Existential Landscape · Monday February 19, 2007
1) Desert
In Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide To Getting Lost, she says wistfully
I once loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation. There the geology that underlies lusher landscapes is exposed to the eye, and this gives it a skeletal elegance, just as its harsh conditions – the vast distances between water, the many dangers, the extremes of heat and cold – keep you in mind of your mortality. But the desert is made first and foremost out of light, at least to the eye and the heart….The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face (129).
I like this. The only part of it I don’t like or agree with is the skeleton metaphor: bones are hard and dry and the latter compares well to the desert, but not the former. Sand is soft, silky and sensual; and that’s part of the attraction of deserts.
People have different views about Bob Geldof. I quite liked the Boomtown Rats, Live Aid was brilliant, and he’s championed father’s child-access rights with an intelligent and articulate voice. In a recent TV series on Africa, he described the desert as the “zero place”. I’m a mountain kinda guy, but I’m starting to wonder about Desert. The zero place: interesting notion. Hot, dry, empty, austerely beautiful with dramatic shadow and burning sand: I’ve never visited Desert for some photography but like most people, I’ve seen pictures of it and watched Lawrence Of Arabia. I’m sure it does, as do mountains, “keep you in mind of your mortality”.
These are existential places, cutting back to a stark simplicity where fragile life is revealed as it is: vulnerable, contingent, precious.
2) Mountain
Spend a few years photographing the mountains, even the English Lake District which is relatively tame, and you inevitably have scary moments. It’s always a calculated risk, weighing up preparedness and skill against a beautiful but potentially hostile environment. Alfred Wainwright, most famous of all Lake District lovers, described its hills as “friends” not to be feared. There’s nothing to worry about, he said; you don’t fall when you walk the streets, and there’s no special reason why you should in the Lakeland fells. This makes sense to someone with experience, who’s pushed the boundaries of comfort and discovered actually, the hills are not so formidable. But when you first explore them, it’s silly to pretend it’s like walking down a high street. It isn’t; people die in the Lake District, as they do in Wales and Scotland. Basically, Wainwright was showing off. Much of the confidence you gain comes from a familiarity whereby you know your way around, as he certainly did. It’s a major concern because although the Lakes are relatively tame, if you get lost for example it can be serious – and it’s easy to get lost. I’ve had a few worrying moments myself; walk for years, and you inevitably will.
There was one time however, that was particularly existential. It was February 2003, and I was just discovering the delights of snowy hills. In the Youth Hostel chat the night before (for dinner not accommodation – I don’t like dormitory sleeping), he said “it’s like a big golf ball”. He recommended me not to tackle it, especially as I lacked both ice axe and crampons. But then said he couldn’t judge me or my suitability for doing it, and there it is: no one can. Only the individual can evaluate their safety and competence in a dangerous landscape. You have to see it for yourself, and so I did. Up early the next day making use of limited wintry daylight, I climbed up to the foot of Helvellyn. I wrote about the experience on my return, saying this:
And then I reached the last section. It still distresses me to think about this. The previous night they’d described it as a golf ball – you couldn’t see what was ahead because the curving slope was so pronounced. And I had to go up it. At this point I was hyperventilating, disciplining myself not to look down, and focussing on the single desperate fact that I had to do this, because there was no return option. This was not fun; it was a life or death situation. The last 20 metres were a steep incline up a snowy rounded face, relying on foot holes that someone had dug out. There was no other purchase and if you slipped, it was certain that you would slide and plummet to the bottom….The following day I ventured into an outdoors shop and heard the following conversation: “Yeah he’s a real character. We did a walk with him once and he’s got endless stories; he lives up in those old mining cottages. ‘Had to drag a body across there once’, he told us”. ‘There’ being the frozen tarn in the lower basin of Hellvelyn. Apparently several people die every year, tumbling down from precipitous heights. I think I could easily have done so, relying as I was on icy foot-holes up a steep incline, with a dramatic open drop both sides. It wasn’t a good experience. I also heard that the day after my adventures someone got stuck on Swirral Edge – too terrified to proceed, and far too inexperienced to retreat, which is even more difficult. They had to be lifted off by a helicopter because, apart from their own hazardous situation, they were blocking the way for other people.
In February 2006 I revisited the area and exorcised the fear I’d established by walking along a snow-covered Striding Edge, a longer and more challenging ridge than Swirral Edge. It was, admittedly, less precarious conditions; delightfully snowy but not especially slippery. But for me, psychologically, it was an interesting challenge I approached with great care, an ice axe, and a constant monitoring of both the conditions ahead and a feasible retreat: if you always know you can go back, that’s a big part of your safety taken care of. To honour a near-final February moment I post these memorialising and beautiful photos of the area in question, Helvellyn. James, nearly RIP:
This is one of the big lessons of dangerous landscape, and part of the strange but understandable attraction: exposing yourself to nature, devoid of the comforts and security of the city, is an educational process. It’s an existential situation, prompting a new consideration of your life and what it means. For most of the time you never encounter this and walking is a lovely and relaxing pursuit maybe with summer time skylarks, but generally with soothing rather than scary terrain. However there’s always a slight, calculated risk when you leave civilisation to venture into the hills. Ian McEwan describes this in his novel Amsterdam, when the narrator goes walking in the Lakes. It’s not clear but I think I know the area he alludes to, and the hotel where the narrator stays, where presumably McEwan did also. It’s in Borrowdale – McEwan does name some of the Borrowdale hills.
What I realised, in my life and death moment, is this: had I slipped, it would have looked exactly like Breughel’s painting The Fall of Icarus. There were other people around, but they would have barely noticed. My body would have lain, small and broken, in a vast uncaring situation oblivious to what had happened. Life is like this; we have webs of loving relationships, networks of friends, acquaintances and colleagues which sustain us and give us meaning, and mortal accidents are traumatic. But fifty years pass, a hundred, and so does the trauma and all trace of it. We’re essentially alone, getting by as best we can, in a contingent predicament where thinking these ideas is itself precious: life, and how we understand it.