Alan: Citybanker and climbing freak.
At first sight I didn’t like him very much, his handshake was powerless. Tim from the climbing hall in the «Castle» in London had poked me: «You are looking for colleagues to climb. There’s someone who has time.»
Alan stood at the climbing wall in the gloomy light of the old pumping station. A narrow, pale face, dreamy eyes behind strong spectacle lenses, a delicate body, slightly sloping shoulders. He did not look like a strong climber. I remember hesitating. I lived alone in the city, it was spring and I longed for nature, for rocks, for outdoor climbing. For this I needed a partner. The artificial wall with plastic handles was good for training in winter or on rainy days.
Alan was an American from Boston, a professional banker in the City of London. One of those guys sitting in a suit and tie in front of the screen, staring at the colored curves of stock market prices, typing on the keyboard and making money. «Currency trader,» he later explained to me that he had traded options on foreign currencies. «These are kind of insurance policies against currency losses, nicely put.» He was lucky, just a little hand. He had quit the job and had his mouth full. And also the own account. Now he is serving a few more months in London until he gets British citizenship, then he returns to the States.
We climbed a few routes together in the castle, it went quite well. We exchanged telephone numbers. Alan had any time, like me, a stroke of luck, this coincidence. He also knew his way around the English climbing areas. «Portland», he said, «steep limestone». Steep limestone rocks. That sounded to my ears like Eldorado.
It is still night as I walk through deserted streets to Whitechapel subway station, my backpack with climbing equipment on my back. Then the ride across the city to Kensington is crammed between people who commute to work in silence, reading or sleeping. At dusk I walk through the long High Street, past shops that are still closed. Here and there men or women clean shop windows, someone puts a trash can on the sidewalk. The city is quiet, my footsteps echo on the pavement. It is a strange feeling to set off on a hike through the waking West End of London to climb, unusual and exciting. Alan waits at the car rental, also he with backpack in his typical, somewhat crooked posture. «Hi!
We don’t shake hands. I know, in America one shakes hands only at the first encounter. Alan attaches great importance to not being a typical American.
«I’m the only US citizen who doesn’t own a car,» he says with a narrow smile. «If you live in a big city, you don’t need a car. You can rent one at any time».
He learns French, Italian and Spanish on his own. His mother emigrated as a Jew from France to the USA. Alan’s wife Elizabeth also comes from a Jewish family, but also has Sicilian roots. While we drive through the southern suburbs of London, where the motorcade of rush hour traffic rolls towards us, we exchange a few Italian and French sentences. Alan often meets in the city with students and especially female students from the continent for «language exchange». They talk alternately in their mother tongue. During the three-hour trip to the south coast, he corrects my English, for example the correct use of the tenses.
We separate at breakfast in a motorway service area. I need a coffee and a croissant, Alan fried eggs and bacon, even if I tell him that a heavy breakfast is poison for climbing. Not only culinary, but also political we often disagree later, occasionally we even argue. Alan is a 100% Republican, he despises his democratic president, Bill Clinton at best has the format of a high school teacher. I flirt with my left-wing attitude, revealing myself as an alto-68. He finds the Vietnam war in order in those years, one had to stop the communist advance, just as the US army saved Europe from the Nazis. To challenge him, I tell him that I demonstrated against the dirty war, 1973 also against the support of the USA for the military coup in Chile.
«You Swiss have no idea!»
«Let’s put politics aside, let’s go climbing.»
Our destination is Portland, a small island off the south coast of Weymouth, connected to the mainland by a dam. All around steep cliffs drop down to the sea, once they served as limestone quarries. Many palaces and churches in London are built of Portland limestone, including St Paul’s Cathedral. The blocks were shipped locally, in the quarries convicts from the large prison in the south of the island worked hard. The limestone layers are horizontal, ideal for quarrying and climbing. Since the quarries have been closed down, the prison is the best employer in the area, in many villages we pass houses are «for sale».
