Nesting

By Alex Mullarky

***

Have you seen the wild wall

climb the fellside,

border to the clouds

where only the sky-giants' flocks

compete for grazing -

it is a nest, stone by stone

from the riverbed, the quarry

we built it, this is our home.

We do not trespass here

but tread, as we always have

on mossy turf beside sheep.

Shielded by great mountains

above dark hollow lakes,

great cliffs swelling out to the sea -

here we have carved our homes

from the trees, the earth

beneath a grey sky like the birds.

***

Alex Mullarky is a writer from Cumbria, living in Edinburgh by way of Melbourne. She likes to tell stories about adventures with animals and trees, mountains and magic.

False Mountain

By LJ Kessels:

When I think of the word mountain, I think of home. Which is ironic, as I come from the Netherlands, from Limburg in the south, the dangling leg bit, treated by the rest of the country as its forlorn relative, with a funny accent, customs, and catholicism. It is a place of poverty, corruption, melancholy, and exuberance. An exuberance generally described as bourgondisch, in reference to the enjoyment of life, wine and hearty food. The people in Limburg are an alienated people, both from one town to the next, and then together, against ‘The Hollanders’.

In the south of Limburg is the Vaalserberg, a hill just over 300 metres above sea level and the highest point in mainland Netherlands. Vaals sounds like False, or the Dutch word ‘vaal’ meaning less bright or washed out, like a shirt that was washed too many times. There are stories that the hill used to be higher, but that it sank due to mining activities underneath it. In actuality it was first mentioned in 1041, and comes from the latin in Vallis, meaning in the valley. Due to the run of history three countries (Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands) claim part of the Vaalserberg. 

Nevertheless, it was the highest ‘mountain’ in the Netherlands, until this source of pride was taken in 2010 with the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles. The Caribbean island of Saba was incorporated into the Netherlands and with it Mount Scenery , nearly 900m above sea level and the new highest point on Dutch soil.

I only went to the Vaalserberg once, my roots are more towards the ‘armpit’ of the province, in the swampland of The Peel. I grew up in Nederweert-Eind,  a small village, close to the city of Weert. In Dutch, Weert is a piece of low land surrounded by water. During 1944 Nederweert-Eind was the front line of the war, and completely shot to bits. So much so that when my step-grandmother arrived in the village after the war, she described it as the place where the world literally had ended. 

I like that story as it describes what it felt like growing up there: life was flat and bleak, stuck in the cyclical nature that comes with life in the countryside. A life that echoed the seasons: work, eat, sleep, repeat. After Christmas comes Carnival, after Lent comes Easter. The summer ends with a fair. Repeat. For some it is reassuring, for others it gives them the feeling there is no way out. Of never making it to higher ground. 

The first question people ask around there is where are you one of? What family do you belong to? You don’t answer with your surname, as that is only how you are ‘written’, in reference to the time of Napoleon where people had to ‘pick’ a surname. Instead, you provide your family nickname. This can be a name referring back to the old family homestead, an infamous character in a family's history, or (as in my case), just a succession of patriarchs. Like an instant family tree. 

As a kid I told my teacher, I could not wait to be older, have my own place, and be able to make ends meet. I had more ambition than small town life, where everyone knew everyone’s business all of the time. I felt alienated in that place. My first escape attempt came when I decided to move to Amsterdam at 18 and study philosophy. For the daughter of a working class, illiterate single father, this was unheard of. All of a sudden I became a person. I was no longer the daughter of so-and-so, or the little sister of so-and-so. I was taken out of my context, where everyone knew your entire family history by simply knowing what family I belonged to. For everyone I met, I was the single point of reference, and became my own person. This became more clear to me the moment someone had asked me to spell my surname. A strange question when you grew up in a place where nearly every third person has the same surname. Then my second attempt to escape came in 2016, when I boarded a train with two bags and a bike, and moved to Berlin.

