Rock, Paper, Fire
ROCK
PAPER
FIRE
edited by
MARNI JACKSON
TONY WHITTOME
rock
paper
fire
THE BEST OF MOUNTAIN
AND WILDERNESS WRITING
To all the writers in The Banff Centre
Mountain and Wilderness Writing program
Rock, Paper, Fire
Copyright © 2013 by the contributors.
Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of
this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system without express written permission
from the publisher, or in the case of photocopying, a license from the Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency, Access Copyright.
Rock, paper, fire : the best of mountain and wilderness writing / edited
by Marni Jackson, Tony Whittome; introduction by Charlotte Gill.
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-894773-67-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-894773-69-0 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-894773-70-6 (mobi)
1. Outdoor life—Literary collections. 2. Mountains—Literary collections.
3. Wilderness areas—Literary collections. 4. Canadian literature
(English)—21st century. I. Jackson, Marni, editor of compilation
II. Whittome, Tony, editor of compilation
PS8237.O8R63 2013 C810.8’036 C2013-904879-0 C2013-904880-4
Designed by Jessica Sullivan
Banff Centre Press
Box 1020, 107 Tunnel Mountain Drive
Banff, Alberta, Canada T1L 1H5
www.banffcentrepress.ca
The Banff Centre is pleased to acknowledge the generous donors who have
given financial support to the Mountain and Wilderness Writing Program.
Balancing two small trees
between his ears
he mooches through the forest,
slow as a teenager,
head lifted so as not to drop
the twin gemstones
he carries in his skull,
whose amber
stores the customs
of new snow,
habits of grass, a list
of spring’s imperatives
and when he turns his stare
towards the house,
it’s we who are exhibits,
crowded behind glass.
He stands stock-still,
examines us:
re-homed and happy, strangers
to ourselves at last.
HELEN MORT, “Elk”
(Written during the 2012 Mountain
and Wilderness Writing program)
CONTENTS
FOREWORD | Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome
INTRODUCTION | Charlotte Gill
First Ascent
Barry Blanchard
Into the Mountains
Niall Grimes
A World of Ice
Jon Turk
The Magic Bus
Niall Fink
Norman and the Crow
Niall Fink
Writing on the Wall
Andy Kirkpatrick
Finding Farley
Karsten Heuer
Tough Living, Oh Boy
Wayne Sawchuk
Muskwa-Kechika
Bruce Kirkby
Walking Off the Edge of the World
Bruce Kirkby
Searching for Humar
Bernadette McDonald
Underway
Christian Beamish
No Map Could Show Them
Helen Mort
Transgressions
Katie Ives
Surge
Erin Soros
The Telephone Pole
Steve Swenson
Pioneer Ridge
Steve Swenson
Spirit Friends
Maria Coffey
Unseen but Felt
Fitz Cahall
End of the Rope
Jan Redford
A Short Climb with Ueli Steck
Freddie Wilkinson
The Descent of Man
Don Gillmor
Hunting and Killing
Masa Takei
What the Mountains Mean to Us
Ian Brown
CREDITS
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
FOREWORD
SITUATED IN a national park in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, Banff offers some of the world’s finest ice-climbing. This was part of the attraction for the six writers and climbers who came to The Banff Centre in 2005 to participate in the first year of the Mountain Writing program. They would write, and they would climb. What we weren’t prepared for, as faculty editors of the program, was the group’s insistence that we join them on a frozen waterfall.
They drove us to the edge of town and the base of Cascade, the queenly, symmetrical peak celebrated in local postcards. It was November, and the narrow waterfall that tumbles down one flank had become a bluish-white column of ice. Like children on a daycare outing, we were harnessed, helmeted, secured to ropes, and outfitted with crampons and the murder weapons known as ice axes. Kicking all available points into the curtain of ice, the two of us began to climb.
It is a strangely secure sensation (though a misleading one) to attach oneself like Velcro to the frozen surface of a mountain. The spectre of the route above and below vanishes, replaced by a self-obliterating, laser focus on the moment at hand, and the next move. Like the task of writing—on a good day, at least.
Although climbing a mountain should be the polar opposite of sitting in a room typing, they share many challenges. Both demand unusual focus, patience, and precision. Both require constant decision-making, while offering the ever-present opportunity to fail. In writing as in climbing, the story can seem obscure at the outset, and the route toward it beyond our grasp. Like climbers on a pillar of ice, writers must learn how to anchor themselves in something intrinsically fragile—a string of words that can bear the weight of the story—and carry us forward.
All of the stories in Rock, Paper, Fire, with one exception, are by writers who have taken part in The Banff Centre’s Mountain and Wilderness Writing program (as it’s now called) in the past eight years. Created by Bernadette McDonald during the time she was director of the hugely successful Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, the MWW program has expanded from an early emphasis on alpine narratives to include projects with other wilderness or environmental themes. Through our writers we have climbed Himalayan giants and the big walls of Yosemite, sailed, kayaked, and surfed the world’s oceans, cycled the Silk Road, and explored the precarious survival of our most threatened creatures and ecosystems. We have welcomed participants from all over the world, working in every genre: fiction, biography, memoir, journalism, graphic novels, and poetry.
