SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
I was entering the land of
so many childhood memories and sacred places. I recalled the ostensibly
innocuous Bingly Bongly Wood, a square of a few hundred trees just off the
road, the menace of Demon Drock, the invented devil who lurked in winding woods
stalking cars. I dreamed of the plateau on Harrison Stickle that looked like a
rock-pool-dotted moon.
I alighted at Keswick and
headed for a B & B – the youth hostels were out of the question – I never
wanted to meet again that curious quasi-Fascist breed of boarding school types
who somehow relished the suffering of staying in huge wooden dormitories and
having to be in bed by 11pm, even if they were on holiday and could afford
better. I recall one time being in a dormitory of ramblers when a sharp voice
pierced the darkness telling some kids to stop messing around or he was ‘going
to call Matron.’ It wasn’t the outburst that did me – it was the fact he didn’t
use the word the before Matron.
I digress somewhat. My story
really began with a newspaper I found in The
Golden Lion. I had noticed it lying there as soon as I’d sat in the pub but
it was a local rag and I didn’t fancy it. I had just finished tucking into one
of those oddly conservative yet delicious meals you get in pubs sometimes –
sort of halfway between an old style pub snack and a proper restaurant - vulgar
in a very British bourgeois way, but huge and tasty and good value for money.
As I digested the meal like a bloated motionless ox I browsed the paper. To my
surprise there was an article which struck me as worth reading.
LOCAL MOUNTAIN CLAIMS ANOTHER DEATH
The
body of another climber was found yesterday on the slopes of Blencathra. The
deceased has been identified as a local woman, Patricia Varndean, 48. The body
was spotted by another fell walker in the early hours of the evening, a few
yards off the National Trust path. It seems the woman suffered injuries to her
head, ribs and legs. Forensic police say the cause of the injuries is unknown.
Mrs.
Varndean is the seventh person to die on Blencathra so far this year, and we
are still only in late March. Experts are wondering if the mountain is becoming
more dangerous to climb or whether it is purely a coincidence. Some locals are talking
about a curse on the mountain – others suspect some sort of foul play. It is
suggestive that all the victims have been lone climbers. The police would
welcome any information to help them ascertain exactly what happened.
Blencathra was a mountain I had climbed twice before and was
one of the more thrilling Lake District climbs – I rated it alongside Bowfell
and Helvellyn for atmosphere – narrow steep paths you had to scramble up with
sheer drops on both sides, often clouded with swirling fog. Deaths
however ! Climbing Blencathra was on my list of possible things to do in
the four days I had intended to spend in Keswick – now I was going to do it
tomorrow ! Not that I’m brave or anything like that, it’s just that my
death was out of the question. I am a pompous old puss at times…
That morning, before I set off, I chatted to the Australian
lady who ran the B & B about the Blencathra deaths.
She told me the first one was in early January - a teenage
American going it alone in ragingly inclement weather. Apparently there had
been a minor avalanche on Blencathra – a mere snowball compared to a Himalayan
avalanche but enough to kill someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Broken limbs and damaged head suggested this foolish hero had met his end this way,
but the injuries sustained by all seven victims had been fairly similar. The
talk of avalanches reminded me of Leonard Cohen so I shoved my Walkman and my
self-compiled ‘best of Cohen’ in my rucksack. The peak of the mountain was
covered in snow and I knew when I hit it Cohen was going straight into my ear,
and if there was mist as well it was going to be FULL ON starkness and
melancholia up there. Cool !
I won’t bore you with details of my early ascent - after all,
this is a story and not a mountain manual; save to say I was heading with
gusto towards ‘Straight
Edge’: this is the mother of all Cumbrian spine-tinglers – the final ascent
of the mountain, and not for the vertiginous. When I reached it things became
totally far out straight away.
Clouds circled, rain lashed down, I scrambled for Cohen, the
sheer drops flashed like strobe lights in the inconsistent mist, and when
flashes of green, orange and violet stabbed the sky I wondered if the
Australians had influenced my coffee. I stumbled on up a sheer crack slippery
with glistening drips, and the higher sky became knives of a thousand colours.
I put Cohen back in my pocket and replaced him with Iggy Pop. Thunder cracked
and green lighting ripped and roared and in fear I started shouting “Cohen
Cohen Cohen,” and turned Iggy up until my ears thumped in harmony with the
maniacal sky.
