Coming Ashore Page 7

  Probably the circumstance most responsible for my sexual squeamishness was that I was an only child who was close to my dad. I didn’t have childhood friends or siblings who could initiate me into what post-pubertal behaviour was supposed to be. I had no idea what was normal. My father yelled at me only once in my life and that was when he caught me, at age thirteen, slightly flirting with a boy at church. He said he was ashamed and humiliated by my behaviour and that I was not a girl he wanted for a daughter. I never forgot it and flirting inevitably elicited dread and anxiety thereafter.

  Shame and humiliation are scars for the mind. They lighten and fade with time, but they are always a part of you. Whenever you look at one of your scars, you remember exactly where you got it. You may forgive yourself, but shame will not be erased.

  Little did I know I had nothing to worry about, since we couldn’t find anywhere to stay. We were caught in the worst traffic jam in English history. They were now turning Europeans away at the Channel, every pump was out of petrol and no reserves could be delivered on the stymied roads. The M40 looked like an auto-wrecker’s field where people had willy-nilly abandoned their overheated and gas-depleted investiture-seeking vehicles. I had no idea at the time, but it would take us weeks to get back to ­Oxford. Helicopters were dropping off food and the police were turning everyone back where they could. Potable water was a ­crisis, and the police were on the radios, asking homeowners to take in stranded wayfarers.

  I couldn’t imagine what it took for Clive not to say, “I told you so.” I know I could never have managed to keep my mouth shut. We, unlike most people, had made it as far as Snowdonia in the depths of the night. The police turned us back there. No one could go on to Caernarfon.

  We walked on and on in the dark in search of shelter. Now I knew how Mary felt on Christmas Eve. We approached nine farms to ask for lodging but all were full. We’d walked for miles into the depth of the forest. We felt our way along in the gloom and heard a dog bark. Clive said it didn’t sound like a coyote or wolf and guessed there was a farm in that direction. We followed the barking until we came upon a tiny farmhouse. The woman said she had no room. As we walked away, she yelled something at our backs, in some foreign language that sounded as though it had no vowels. I recognized the words “Charlie’s investiture.” As we felt our way down the dark path, she began squawking and pointing to the barn. Clive made the sign for sleep by resting his head on his two folded hands. She nodded, pointing more insistently to the barn. She yelled some further directions, which we didn’t understand. I was so hungry, cold and grateful; all I could do was smile at her. After entering the barn on my legs that shook from fatigue, I grabbed a blanket off the closest horse, figuring he couldn’t grab it back, covered myself with straw and was “spark out,” as they say in England, in seconds.

  This was the closest I’ve ever come to communing with nature. I was a city girl who did sports in arenas. I had never been camping. My mother said people who camped were loopy. Her view was why save a whole lifetime for a house so you can sleep outside on the weekend? And the camp food, that dried stuff that grows like a man-eating plant when you add water, was, according to her, out-and-out scary. She said it was bad enough to cook on a stove, let alone an open fire. My father had been in complete agreement. After all, you could get poison ivy and as he said, “Thank the good Lord for campers. How else would druggists sell calamine lotion, bug spray or antibiotic ointment?”

  I was having my first real outdoor adventure. Needless to say, I was shocked when bleating awakened me. I opened my eyes and there, in the next stall to mine, was a sheep looking down on me. All I could see was his head sticking through the wooden slats. I swear he smiled at me. I yelled over to Clive to catch the grin and he said he’d seen it. It was a real smile. I said no one will believe it back at the Bear, our local pub, but Clive said he’d back me up.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked.

  “Great. I hope I didn’t give birth to the Christ child in this manger.”

  “Magi are forever late,” he said.

  “Bloody foreigners,” I said as I brushed straw out from my hair. By now I could do a fair Oxford accent.

  The farmer, who hadn’t even seen us the previous evening, rang a bell as he swung the barn door open and grumbled in some foreign language, which the sheep seemed to understand. Clive said it was Welsh for breakfast. All the sheep stirred and ­bleated. After propping the door open with a pitchfork, the ­farmer walked away, carrying a big pail of feed. The sunlight streamed in the door, forming beams that shot through the hay like lightning. The scene reminded me of the cover of my robin’s-egg-blue childhood Baltimore Catechism with an illustration of the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, perched in the white clouds bursting with beatific sunbeams from the heavens. The sun shone on the sheep’s wool, making the lambs warm to the touch. Petting their wool was just like cuddling a stuffed animal, and when you snuggled close to them, you could feel their hearts beating and be warmed by their breath.

  Since we’d arrived on a moonless night after wandering in a forest, I was not sure exactly where we were geographically when I woke up. We were somewhere in Snowdonia, Northern Wales’s huge provincial park with the Cambrian mountain range as its backbone. Tiny, ancient towns dotted the landscape and cultivated farms were tucked in between the mountains. The whole area was criss-crossed with trees and fields that made me realize that the colour green had infinite variations. Streams meandered through the forests and were so clear you could see the forest perfectly reflected in them.