What the stories in this anthology share is a focus on the physical world and our relationship to it. They are all deeply rooted in a particular landscape—and they owe something to the peace and beauty of Banff as well.
The Mountain and Wilderness Writing program is, we believe, unique in the world. A number of prize-winning books have come out of projects that were developed in Banff, as we sat around the dining room of the Painter House discussing Nanga Parbat, talking crows, nylon ropes, and W.G. Sebald. We’re very proud of this enterprise, which combines high literary standards with the increasingly urgent theme of how we interact with the natural world.
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For a brilliant example of this in these pages, read Don Gillmor’s darkly comic story, “The Descent of Man,” in which he compares the accelerating disappearance of the world’s glaciers with his own aging process. Or turn to the alert, assured poems of British poet Helen Mort, in which she imagines the lives of several early women climbers. Jon Turk, a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year in 2012, writes about circumnavigating Ellesmere Island in a sea kayak, which represents a polar first. In “The Magic Bus,” twenty-five-year-old writer and Yukon guide Niall Fink describes an Alaskan rafting adventure that uncomfortably echoes Jon Krakauer’s classic Into The Wild. Our other Niall, the Irish-born Niall Grimes, offers a beautifully evocative piece about grief and “grand rocks” on a trip back to County Donegal. Erin Soros explores different kinds of childhood courage in a wartime logging community. And Wayne Sawchuk, formerly a logger and trapper and now a conservationist in the deep wilderness of B.C.’s Muskwa-Kechika region, explores a chilling mystery of death in a Canadian winter.
MOUNTAIN NARRATIVES play an important part in Rock, Paper, Fire. Bernadette McDonald’s portrait of the great Slovenian alpinist Tomaž Humar shows just what it takes to excel as a mountaineer at the highest level—and what it can cost. Steve Swenson and Barry Blanchard, both at the cutting edge of contemporary Alpinism, provide graphic accounts of fulfilling but dangerous climbs, as does Freddie Wilkinson in his story of a Himalayan ascent with Ueli Steck, the man who has soloed the North Face of the Eiger in two hours forty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds. Breaking with convention as usual, U.K. climber Andy Kirkpatrick, twice winner of the Boardman-Tasker Prize for mountain literature, shares his live blog—written from a portaledge anchored on the face of the 600-metre Norwegian wall known as the Troll. Katie Ives, the editor of Alpinist, digs deep into personal and literary experience to explore the morality of risk in climbing. And Globe and Mail writer Ian Brown (not a MWW grad but current chair of the Literary Journalism program at The Banff Centre) unforgettably delivers the experience of backcountry skiing in his eloquent essay, “What the Mountains Mean to Us.”
As faculty of the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, we have been privileged to work with a variety of talented people, firstly of course all the writers who have graced the program, and then everyone at The Banff Centre who has made our work not only possible but immense fun, from Bernadette McDonald and Shannon O’Donoghue in the early days to the present Director of Literary Arts, Steven Ross Smith (whose idea this anthology is), his deputy, Naomi Johnston, and the whole dedicated Literary Arts team. We are also grateful to our Managing Editors, Robyn Read and Leanne Johnson, and to our copyeditor, Melanie Little. In the traditional disclaimer, any faults remaining in Rock, Paper, Fire are our own.
We haven’t included any maps, by the way. These stories are wild. Let them take you out there.
MARNI JACKSON AND TONY WHITTOME
Faculty Editors
Mountain and Wilderness Writing
The Banff Centre
Charlotte Gill
INTRODUCTION
THESE DAYS, it’s possible to dwell in a high-rise, sleep hundreds of feet off the ground, and never experience mud or a spider in one’s house. Skyscrapers themselves generate their own weather, buffering us from the true bite of the cold. If you live in the heart of a modern city, it is possible to exist almost totally isolated from what we’ve come to think of as nature.
But, as the American poet Gary Snyder reminded us decades ago, “nature” is a human conceit. When we say wilderness, we mean the terrain beyond the familiar. It’s a word we now associate with landscapes severe and extreme—because mostly that’s what’s left of the wilderness, the marginal outlands. In just a few centuries we have tamed Earth’s more benign latitudes with asphalt, electricity, and agricultural fields. But what we call the “environment” is a kind of invention, too. We are a part of our planetary living space, and it is a part of us, written into our DNA.
This evolutionary connection to the wild must be one of the reasons people feel compelled to venture out to the edge of our habitable realm in crampons and Gore-Tex, on skis and in kayaks or on foot. When we go climbing, paddling, on walkabout, we crave an unmitigated, free-range connection with the outdoors. We want to be reminded of what it feels like to be human, as we’ve been human for almost two million years. This urge is so compelling, apparently, that many of us will risk frostbite, drowning, and altitude sickness—often at great personal expense—with no promise of glory or reward beyond the trip itself.
