The curse

by Tom Curtis

January 16^th, 2019

My mind is on the ledges near the top of the granite alpine peak. Bedding down for the night with a wary, weary satisfaction from of an ascent of Dermot’s sixth north face. Old hands of tender years, we are sanguine about the clouds billowing up from the Chamonix valley. This is not our first bivouac- not even our first storm - and we slip Goretex covers over our sleeping bags. We joke and play with words, describing our precaution as prophylaxis. Happy that tonight we will lie down head-to-head on the long thin ledge, drink tea from melted snow and slumber as the clouds gradually obliterate the stars.

There was no warning.

Perhaps I had a quizzical thought for the moment when the air buzzed in front of my nose and the ether ionised, before the flash-bang and the kick in the face. Shock and fear and panic all come at once. We sit up and make a futile attempt to save ourselves by flinging the metal rack and axes down the ledge. But there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. I lie face down.

A flash outside lifts my eyes from the flicker of the screen to the dull dark Newcastle skies and the fat drops of rain on the office windowpane.

I won’t cross the Town Moor tonight. Just the thought of being exposed on that familiar urban pasture in this weather creates a pit in my stomach. So I cycle home down the back streets of Gosforth. Hoping the tall houses and trees will be more attractive to the malevolent electrostatics than my hunched figure. Still, I flinch like a cowed dog at the thousand and 1, thousand and 2, thousand and 3 mile-off storm. I don’t swear. My eyes are on the road but my mind…

There is a big shock, a really big shock.

It instantly and involuntarily invokes a childhood memory. A violent and dangerous jolt of mains electricity from the bare wires of an old clock at home. But this is worse.

And the storm begins to play with us. Little shocks are interspersed with those inflicting severe pain. This is not simply fear. I am used to fear. This is fear x helplessness x anticipation.

I have no agency, no tips. no tricks, just cowering impotent dread of the blow I know will come. The shocks are hard, so hard; the next one must surely kill me.

I count to cope. Not all the electrocutions, that would be too many, just the big ones. Four.. five… six….was that eight? Is this what it is like to be tortured? To bear pain upon pain, not knowing what you can endure or what you can survive, when it will stop. But there is no torturer. There is no one to blame or to appease. This is just physics.

“When this fucking storm is over I am going to climb to the top of this FUCKING mountain and I am going to find that that FUCKING Madonna and throw it down the FUCKING hill!”

Dermot responds in soft, composed Irish tones.

“Tom, I don't think this a good time to be cursing Madonnas”

I stop. And in that instance I find comfort. I may have been too proud to pray. But simply not swearing was an admission that more than physics could be at play. The presence of forces that I would not explicitly admit to believing in, but in my terror I would not now dismiss.

Were we struck again? I don't remember, but I think we were. But I was not quite so frightened - I had brought something on to my side. And eventually the storm slunk away to other mountaintops and other victims, and we slept.