Rock, Paper, Fire Read online

  “I’m far gone, son.”

  “Sssshhhhh,” I said. “You look fine to me. Now get some rest.”

  They were the last words she said. Only later did it occur to me that she might have wanted to talk awhile in that lonely darkness with her last-born, that rest was coming for her soon enough. Some days later the family stood round and I watched as she stopped breathing, the tiny rising and falling of the chest finally disappearing. I thought it would be a relief. Instead, it plunged me into a new grief. Swimming breathless and desperate toward the surface, only to find that it’s a mirror.

  Grown-up talk about “arrangements” filled the days that followed, as duty kept us busy. At the graveyard where we had buried her own mother while she held my arm in the rain, we buried her, and then were left with our own feelings.

  I got in the hire car and fled.

  AT FIRST I thought I was just getting away, putting distance behind me, but when I passed the abandoned armoured buildings that were once the military checkpoints that separated Northern Ireland from the Republic, I realized where I was going.

  Donegal lay ahead, Ireland’s northernmost county, a sparsely populated expanse of green hills, orange bogs, and grey mountains. For a little boy in a car-less family it had been just another faraway place, even though it started seven miles from our front door. In my teens, an older boy took me there to go rock climbing one day and from that day on climbing became everything to me.

  So too did Donegal. I made a new friend through climbing and together we became obsessed with exploring the county for new outcrops and unexplored cliffs, travelling there any weekend that he could borrow his parents’ car. We would examine hillsides with binoculars for rock clean enough, tall enough, and steep enough for climbing. Always looking for something new. We looked in the blanker areas between old routes for harder lines. We would spend hours crossing wet uplands in hope, often finding nothing. But often we found treasure. We climbed the rock and created new ways up the mountains. Our ways. We named them and my connection to them was immense. Later I wrote a guidebook to the area including all of our first ascents and that was it, I was part of history.

  But that was nearly twenty years ago: things had changed since then.

  The roads in the Republic were as potholed and puddled as I remembered them. I drove the hire car on through small villages and sprawled townlands that I remembered from that easy past. The road led soon to Letterkenny, the county town— “The Fastest Growing Town in Europe,” it claimed—and once through its ugly modernity, I took an old road which began to incline gently upward. The rain started, a thick wind-driven drizzle, and I turned on the wipers.

  Hedgerows. Holly, blackthorn, and brambles. Barbwire fences and rusted gates. The odd dwelling. As I went higher, the land got worse: damp fields, cows standing in mud. On I went, into the rain, into the mountains. Featureless land lay ahead, anonymous. I recognized this place, not by any physical references, but by the mood of it.

  The road I was following had long since left anything as self-conscious as a town; soon, only the orange bog yawned away into the far lonely distance. Featureless, untameable, and forever. A low sky clung to hilltops, each seeming to seek comfort in the other. Grey scours of rain swept here or there in the distance. A single tree might survive in some sheltered spot, leafless, like black lightning cracking back to the heavens, branches scrawning about in senile rants. A small river ran beside the road in a drunken meander, black from the peat that carpeted this inhumane land.

  It was a land you yearned for, even in its presence.

  The car radio drifted in and out of stations. Pop songs would lose their signal to current affairs, serious men talking of the big issues of our day. I couldn’t tune in to their importance. Then static, as the mountaintops cut the signal again, followed by traditional music. The old thin songs of lament, joyous reels, a love poem set to music, interspersed with the Irish language. Nothing stayed tuned for long.

  But it was important to keep driving.

  I was in the granite highland, enormous and ancient. Rock flows, molten, then cools; an ice age gouges by. Woods and forests grow up and again die. Their trunks rot and melt into the soil, becoming the acidic peat that will line the bog. Famously, into this bog fall the bodies of ancient peoples, and their yawning deathmasks along with bellies full of berries are preserved, mummified by the acid.

  In lonely valleys I passed some ruins of houses, huddled in hopeless clusters. Grass and weeds grew inside their small, windowless walls, now mostly tumbled. Amazing to think that anyone could ever have managed to live off this wet, bare, rocky land.