Remember my step-grandmother who arrived at the village of my childhood shortly after WWII? A war-torn place in the throws of trying to (re-)build. Another aspect to this story is that she was in her early thirties when she arrived at this place, around the same age I am now. She had met a widower with seven children, and decided to leave the comfort of her family home, to move to a small village, and become a mother to a brood of traumatised children. She would remain there, mainly accompanied by her mentally disabled step-daughter, until she got too old, placed into a care home, and died not long after.

Life goes on, up and down, like the outline of a mountain. Wanting to climb it, also means the risk of falling down. Something that in a flat country, where I might have stayed, rarely happens. As a reminder of my own ambition I have a tattoo of a mountain on my forearm. To give myself a push. For when I’m afraid. To remind me to listen to my own saboteur. To push myself further and not fall down the valley, or sink back into the muddy waters. 

***

LJ Kessels is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. She has a MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and has worked for various (film) festivals, events and whatchamacallits across Europe. Her work has previously been published in Bull & Cross, OF ZOOS, and Stadtsprachen Magazin. 

Podcast: The Adventure Podcast

By Paul Scraton:

There are many ways to have an adventure. For some of us, it means climbing to the top of a mountain or exploring a remote island. For others it means pushing ourselves to our physical and mental limits. For yet others, it means challenging our perspectives or our beliefs through learning and discovery, by searching out the stories of people and places, and sharing them with others. All of these forms of adventure are the subject of The Adventure Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by the filmmaker Matt Pycroft.

Many of the interviews are with people who might fit your preconception of what an “adventurer” is. These are men and women who have done things that are barely imaginable to most of us, people who have travelled to extreme places. They are mountaineers who have summited K2 or crossed Antarctica, people who have climbed trees in the Amazon or trekked the desert. I discovered The Adventure Podcast through the edition featuring Chris Bonington, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. The next I listened to featured Dee Caffari, the first woman to sail solo, non-stop around the world in both directions. These are the type of people whose stories have long fascinated me, precisely because they set out do those very things I would never be able to do myself.

As I listened on, getting deeper into the archive – 62 editions at the time of writing – I saw that Pycroft’s understanding of adventure was as broad as the range of guests he invited to speak to him. In a two-part interview, Sophy Roberts spoke eloquently about how, over the course of six trips and many thousands of miles, she gathered the material to write her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia. I listened to the absolutely fascinating tale of Emma Crone as she tracked down the father and son who were known as the ‘last poachers’ in England – and a reminder that distance, when it comes to adventure and discovery, can be as much a matter of time, place, culture and class as it is miles or kilometres. And I found myself stopping on a walk to scribble down some notes as Michael Turek reflected on how a deep personal connection to place informed his photography, and why photographs are perhaps the closest thing we have to time travel. 

Recent editions of the podcast have included Ed Caesar, a writer of long-form essays that has taken him to the DR Congo, a Russian prison camp and on frequent deep explorations of libraries and archives in search of stories, and Cal Flyn, whose book Islands of the Abandonment led her to all manner of abandoned places around the world and discussion that included the appeal of ruins and the dangers of Ruinenlust, the many conceptions of re-wilding, and why places and their stories speak to us and can really matter. 

What all these editions and conversations have in common is that Matt Pycroft has found conversation partners who have not only done extraordinary things, but people who have thought long and hard about the places they inhabit, whether for a short period or a long while, and who have something truly interesting and thought-provoking to say. And they have found, in Pycroft, an interviewer who is skilled in asking the right questions, who knows when to challenge or discuss, but who also knows – crucially – when to stay quiet and let his guest tell the story at their own pace and the way that works most naturally for them. The result is a podcast that is a form of exploration and discovery in its own right, especially for us – the listeners. Highly recommended. 

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Memories of Elsewhere: Tre Cime di Lavaredo, by Steve Himmer

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Steve Himmer:

There are better hikes. Hikes where you don't wait in a long line of cars and coaches to pay admission. Hikes that don't begin at a trailhead with three terraced levels of parking and tour buses spilling groggy riders by the hundreds. I've spilled from those buses myself in each of the past three years, bringing successive groups of college students to Italy's Dolomites as part of a course.

