And we’ll all go together

to pull  wild mountain thyme

All around the blooming heather

will ye go Lassie go

We said goodbye to a close friend’s Dad last week,  He was 86 years old and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  By all accounts the family were pleased he was no longer in pain and he passed with his wife and two daughters by his side.

John – Craig’s Dad – is also 86, and we are conscious that this Christmas period maybe the last time that Roscoe shares with his Grandad.  It’s a poignant time – not least because John is frail and lonely, relying on daily visits from carers to wash, dress and feed him and take him to the bathroom.  He is done with this life.

But 86 is a good innings.  A lifetime’s worth of memories.  Loved ones mourn but are comforted by shared recollections of good times.

I also have friends who have tragically lost children, wives and husbands, before their time.  But, when is your time?

Back in 1996, I am training for a planned trip to Ammassalik in Greenland. This necessitates several visits to the Alps so as to improve my fitness and ski-touring and ice axe techniques.  I am also keen to understand and train for the threats and signs of avalanche. So we are on the Haute route ski tour, a high Alpine 120km traverse with 6,000m of ascent and descent linking two historic Alpine centres, Chamonix and Zermatt. It’s a structured route travelling Alpine hut to hut with little time for ‘ dilly-dallying’. It’s a hot day and so I take off my fleece before putting my outer gortex layer back on.  I’m carrying my rucksack with a week’s worth of provisions, largely a few pairs of clean knickers, a couple of T Shirts, my sleeping bag and mat and a bare minimum of toiletries.  I also have another pair of lightweight skis and my crampons and ice axe strapped to my pack.

 Tired, I am slowly zig-zagging my way across a mountain face, when I feel a cold wind.  The storm comes out of nowhere and very quickly I am confused and disoriented.  My companion is a fair distance ahead and as the storm rages, I get angry and common sense flies away.  I take my skis off, to walk my way out of the mess, and find myself up to my waist in snow. Defeated, I howl in despair and somehow the wind carries my call. He stops, looks back and retraces his steps.  30 minutes later, exhausted, I have my skis and skins back on. But my legs are no longer playing, they are shaking and struggling with the weight of my pack and with the biting wind and whipping snow.  Slowly, laboriously,  we make our way to an outcrop of rocks to hide from the wind and regroup.

By now, I am somewhat delirious and I’m repeating nursery rhymes  to try to gain some degree of control.  I know I’m becoming hypothermic, although I have little concept of the real trouble I’m in.  He does not leave me but is not talking either.  I don’t care, my own dialogue is also in my head and the unspoken is between us.  We both know this is untenable. At some point, I don’t remember how long, we hear a cry.  A man’s voice.  My companion shouts back and then he is with us.  He’s a member of the Swiss mountain rescue team that we had seen earlier in the day.  Thankfully when the storm came down and we did not appear, they came out to search.  After some discussion, he lifts my pack and heads off into the storm.  This time I find my voice and demand to know where he’s gone but there is no answer.  I am being pushed to my feet and ordered to get moving.  It’s a tone of voice that does not allow argument and I shuffle a few steps forward and using all my strength turn once more into the wind to zigzag upwards. Then the mountain man is back.  There is more discussion and we move on, heads bent.

I am lost in a world of Humpty Dumpty and Georgie Porgie but somehow I hear an almighty yell.  I stop and look around.  My companion is gesticulating wildly “Reverse! Reverse!!” I look down and a swirl of snow mist lifts enough for me to see my ski tips are over the edge and into nothing. I stand still, trying to work out how to go backwards.  I’m not scared. I’m not anything – in that moment I too am nothing, a tiny speck in an infinite universe. There is no fear.  Then the death scythe gets distracted and the mountain man is somehow behind me, pulling me back before setting my ski tips upwards once more.  He guides my every step up to the door of the hut and has obviously warned the team of what to expect.  They are on me like locusts, pulling off my wet gear, drying my hair before putting a tinfoil type hat on me.  I stand for a moment, like a compliant rag doll, before falling to the floor in an undignified heap.  They carry me upstairs to a huge log fire where I am put in a wooden chair almost on the hearth  itself.  I have a man either side of me rubbing my fingers, another two men have a foot each and they are vigorously working my toes.  Someone is behind me making my ear lobes sing.  They swap around taking turns as, rhythmically, they bring the blood back to my veins.  It happens slowly and then, with a whoosh of almighty pain, it is there, throbbing with every heart beat. I am given hot, sweet tea and they feed me sausages before cleaning my teeth and helping me to bed.  I don’t sleep – my fingers are swollen larger than the sausages I have eaten and they hurt so much that I put them in my mouth to stifle my cries.  My companion snores in the bunk bed next to mine.  The next day there is the roar of the helicopter blades and we find ourselves and our gear being airlifted down the mountain.

Sedated and on a drip in Chamonix hospital, I finally sleep, for three days. I am discharged on day four and that afternoon, my fingers still huge, are jammed into men’s ski gloves.  There is nothing of me exposed to the wind as I look down the mountain.  I know if I don’t push off,  my mind may not let me ski again.  So  I take a deep breath and feel the familiar burn in the thighs.  I only do one run but it’s enough to know that I can.  Even so, we never make Ammassalik as my injuries are too severe.

Yet for months afterwards I feel invincible.  Way into the summer months, the skin peels from my fingers, hands and ear lobes in great sheets.  In winter, I am shedding skin once more.  But it’s life affirming  and, although disgusting, I derive great pleasure from the scaly macabreness of it all.

Aside from the scaly skin which now reappears whenever my hands get really cold,  time thankfully steals the sharpness of memory.  It’s only when I struggle into ski boots or stand on top of particularly fierce mountains the fear grips me once more.

It was not my time then.  And – minus some tongue – it is still not my time now.  And I don’t know, like most of us, when my time will come. Our choice is surely not to put ourselves deliberately in harm’s way but to still spank the mountain when the winter breeze calls.