Bo and the mountain

To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977

January 25th, 2024
On a train from Bristol to Devon, England

I hadn’t planned to be back in England so soon — I’ve come to kidnap my brother. I’ll take him to the sticks and get him sober but first, a weekend with Paul and Maiken in Devon, a circuit breaker.

January 26th
Walking on the moors with Paul, Bo, and John

Bo is looking for answers to questions I recognise, questions about community, about the making of sense and of meaning. He’s heading to Mexico next month, flying high on the possibilities of the trip ahead — the meeting of minds, the crucible of big climbs — and we’re all hoping he finds what he’s looking for.

Once Jamie is sober I’ll head back to Albania, the walk, the climbs, the questions. To answer questions is more or less the purpose of the walk. It offers ready answers to simple questions, questions like “what’s over there?” and “what can this body do?” and it yields fragments of answers to more nebulous questions like who do I want to be? how do I want to live? what does goodness look like? what can I give to the world?

The answers, like the questions, come from within and without.

2:21pm May 8th
Tirana, Albania.

Paul sent me a voice message this morning. I was at the dentist, so I’ve only just listened to it.

He wished me well for this years walk and urged me to “take care out there, mate”, told me Bo was dead, a climbing accident.

June 3rd
Theth, Albania.

I was thinking about him all day Saturday — the first day of this years walk — and I’m thinking about him even more this evening. I’m reminded of a call with Mizuki after Bo died. “You’re not allowed to die”, she’d said.

Yesterday morning I came as close as I ever have to dying in the mountains. A long winter of atrophy yet I tried to return to the mountain as though I’d never left. Seven months ago I was about as fit as I’ve ever been, today the mountain humbled me. Sent a light hearted update to the group chat after reaching Theth, not the place to talk about death or near-death. I’m lucky to be whiling the evening away with a gang of German and Dutch hikers.

I’ve felt this before. On a long rocky trail through the outback of Australia, December 2018, running low on water during the hottest summer on record¹, 45°c in the day and I was lucky if temps fell below 30°c in the night. I’d started down that trail with fourteen litres of water, anticipating two days ride before I’d find any more. By the start of the second day I was over half way through my water and barely a third of the distance — at midday I turned back. The rocks and the heat had beaten me. I ran out of water long before making it back to the state highway. A supervisor at one of the mines saw me splayed out at the roadside, tried to persuade me to let him drive me back east to Katherine, I refused, but was glad of the water he offered. A month earlier a family of four died to the heat when their car broke down on a similar road not so far away near Willowra². Less than a week before that, a motorcyclist³ suffered the same fate on the same King River Road that I had just returned along.

In New Zealand, January 2021, I came even closer when I was swept down the Deception River going over Goat Pass.

June 17th
Radomire, Albania, after descending from Mount Korab

In a cafe in Radomire I’m talking to the owner’s son. He’s curious about mountains. Despite living at the base of Albania’s tallest mountain, he’s never climbed it. He asks me why I like climbing mountains. Why take the risk?

I’ve heard that more of late. From shepherd’s up in the mountains; from a large group of Austrian motorcyclists; from nearly everyone I met in Gjakove, and — with renewed urgency — from you lot, since sharing a little more of what being in the mountains can involve.

Sometimes that question takes a more pointed tone, some folk feel compelled to make accusations, call me selfish, naive, tell me things about my ego. I like those accusations more than the questions, they’re more interesting. When they arise I don’t defend myself or try to alter what that person believes about me, that’s not where I want to spend my energy, that’s not the interesting bit. Wandering along in the days that follow I’ll return to the question, walk with it, sit with it, interrogate it.

Why take the risk?
Is it selfish? Yes.
Is that wrong? I don’t think so.

The accusations do get something right — it is the ego that leads me into the mountains, carries me to these summits, but not in the way most people imagine.

I climb mountains not to conquer them, but because they are unconquerable. The lands where we make our homes, the low lying lands, invite us to pretend we are masters over the earth. These pliant lands indulge and enlarge our egos because they yield unto our hands and our machines. We scorch and shape the land, move it and conduct it, divert its rivers, pillage its riches, slaughter its creatures, desecrate and destroy it’s balance. Re-imagining ourselves as gods, we create desolation and call it peace, call it civilisation — all the while the mountain, the high land, is unmoved.

Rivers cut new paths and change course, forests rise and fall and burn, all that is lush will eventually turn to desert, all that is alive must eventually die. But the mountains — which took their shape long ago and will hold their shape long after man and machine cease to rake the earth — will outlive us all. To the mountain we are as the insect is to the forest, the fish to the ocean, the bird to the sky. The mountain reminds us we are small, the price is knowing that we might fall.

June 26th

I’ve listened to that message countless times, I couldn’t believe it the first time through, nor the second. Still it doesn’t feel real. Every now and then I listen to it just to make sure. Time passes and I become convinced that I must have imagined it, that I’ll return to it again and discover I’d hallucinated, or see that there was no message. But each time it’s exactly as I remember it.

Bo went to the mountain, gave it all to the mountain, and still the mountain was unmoved. Bo, who made an impression everywhere he went — so fucking full of life and energy — now just memories. Bouldering, playing board games in Paul’s loft, walking out over the moors. I almost joined he and Paul last year when they were climbing mountains in Italy, but our schedules missed by ten days or so. It’s easy to despair, to see “death not as natural and inevitable but as a cruel, unmerited disaster”⁴, to curse the senselessness of it. Bo — younger than I, more full of energy, a better climber than I’ll ever be, bursting with life and a potential that cried out for purpose — gave all that energy to the mountain, and the mountain offered only oblivion.

So why do we go to the mountain?

Because not going to the mountain, clinging to the low idea of our dominion over the earth, daring to forget how small, how frail, how short-sighted and short-lived we are — that’s the true hubris. On the mountain we are nothing, masters of nothing, not even of ourselves. The power of the mountain deflects every attempt at conquest, and the climber who seeks it will find no lasting satisfaction, for the mountain permits only visitation, repels ownership, elicits all our wonder and fear, tempts then tempers our egos. The mountain has seen more than we ever will⁵, knows well enough to say nothing, yet calls to us still. The mountain is a cathedral whose mass is greater than any congregation of people and to climb it is our prayer. We give our whole being to the mountain and the mountain is just the mountain.

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow — the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
— Mona Simpson, A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs, 2011