Mountain Magic

Graham Buckenham (United Kingdom)

When Dr. Morrell gave me the news; after he had studied the images, checked the ECG strips, the Holter monitor evidence, the blood tests; after the angiogram, I had to agree with him; I had to accept the results, there was no hiding place. In January, my body was normal for my age but now, nine months later, a stain ran through it – like a seaside town name in rock. Like a piece of lamb peppered with rosemary, so my inner torso was speckled, patterned, dripped – an Action painting out of it’s time. In that clinic, on that day, the complete sense what mortality means fell upon me; all philosophical finery was rubbed away, by a sparking angle-grinder. Those separate images – the Pollock painting, the lamb roast, the grinder – such a jumble and even then, they barely express the fizzing confusion within. I tried to focus and concentrate – but reality was a mush now. Dr Morrell was talking to me but his words passed through me, without meaning or import. I can see his mouth move and his even, white teeth but I could do that with my grand-daughters’ dolls. He looks like he’s asking me a question – I should be present but I’m not. I can’t even nod. He looks at me with caring eyes. He knows I’m empty. Spent. The jumbled noise of the delivery of the news that would and has and will change me. For good.
Outside, bearing in mind it’s October, a heavy grey sky broods and presses the light down, so that eight ninths of the sky is thick grey and one ninth is a peculiar mix of lilac, ochre and moss green. The sky looks as though it’s a lemon and the earth the lemon squeezer. Pressing. Bitter.
It was the news nobody would welcome.

REACTION

That was five months ago.
April now, in three weeks we travel to the Alps. In the meantime, C has started to bite deep. This has to be my last chance of fulfilling a life dream. In six months’ time I won’t have the strength to do what I’m about to do. What I’m planning is The Matterhorn climb. I will have four others with me; I’m the amateur, they are professional climbers. When I watch them closely, I can see my own clumsiness. They grip into rock, while I fight with it; they tenderly feel for a line, I grope with hope not certainty; they shift body weight as if they were weighing a precious metal while I clunk, banging a knee, knocking an elbow, grazing my chin; they feed rope out while I jerk it erratically; they find minute toe holds, while I scrape my clunky boots on granite, igneous, rock scratching surfaces, while theirs are spotlessly clean, boots which grip without leaving a mark. Ingenious.
Humbling: the whole experience threw me back upon slim resources. I wanted to know how they developed their skill, or was it in-bred, DNA fuelled talent. They said the more rocks one climbed, the easier it was to read rock, as pages in a master volume; say the works of Henry James, Leo Tolstoy or Victor Hugo. The massive framework, with the gripping tension, the sub structures and the varying colour. On close inspection rock is not uniform in colour, varieties play through the multi-layered striations. With sunshine on rock, it glitters, like a party decoration, but you must look, change perception, change how you absorb the data.
I sat dumb and deaf – The Tommy of the Mountaineering world – a pin ball wizard, looking for a crampon – how do you think I’ll do it – I don’t know. What makes them so good.
People will tell you anything, you know that. Rock can talk to you; what do you think of that assertion? Have you ever heard anything so baseless in fact. But ask any mountaineer with experience and skill and they will credit rock language with their success.
I must be rock deaf.
I’ve tried so very hard to reach into the spirit which is rock. It’s not one huge mass, it’s not a monolith, designed to dwarf human personality; rock has character and personality; and those two terms are different. I know they’re different but I’m not sure yet I’m learning. This sense-data is touching the thing.