We park at the road and walk over the plateau through pastureland, larks flutter high in the air in the wind. Through steep slopes we reach the foot of the rocks on a grassy terrace, high above the surf. «Battleship Edge» is the name of the fantastic place between the rocks and the sea. A white seagull with black wingtips sails into the blue, a few meters above me, watching with interest as I work my way up the vertical cliff with tiny holdes. She laughs at me, tilts into the wind. The sea breathes far. The limestone is yellowish, rough, here and there somewhat brittle, with black, slate-like bands running through it.
The British mountaineering pioneer John Tyndall wrote in 1869: «These cliffs give me sensational risks, there are places as dangerous as anything in the Alps». Here, in Victorian times, the primal rocks of alpinism such as Albert Frederick Mummery or Edward Whymper, the first climber of the Matterhorn, climbed. The bolts reduce the risk today, but the distances are long, so that my twenty-year younger friend has to turn back with soft knees every now and then, which annoys him a bit. As I realize over time, his ambition is considerable.
«Do you think of falling when climbing?» he asks me once.
«Rare, I say. Who hesitates in this vertical world of precarious holds and footholds has already lost the game. «When you traded foreign exchange, you also thought of the profit and not of the loss.»
In the evening we sit at some pints at the bar in the Royal Victoria Lodge Hotel, which is being renovated and smells of oil paint. The waiter is also a climber and also a diver, lifeguard, surfer, speleologist and, by the way, at the end of his A-level, he wants to study computer science. Alan, who has experience with diving, discusses wetsuits with him.
Bed and Breakfast is as much a part of an excursion into the English countryside as praying to the church. The double bed is soft, ruffled, flowery, intended more for a honeymoon couple than for two tough guys. On the ledge of the dummy fireplace there are plastic flowers in a Wedgewood vase, on the walls hang sweet pictures of girls with cute dogs. The shower cubicle is new, but already defective. But sweetly we heroes slumber after our courageous deeds in this museum of bad taste, as we call our pension, «museum of the bad taste».
In the morning I also choose English Breakfast, fried eggs, ham, pork sausages, chips, tomato, toast, butter, jam. Not the right breakfast for athletes, but very British. Let’s go to another hard climbing day.
I am happy after our first trip together. With my new friend I get along very well, although we are so different. Also Alan seems satisfied. Once he went alone to Portland because he couldn’t find a partner, he says on the way back to London. It was a foggy day, he walked along the rocks. Then a young woman appeared out of the fog, also she alone, but had climbing shoes and a harness with her. «An apparition like in a dream,» he says. «A Swiss woman, by the way. We climbed a few routes together. Then she disappeared again in the fog like a supernatural apparition. We didn’t exchange numbers and never met again.»
Almost every week we drive out of the city. To the south, but also to the north, to the Peak District between Sheffield and Manchester. Wonderful rock, golden brown, handy Gritstone, the true Eldorado of climbing in England. On the long journeys we tell each other a lot about our lives. Alan was a forex trader on Wall Street before coming to London to the National Westminster Bank. He has been working in banking for ten years now.
«Ten years is enough,» he says.
«How many billions have you shifted in that time?»
He shrugs his shoulders. «I don’t know.»
He liked the job, a challenge, a game actually. You shouldn’t think about losing, otherwise you can’t sleep anymore. By the way, he seldom lost.
«How much does a banker earn in the city?
Alan hesitates, then he quickly says: «Fifty to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Plus bonuses.»
He had been able to put a lot on his side and received a severance payment. He stopped because he found his colleagues and the boss «fucking assholes». Only money, cars, women and booze in his head. Now he sits down in a church at noon after sports training, listens to organ music and reads a book, mostly from the history of the Middle Ages.
His wife is homesick for Boston, it is difficult, even for Americans, to find a connection in London. Only we climbers, happy people, find friends all over the world.
Alan overtakes a car with a blond girl at the wheel, laughs dreamily. «You know, the English women are more interesting than ours, they have more culture, you can discuss.» There is a problem shining through. His American Sicilian knows above all the language of tears.
