The wings do not grow of their own accord | Pinnacle Newsletter #78
#78 The wings do not grow of their own accord
Hello and welcome to my first newsletter of 2020! After a couple of status updates, I’ve included something for you to read.
As I’d hoped, moving further from TGO magazine’s orbit has led to new opportunities for me, and I find myself in the unusual position of being fully booked for most of the year. Right now, I have as much work as I can handle from now until late August, including a stack of outdoor writing for TGO and other publications. After that point I want to relax my pace and make time for some personal projects, although I might have time for more editing work too. My relaunch of pinnacleeditorial.co.uk has been postponed until the autumn.
Work on my first non-fiction book, The Farthest Shore, about my 2019 winter Cape Wrath Trail, is coming along well. The first draft is at about 20,000 words. I’m getting a small chunk done every day – right now my writing schedule is roughly 17.30–19.00, which suits me a lot better than the 06.00–06.30 writing slot I’d experimented with before. It turns out that I’m just not awake enough to do much of anything at that time of the morning.
I’m a little hesitant to do this, because it’s rough material still, but in this newsletter I’ve decided to share a short extract from my book. This comes from the end of Section 2, which covers my journey as far as Glenfinnan. Perhaps there’s something to consider here when coming to terms with the relatively poor winters we’ve been having in recent years.
This is an unedited rough draft, and will change before I send it all in to my publisher. Needless to say, please don’t share or reproduce this material. I hope it provides an interesting glimpse into the book I’m writing. Bonus points if you pick up the nods back to my first novel (now out of print). After the extract, you’ll find my list of recently published material since my last newsletter as usual.
As I climbed higher and a veil of cloud blew over the mountain, transforming it from benign dreamscape to a swirling place of cold winds and abstract forms, Mike’s parting words echoed in my head, loose ends looking for connections.
Scottish mountains in winter are creatures of transcendence and wonder. They are in a state of constant flux. Snow falls, is driven and drifted by the wind, baked by the sun, and hardened by the stars. As the weather turns, ever sculpting a living work of art, the aspirant mountaineer is left to wait for the optimum moment to attempt the climb – or to wait for another day. Snow and storm conspire to build the latent threat of avalanches. More often than not the snow is too soft, too deep, or too wet; high winds or persistent low cloud can make the very idea of climbing ludicrous. Snatching an audience with the sublime can feel like a chance in a million. Sometimes bad forecast after bad forecast can turn the love sour and make us forget how revelatory it can be at its best.
But a mountain in winter is more like a delicate bird than a landscape, and as W.H. Murray once wrote in his classic book Mountaineering in Scotland, the wings do not grow of their own accord.
There are moments that flare through a life, illuminating everything that came before and everything that will come after. Breaking out into the pristine snowy bowl of Coire nan Lochan on a morning of such silence that I could hear my own heart, the sky blushing pink over the shoulder of Gearr Aonach, stars burning steady out of the cold depths. Contemplating the alpenglow-lit north face of Aonach Beag after heavy snowfall in May – a primal place belonging to atoms and frost and the slow turn of the heavens. Waking at midnight beneath a tarp pitched on the ridge of the Grey Corries to find the aurora borealis dancing over the depths of Glen Spean, greens and purples flickering off the snow all around me, ten minutes of contemplation decompressing into a lifetime of rapture. I have stood and sobbed at the beauty of it. Sometimes I’ve waited years for conditions to be right. Sometimes years have passed between one such moment and the next, filled with thousands of miles of wandering in the high places, seeking that spark of enchantment I long for and live for.
These experiences are precious because they are rare, and they are becoming rarer.
Living in Glen Coe a decade before, I’d come close to taking the splendour of Scotland’s mountains in winter for granted. I’d been at hand for some of the best winter seasons in decades. The mountains had been wreathed in snow for months on end, and uncommonly low temperatures had frozen the biggest waterfalls – and I’d drunk my fill, treading the starry ways with ice axes and crampons. Perhaps I’d thought it would always be like that. But since then the world had turned. Winters had grown leaner and meaner, granting less of the magic, bringing instead rain, gales, and the bleak brown of bare hills. The world was heating up, the beauty fading more quickly than I could ever have feared. And I’d changed too, of course. The death of a parent had cast strange shadows within my soul.
Did I believe that I’d find what I was looking for on this winter Cape Wrath Trail? Perhaps setting out on this journey had been an act of hope, an act of defiance. Of resistance.
As I neared the summit of Sgurr nan Coireachan, hidden in the cloud one moment and revealed the next, I looked down and beheld the fractal whorls of sastrugi in the snow at my feet carved by the wind. Fine powder blasted across the ridge, blinding me for a moment; when I looked up, the patterns in the snow had changed again, their previous formations gone forever. A time might come, I realised then, when a person could no longer stand near a Scottish summit and marvel at the fleeting beauty of sastrugi in a wind that decorated every stone with feathers of rime ice. A point when shifting baselines would erase this wonder along with all the others already lost in time. Don’t take days like these for granted, Mike had told me. For a moment I was overcome by gratitude.
© Alex Roddie, All Rights Reserved
Recently published
Wild perspectives: a twilight nature encounter at Snipe Dales – One of the last things I did in 2019 was to go for a walk in the woods, and I caught a glimpse of the wild perspectives that govern hidden corners of our world.
Book review: Rebirding – Rewilding Britain and its Birds by Benedict Macdonald – my standout nature read for 2019.
Digital feature: The Meaning of Adventure – my feature for Sidetracked magazine on hiking the Haute Route Pyrenees. ‘If I could never tell anyone about this trip, never publish anything about my experience or share any of my photos, would I still put myself through this?’
Images from a local wood that is being destroyed – I was recently shocked to witness one of my favourite local woods being wrecked by bulldozers. The damage is ongoing; I need to update this post with some recent developments.
And finally, my ‘what I’ve been reading this week’ link lists:
Until next time,
Alex
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