PREPARATIONS

I am led into a side room at the Lodge by the climbing Captain who is a young man- age 24 or 25. He looks at me with sad eyes. He knows that I will be on the rock but rock-deaf, while they will hear music of all types, from orchestral to grime.
“Listen, man, try to listen. The rock will help you.” His mouth moved, words emerged. As if they made some sense.
Four others in there look at me, not in a patronising way, but their mien, expression, body language shape, their eyes – is one of deep sympathy. This isn’t sympathy about my clinical condition, they’re unaware of that, I haven’t told them. The sympathy is because they know they will hear the rock chorus and orchestral, while I’ll be tone deaf; it will be like I’m walking past a music shop, with people playing instruments, I can see they’re playing but I can’t hear anything; or like walking past The Royal Albert Hall, or 02 venue, or – Carnegie Hall, The Hollywood Dome – La Scala, The Sydney Opera House, The Bolshoi Moscow, The Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, The Palais Garnier Paris, The Deutsch Opera Berlin or The Metropolitan House New York. Walking past these palaces of sound – and not hearing a single note, while the orchestra booms out into the auditorium, yet out here I can hear the most tiny sound from the tiniest bird. The incongruity of it impressed tightly upon their nervous systems; it was though their knowledge of my audible block was too much for them to bear. Each physically shuddered, as their nerves tried to cope with my deafness to the vibrant, beautiful sounds they will hear. One of the female climbers has a tear in her eye I notice.
I ask her why she cries.
“We want you to hear what we will hear but we cannot create this experience for you. It has to happen inside you.”
I could see she was trying to verbalise her sorrow and regret but she found the specific articulation of those feelings inside her being, almost impossible to express.
Next thing, she adopts a dancing posture – she shapes her body, contorts it – I can see that she is trying to express her feelings through dance – she is trying to lure me toward a place half-way between my ignorance and her bliss – to help me cross the crevasse of knowing and not knowing.
She knows she cannot implant this experience into me.
She is at a complete loss. Then, the enormity of this gap began to penetrate into my mind. I felt as though I was being born a second time. Given that just a few months ago, I received serious news about my health, news of the very worst kind, the irony of this situation right here, right now, hits me very hard indeed. Feeling reborn, yet on the road to short-term termination; can you imagine the massive bifurcating effect it had upon me, my concept of myself, everything in my past- anything which could be labelled – “my future” – my soul, my heart – my bodily organs – even now, ravaged by the–

CANCER

I couldn’t complete that sentence. Sorry.
I am
I am struggling to
I am struggling from
Why me
What have I – what have I – what have I done to deserve this. Get a grip – stop feeling sorry about.
The last clinical examination showed that C has thoroughly invaded – like a Roman Empire in my body.
From Asia to Britannia – A to B. But I know it’s at Z.

THE CLIMB

I am third in line, eight thousand four hundred feet into the climb.
Rope and chain links connect me forward to climber two and back to climber four.
I can see them – the other two climbers ahead, rejoicing in the Philharmonic Ultra High Tone audio of this beautiful mountain. There are clouds ahead; the valley below looks so tiny. The power of the mountain ripples. I can hear my climbing colleagues squeal with delight. They position with ultra-careful highly fluid movements, they make marginal adjustments to the position of their hands and feet. A millimetre angle change seems to yield yet more gap to pivot and lever upwards. Incremental.
We make another two hundred feet in forty minutes. The other mountains lay flat and a little below us now. They look like patients anaesthetised upon a table, with the women coming and going, many thinking of Michelangelo. And still the music will not come.
I see them ecstatic in their joy, their bliss. I feel lonely now.
I feel I can sense my cancer inside my body on the move, shrugging its shoulders, assuming a power – taking control. I can feel my bones in my shoulders knot, the tendons in my knees feel mushy; my ribs seem to be fixed making breathing tight and locked instead of loose and free. I look down – my goodness, just a thickness of rope.
Just a thickness of rope.

THE MOUNTAIN MUSIC FIRST BARS

Twenty minutes later, at nine thousand feet, according to my altometer, something started. I heard a tap, like a conductor taps, then a few jarred, scraping sounds, the first scrapes of string, a bong of a drum, a few high blows of a wind instrument; a slow rasp of a trumpet – all of it without form, there is no melody, it is not even a planned cacophany; it really is a jumble of noise, not even atonal.
This isn’t musical – because I can hear it. That’s how I know.
Ahead, the huge ice field looks solid and all of a piece. The whiteness dazzles. The coldness now starts to create a finger numbness. But the Climbing Director, Sven puts his left gloved hand up, he motions us to climb, as a group westwards. So we do but as we do, the mountain rumble converts into a sort of throat gargle, as though the mountain is clearing itself for something.
As we shift west, slowly, deliberately, toward a slight overhang – we can all see what Sven saw now, the snow and ice seem to catch a different type of light. Imperceptibly, the light tone is different. It’s as though the ice has broken, as if we were under water on a frozen lake, having falling through a fishing hole – and we are now looking up at thick, refracted light, panicking a little, holding our breath, lungs stretching, trying to get to air. Scrambling hard.
The whole field of ice now looks as though a giant finger is lifting it.
Sven is climbing with urgency now, trying to pull us all – we grip deeper into tiny rock holes, we force our bodies faster toward the overhang, we hear a rumble noise pick up.
From Mozart to Schoenberg – to Stravinsky – to the riotous Parisian audience, protesting vehemently at the discordant jagged rhythms, the throbbing discord, the jerkiness in the atmosphere versus the balanced harmony of just moments ago.
Sven – tugging now – making it so very clear – get over there – another sixty feet to go.
A boom. A rumble. The first, loose pieces of rock.
The gnawing sensation, that the mountain is yawning, stretching, ready to let go.

