TENDERNESS
Sarah-Jane is
self-publishing – the book is available on her website
dobdobdob.co.uk or through good bookstores and Amazon. Follow her at @ afeelingforrock.
THE LEADER
Sit. You’re safe. You’ve survived. Breathe. Breathe.
A Feeling for Rock won the Climbing Literature Award at Banff Mountain Book Festival 2021 having been a Finalist in the Fiction & Poetry Category. The book is a clever mix of poetry, essays, cartoons, artworks and interviews which muse on many aspects of climbing life including touch, companionship, ethics, landscape and language.
Now look. Look around. Look at it all. Look out and around at the wide, far view. Look as you’ve never looked before. Look and breathe. Look and breathe at the same time. Look around. What is here?
I recall watching the opening sequence of a film by Chantal Akerman. The extended, unedited shot, from a fixed camera point, is quite an average view, with quite an ordinary tree branch in the foreground. The colours are washed out, grey-grade, unremarkable. The branch blows a little in the breeze, from time to time. Nothing else happens. The more we look, the more there is to see. The branch, the view, the greyness, the everyday- ness. It becomes strangely hypnotic. An unwillingness to focus on anything else. Just this. Just this branch. Just this arbitrary view.
Something happens, belaying at the top of a climb. Specifically, at the top of a trad climb. It is one of the (many) reasons I’m especially fond of trad: a place for reflection, a time when the moment sinks in and I can just be. A space to be. To be me, here. In this landscape. It’s such a shock to be lowered straight down after a hard sport ascent. Where is my ‘Forever Moment’? The stop. I remember when I gave birth to my daughter, on the sitting room floor of our rented flat, and the midwives grabbed her and shoved her straight on the nipple. I remember that. See the vocabulary: grabbed, shoved. That’s not what anyone wants, is it? Pauses are good. Stops. Time to reflect. I would have preferred to come to, for a few seconds, and then gather her to the breast myself. To have control. To be calling the pace. Belaying, especially at the top, is a natural opportunity for active meditation. The enforced sitting, combined
with post-lead-I-didn’t-die euphoria, lends itself to heightened awareness. My hands constantly feel the rope, testing and taking in or giving out, but mainly taking in. This happens pretty automatically now. It’s body memory. It’s what my hands will do. Which leaves my mind and heart free. Look again. Observe the sun on the ocean, straight ahead, the shimmering, tripping road of light to the horizon; sea-surface utterly opaque, a choppy border between drenched and dry. When the sun’s at your back, the water opens up and you’re welcomed in. Can slide between waves, sense the surge of tides. See the starfish and kelp and bladderwrack. Look out for seals. A seal day is always a good day. They watch us and we watch them. I fancy they can read my features from all that way down in the briny swell. From the top you can tell time by the rise and fall of
estuary water. You can tell time by the height of the sun. You can tell time by how tired your forearms are; how exhausted your mind is from protracted fear. Can tell weather from the cloud banks; tell weather from the bird- song; tell weather from the yellow light which inevitably means time is up whether by inclemency (snow, storms) or nightfall heralded by the witching hour. Look once more at the tiny things. Perhaps, while you
belay, you will stare at this small fringe of lichen for an hour. Perhaps you will watch the play of wind over this grass-seed head, or this daisy. You might share the ledge with a woodlouse. Or ants. Or a baby gull. Do you feel the flood of love for the ants and the seal and the daisy and the ledge? This is your Forever Moment, or can be, no matter what a struggle the route has been. No matter you used your knees on that Hard Severe. All this while, you are bringing your second up. Being sensitive to that traverse, to how tight they like the rope,
38 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
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