The trail, reached after a long walk on pavement, remains crowded as it departs the Refugio Auronzo, your last chance for snacks and souvenirs until the next thirty minutes away. It's entirely flat though there are numerous spots at which enthusiasts might veer off to inspect pale rock formations above or green meadows below. There's as much shuffling between oncoming walkers and getting ahead of slow moving clusters as on any Venetian sidewalk (which my students encounter soon after), with the same risk of selfie sticks swung at eye height. Last summer a drone buzzed overhead the whole route and I found myself uncharitably wishing for the invisible pilot to twist an ankle or crash the contraption or both.

There is no reason, in other words, no reason at all, for any person who enjoys hiking or mountains or being able to hear their own thoughts to visit Tre Cime di Lavaredo in summer. I bring my students up other trails in the region, like the exposed, narrow spine designed to cause vertigo at Cinque Torri. But of all the more meditative, more challenging, wilder places I've walked it's Tre Cime I'm thinking of lately, with its trio of spires in pale lunar stone.

That flat, gravel trail hangs on the rim of a valley, offering sustained views toward a far away lake so blue it can't be described without risking cliché. Overhead, set into the faces of the three peaks themselves, are the shadowed mouths of caves left by soldiers who endured the fierce fighting and vertical living of World War I along that contested border between Austria and Italy. The meadows call out for singing — my students reliably belt selections from The Sound of Music — then stretching out among flowers to bathe in high altitude sun and forget, for a while, that the trail a few meters above remains packed with people watching their phones as much as their feet or their world. The longest downward digression reaches a memorial statue to honor the marksmen of the 8th Bersaglieri regiment: a tall angel standing wings folded with one hand pressed to the pommel of his sword and the other holding a wreath as he keeps watch over the towns of the valley below.

After all that, beyond the memorial or at least where its steep path departs from the trail if you choose not to take it, past the rugged Cappella degli Alpini with its steeple low enough to stay out of the wind, you'll arrive at the trail's second chance for food and trinkets, Refugio Lavaredo. The outdoor patio will be crowded and you'll jockey for space at a table — a large group will most likely be scattered — but the polenta and sauerkraut and venison and boar, not to mention the beer, will achieve depths of flavor and satisfaction they never would at sea level with better prices but without the view. All those other day hikers, marvelling in languages from all over the world, are there for the same reasons you are and so what if it's at the same time.

The trail carries on past that second refuge. All told it's a six mile loop that climbs more aggressively after Refugio Lavaredo to reach a plateau with views across the Austrian border. It swings around the far side of the peaks to reclaim the parking lot from the opposite end. But most of those having lunch won't go up, or if they do it will be a short scramble to take in the view and to see what remains of some World War I bunkers before coming back down to return to their coaches the way they arrived.

The way we arrived, I should say, because with my students it's always like that, not enough time to complete the full loop.

What I miss, what I long for right now, are the things that annoy me on that trail: the people, the jostling, the cacophony of human voices and dogs greeting each other, the elbows-in space of the refugio's terrace, and more than anything else the fresh awe of my students each summer through whose eyes that crowded, unwelcoming, less than wild trail and valley and ancient rock face could never grow old. I've watched one of them spring hircine up a steep slope only a day after facing down her fierce fear of heights on another peak. I've seen a sprained ankle risk ruining the day for the group but result instead in a ride back to the coach clinging to the waist of a refugio host straight off the bodice-ripped cover of a romance novel. I've had the privilege and pleasure of introducing that mob scene to new students each year, along with annual guilty grappling with my own conflicted emotions about our contribution to its overcrowding, and I've read what they've written about it.

This year's course is in jeopardy while that region of Italy suffers as badly as any place does, but I daydream of summers and students to come when the world has found its new normal. The Tre Cime di Lavaredo have seen centuries of avalanches and harsh winters and soldiers lost where they can't be recovered, and every hike there, however constrained, is undertaken in the shadow of those many deaths. So the more legs out on the trail walking, the more voices raised and the more elbows bumped while hoisting a beer, the greater the celebration of being there against odds.

***

Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram and Scratch, and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College in the US and the Netherlands.