AVALANCHE

From tiny dark pebbles, emerging as if from nowhere, to bigger stone, to rock, to ice chunks, to snow in basketball court volume, then baseball field volume, now football stadium – and we’re still twenty five feet from the overhang, a solid place of refuge in a sea of shifting frozen water.
The gurgle sound is disgusting. Like a toilet from deep inside the universe.
We are ten feet away now, Sven is already inside, hauling Svetlana, then Aivor, while I hack as best I can – Mimi behind, with gale blown snow filling her goggles like a crayoner filling in.
The ice sheet travels at fifteen miles an hour with probably two hundred tons, who knows – maybe more – shifting from Point A to B.
I just get under the overhang – the booming rumble smothers all – Mimi just makes it as a massive roar drowns out everything.
This terrifies.
It’s as though the mountain has decided to flip a lid on its bin and clear a plate.

MUSIC IS MY FIRST LOVE

We gather tight, huddle – get well inside the rocky protection – praying that the rock above isn’t snapped off, like a rotten tooth pulled by a too-tight apple.
Ice – snow – rock – dirt – slide above us, like hell’s conveyor belt.
It rattles, deafens, it’s all consuming.
Then, almost as suddenly as it started, the grotesque sound dies away. Peace returns.
The experienced mountaineers exhale deeply, they knew completely what was at stake, whereas I didn’t even have the imagination to dare to dream
They start to pick their way out and toward the mountain side again. Sven hears it first, he hears the mountain – his smile, as he turns to us, beams light toward Zermatt, a dot in the deep distance. We hack a way back toward Furggen ridge.
Springing from the deep, deep fear brought by the avalanche, I begin to hear something. It’s as though someone just handed me a concert ticket
I can hear the mountain My Goodness – this is what they can hear. The door to the music shop is opening. Those closed opera hall doors are opening to me.
It’s sublime. Words aren’t enough now.
My movement now shifts up in skill; it’s as though the mountain music fluidises my body, to tune with it, so I climb better.

A DISLOCATION

I climb on in complete bliss.
Until I feel a jagged, slicing, really painful thrust into my lower back I’m reminded again of Big C – rampaging across foreign land
The rosemary speckled lamb.
And the mountain lies before me – Svetlana fifteen feet ahead, Mimi fifteen feet behind:
I balanced all – brought all to mind
A waste of life the weeks to come
A waste of life the years behind.
In balance with this climb –
And robotically, but logically, I’m unhooking the line back to Mimi and forward to Svetlana. Both look back at me, neither is aware of my illness, both see a look of complete joy on my face; my eyes glitter, my complexion glows, I stand straighter.
Standing.
They’re calling:
“No! No!”
They think it’s the mountain voice finally getting through.
They don’t know I’ve released the vice like grip of Julius C and his marauding Legions.
I’m skipping now – headed toward the glacier edge – throwing my goggles away, throwing my gloves away – my hat – throwing my coat off – and the wind chill, feels like the purest sensation anyone could possibly experience in this, our shared world.
Howling. Getting closer to freedom.
“Stop!! God sake stop!”
I’m at the edge – fresh air awaits. Cancer – you bastard.
I’m leaping with the grace of the arc of a diver, hands high and wide, thinking of Shirley Bassey with her feather boa, glorifying. I’m thinking of the hyper-space Red Bull jumper, except that I’m nowhere as high, but he had a parachute and I don’t. I’m thrusting through vapour filled cloud, which sieves my lungs, so instead of cheese, the cancer is plopped out. Instead of cheese on a counter top, it’s cancer-goo. Red streaked tissue. I’m laughing at my new found power. Probably hurtling at over 90 mph now. Better than any Fair ground ride – Thorpe Park, I love you but as thrills go you’re bronze, this is gold.
The world ended with a wonderful applause and cries of bravo!
Carnations and red roses hurled across the brightly lit stage.
But of course, it wasn’t flowers, it was me.
My mind had been in a mess for months – unable to properly articulate – now, lying in a thousand grey pieces I await a sculptor-ambulanceman to make sense of it A jigsaw puzzle with no straight edges.