming adventure is of your own making; this is a great ironic mistake. You can’t pay to be mollycoddled in a real adventure. However much you dig and scrape you will not find it. You need to stray a long way from your intended path and perhaps, just perhaps, adventure will then find you.

Back on the rock after nearly seven years

The Stiltskin Shuffle


Rincon 5.4, Eldorado Canyon, Co.

This was a whole new concept to me; one armed and mostly one legged rock climbing. I was feeling along the wall of a dark cave here not knowing what to expect of my body.

The little bouldering I had attempted seemed contrived in the extreme - a bizarre series of strenuous one arm pull-ups and hops with my foot up the rock. It bore no resemblance to what climbing a boulder used to entail.

In fact that act of bouldering was so alien to me now that I doubted whether rock climbing was for me anymore.

Limp and leaning heavily on my stick I sweated up to the Wind Tower in Eldorado Canyon, Colorado. The approach to the climb itself was a steep winding path, which terminated in a shuffle along a narrow ledge.
Pausing repeatedly, looking up, I had to take care not to topple backwards, so confusing to my senses was this landscape, which once I would have pranced up with inborn content.

Rincon, although a lowly 5.4, seemed dizzyingly high and imposing and I felt daunted. What was I about to get myself into?

“Hey Cris-Ann, that looks really very steep,” I raised my voice up to her as she drifted over the rock as light as a piece of silk caught in the updraught.

“Yeah, but ya know there’s buckets all over here.”

From where I was sitting the rock face appeared practically smooth so this information was well received. I was supposed to be resuming my climbing career on a forty-five degree slab not an imposing near vertical wall, but - one may say strangely - I was quite calm.

I was expecting my post serious injury mind to be freaking out. You know, “I can’t do this. Your going to die,” that sort of thing.

But being without the emotional sack of fear that one drags up to the start of his/her first climb is of great benefit: I’d been through all that twenty years ago.

Dieckhoff lowered Cris-Ann down and tied me in with a bowline. He asked me to check the knot but I declined.

So, with a rope above me and complete trust in Cris-Ann’s belay building skills my climber’s mind reassured me, “You WILL be safe.”

I was used to fluid graceful movement, like a water trickle that had decided to disobey Isaac Newton (though some of my mates would disagree), not this Stiltskin Shuffle. This scraping and scrapping with the rock was interspersed with long, maybe ten minute, pauses whereby I would be at sea on a ledge no bigger than a cigarette packet that had been jettisoned overboard.

Forearm pumping… My forearm… My forearm looking like a bag full of worms! After seven years I could not believe how good that felt… That burning sensation… The red-hot forearm nonchalantly gripped in a pair of tongs and slammed onto the blacksmith’s anvil… The swollen appendage then agonisingly tempered with blows of the hammer and the arteries achingly extruded.

But the transport experienced belied the fact that my body was about to part company with the rock if it didn’t come up with something very soon.

As my other, spastic arm fought to push me from the rock I was unable to release my fist-like grip from it’s precarious hold, because to do that would be to fall from the face.

The knowledge of complete safety brought no salve to my conscience. I clung to the rock; a worn old jumper that would not - could not be disrobed from it.

For several years I didn’t want anything to do with rock climbing. I thought I had quit the rock; But the bud of begrudging casual interest - to throw away climbing would be to throw away many close friends - slowly transformed into a hungry rose which had to be sated. It had been almost seven years since my accident and I was famished. If this was to be my first climb then I was going to give it my all.
Side stepping the outside edge of my left shoe onto a high foothold I powered up on a single thigh made strong by all the mountain hiking I had done these past four years. Aiding me in this manoeuvre was the finger hold my four left digits were crimped onto, and pulling down on, directly in front of my face.
My one useable arm, having to do the work of two arms in daily life over the years, has also seen an increase in strength, as have my fingers and thumb.

Once the leg was straight, and ever so delicately, I let go of the hold now at my waist. Reaching up in a fan like motion I contemplated how students are taught to observe the ‘three points of contact’ rule at all times; and here I was with my one lonely toe.

My fingers discovered a long, deep sloping ripple, as rough as coarse sandpaper. Blindly massaging the rock in an attempt at finding the comfiest spot the fingers settled down to a night slouching in front of the telly.
My right leg then realised it’s turn for action had come. Whilst stabbing at the rock repeatedly with my toe I was mithered by the, “Eee, eee, eee, eee,” of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho shower scene score.

Eventually, with elephantine precision, the limb found its ripple and the foot stayed. Leg shaking like a pneumatic hammer I stood up.

I wouldn’t say this system worked well for me, but it was the only way I could use my new body. So with the rock face always to my left and mugging it with violent kicks I found I was actually climbing.
Reading the rock became much more important than it had been in the past. Sure, I was used to studying the rock around me but not a whole four metres above my head. The precise layout of the holds was as important as the shape of each individual layaway, edge, crack. Was it a sloper or incut? a two centimetre hold or three? the sort of decisions a climber normally has to make, but I was finding a need to force these judgements much further in advance.

The bare knuckle fight with the rough sandstone - more the texture of granite - was leaving a trail of skin and blood behind.

I made a mental note, “Must wear a leather gardening glove next time.”

Being a couple of stone heavier than my pre-injury days the single shoulder, having to do all the work, was feeling it (the day after the climb it was in bits).

But I was loving this. Kilimanjaro was profoundly challenging and brought me back into the circle, the fold of humanity that only exists when you are in close proximity with other like-minded people. But rock climbing was what had always given my life meaning; whether it be in a luminous green gritstone quarry or on the sun-drenched granite of El Capitan. It was impossible to shake off twenty years of tactile memory it would seem.

Dieckhoff soloed up an adjacent route and hung by one arm above me pointing to, “A great bucket here,” or, “A killer pocket there.”

And before I knew it, an hour after leaving the sanctuary of the ledge, and sweating in the glare, here I was at the belay.

There were whoops of delight for me from below.
A cool, “Good work,” from Steve Quinlan, and even a delayed, “Right on,” from my eighteen month old daughter!

There was still a lot to learn about my new (and unlike washing powder) unproved body and many novel techniques to be mastered. After all I was moving into uncharted territory.

Now normally I would shed a tear after such an emotional event but there was too much excitement within me.

Rock climbing would have a place in my life again, only to climb slabs sure, where I would always be in balance, but there are plenty of those - Lliwedd on Snowdon and Idwal Slabs in the Ogwen Valley. The Cioch block on the Isle of Skye and the Rannoch Wall on The Buchaille. I would be able to achieve endless routes on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire. And then there are the international climbing grounds such as Yosemite in California and Handeg in Switzerland.

Six years ago when I sold my eight point eights, big wall rack, skis, plastic boots and desert rack of Friends I thought that climbing rock would be forever out of the question… But I must have suspected something as I couldn’t part with one piece of equipment; my first nut, an original MOAC on rope.

I have realised for some time that I am not going to wring much more movement out of my arm or leg. Correct the brain never stops healing but does get less plastic and therefore slower and slower.

Now I am approaching the end of the road as far as getting better goes and must adapt to what I’ve got (something I have been doing for the past few years).

This doesn’t discourage me one bit and all the striving has not been in vain: it has permitted me to have new adventures such as pedal boating, fishing and caving and allowed me to walk again, write again, cycle again, dance again…

…And now climb again.