Life and death experiences
Dec. 1st, 2003 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azziriaI've just been reading about the problems and differences of opinion surrounding the making of the film of Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void. (If you haven’t read the book, go and do so now - I don’t know if I’ll go and see the film, but the book is just an amazing story.)
I was lucky enough to see Joe give his Siula Grande talk before the book came out. I didn’t even know the story, being at that time totally immersed in the caving world rather than the climbing world (a climber friend took me along). In the beginning it seemed to be just another mountaineering talk, then as the story got more and more incredible I sat there thinking “I know he survived, because he’s standing here in front of me, but I’ve no idea how the f*ck he can possibly have done it”. I was gripped. Totally and utterly.
The whole ‘cutting the rope’ thing must inevitably hold some sort of horrible fascination for anyone involved in any sort of outdoor pursuit, unless they have no imagination at all. To be in that situation, where you have to choose between killing a friend or both of you dying. Objectively, the ‘right’ choice is clear: better one dies than two. But what does it do to you, personally, to have to make that choice?
Of course when you’re out there, caving or climbing or whatever, you don’t think about death. You don’t feel it could ever happen to you, because otherwise you couldn’t do it. But occasionally something happens that forces you to face it.
A friend broke her thighbone below a particularly tight and awkward section of a cave we were exploring in the Austrian Alps. When the news first reached us on the surface I was absolutely sure that she was, effectively, dead. I didn’t see how we could get her out alive from where she was with an injury that severe. It was a horrible moment. (I’m glad to say that, because she is one tough lady, and because the whole team pulled together and were amazing, against the odds she survived and is now as good as new - and still caving.)
Another friend spent two days trapped by floodwater on a ledge in a cave in Spain, next to the body of his colleague who had drowned when the cave unexpectedly flood-pulsed. How do you handle that?
DH once slipped and trundled a large boulder down a 150-foot pitch in Yorkshire. For the best part of a minute, until he managed to get his bearings and get his light back on, I thought he’d gone with it. The longest minute of my life (with extra spice added by the fact that last time we’d been down that cave, a few months before, we’d sat on that same boulder and chatted). The full impact didn’t really hit me until we were halfway home - I had to pull the car over on the hard shoulder of the A1 and sit and shake for 20 minutes - physically, uncontrollably shake with delayed shock.
Still prepared to go out there and do it, though. I guess that every time you get away with it you feel that little bit more alive.
I was lucky enough to see Joe give his Siula Grande talk before the book came out. I didn’t even know the story, being at that time totally immersed in the caving world rather than the climbing world (a climber friend took me along). In the beginning it seemed to be just another mountaineering talk, then as the story got more and more incredible I sat there thinking “I know he survived, because he’s standing here in front of me, but I’ve no idea how the f*ck he can possibly have done it”. I was gripped. Totally and utterly.
The whole ‘cutting the rope’ thing must inevitably hold some sort of horrible fascination for anyone involved in any sort of outdoor pursuit, unless they have no imagination at all. To be in that situation, where you have to choose between killing a friend or both of you dying. Objectively, the ‘right’ choice is clear: better one dies than two. But what does it do to you, personally, to have to make that choice?
Of course when you’re out there, caving or climbing or whatever, you don’t think about death. You don’t feel it could ever happen to you, because otherwise you couldn’t do it. But occasionally something happens that forces you to face it.
A friend broke her thighbone below a particularly tight and awkward section of a cave we were exploring in the Austrian Alps. When the news first reached us on the surface I was absolutely sure that she was, effectively, dead. I didn’t see how we could get her out alive from where she was with an injury that severe. It was a horrible moment. (I’m glad to say that, because she is one tough lady, and because the whole team pulled together and were amazing, against the odds she survived and is now as good as new - and still caving.)
Another friend spent two days trapped by floodwater on a ledge in a cave in Spain, next to the body of his colleague who had drowned when the cave unexpectedly flood-pulsed. How do you handle that?
DH once slipped and trundled a large boulder down a 150-foot pitch in Yorkshire. For the best part of a minute, until he managed to get his bearings and get his light back on, I thought he’d gone with it. The longest minute of my life (with extra spice added by the fact that last time we’d been down that cave, a few months before, we’d sat on that same boulder and chatted). The full impact didn’t really hit me until we were halfway home - I had to pull the car over on the hard shoulder of the A1 and sit and shake for 20 minutes - physically, uncontrollably shake with delayed shock.
Still prepared to go out there and do it, though. I guess that every time you get away with it you feel that little bit more alive.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-01 05:48 pm (UTC)This was what I felt when I was out solo backpacking this Fall, and the boulder I was standing on decided to take a little trip down the hillside, about 40 meters' drop. It was rather like that scene in The Two Towers, where Sam takes a tumble outsige the Black Gate. The rock was the size of a Volkswagen. I managed to stay on top of it, by dashing around the uppermost surface, and leaping off before it crushed me.
I got to the bottom of the hill, filled the water bottles in the stream, purified the water, and hiked carefully back up to the campsite.
And then the shaking started. Rum tastes good in Gatorade.
I've downplayed the story to everyone in RL. But that's probably the closest I've come to dying. One tiny miscalculation at that moment, a twist of bad luck, a little less balance or forgetting to tap into the surfing experiences of my youth? I would have been under that rock.
And no one would have even missed me for three days.
I feel more than "a little bit more alive." I feel The next morning, I was petting the rattlesnake coiled around my campstove. *grin* That wasn't really dangerous, merely a calculated risk.
Thanks for the reminder. :-)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-01 07:07 pm (UTC)