Parenthesis in Time: Journal entry from a road trip in northern Chile

By James Kelly:

Down in the valley, among the verdure, the landscape seems still, immobilised in time. Giant slopes of sterile rock bear down from above, arid, expectant in an epochal wait for rain. Yet carved between the high walls, the valley floor, with its regular crops of alfalfa and corn, is of a different time. The boulders and pebbles that lie scattered across the riverbed stand at rest, a temporary pause on their journey down from the Andean highlands to the sea. These petrified fragments of an immense telluric memory are testament to the youthful vigour of the mountains that bore them, the wave of rock that surged up from the Pacific Ocean to form the Andes.

Some of the stones, no doubt, have siblings way up there, up where the air is thin and fresh, where the snow-capped volcanoes of Isluga and Guallatiri attract giant storm clouds with their magnetic pull. Some of the rocks would have been present in the immense columns of burning ash and debris thrust skywards from the bowels of the Earth to hang suspended in the air by great updrafts of igneous gas, before collapsing in devastating waves that ripped down the mountain slopes with force enough to bury a small country under the volcanic rubble. 

And it’s there, up in that other world, in the heart of Cerro Anocarire, that the river begins, the same river whose flows have sculpted the valley and its hillsides. It’s there that the source of the water can be found, the water that washes gently over the pebbles, polishing and massaging them, conveying their sediments on towards the ocean, the same water whose minerals now nourish the transience of these sun-kissed plantations, day after day, year after year.

15:25, 9 January 2018. Camarones Valley, Arica and Parinacota Region, Northern Chile.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. His work explores interactions between different timescales, from the human to the geological, and what we can learn from the cosmovisions of other peoples in our relationships with the land. More of his work can be found at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Memories of Elsewhere: Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Sara Bellini: 

The first thing I think about is the rain. The sound of a summer storm beyond the window pane just before going to bed, no other noise in the room. And then the petrichor, the smell of water on the grass slope behind the house the morning after, the earth still dark in the daylight. The first thing I think about when I think about the mountains is heavy rain on a summer night.

I cannot tell exactly when we stopped going to my grandma’s holiday home in the mountains. It must have been sometime before my teens, after my grandpa died, but I can say I went there every summer during my childhood from when I was six months old. My mum’s mum lives down in the valley, half an hour by car, and used to spend the whole summer there when the weather got too warm. My mum and I, and later my little brother, would join her, my grandpa and his sister (and the occasional guests) for a few weeks.

The second thing I think about is the smell of the pine cones burning in the little wood burner in the bathroom, their soothing crackling keeping me company during the shower, the stove’s warmth cosy and earthy. The pine cones and kindling were fetched during trips to the nearby woods, usually by my grandma and her sister-in-law (her partner in crime), both wearing skirts and comfy old-fashioned shoes. 

My grandparents’ holiday home was at the edge of a village on what is called the Plateau of the Sun, right behind Monte Altissimo, the mountain visible from my grandparents’ kitchen. They bought the house when my mum and aunt were in their teens and used it mostly during the warm season. The garage on the side was added later, and the old one on the ground floor was turned into a spacious kitchen/dining room/living room. I remember opening the house for the season, the big heavy key turning into the glass door and behind it a wall of peaceful darkness, heavy with the smell of wood panelling and sofas and cold stone fireplace.

The third thing I think about is the food. Like any Italian woman that had grown up during the war, my grandma’s main concern was that we were all well-fed, and happily fed too. This idea practically translated into all of her signature dishes: homemade lasagne, polenta with mountain cheese, pasta fresca with ceps, risotto... We would get fresh bread from the little stone bakery every day, and ice cream from the gelateria on the main street. And then of course there were the blueberries and mushrooms we picked in the woods, and ice-cold water magically pouring out from the mountain side. My own idea of a mountainscape is located very precisely in those experiences and in those places. Even now whenever I enter a forest my sensorial memory unleashes images of my childhood there: smells of pine trees, wet soil and wild strawberries.

