Epilogue - Bad Memories
In mid-July 2002 I stood at the precise point where seventeen years earlier Simon Yates had found me on a dark snow-filled night in the Peruvian Andes. At that time I had been an emotionally and physically shattered wreck of a human being. I weighed a little under ninety pounds, was suffering from keto-acidosis and was close to falling into a coma. My body was as near to total exhaustion as it is possible to get without dying. I suspect now, having spoken to a number of doctors, that I probably was dying when Simon found me that night.
Now, all these years later, I was uncomfortably aware of the camera man, the director and the sound man watching expectantly as they pointed a lens and a long furry microphone at me. Simon was standing by my side explaining to the camera what it had been like to find me, the state I was in, and the way I was lying on the rocks.
I seemed to be hearing all this from a distance. I could feel that my heart-rate was increasing rapidly and I was acutely conscious of the surrounding mountains. They seemed to press in on me. I felt out of breath. A hot flush ran through me and I started sweating copiously. I shifted uncomfortably hoping the camera was not picking up on these signs.
I was feeling strangely vulnerable as if about to be attacked. In fact the more I thought about it the more worried I became. I was asked a question and I seemed to be hearing it from a long way away. I could hear the blood pumping in my temples. As I started speaking I was trying furiously not to cry. I had been determined not to give a teary interview and yet now I was being ambushed. I heard myself talking about the moment Simon and Richard came looking for me in the dark, the sight of their head torches and that exquisite moment when I realised the nightmare was over and that the rest of my life had just been given back to me.
I looked down at the ground where I had been found lying face down on the rocks and then glanced up the river bed of chaotic jumbled boulders. How on earth did I get down that in the dark?
The thought seemed to make the feelings of panic stronger. I'm not even sure whether I stopped talking but for a long moment as I looked at the ground I had the feeling of lying there, the uncanny sensation of Simon's hands gripping me by the shoulders and rolling me over and holding me. I almost turned around to see who had touched my shoulders.
It was as if something hallucinogenic had happened to my brain; synapses had crossed, colours, feelings and sensation from some long deep hidden memory had come bursting back with a quite shocking force. Perhaps it lasted a millisecond. It seemed like minutes. Then the moment was gone and I was left feeling completely unnerved.
Simon and I walked back towards where the film crew had reconstructed our original base camp. It looked very familiar. I think Simon must have noticed something. He asked if I was okay. I said, 'No, not really,' and not much more. I wanted to run away. I sat down and tried to calm myself. Externally I appeared quite normal. Inside I was feeling hysterical.
Back in the huge base camp twenty minutes' walk down the valley I began to feel a little better. I went to my tent, poured a shot of whisky into a tin mug, lit a cigarette, and thought. 'Joe, that was a panic attack. Don't worry, it's normal.'
In truth I don't know what it was but it was to happen repeatedly over the next three weeks, perhaps not so strongly, but that may have been because I was bracing myself for the attacks. Telling myself as they came on that it was just my mind playing tricks on me and that it would fade helped.
As we had made the slow four-day walk-in to the camp with a fourteen-strong group comprising the film crew, the safety team, porters and seventy-six donkeys, I hadn't the slightest anxiety about being back in that familiar landscape. In fact it all seemed farcical. Dressing up in '80s style gear and re-enacting the approach with four recalcitrant donkeys and the team doctor disguised as Richard Hawking was a combination of hilarious farce and tedious repetition. We tramped past the camera tripod then scurried around, herding the confused burros back the way they had come so we could do yet another take.
'Start walking for camera when you get to the large patch of lupins.' This cryptic instruction squawked from the radio and we glanced at the distant notch on the ridge where the camera with the big 600mm lens fitted was set up. We then examined the steeply angled walls of the v-shaped valley which we are about to traverse.
The slopes ran thousands of feet down from a jagged rocky ridge line to the thin glinting sinuous lines of a river far below us. The entire hillside was covered in lupins.
When I sighted the snow-covered peaks as we rounded the valley far above the village of Huayllapa I registered only pleasant surprise to see old friends again. The ice-sheathed peaks of Rasac and Yerupaja dominated the head of the valley. My reaction was one of interest rather than foreboding. I had forgotten how beautiful these mountains were and realised with a start that despite twenty years of climbing mountains all over the world the Cordillera Huayhuash was still the most beautiful mountain range I have ever laid my eyes upon. It made me smile.
Then I saw the West face of Siula Grande and felt a tremor of fear. It was bigger and meaner and so much more threatening than I remembered. It made me wonder at the person I had been all those years ago. I must have been bold, ambitious or even a little crazy to have considered such an undertaking. I traced the line of our ascent and watched the snow pluming off the north ridge in the strong high-altitude winds. It scared me. Where had all that drive and passion gone? How had I lost that sense of invincibility, the confidence born of youth, too much testosterone and too little imagination?
