PERSPECTIVE
I was young. I was expecting my life to flash before my eyes. It didn’t, but I hung in the air there for ages, a few metres short of the peg with a slack rope and about eight metres of nothing below me. It’s not that far but I was terrified, repeating to myself over and over that the rope will come tight and I’ll be laughing. I can’t believe how many times I could repeat this to myself in what must have been only a couple of seconds. It’s like how they say that dreams can feel like hours or even days, but they last seconds in reality. I remember the pink rope, in its long, slack arc, flicking up into tension and rippling back into a wavy, slack wiggle as I rotated skywards. The ground hit me so hard. Hard, frank and undeniable. None of the glamour of the action films that animated my 15-year-old imagination. I didn’t bounce like Batman and I didn’t roll out of it like James Bond.
The cam had ripped but tilted me back before I collided with the ground. It was my back that took the impact and naturally the wind was knocked out of me as if the air in my lungs wasn’t subject to the solid defiance of the ground.
I had the sensation that I continued to fall, sinking
Words: Angus Kille.
Angus has now been climbing for more than a decade, in which time climbing has developed from a hobby to a passion and into a lifestyle. He’s now an MIA based in North Wales, teaching climbers to not take terrible trad falls…
below the surface. I kicked and writhed like a drowning teenager, my body contorted, pleading for that evasive breath of air. It didn’t come. Another eternity passed, longer than that of the fall. I rolled and kicked and continued to sink as my exasperated, desperate mime of a drowning man terrified Tom. I surfaced with a rough, laboured breath. I heave and gasp and Tom gapes, frozen in his four-legged position beside me. With time, a normal, slightly struggled rhythm returns to my breathing and Tom tends to the troubling pain in my back. “Shall I call an ambulance?” He asks. “Mum won’t let me climb…” I shake my head. He nods and straps my rucksack on dead tight like a makeshift splint so I can walk pretty much upright. I got the train home and never told my parents, incredibly only enduring a few days of pain from the fall, which apparently wasn’t obvious. I was pretty much recovered within a week.
But the real recovery came a few weeks later, tying in again on the route as a terrified teenager. It was a bit of a lesson, but also a decision to continue with this dangerous passion that had at last bitten back. I’d keep it going, I was infected with it.
22 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
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