My mum told me that one of the first solid foods I had were grapes. Once when we were on holiday in the mountains and I was about one year old I disappeared and everyone searched the whole house and went as far as the street looking for me. They found me quietly sitting inside a kitchen cupboard enjoying some grapes. I was too little to remember this, but my mum and my grandma have told the story so many times that I consider it a memory. And it’s the same with the many photos of me taken there in my early years: holding my great-uncle’s hand, playing with fresh mushrooms picked by my mum’s cousin, sitting on the dining room table while entertaining the grown-ups.

The fourth thing I think about is the old deck of Trevisane we used for the card games: briscola, scopa, Marianna. It had been handled so many times that the cards were almost soft, their laminated slipperiness worn away by time. We would all play – me, my mum, my grandma, my great-aunt and the regular guests. That’s what we would do on rainy afternoons or after dinner, for hours, chuckling and strategising. We were never bored. I think that’s where we got the habit of playing cards after eating, and even now, in the rare occasions when I see my mum or my grandma, it feels like a deeply familiar thing to do. 

A few years ago my aunt mentioned in passing that my grandma had sold the house in the mountains. My mum had probably forgotten to tell me. My grandma was just too old to be there by herself and all her holiday companions were dead. I hadn’t been there in a decade, but I was utterly shocked at the realisation that the possibility to go there was lost forever. And after the first instinctive shock came a second one when I thought how it must have felt for her to touch every familiar object and have to decide on its fate, to disassemble each room piece by piece, one memory at a time, and then leave the house for good.

When I think about the wooden house in the mountains I think about family and home. When I think about the mountain I think about my grandma.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

The 'Ghost of Tryfan'

by Rob Piercy

By Phil Scraton:

Moments can catch us unaware. Initially seeming simple, unspectacular, they transform to live in memory. It had been a long, warm early Autumn day climbing on Bochlwyd Buttress. Tired from exertion, joyous from achievement, discovering muscles rarely used, the group headed down to the renowned Ogwen Tea Shack. Excited chatter, punctuated by snatches of song and much laughter, echoed around the cwm. Eventually it faded, giving way to the mountain’s voice. The tumbling stream draining from Llyn Bochlwyd flowing on through its fissured moraine to Llyn Ogwen. A solitary raven en route to its cliff eyrie.

Perched on a low boulder, my back to the descending path, I coiled the final rope. I didn’t hear his slow approach. Suddenly he was there, breathing hard but regular, leaning on two sticks. Seeing my startled reaction, he apologised. He was old, unsteady on his feet. Surely he hadn’t traversed the summits? No, he had walked from the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel over the Bwlch Tryfan col. His starting-point holds a special place in mountaineers’ collective consciousness. It was the base where Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay planned their infamous 1953 ascent of Everest. My new companion’s destination was the tea shack from where he would hitch back to the Pen-y-Gwyrd.

I found myself concentrating on his lined, weather-beaten, kindly face. ‘You must have seen some changes in these mountains, especially since the new wave of popularity in hill-walking’. He was surprised by my presumption. ‘I’m a beginner. I started walking in the mountains in my late seventies’. I apologised. His strong accent and slight hesitation revealed Welsh was his first language. ‘I began walking in the mountains when my knees couldn’t take pedalling up steep hills’. I tried to disguise my astonishment.

Looking down from the lip of Cwm Bochlwyd a thin mist had settled in the valley below. I finished coiling the ropes, draping them over my rucksack and across my shoulders. He said I should head down as he would be slow. Not wanting to patronise him I replied that I had plenty of time, that it would be enjoyable to share a yarn. From this point the descent is steep, over smooth and occasionally unstable boulders. We set off, initially in silence, concentrating on placing our feet, his wooden sticks clacking against the rocks. At that time, it was beyond imagination that light weight ‘anti-shock’, ‘carbon’ poles would become part of a multi-million Euro walking industry.

Slowly descending close to the tumbling water, he recounted cycling adventures. He had never been to ‘the Continent’ but had explored the remotest parts of England, Wales and Scotland, often cycling long distances - crude, home-made panniers carrying all necessities for the trip. His stories of time and place were wonderful. Sleeping on the white sands of Scotland’s beaches, under stars in the Pennine Hills, in draughty Welsh mountain huts. Absorbed in his vivid story-telling, I didn’t want our walk to end. Too soon we arrived at the footbridge where Llyn Idwal’s tributary tumbles towards Llyn Ogwen.