It flashed on the horizon like a fragment of a vision; like
some horror-movie trickery, all silent and subtle and quick: the size of a man
or more, a smooth grey gingerbread man of stone. Faceless, handless and
footless like a plasticine parody. The thunder squealed like a feline God and I
nearly tripped and died as hundreds of little stone men scuttled past my
boots ! ! In the swirling panic I was reminded of Miyazaki’s tree spirits
and realised they were spirits of the rocks. They were sometimes mottled with
algae or chipped and cracked and it all happened in a second as a flash of
lightning sent them hurtling into some other dimension and I questioned what I
had seen. Stone Man again ! Two feet in front of me ! I crunched
up my eyes, heard a whizzing, and forcing them back open saw nothing but a
burst of clemency in the shape of a burning marigold sunlight. The Cumbrian
weather was crackling with its madness of super rapid change. Clouds cleared
and a ridiculous blue sky cleared the way to the summit of the mountain. Five
minutes later I reached the top and my face collapsed into my sandwiches.
Slopping my bread, ham and eggs with the messy gusto of a
slobbering dog, I fell asleep and dreamed of stone men, tiny and smiling and
benevolent, then bulging up into stone balloons of malice and crashing down
with supernatural force and sudden speed on to my skull. I think I jerked like
a newborn baby for a while, then awoke to find a third weather; a bland white
sheet. I welcomed it.
Almost everybody who ascends Blencathra via Straight Edge descends
by a less intense route, and being no different I found a gentle path down a
rolling grassy expanse, with the spiked cliffs rearing up to my left. It was
getting warmer and I found myself whistling and singing under my breath,
glancing at the sheer stone rise with decreasing frequency. Relief and the
beginnings of harmony filtered into my muscles and veins. Then,
CRAAAAAAAAAACK ! A sudden flash and roar of storm and
rain like a swish of a colossal hammer. A profound and immediate darkening
of the heavens, then zoom ! - Another flash like a cosmic camera and
I was surrounded by a stone circle of stone men, waddling on their hips like
disco-dancing weevils. One snapped and flashed a sinister eyeless grin, then
they disappeared with a shimmering fade. The weather was grey and dismal and
rain was spotting insipidly and I gathered my shaking skin and continued the
descent. I was nearly running. I just wanted to get off the mountain and away
from this wondrous savagery. Straight Edge still loomed large to my left and like Orpheus in the
Underworld I somehow knew it would be fatal to glance at it, so I arched my
back and bowed my head, looking inches in front of my feet at the dreary sodden
ground. I headed downwards like an unrelenting arrow for several minutes,
all curled up inwards like a ball, when a rumbling and cracking sound terrorised
my ears with a terrible treble. My instincts flung my head sideways and a
huge gingerbread man-shaped hole gaped in the side of the cliff. Everything
stopped; time, my heart, the clouds and the breeze, and dread fixed my lumpen
body to the spot as if I too were a stone man. All hope passed and a vague
curiosity as to the manner of my demise remained.
And there it was. Framed on the horizon at the top of the
grassy slope I had just descended. A giant, motionless figure of smooth stone
with the white sun behind it. Arms and legs childishly stiff, it reminded me of
the dramatic image of the 100-foot Wicker Man at the end of the film of the
same name. We looked at each other for what I think was minutes but could have
been seconds, me gripped with hypnotic despair, and the thing infinitely
patient as it dwelled coolly on its puny quarry. I imagined a camera panning
silently and suddenly from its head to mine, and back again, and my brain
swirled as if the machine in motion. Hope slapped me like a flat crack in the
cheek, and I belted down the mountain, a screaming, flailing-limbed banshee. I
looked behind and the man-shaped tower of stone stayed as still as the rock
from which it was hewn.
Then it started running ! A couple of inexorable bounds
and it was almost upon me. Suddenly it wailed a wail that pierced and ripped
the sky as several eagles crashed dead around me, and sheep thudded to the
floor with bleeding ears then floating souls.
Something extraordinary happened next ! The stone
monster had split into hundreds of huge boulders hurtling down the mountainside
like red-tailed cannonballs. I ran until I felt a crack on the back and fell. A
gigantic ball bashed my head between the eyes and I started floating in the
watery air.
Already amazed to be gazing down on my crushed bloody
cadaver, I was more astonished still when the boulders were pulled together as
if by some incredible magnetic force. There was a curious clunking sound and
there once again stood the stone figure, whole and still. In a swish of a wing
it was gone and the mountainside from where it had come was full of its stone
again.
I
am writing from my afterlife which is beautiful and bright but a little lonely.
As if sensitively planned by benevolent cosmic potters, sometimes I whizz
around an infinite whirlpool of creamy white light with the sound of
Sly and the Family Stone
filling the Universe. Each beat is accompanied by some shapely flash of colour
– it’s lovely to behold! This reminded me to name my destroyer Sly
as he (I see him as the father figure) clearly had his family up there on
Blencathra, and they were evidently made of stone. I wonder where they came
from, and what Daddy’s beef was with human beings climbing his mountain ?