  “Them’s the houses of the peasants Captain Hill evicted in 1887,” Aiden MacKinney had told me one time while drunk. “Sent the whole lot of them out off the land. Two thirds of them died, and the rest went to America.”

  “Murderous English fucker,” he concluded.

  It was really just another case of Enclosure, the taking of common land to maximize profit through scale, which would have been happening in England at the same time. But the Irish always managed to see misfortune as some kind of personal insult.

  Still, I thought of the dead—compassionate, fond thoughts—and once again my eyes moistened with tears. Even a ruined house could set me off. I drove on, allowing the tears to empty me. The window wipers slouched away and I followed the black line ahead.

  Out of habit my eyes constantly scanned the hillsides for rock features. Every now and again, some silvery granite showed itself through the vegetation. Near the bottom of one hill I saw there was a reasonable amount of exposed rock. I stopped my car on the road below and stepped out for some air. After the hire-car clamminess the outside air felt beautifully fresh and damp. I got an orange from the back seat and as I peeled it my eyes turned to the exposed outcrops above and examined them half-consciously. Then something dropped into place.

  I suddenly realized that I knew what I was looking at—knew it by heart, in fact. The bare features above were all a part of my past and magically threw themselves into focus. That wasn’t just a rocky corner I was staring at, that was Tarquin’s Groove, climbed on one of my first days out in the mountains. That wasn’t a bare slab over on the right, that was West Buttress, one of my first leads. That wasn’t a way down, that was Triversion, which we climbed in the snow. The wall far above, which looked unclimbable, was Deltoid Face, one of my finest first ascents.

  There below the cliff was the flat stone where we would change our shoes and drink tea from a tartan flask; the groove where I once fell; the place where I sat and took pictures of Alan. I knew I could now turn round and see a curving lakeshore, where a river, dark from the peat, would flow into the lake at a white sand beach. There would be rows of bags of turf, and beyond, a rocky hillside. I turned round. There was the shore, the beach, the river, the rows of bags, and a wet rocky hillside.

  God, I wasn’t ready for that. It had taken me back a bit too quickly.

  This was Lough Barra Crag. The ancient granite cliff where I had begun climbing, over twenty years ago, on wet Sundays between aimless teenage weeks. The dark river I had driven along was the Owen Barra, where we would fill our bottles to drink the lovely brown water. I was in one of my special places.

  Tens of memories came at me in that windy lay-by. I looked down at the sand at my feet and remembered seeing the footprints of my first walking boots among its grains. This was the spot where we would peel off sodden waterproofs and clammy cotton T-shirts and shiver into dry track-suit bottoms at the dead end of a lightless winter afternoon. Dry shoes and socks over brown, waterlogged feet.

  Lough Barra, where it all began. After a short day on a small local cliff, Gerard and Raymond had taken me and Paul here. A Sunday in October. An orange Ford Escort and a U2 cassette. On the way in the car, Bono had sung “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and we all called him a wanker. Rain. My terror and my excitement and my ignorance and my obedience.

  I stared again at Tarquin’s Groove, the route w
e had all four done that day, and my imagination wove deep into its recesses. Still now it looked beautiful. Subtle, steep, and clean, weaving up for four ropelengths directly to the summit. I remember, my God how clearly, sitting tethered to a nut halfway up, the rough branches of a raven’s nest digging into my back, and, with the utmost responsibility, paying the rope out as Raymond led from the stance. I remembered how seriously I took my role, and how I used it to take my mind off the fear I felt. How early such habits form. And how easily such habits form the person. As I stood below, I could reach out and touch those emotions, how that sixteen-year-old felt about the height, the landscape, the newness of this thing he was doing. And I remember the rain on the last section, the whips of water that would fling from the rope as Raymond took it tight, the rivers running down my upstretched hands, into my cuffs, and along my cold arms. The elements, raw, felt like never before.

