Something between parachuting and skiing. You’re suspended between nothingness and nothingness, like when parachuting. But you can stop almost when you want to, like when skiing. If the rope breaks, you die, like in a parachute. But the chances of it breaking are closer to the chances of your falling off a cliff when skiing than of your falling off a parachute when parachuting.
That was just about the worst metaphor I had ever thought of. It came to my mind when doing the thing it describes – single rope technique. Which is as good a demonstration as any of the sort of experience SRT is – it’s scary. It gives you weird thoughts.
Why parachuting? Probably because I had never done it. Why skiing? Because my family happened to be in Austria doing just that while I dangled from a rope somewhere below the mountains in Wales.
But my adventure with SRT started not in Wales, but in England, in my own lovely Oxford (yes, that claim of ownership is almost completely unfounded). It began on a gloomy Saturday afternoon on Wolvercotte Bridge. “Gloomy” being a bit of a euphemism (and “a bit” being a euphemism also), as there was howling wind and a fair amount of rain. But I didn’t really notice. I was too preoccupied with putting on a fiendishly complicated harness and attaching some loathsome caribiners and other such confusing thingamajigs onto it.
Three months and n miles later, time had erased any grasp of single ropes I might have acquired on that Saturday afternoon. But this time I learned more quickly – for caves tend to be more fun than bridges, and contrary to the beliefs of countless soulless teachers, one does learn better while having fun.
“I can see you’re enjoying yourself” – says Tim at the end of my descent. Enjoying myself? Suspended somewhere between amazement and terror, hatred and love, hysterical laughter and tears of relief, swinging to and fro between these emotions on a thirty-metre long rope – yes, I am enjoying myself like hell.
Thanks, Tim, for that reassurance. Nothing makes me enjoy myself more than someone who tells me that I am clearly enjoying myself – and lately people seem to be telling me that quite a lot in situations in which they are clearly both absolutely right and sorely mistaken. Just the day before coming to Wales, my philosophy tutor greeted me with the joyous reassurance of “I can see you are enjoying this logic course very much”. After half the night spent on a ridiculously difficult problem set, followed by that indescribable dawn of new ideas sometime around daybreak, when like sunrays of enlightenment and trills of freshly awoken birds, the only possible solution sprang to mind without warning – yes, I was enjoying the logic course like hell.
Where was I? Ah, above the thirty-metre drop already, clambering out of the cave as fast as possible. Why the rush? We were due to miss our callout – the time we said we would be back, and the time after which those back in the hut could begin to organize a rescue party. Darn, how’d that happen?
If it weren’t that stressful, getting out at such a speed and such levels of adrenaline would have been great fun. As it actually was that stressful, the above sentence is really rather meaningless, and it was great fun nonetheless. At least for me, probably not for the leaders, for whom it really was that stressful.
The sky was so clear, the silence and starriness so intense that I thought for a moment that it would have been a better idea to have spent the day above ground, in the magnificent mountainous rooftops of the caves we had been exploring, below their own ceiling of blue sky. But then there have been many mountains and blue skies in my life, and only one first-ever SRT, only one hell of tangled up enjoyment.
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