Why do we do it?
First, there is the mountain, the glacier, the desert, the long trek across the steppe. A landscape passes beneath our feet. In the thick of it, we have no choice but to engage, to breathe the air, feel its jagged surfaces in our hands, to hear it crackle underneath our feet. We are present and immersed. Perhaps we explore merely to break records, to be the first to reach the summit. Or, we want to dip into some hidden well in ourselves that is never accessed indoors. Maybe, when some of us return home, we’ll put our fingers to the keyboard.
For thousands of years, people have been doing just this, going on expeditions and then coming home to tell the tale. I imagine the first campfire stories originated this way. Tribal scouts travelled out, explored the beyond, and returned to report on what they’d found. These would not have been mere yarns—the clan would have depended utterly on this knowledge for food and safety. Perhaps storytelling has its roots in this imperative—to create a narrative map of our environment. Even now, wilderness and mountain writing—what we sometimes call adventure stories—seems made for narrative. The act of departing and coming home, climbing up and coming down, coincides perfectly with the shape of a story.
In the twenty-first century, wherever we go on the planet, chances are someone will have gotten there before us. Sometimes our destinations aren’t wild places at all. They’re wild only to us: unknown. But we can turn this into an advantage. We can take advantage of our unique point of view to create the story. Mount Everest is a fact of geography, buckled up from the earth’s crust millions of years ago. That tale isn’t new. The mountain has been climbed thousands of times since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first ascent. And yet this isn’t the heart of the story, either. Everest is only the raw material. Until a man and a woman see the sun collapse along the ridge, until the place comes alive in their gaze, until then, the mountain is just a hunk of rock. Until they warm their frigid hands with tired breath as spindrift whirls all around, the tale doesn’t exist.
It is this potential alchemy—human being plus natural world—that gives the stories in this collection their dramatic, suspenseful magic. Jan Redford writes about the difference between climbing El Capitan and making the wrong moves in love; Karsten Heuer paddles across Canada with his family, revisiting the rivers and paths author Farley Mowat wrote about; Masa Takei explores, as part of his experiment in sustainable living, the complicated emotions of hunting. These essays recapture wild journeys in all their sensory vividness, so that when the writer’s heart races, our pulse quickens, too. This intermingling of the printed word and life itself is the hallmark of creative non-fiction, and it has the power to transfix and move us. It’s not just the snow on the trail or the sand blowing across the desert, but the experience of it, which is as singular as every one of us who slings on a backpack and steps across the threshold into the wind.
Even then, the adventure alone is probably not enough. An explorer who chooses to tell her story now must be deeply aware of the context. Wherever we go, chances are we’ll find humans who already live in these locales. This kind of writing is also an exercise in sensitivity. We must examine the footprints we leave behind, environmental, economic, and cultural. And any story in which a human protagonist struggles valiantly against nature is inevitably flecked with the irony that this wilderness is losing its tug-of-war with us and shrinking every day. In response to these complexities, the genres of mountain and wilderness writing
are becoming more hybridized and fascinating by the day. When we pick up an expedition book or essay, chances are it will be part travelogue, part history or ecological saga—and part memoir.
A writer may even come to question her very motives for wanting to venture out in the first place. As readers of nonfiction, we have come to expect that the author will speak to us directly, guilelessly. She must be as brave on the page as she is on the slope. Why hit the trail? Why climb the mountain? Everyone has his own reasons. We must explore those, too. When we tell a true story, often enough it’s because we were changed by the experience. And it is that change that readers want most to discover. An expedition is often matched by a corresponding inner journey. A man crosses the trail of another young adventurer who disappeared in the Alaskan backcountry. A woman embarks on a journey of self-exploration as she climbs El Capitan, whose sheer granite face was once considered unassailable. The stories in this collection will take you to the high and far places we long to explore—and, sometimes, to the unmapped places within us as well. The explorers may also find more than they bargained for. En route to a goal that may never be reached, they discover something better, emerging from their voyages enriched and deeply affected by their experience.
All the better for the reader, who comes along for the exhilarating ride.
Barry Blanchard
FIRST ASCENT
A GLOWING STRIP of ice draped down over dark rock bands, linking patches of snow like a silver braid of pearls laid onto black velvet. I immediately thought of the Peruvian Andes or the Himalayas. I grabbed the eight-by-ten glossy from the piles of mountain photos and route descriptions sheaved atop David Cheesmond’s desk.
“Where the hell is this?” I said.
“Oh shit, man,” he said. His pale auburn eyes slashed left, then right, acute as a fox’s. Vulpine eyes. He made a futile grab for the picture. “You weren’t supposed to see that!”
“It looks so cool. Where is it? The Himalayas?”