The First Taste

My first taste of adventure was climbing Everest. Or it might have been sailing a balsa-wood raft to Easter Island. Then again, it could have been flying a second world war bomber to the Antarctic to search for a missing ship with a cargo of gold. These first tastes were not due to an extraordinarily exciting childhood (I grew up in a town so dull I could regularly be seen kneeling in my parents garden, shaking my fists at the sky and imploring the gods to make something happen). No, these first tastes were thanks to books.

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For a ten year old boy, shackled by his youth to the safety of home and the turgid misery of school, there were two genuinely great human endeavours – the pursuit of adventure and the art story-telling. Combined, they provided the formative experiences, albeit vicariously, that would shape the man I am today (short attention span, unrealistic expectations of life, steadily worsening limp) and would determine the direction my life would take. Sometimes those stories were true - like ‘The Ascent of Everest’ or ‘Kon-Tiki’. Sometimes they were just stories – like ‘Biggles Breaks the Silence’.
Fiction or non-fiction, it didn’t really matter in the end - as long as ‘exciting stuff’ happened. You know the kind of thing: men (tough, monosyllabic, moustachioed men) falling in crevasses, fighting off cannibals, discovering buried treasure, shooting Jerry out of the sky with a single blast from their Vickers machine gun, scaling unclimbed mountains and sailing unchartered seas, eating their boots and being eaten by sharks - all without so much as a raised eyebrow of surprise or a murmur of complaint. As a ten year old, I was convinced that if a man couldn’t have his arm chewed off by a hungry lion without remark, then he was no kind of man at all.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I got a crack at this adventuring thing myself. It might not have been conquering Everest, but joining the Scouts was as close as an eleven year old was going to get. Cruelly misled by my peers into believing that the Scouts was all about helping old ladies across the road and singing ‘Ging-Gang-Gotcha-By-The-Goolies’, I resisted, until rather better informed friends dragged me along to a mid-week meeting.
I was amazed to discover that, far from being constantly urged to ‘Bob a Job’ or earn my handicrafts badge, I was being positively encouraged to carry around fire-raising equipment (ahem, that should probably be ‘fire-starting equipment’) and a sodding great bowie knife (yes, they were more innocent times). Not only that, I was being trusted to do this in a responsible manner. Of course, this trust was sometimes abused (my parents never found out how close the Ochill hills came to having one less forest) but more often than not, we were responsible Scouts. I like to think that Baden Powell, whilst perhaps not being proud of us, would not have been abjectly ashamed of us, either.
Suddenly, I was going camping and canoeing, building fires and constructing bivouacs. I found myself in a world where I could easily imagine myself paddling through the Canadian wilderness, climbing some savage Himalayan Peak or in a tent three days from the next cache of supplies and having to eat my boots (yes, my Scout leader’s mashed potato really was that bad).
Of course, as I got older, the adventures became more ambitious - I can remember my ascent of Ben Ledi, twenty five years ago, like it was yesterday. To appreciate why climbing Ben Ledi was such a momentous occasion for me, you have to understand that I was a twelve year old boy who had just read The Ascent of Everest, thought Chris Bonnington was the coolest man in the world and would rather be seen in Dachstein mitts than a ‘Frankie Says’ t-shirt. Ben Ledi was not just a mountain, it was the mountain that dominated the view from my back garden and, crucially, my maths classroom (a school report of the time beautifully summed up my lack of progress with the line: “Matthew would do much better if he spent more time on his schoolwork and less time staring out of the window at the mountains”). Not only this, but Ben Ledi was the first mountain I ever climbed. Sure, I’d been up a few hills in my time, but this was the first time I’d ever been up something that could even remotely be described as a mountain.
It was a crisp winters day, some thin high-altitude clouds perhaps, but otherwise a perfect day for mountaineering. On my back was the bright red rucksack I’d got for Christmas and in my hand, a second world war commando issue ice-axe that had belonged to a friend of my father. With me were four of my close friends and two of their dads; who had come along to make sure we didn’t fall off a cliff.
The path to the summit started slowly up through the dark, conifer forest that cloaked the lower slopes. Every now and then we would get a tantalising glimpse of the snow-caked mountain above and I became impatient to break out of the tree-line. Down here, among the trees, it was really just a pleasant wooded stroll where at any moment one might turn a corner to find a young family feeding the squirrels. And, as any budding adventurer will tell you, nothing ruins the aura of savage wilderness than young families feeding the squirrels. I’m pretty sure Shackleton didn’t have to put up with young families feeding the squirrels in Antarctica.
Soon enough, however, we broke free of the trees and onto the open slopes of the mountain. It was covered with a deep layer of heavy snow. Not the mere dusting we so often see in this country – like the thin coating of fine sugar on Grandma’s sponge cake; this was more like the thick icing plastered onto a wedding cake. Only in a few places were black rocks and crags visible. This, for me, was as close to climbing Everest as made no difference. It was the most exciting day of my life.
We waded on through the white blanket, stumbling occasionally on the tussocks of grass and heather below, heading for the craggy ridge above us. Ben Ledi had never looked so beautiful. Not even in the most achingly boring maths class had its perfectly proportioned peak appeared so attractive, never had I felt its call so strongly. For the first time in my life I had ‘summit-fever’!
It wasn’t more than a few minutes before the wet snow began to seep through my second-hand Czechoslovakian walking boots. Clearly they had been £4 for a reason. I didn’t really mind, however. Shackleton probably did have to put up with cold, wet feet in Antarctica. Having cold, wet feet was far better than coming across young families feeding the squirrels and ruining the aura of savage wilderness. After a while, my feet went numb and I could no longer feel anything. At the time I thought this was probably a good thing. At the time I had never experienced the unspeakable agony of ‘hot-aches’ – the pain one experiences when the feeling comes back.
At last we reached the summit ridge and the going became slightly easier. The wind had torn away most of the snow in this exposed location, leaving only a thin layer over the rocks and grass. The snow was also harder here, more frozen - and had developed into crisp sastrugi that swept across the ridge in delicate, sinuous lines. The wind buffeted us gently, bringing with it subtle aromas from the valley below - the sweet, fresh scents of pine forest and melting snow.
Our pace quickened as we neared the top, all of us keen to stand on the summit. Then suddenly we were there; a tiny huddle of schoolboys surrounded by the wild majesty of the Highlands. We were so high we could see for miles. None of the nearby mountains were nearly as tall as the one we stood on. To the south we could see the Trossachs and the Forth Valley; to the north an unending procession of snow-clad mountain ridges, one behind the other, as far as the eye could see. I could feel the cold air rushing into my lungs and the tops of my ears stinging in the freezing wind. In all my life I’d never seen anything as beautiful as that view and never done anything as exciting as climbing that mountain.
As I sat in my friend’s father’s car on the drive home, the ‘hot-aches’ setting my toes on fire, I knew without a shadow of doubt what I wanted to spend my life doing. I wanted to get out into the world and experience it. See it, smell it, hear it and feel it - first hand. Feel the biting arctic wind on my face and the scorching desert sun on my back. Explore the mountains, lakes, rivers, seas, deserts and forests. There was so much to do and so little time to do it in. I was already twelve years old and not getting any younger. I had better start planning the next adventure immediately.