  Deep and dark within the gully was the steep crackline I had tried as my first new route, the first attempt to write my name in the never-read history book of Donegal climbing. And the long fall I had taken onto a runner, and the pride, the respect I had felt from my companions at daring to take a fall. I never did the route, but I would never forget the fall.

  The small outcrop we investigated one February. We climbed a crack, then from the height saw that the surface of Lough Barra had frozen into huge, circular patterns. These were ancient circles of Celtic legend, and we ran and danced across their magic and, when we pushed the magic too far, we went crashing through the ice into the water below. Our screams of terror slowly melted into embarrassed chuckles as we realized we were in water no deeper than our basketball boots.

  Comical, almost, to behold it all with fresh eyes. To see that these climbs, so huge in my own self-myth, now look like small scraps of rock poking out from swathes of vegetation. Has nature reclaimed them over the years? Perhaps no one ever climbs here now and they are untravelled. Or maybe they always looked like this and it was only the eyes of youthful self-delusion that saw them as anything more than a wash of wasted Sundays.

  In the end I had to tear myself away from the spot. There were too many memories here. Things were different then. I got in the car, started the engine, and pulled back out into the road. I was crying again.

  As I drove, the open mountains began closing in to a narrower valley, the mountains funnelling down between its narrowing sides. I passed a farmhouse. A collection of tumbledown ruins and a dirty white bungalow with faded lace curtains in the dusty windows. Rusting farm machinery littered the mucky yard. Opposite the house were threadbare fields that held a handful of sheep, their wool ragged and dirty. Brown smoke smudged from a chimney pot, and the air carried the unmistakable smell of peat being burned—sweet, yet acrid. In forgotten poverty, someone was still working the land here, somehow surviving. I couldn’t help but dwell on the farmer giving his life to this valley, his soul disappearing into the soil like the ancient landscape that disappeared to make the peat he now burned to stay warm. I wondered if the smoke and the smell were old spirits escaping from the brown combustible earth, the way someday the farmer’s soul might also flee this place.

  I TOOK MORE turns in the road. The rain had stopped, and now and again sun strained pale through the low clouds. I still didn’t know where I was going. When I saw a curious sign by the road, a big yellow footprint on top of a yellow metal pole, another memory punched to the surface:

  —Where are we, son?

  —I don’t know, Ma, I just wanted to stop beside this sign.

  —Does it say where we are?

  —No, it’s just a yellow foot.

  —Well then we must be at Yellow Foot. All we have to do now is find Yellow Leg and we’ll be halfway there.

  In the time before she became sick I had taken to spending long weekends back home once or twice a year. We really treasured each other’s company then and at the time it didn’t occur to us that it might not always be there. I’d often hire a car and we’d go on runs in the country. Pointless drives, seldom looking at a map. Perhaps a cup of tea and a bun in a shop if we found one. We’d drive for hours, sometimes talking about nothing, sometimes reminding me of something I did in the past—“Do you remember you once washed a knife with a tea bag?”—mostly in easy silence. Sometimes she’d say things out of the blue—“How are things in Glocca Morra?”—to which I would reply, “The price of hoggets has doubled in this last month alone,” and in the rearview mirror I’d see her quietly laughing to herself. We would cruise past breathtaking scenery in silence, until we’d pass a collection of household gnomes or a brightly painted fence and she’d finally exclaim, “Oh, isn’t that lovely.”

  I had spotted the yellow foot on one of those drives. It looked odd, so I pulled the car over and stopped below it. It was a beautiful autumn day. The orange bracken shone golden in late-afternoon sun, and miles beyond it the Atlantic was a dark blue. A gentle wind was blowing, and I watched the long shadow of the car stretch out on the tarmac. I let my eyes rest on an abandoned glove in the roadside ditch, allowing moments to pass. She asked where we were and I had told her.

  —There’s the grand rock for you, son.

  —What’s that, Ma?

  —Over yonder, I say, there’s the grand rock for you.

  She had wound down the window and was pointing a slender finger past a barbwire fence into the rough mountain ground. I looked.