As I turned from the face and trudged up the jumbled moraine fields on the glacier I consoled myself with the thought that at least I was here; a little greyer round the temples, only a little wiser, but at least I was here.
The days spent re-enacting for the camera the crawling on the glacier and the moraines were both surreal and disturbing. I knew everything was being filmed so that my face could not be recognised when they cut the film in with action reconstructions filmed with actors in the Alps. Nevertheless it felt irritating to have to go through the unnerving business of dressing up in the same mountaineering clothing, wrapping the yellow foam mat around my right leg and then pretending to crawl and fall and hop as I had done seventeen years earlier. Why couldn't they have just used an actor out here? I kept asking myself.
I felt as if I was about to be attacked from behind at any moment. The feelings became most powerful when I was on the moraines or the glacier and the familiar cirque of mountain ridges dominated my every view. It was a memory that had been seared into my consciousness. Seeing it again all these years later was the trigger that brought back my worst memories and associations. This was the place where I had known I was going to die. Those ridge lines should have been the last thing I would ever see. I should never have come back. It was not cathartic. It was terrifying.
Oddly enough Simon and I hardly spoke to each other about our personal feelings. So much had been written and spoken about the experience it was as if there was no more to be said and therefore no point speaking about it. Nothing would change. In our hearts we knew better than anyone what had happened in this place. It was history and we had dealt with it.
For me the memories came rushing back with such a clarity and startling vividness that I became convinced at times that the last seventeen years had not passed by and I was back in the terrible reality of 1985 trying to crawl down the mountain.
One day I was alone in a narrow sandy gulch running between the moraines and the valley walls. I sat staring at the miles of jumbled rocks with my leg strapped and the clothes and rucksacks donned waiting for the radio call from the film crew perched on a high ridge over a mile away. Again I began to panic. In 1985 I had sat in this precise spot convinced that Simon and Richard were following along behind me. That had been an hallucination, a cocoon of comfort I had hidden in so well that I had believed it completely. It was no weirder than the one that I now seemed to be experiencing seventeen years later.
I kept peering nervously over my shoulder trying to make out the people on the ridge. My heart began racing and I kept sucking in deep nervous breaths. I thought I might burst into tears. Then I spotted the tiny figures huddled around the camera and tried to calm myself. The sense of menace increased when I heard the rattle of rocks tumbling down the valley walls and spurts of dust drifted away on the wind. They were uncomfortably close. I glanced back at the ridge. Come on, come on. I want to get out of here. Another volley of rocks spat down towards me. I jerked away instinctively. Seconds later a feeling of all-consuming panic overwhelmed me. I had to run from the place, had to escape. Just as I began to remove the mat strapped to my leg the radio squawked into life.
'Joe, this is Kevin, do you copy?' I stared at the radio aerial poking from my chest pocket. 'Joe, Joe, do you copy? Are you ready for the take?' 'Kevin, this is Joe. I copy,' I released the transmit button and let out a long sigh of relief.
'Okay, Joe, begin to crawl towards the rocky narrows please. In your own time.' I began to laugh. It had a slightly manic edge. I was not enjoying my return to Peru.
*
Traumatic emotions; feelings of guilt, regret, sadness and terror travel hard-wired neural pathways in a manner that mimics ingrained or archetypal fears. There have been huge advances into the shadows of memory and deep-seated fear. Today scientists are discovering ways to help the brain unlearn fears and inhibitions. Tests on mice and rats have shown that the brain's hormonal reactions to such memories can be inhibited thereby softening the emotions that they evoke. In short they are mastering the means of short-circuiting the very wiring of primal fear in the mind. The source of your worst nightmares, real or imagined terrors, radiates from a dense knot of neurons called the amygdala. With each new traumatic experience, or the reliving of an old one, this 'fear centre' triggers a release of hormones that sear horrifying impressions on your brain. The unbearable becomes unforgettable. The research is aimed at helping victims fend off the ravages of post-traumatic stress disorder. The first human trials with betablocker propranolol have already taken place in America. For the medicine to be effective patients have to take them as soon after the event as possible.
I had always been a little sceptical about the very idea of post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems that everyone gets it nowadays and I was suspicious that it had become a catchall to provide exculpation from the past and a convenient way of suing for compensation. Why were not millions of people paralysed by post-traumatic stress disorders after the first and second world wars, both soldiers and civilians alike who bore witness to the most appalling experiences imaginable on a scale never before encountered? Certainly by the Second World War 'shell-shock' had been recognised as something other than 'lacking moral fibre'. Perhaps the difference then was that people did not live in the ghastly blame and compensation culture that we do today.
