8) Remember the first turn

8) Remember the first turn

Switzerland 1969 sees me walking for the first time in mountainous terrain. Not with Chantal but with another girlfriend, Evelyn. My life with Chantal is still years away. After the very first day of walking I can hardly breath because of severe chest-pain.

I’m bred on the flatlands of Holland. A hill of three-hundred metres is called a mountain here. Switzerland offers the uninitiated nightmares. Every time we reach a slope that seems to disappear in an abyss I hold my breath. That fear hits me so often that it causes muscle pain in the end. I won’t admit it but I suffer from fear of heights.

On black and white photo’s you can see Evelyn and me roped together crossing a glacier somewhere in either Switzerland or France. Pickax sunk firmly in the snow, crampons under our boots, almost hugging the treacherous snow you can see us climb to a top.

Later still it is Annet with whom I go mountain walking. The fear of heights is still with me. I remember vividly that sinking feeling once in France as I see in the far distance our route carved into a mountain. A thin line incredible high above the valley. A path without any safety measures.

From that period few pictures remain. I find a picture of a temporary settlement of tents. Our tent farthest away. The tent into which Annet sees a viper slithering. Had she not seen him we would have gone to bed with the animal between our improvised pillows.

What will my girls think when they see Evelyn on a glacier or Annet sitting on a rock? They won’t recognize me as the pictures show me with long hair. I have hair in the first place! I have a drooping moustache and a tuft of hair under my lower lip. Later with Annet there appears an enormous bush of hair both on top of my head and among my mouth. Your face has to be hairy in the 60s and 70s. It shows you are left-wing, anti-establishment and probably a user of soft drugs.

Of course I’m glad to have these pictures. But the girls cannot possibly appreciate them the way I do. Forgetting for a minute the political and cultural context, I see the investment, the choices I have made.

Traversing a glacier for the first time can be the beginning of serious mountaineering. I learn rope tricks with which to help someone out of a crevasse, techniques to carry a friend with a broken leg and how to use your ice-axe as a brake. On the first mountain-pictures I am still on the threshold for more ambitious expeditions to  ‘four-thousanders’ as the beginning of the serious mountain-range is called. 
But one day in the French Alps we reach a mountain-hut near the summit of a mountain. We have walked all day, rain has found us and we are frozen when we enter the hut. There is already a company of mountaineers   when we arrive. French tour-guides and their clients, a boisterous group. Two things stand out immediately. Their gear is new and expensive. Bulky down-coats in blistering colours, the newest fashion in trousers and bodywarmers but it is not their gear that sets us apart. We are still walking in cotton T-shirts, baggy trousers or jeans cut at the knee. It is the way they look at us, their condescending stare that makes me realize mountain climbers look down upon other people. I choose the mountains not higher than three kilometres as the limit of my aspiration.

Even if it does limit your scope of climbing, basically you choose walking over climbing, it opens a still dazzling array of walking possibilities. But of course helping Evelyn out of a crevasse I don’t realize I jot out the Himalayas.

With Annet in the seventies I start to explore the Grande Randonnées of France. Almost no picture survives this period. Other people make pictures of us and sometime send them to us. No color-slides fortunately. Peace fills my heart as I don’t have to make choices what to keep and what to destroy.