  I walked out the door, and there before me lay a Welsh paradise. The sheep were filing out of the barn and the sheep dogs were barking, running around them in circles, nipping at rams that dared to stray in another direction. Wow, a dog with a job. That sure beat my lazy dachshund, Willie, who slept in all day and only woke up to growl at the mailman; at dusk he would bark at my mother until she put down the top on the convertible and took him for a ride.

  Opening the door of that barn was a magnificent moment for me. Suddenly I knew what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he said, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It was the first time I had seen God as separate from organized religion.

  The wildflowers were drooping with perspiration, exhausted after a wild night. As I continued to walk away from the barn, I saw the wheat was as high as the little stone farmhouse with its milk-paint-blue Dutch door. I cut through a field of purple lavender. The smell was so strong and intoxicating my eyes watered.

  Clive, forever the Renaissance man, acted as though he was born there in the folds of Snowdonia. He had the sense to go right into the hen house and search for eggs. Some of the eggs were ­actually warm. He went up to the farmhouse and handed them over the top of the Dutch door. Inside, the peat fire had the warmest and most inviting smell, like incense from the earth.

  We wound up staying in their manger for over two weeks, maybe more, since we were trapped in the mountains while the investiture traffic was clearing. The owners, Hiral and Aarowen, wouldn’t take any money for our stay and refused the offer of work, although we did as much as we could. They danced in a small circle to indicate we’d entertained them for our keep.

  We decided that since the traffic was still not cleared we might as well do some sightseeing in the area. As I packed, which meant putting an anorak and a toothbrush in my bag, I told Clive that I wanted to go mountain climbing. Although he agreed that mountaineering sounded perfect, he was worried that we didn’t have the right equipment. Clive gestured his concern to Hiral by pointing to his shoes and then mimicked falling down a mountain. Hiral scoffed at Clive’s trepidation by waving his hand and shaking his head. He drew out a map and indicated that Tryfan was the spot to go.

  Thus began our trek through the forests. I remembered reading Heidi when I was a child and longing to experience the mountains. I had always loved climbing. I think it was genetic. My mother h
ad made the mistake of reading Jack and the Beanstalk to me when I was three, and the following day I climbed to the top of our cherry tree and wouldn’t or couldn’t come down. My parents had to call the fire department. (My mother said if they could come for a cat, they could come for me.) The next day I did the same thing again, and my parents had to put stilts around the trees to keep me off them. They got me a climbing gym at age four. When I did a 360-degree flip over the top of the swing and got a concussion, I had to stay in the hospital until I knew my name. When I said, “Eisenhower,” they said, “Close enough” and sent me home.

  What do you do when you like climbing, but you live in a city with no mountains? You become a pole vaulter like my grandfather, a high hurdler like my father or a high jumper like me. I had expressed a desire to climb mountains for as long as I could remember. I even dressed up as a Billy Goat Gruff for Halloween. However, my mother, a lover of the level surface, nixed the idea, saying if God had wanted us to climb mountains, he would have given us cloven hooves.

  As Clive and I began climbing Mount Tryfan, we came across varying patches of blooming phlox growing over the stones; the green mountain side was flecked with white and gold, purple and blue in a careless smattering of wildflower glory. We stopped and ate our cheese and bread that the farmers had packed for us and sat down in a valley in a crevice of the mountain to eat it in the sunlight. The ground was warm and there was no wind there. A creek rolled through the valley, which Clive said was drinkable since it was mountain run-off for the spring. We lay on the ground and stuck our heads in and lapped up the freezing water. As I threw the water on my face and then lay fully sated, sinking in the toasty moss, I said, “You know, Clive old boy, I won’t forget this moment. If this stream was like memory and over the years it dried up, I could still dig through the silt and find this one moment.”

  >> <<<br />
  After seven hours of hiking, we were still ascending. The wind had gradually picked up and was now circling near the peak, making a sound like a Jew’s harp. Either the wind was drying my throat, or maybe it was the thinning altitude, but I was parched.

  We had reached the cairn, the pile of stones that indicated you were almost to the top of the mountain. The temperature had dropped enough that there was some snow and the steepness had increased. Instead of grass, there was only shale and stones to grasp. It was now so steep we had to go on all fours and find ­protruding stones or stumps to use as handholds. One mountain climber scaled the shale beside us. He was the National-Trust-­English-tramper type, equipped with thick mountain climbing gloves with traction grip, hat, boots, anorak and a detailed summit map hanging in a plastic sleeve around his neck. No one had told me you needed a map or that it was colder at the top and you had to expect incredible wind pressure. Clive said we needed to go back as we weren’t dressed for the summit or for the scramble needed to get there. He also pointed out it was colder in Snowdonia compared to Oxford. I said we were almost to the top. He pointed out that ­summits were deceiving. The narrowness makes the top seem closer.

  He assured me it was much farther than I thought. “Summits narrow for a long while. Everyone thinks it’s over the next crag but it isn’t.” He said we had hours left. But, Christ, I’d come this far and I knew we could make it. He said we had to think of coming down, not getting lost in the maze of valleys and turnoffs, and it all had to be done before dark.

  What a worrywart. I mean, really, coming down was no big deal. It wouldn’t take any energy at all.