  There, not thirty metres away, was a huge granite boulder. Its golden bulk shone in the sunshine. Somehow I hadn’t noticed it myself. I got out and mounted the wobbling top strand of the fence’s wire, jumped down on the other side, and strolled to the boulder. The surface was clean, perfect granite. It was two bodyheights tall, and about the size of a trailer. The sides were steep, with rounded features, all of which fit the hand perfectly. I touched them, felt the granite crystals, imagined holding them, pulling on them, the way a climber does. Across the front face, glowing in the light and warm to the touch, ran a rounded ramp, a perfect line for a traverse. It was a beautiful boulder, a perfect boulder, the kind that we used to spend entire weekends searching for. I looked over toward the car, and just as I did, my mother looked up. I waved, and she back. I ran back to the car.

  —That is the grand rock, Ma.

  I was surprised. I remember once explaining to her the idea of bouldering, of climbing on little roadside rocks, and had once shown her a picture of someone bouldering in France. It appeared she had remembered, had understood, and, even so many years later, had recognized the qualities of this remote rock for that activity. Quietly, in the back seat of the car, she sat and turned over the pages of a TV magazine.

  —Hmmm?

  —I say, that is the grand rock. Will we go and climb it?

  —No. The prime minister and the parish priest are coming for tea tonight at half six. We better be getting on, son.

  Parked once more under the yellow foot, the memory played back, word for word. The sun was low and golden now, as before. It shone on my face. I laughed again at her quirky jokes and collapsed once again into tears.

  I let the tearful quaking subside, got out of the car, and looked over the fence. There, inch-perfect, was the boulder still. That’s the grand rock for me, I thought to myself.

  “A climber keeps his boots and a chalk bag with him at all times.”

  This had been one of our early mottos, and one I still clung to, more as a badge of identity these days than for any practical purpose. But still, I always tossed a small plastic bag with these items, the most basic climbing equipment, into my baggage on flights home, and usually it would stay in the rental car. I popped open the boot now, took the bag, jumped the fence, and felt again the perfection of the boulder. Even the warmth of the ramp was perfect to my memory.

  I had thought about this boulder from time to time since first seeing it that day and had wanted to come back to climb on it. It was the pioneering spirit in me, still wanting to write my name in the book of the place.

 
It would be nice to do something new again, I thought. So I spent an hour unravelling the problems on the boulder, then began working on the traverse. This took a lot of effort, but I was grateful for something as mindless as having to move leftward across a feature on a rock in the middle of a bog, with my feet just above the ground in a light breeze and the October sunshine. I pulled the sleeve of my grey woollen jumper down over the soft fleshy bottom of my loose fist, using it to scrub away any loose crystals of rock from the surface of the holds. The process took all my spare thought, and for a while I forgot to be sad. Then I would catch myself looking the short distance to my parked car, the yellow foot, and the absence, and fall again to tears.

  I could always muscle my mind back to the problem in hand, and persisted. After some time, I managed to complete the traverse. I swung myself from the final holds onto the top of the boulder. I couldn’t help but feel pleased with myself: a first ascent, after all these years. And one of this quality. I rationalized with myself over the grade of the problem and then, to fully possess the experience, to make it a thing, I gave it a name: Pauline.

  The land was before me. Donegal, the first land I had learned to love. The first land I had given myself to; my years and my hopes poured into my days on the cliffs. To my right, gentle wet hills sighed off over rolling summits and rounded valleys. The dying grass and bobbing bog cottons and the breeze-blown heather of the foreground gave way in the middle distance to a more general sense of growth. Beyond that, the surface of the hills was a flat carpet, absorbing all, no sign of houses or trees or people or anything that looked like life had ever lived. Just the forever bog that covered mountains, still with grey clouds haunting their flanks and summits.

  I had thought of the idea of claiming the problem like we used to do, of sending it to those who record such things, who publish such things, to make the climb mine. To have a tiny piece of this place named after my achievement, like a memorial to myself. Saying to the world, Remember me!