Pennine Lines w/c 9 October 2023
|| Disgustingly mild || Keep your powder dry ||
Flying Buttress Direct || Climber: unknown
|| Focus On... ||
Survival
This is probably going to be a short one this week as interior decorating chaos has descended upon headquarters here, where finding a surface to put a coffee mug down on is difficult, sitting down impossible and writing anything coherent, well, we’ll see how that goes. Add in some unidentified malaise/lurgy to the mix and it’s not looking good. I’ll do my best.
Despite much excitement about the still-just-over-the-horizon grit season, the ridiculously warm October weekend we’ve just ‘enjoyed’ has kicked that idea into touch again. I’m sure 20 degrees at this time of year is perfectly fine and nothing to worry about. Actually I tell a lie, it’s something to be absolutely worried about, and not just for the impact on the grit season.
I’ll be honest with you, at times it’s hard not to feel like ‘stuff’ - and by that I mean the general environmental, social and political situation both domestically and globally - is really on the slide, and that can weigh on you. Even here in the UK where we’ve been prudently outsourcing all our wars for years now it’s kinda hard not to feel like the naive sense of inevitable societal progress we all experienced growing up has evaporated. Not sure if it all started around 2010, or maybe 2016, I guess we’ll never know…. But I do know that what I’m supposed to do is just pacify myself with social media, Strictly, Netflix, and book the next set of cheap flights to the Med. It’s all good as long as we all crack on and keep ploughing 95% of our earnings ultimately to one of about three or four multinationals, right?
Anyway, I’ve long been convinced of the potential for climbing to be, or at least seem to be, a means for semi-successfully navigating life and the modern world. And I don’t mean for the sponsored few swanning around on perpetual climbing holidays (good work if you can get it!), I mean for the rest of us with normal lives, normal pressures and normal stresses to juggle - relationships, work, families, health, finances etc etc.
Fully immersed at Millstone || Climber: James McHaffie
Being outdoors and out of the built environment, and in what I regrettably refer to as the countryside, is a huge part of it. In fact I shudder every time I find myself typing “outdoors” and “countryside” as if it’s some special thing, some rare and elusive state that we can only access occasionally. In fact, this is the main symptom of the problem we find ourselves in. As humans we’ve become urbanised and domesticated. Far from being the default position, being out in nature has been othered. Nature - the very name a symptom of the disconnect. Nature isn’t really a thing that needs a name, because it’s, well, everything, But nevertheless we’ve given it a new name so we can be separate from it and mistreat it.
In fact we are part of nature, and hence why being outside, climbing or whatever you do, is so fundamentally important. Even just being at a crag 10 minutes drive from the suburbs, with an ice cream van parked in the layby and tied up bags of dog muck hanging from the gates, it’s still fundamentally a different world. Even if the place has been intensively sheep farmed, or mismanaged for grouse shooting or whatever, it’s still better for us than the urban world. The wind blows, the weather changes. We’re not calling the shots out here. Even at mundane old Burbage – with all the dog walkers – something as fragile and ephemeral as a drop of rain or a tiny biting insect can send everyone scuttling off for shelter. It’s humbling, and being at the whim of the elements must speak to us at a fundamental level, even if we’ve dulled our senses to it from years of intensive box-set bingeing and try not to hear it. Also of note here is the obvious fact that indoor climbing doesn’t tick this box at all.
One thing climbing has got going for it is it’s a corner of existence where you’ve actually got some genuine agency over what you’re experiencing. Increasingly we’re baked into a well-oiled system where we’re serving the interests of the apex predators at the top of the pyramid, designed to strip agency and empowerment from most of us. People talk about not really having any control over what’s going on in life, and that feeling of helplessness is as a huge source of stress for many people. In fact it’s often cited as the cause of mental health problems, self harm, eating disorders etc (on a slight tangent Katie Brown’s book is worth a read on this subject). So because climbing is fundamentally a potentially lethal activity there’s always something at stake, and you are ultimately in control of a lot of those dangers. You could hurt yourself, it’s down to you to not fall off. You might make the wrong call on the weather in the mountains. What would happen if you just soloed up that route? You might do it, or you could fall off, or get scared and downclimb in a terrified state. But it would be in your hands and it’d be real, with consequences. Place the gear right, don’t fall off. Find the right abseil. Pick the safe line across the glacier. Choose which pebble to stand on. Even when bouldering accidents can and do happen; you and your mates are there and responsible for yourselves and each other. Handling all this and constantly making those decisions, large or small, can often be daunting, but making them is all part of climbing. No waivers, no disclaimers, no member of staff running over to tell you you’re doing it wrong – you’re taking responsibility. It ain’t a pilates class, this isn’t a quick round at the pitch & putt. It’s all too easy to live a life completely devoid of the level of agency and empowerment that climbing can offer, however fleeting it may be.
Running, it's ok but..... || Runner: unknown
Hand in hand with this, climbing is often spoken of in terms of being an escape from modern life. If you go back and watch Hard Grit from 1998, John Dunne says something which has always stuck with me. I can’t use the exact quote here because I lent my DVD copy to someone unknown and never got it back (if you’re reading this, fess up) but it’s along the lines of “life is very safe now and climbing provides an escape from that. You can go out and have a moment of madness then go back to reality”. I may be totally misquoting John there as I’m writing this from memory, but the thrust of the idea here is clear. However, I’m not convinced that thinking of it as an escape is useful. Afterall, it’s only an escape if you never go back, otherwise it’s not much of an escape is it? If you’re looking for an escape you’re going to end up like Steve McQueen in the cooler frustratingly chucking a baseball against the wall.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve all been there, but maybe it’s better reframed as a pressure release, a safety valve? A chance to switch off from whatever else is on your mind. I’m sure people use other activities in this way too - cycling, running, or whatever. The problem I have with, say, running, is there’s actually too much time to think. The exhausting physicality is there but it’s largely devoid of technical interest, so the brain hasn’t got enough to do. It’s like rolling emulsion onto the living room ceiling; it’s tiring but it doesn’t make much of a demand on concentration so the mind wanders. In contrast climbing requires a level of focus such that it’s hard to consciously think about anything at all beyond your ten-foot-wide bubble of immediacy. Climbers often talk about achieving a sort of 100% focus meditation-like flow state; climbing without thinking but without leaving the brain any leeway to go off wandering. As Leo Houlding says in Hard Grit “concentrating on staying relaxed, which is a contradiction”.
Climbing seems to be like the almost-mythical Chess Boxing; a rare fusion of complete physical immersion along with a level of existential mental focus and presentness that is hard to achieve elsewhere. There’s no opponent in climbing though, everyone is a winner simply by taking part, and maybe it’s not sexy enough to inspire a Wu-Tang record. That’s fine, because climbing isn’t for everyone, and it’s not all rosy all the time, but it’s clearly got the potential to be a huge positive long term survival strategy. There’s probably a lot more to be written on this subject, but the paint fumes are clearing, real life calls so I’ll leave it there for now.
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Recently Through the lens ||
Slim pickings, as the weather's not been fit for much beyond Raven Tor. This is Nathan Lee on Fowl Play.
|| Fresh Prints ||
Two very different flavours of Stanage new to the Print Shop this week.