  He screamed — to be fair to him you had to scream over the cacophony of the wind currents — “You know the problem with you? You make rashness sound like adventure. There is a fine line between the two. These winds are unusually high and the direction keeps changing. We need to return now.”

  “So? Don’t come,” I said.

  “Please don’t go from ballsy to batty, Cathy. You don’t have to be the reincarnation of the American spirit. It can be tiresome.”

  “Go back,” I said.

  “Well, then I’d be a cad, wouldn’t I?”

  “No, we would just be two people who made different decisions.”

  “This is just one of those reckless moments of youth that is in truth very treacherous.”

  “You’re getting into some British snit about this and I’m not interested.”

  His face now looked really angry for the first time. I continued in a less provocative manner. “This needn’t be a point of national character. I am taking the risk to go to the summit; you have ­assessed the risk and don’t feel comfortable with it. End of story.”

  “I have climbed the Matterhorn. I know the danger signals. I will not blindly follow an inexperienced climber wearing sandals into high winds with no ropes. This is my final warning or you will go ahead at your own peril.”

  The wind was howling around us now and I was really cold since I had stopped climbing.

  “Everyone has gone back due to wind,” he pointed out.

  “Join them,” I said and turned around and continued climbing.

  “Just one minute, Cathy,” Clive screamed. He had to scream since the wind was now circling like a hungry wolf and screeching in protest as though I’d stolen her pup. He was holding onto a rock to stay upright and said, “You are making this all very difficult.”

  “What is so difficult? I never asked you to come.”

  “Why do you think I came on this star-crossed venture?”

  How the hell did I know why he came? “Look, Lord Whimsy, I am not playing 20 Questions with you on the top of a windy cliff.”

  He screamed across a large fissure from about eight feet below me but the wind was suddenly wailing so loud that I couldn’t hear what he said. His arms were gesticulating wildly and he was going on and on. I indicated by holding my ears and shrugging that I couldn’t hear him. I turned around and began climbing up.

  I didn’t look back until I got to the top hours later. The distance to the peak of the mountain was exactly as deceivingly far away as Clive had suggested. When I reached the summit, I looked down at my hands and was surprised to see them bleeding onto the crumbled shale. I guess I’d lost feeling in them. I looked around. No one else was there. I was puzzled since the pinnacle wasn’t that large. I should have seen the mountain climber in the wool hat since he hadn’t passed me coming down. I was also inexplicably shocked that Clive had left me. I was mistakenly lulled into ­believing the British gentleman training would supersede all else. In a way I admired that he left — after all, he said he would. For the first time, I began to worry about my safety because I knew that it would have had to be truly hazardous for him to bail.

  The peak of the mountain was covered with large boulders that were hard to crawl over, including twin monoliths named Adam and Eve. Clearly, the monolith had at one point split and now there were two slabs separated by a gap. Hiral’s map had a sidebar that indicated that it was a tradition to jump from one to the other. (I now understood what Hiral had tried to indicate by jumping from his couch to his chair.) You had to hurtle only about four or five feet, not an outrageous leap, from Adam to Eve, but the consequences of overshooting it would be disastrous, as there was a huge drop off on the other side. Intending to jump it, I stood up but was suddenly knocked flat by a gust of wind — I felt my lungs had momentarily become concave. I immediately understood the adjective winded. I had to lay flat, face-down on the stone, since the wind was so strong I didn’t dare risk a gust catapulting me off the edge. Listening to the tempest above and below as it blew between the boulders, I hung my head over the side and looked down the mountain, hoping, to no avail, to see Clive. He’d been right, of course. It was hellishly cold. And I was sorry that after getting all the way to the top, it was too dangerous to make the leap from Adam to Eve.

  CHAPTER 7

  a shrew in shrewsbury

  We use the word love for the most amazing variety of relationsh
ips, ranging from what we feel for our mothers to what we feel for ­someone we beat up in a bordello, or its many equivalents.

  — Aldous Huxley as quoted by Harold Bloom

  I descended as fast as I could, having no idea that it was harder getting down than going up. Whoever tells you that? I thought it would be like skiing, where it takes hours to walk up but minutes to ski down. I was unsure about the footing. Finally, I realized I had to back down from the summit with my stomach scraping against the rock. As I undulated down, I heard a rhythmic clacking on the rocks below, the sound of large feet clomping. I knew there were no humans, so I was terrified to look below me. When I slithered farther, I saw it was a mountain goat followed by dozens more. The billy in the lead, with his long white hair and curved horns, looked at me with that kind of look that only males can have, which translated to, “So you thought you could climb the mountain and now you have to slither down. You think you’re the first woman we’ve seen do this?”

  It actually took longer to descend than to ascend. On the way up, you can see what to grab to pull you up, but it’s not so easy in the reverse. I felt around for firm rocks to hold me but sometimes, before I put all my weight on one, I’d hear the scree come loose, then it would plunge down the mountain, pinging on some crevice as my head would if I’d lost my footing. The big mistake, well I guess there were a few, was looking down. I hadn’t done that on the climb up. I had been too focused on finding the right rock to grab to pull myself up. Here I was wearing silly sandals with no tread, jeans and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt. I put my bandanna on, hoping to preserve some of the heat in my head.