So it came as some surprise to be told on my return from Peru that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In all likelihood the memory of the mountains surrounding the moraines and glacier had been so powerfully ingrained that it had brought the fears of 1985 back to me with quite startling lucidity. It was as if it had happened a few days before.
I was told that the effect would soon wear off since I seemed to have dealt so effectively with the traumas of Siula Grande in the intervening seventeen years. I was put on a waiting list for an appointment with a psychotherapist, which was something that I was deeply uncomfortable about. I had always felt a certain disdain, bordering on contempt, for the particularly American reliance on therapy and counselling. The very British 'stiff upper lip' approach to such matters seemed the most effective and most dignified remedy. However, I had to admit to feeling pretty strange on my return so I reluctantly agreed to the appointment.
In the meantime I experienced eight weeks of mild panic attacks, a tendency to cry unexpectedly and a persistent feeling of vulnerability. Then I gave a corporate motivational presentation recounting the 'Void' story and within days the symptoms had disappeared. It took six months before someone rang me about a possible appointment. I declined the offer with a few choice words about the parlous state of the health service and felt relieved that I hadn't been suffering from a serious mental illness.
Telling and retelling the 'Void' story had inadvertently proved to be a good treatment for the condition. Apparently it is common practice for psychotherapists to make a victim recount as vividly as they can the full horrors of their experience. With each telling of their real story it gradually becomes a fiction, becomes someone else's experience, and they can separate themselves from the trauma. In short the hard-wired neural pathways to the amygdala, the fear centre, are blocked or at very least by-passed.
When I went to see one of the first screenings of the drama documentary at a theatre in Soho I was filled with mixed emotions. I was relieved that it was all over and something had at last been made after more than ten years of negotiating movie deals for the rights of the book. At one point it had been sold to a combined production company involving Sally Field and Tom Cruise. It was meant to be a 'star vehicle' for Cruise which caused general hilarity in the climbing world and many jokes about Nicole Kidman playing the part of Simon. I knew at the time that if the film were ever made it would be the usual tripe that the Hollywood studios serve up each year. They were however paying an awful lot of money to make tripe. When the deal fell through and the rights reverted to me I was pleased to hear that a respected drama documentary company, Darlow Smithson, were interested in the rights. With Kevin Macdonald, an Oscar award-winning drama documentary director, on board, I had hopes that maybe a respectable film of the book might be made.
By the time I entered the theatre I had no idea what it was going to be like. Apart from my own personal difficulties in Peru the whole business of film making had proved to be both staggeringly tedious and utterly confusing. I was painfully aware of how easy it would be to make a complete mess filming the book.
One hour and forty minutes later I sat in my seat as the credits rolled feeling pleased and anxious. The film was remarkably faithful to the book and although I am the last person to judge it I felt it was a powerful and emotional production. I was anxious because I had not realised how exposed Simon and I would be until I saw the way we narrated the entire story to camera. Neither of us had ever sought that sort of public exposure and it made for uncomfortable viewing. If hearing a recording of your own voice feels odd, seeing yourself on a big screen is downright disturbing! It is always difficult to make a satisfactory film of a popular book but in this case they seem to have succeeded. That, however, is for readers and viewers to judge. The real experience, of which I had been so powerfully reminded, would always distance Simon and me from any written or celluloid representation.
Oddly enough the physical and emotional trauma experienced in Peru in 1985 did not change my life. It was the success of Touching the Void and my future writing and speaking career that materially changed me. The making of the film will no doubt bring further changes and challenges.
I often wonder what would have happened to my life if we had not had the accident on Siula Grande. A part of me thinks that I would have gone on to climb harder and harder routes taking greater risks each time. Given the toll of friends over the years I'm not confident that I would be alive today. In those days I was a penniless, narrow-minded, anarchic, abrasive and ambitious mountaineer. The accident opened up a whole new world for me. Without it I would never have discovered hidden talents for writing and public speaking. Despite having worked hard I do sometimes wonder whether I just got lucky?
In Peru we had gone to unusual lengths to take the ultimate risk and yet despite all the pain and trauma it now seems a small price to pay for such an inspiring adventure. Isn't memory a wonderful deceiver? Almost losing everything in Peru was a sensation quite as life-enhancing as winning. I seem to have been on a worryingly long winning streak ever since. Where will it all end?
It is a hot sunny day in Sheffield as I struggle to write my seventh book, a novel. I'm trying not to be distracted by a forthcoming fly fishing holiday in Ireland followed by a fourth attempt on the North Face of the Eiger. A busy autumn of speaking engagements and publicity for the release of the film beckons. Fighting for my life on Siula Grande seventeen years ago seems to have turned me into a successful businessman, which is very odd...
Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in?
I'll never know.
- Joe Simpson, July 2003