«Can she cook?» I ask.
«She does not enter the kitchen. In protest, heronna stood at the stove all her life. That’s how I cook.»
His Elizabeth does not climb. Alan tells of her changing moods, migraines, quarrels, different interests. After a hot Sunday morning spent in the climbing hall, we meet her in Green Park. We sit in the grass in the sun, she takes off her shoes, he strokes her foot with the varnished toenails. She is an attractive woman, small and slim with the black curls of her Sicilian ancestors. They had once visited their relatives on the island, Alan had left a dazzling impression with his Italian, while Elizabeth could no longer communicate in the language of her relatives. She speaks Japanese and lived in Tokyo for several years. Now she’s working in fashion design, and I don’t realize exactly what she’s doing. The two look like happy teenagers in love this Sunday in the park.
«Are you angry with me for seducing your husband to climb?
«No, I’m glad he found a good friend.»
Then she says a sentence that I have to quote in English because it surprised me so much. «You are his hero.»
I come from something like, I am happy about our friendship too. Unfortunately, my time in England ran out soon, but I hope they would visit us in Switzerland.
Once Elizabeth and Alan invite me to their furnished apartment in Kensington. The living room is equipped with thick leather sofas and armchairs. He cooked himself. «He needed the whole day,» says Elizabeth, «I was just assisting.»
I like the food, meatballs in a creamy sauce and chips.
«You’re a fine cook, Alan.»
«He only knows one menu,» laughs Elizabeth. «As a student, he worked in a takeaway and always cooked this one dish.»
I can’t do much more, I assure you, but I dare invite her to a Swiss cheese gratin. It’s a bit dry, but it’s praised. But Elizabeth thinks it’s funny that the photo of our cat and not of my wife is hanging over my desk.
After Alan’s return I fly to the USA to climb with him. He now owns a house and a car, runs a cardboard packaging company with his brother. They patented a machine that produces pleat wrap, an ecological alternative to styrofoam chips. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal.
On the hour-long journey through the confusing network of highways from Boston southbound, Alan steers his car with one hand, with the other he operates his Blackberry, makes business phone calls or sends short messages to customers. In between, he takes a sip of lukewarm coffee from the cup in the ring under the dashboard. He has since become a father. His son is called Enzo, a tribute to his Sicilian relatives. Elizabeth provides style advice for wealthy ladies and suffers from chronic exhaustion. Enzo becomes a small dancer, the proud parents are allowed to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, where he dances a solo part.
Our goal is the Shawangunks, a classical climbing area in the state of New York. A wall of quartz conglomerate and sandstone in the Hudson Valley, a hundred meters high and two and a half kilometers long. Germans from the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, who immigrated to the USA in the 1930s, set up the first routes here. One of them is called «High exposure». It ends with a mighty overhang. Alan leaves the tour to me, not because he didn’t dare, but because he wants to give his old friend a sense of achievement.
Because I am no longer «his hero», our roles have changed. Alan is the strong climber, trains several times a week, has changed his diet to a kind of Stone Age diet, meat, mushrooms, nuts and herbs, I think, at any rate he has become very muscular and climbs confidently through the steep and not always well secured routes of the Shawangunks. In the evening we eat sausages and drink some beer in a German restaurant in New Palz, regardless of the prehistoric dietary regulations. Then we crawl next to the car into the sleeping bags, which would actually be forbidden in the nature reserve.
Sleepless, I ponder our friendship. Hardly anything connects Alan and me except climbing, and yet I make this long journey to meet him and climb a few pitches together. Crazy, actually, an ecological nonsense. What connects us, over such a great geographical and social distance, has remained a mystery to me.
It is a full moon night of mighty silence. A bivouac like in the Alps, no shimmer of light, no moon, only the stars and the strip of the Milky Way. As in another life, so it seems to me.
From Emil Zopfi, «Menschen am Weg. Begegnungen», Rotpunktverlag, Zürich 2018
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
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Climbing in the Shawangunks |