My habit is to pause on the bridge, lost in the dance of the water, while bidding a temporary adieu to the high buttresses of mountains I know and love. We parted and I remained awhile imagining that I too might live such a wonderful, full and active life. Eventually I turned my back on one of Snowdonia’s most beautiful views and walked the short distance to the now closed tea shop. The group was sitting patiently on the wall at the end of the path. ‘So sorry I’ve been so long but I came down with the old man’. ‘What man?’ they chorused, their voices in harmony. ‘No-one has come down the path, only you’. I looked beyond the car park to the road. There was no trace.

by Rob Piercy

***

Bochlwyd Buttress is 1,500 feet above sea level, due west of its parent mountain, Tryfan or Tri-faen in Welsh meaning ‘three rocks’ acknowledging three distinct points comprising its summit. Part of the Glyder range it completes the magnificent four mountain horseshoe of Y Garn, Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach. Carved out by glacial movement, the north-facing cwms or corries are marked by vast expanses of shattered rock, majestic buttresses and deep gullies. Its predominant rock-type is rhyolite with occasional flashes of quartz. Unlike its sibling mountains, Tryfan has no softer, non-glacial mountainside. Rising from the Ogwen valley like a shattered tooth it has an imposing presence in all weathers, most majestic in snow and ice fronting a clear blue winter sky.

It stands alone, linked to Glyder Fach by Bwlch Tryfan the col from where my companion had emerged. Ascending the south-west ridge, scrambling over boulders and high scree, below to the west Llyn Bochlwyd nestles in the cwm. There has been a protracted dispute about the mountain’s height. Initially set at 3,010 feet, it was revised in the 1980s to 3,002 feet. Using global positioning, however, its lost eight feet have been reinstated. Height matters, for Tryfan is one of the 14 peaks over 3,000 feet (there is a contested claim for a fifteenth ‘peak’). As so often happens in the great outdoors their traverse within 24 hours has become a classic challenge to mountaineers and fell-runners alike.

The distance is 30 miles with an approximate ascent 13,000 feet – and what goes up must come down! The fine mountaineer and prolific writer, Frank Showell Styles, recalled his successful record attempt. Head down, he had moved at speed, with scant awareness of the stunning views or the rare Arctic plants and wild blueberries skirting the worn, stony paths. Reflecting on his remarkable achievement he felt that moving at speed, inattentive to surroundings he knew intimately, he regretted betraying his deep love of the mountains. A sense of guilt committed him to making the slowest traverse of the peaks, camping on each summit. Fourteen peaks, fourteen days, thirteen nights.

I completed the traverse twice, in 1977 and 1987. Tryfan lies at the heart of the fourteen peaks. Following its descent, so much ground already has passed beneath tired feet, incorporating undulations between summits and two returns to the valleys. For me a stark image, revisited many times on lesser walks, is to pause the rhythm of the strenuous ascent of Pen yr Ole Wen, taking in the completed summits of the Glyder range and, now in the distance, Yr Wyddfa. With six summits remaining, the just-completed Tryfan summit appears to point forward willing you on. Seemingly at touching distance is the blessed trinity of lakes, Bochlwyd, Idwal and Ogwen - where I met my aging companion - now calm in the afternoon sun. It is an overwhelming reflective emotion captured perfectly in Rob Piercy’s wonderful Welsh mountain paintings. Rob, a friend, fellow mountaineer and seer of place. 

***

Tryfan inspires memory and calm. Winter ascent, in firm snow and ice, of Glyder Fach’s Main Gully. On to Tryfan and a challenging descent down its North Ridge. The classic Cneifion Arete along Y Gribin Ridge, Bristly Ridge and down via the mountain’s Heather Terrace. Each place, each experience, unique in the moment and the companionship of others. I have rarely climbed or walked alone. Bivouacking at Llyn Bochlwyd, I shared my shelter with the international guide and wonderful mountaineer John Cunningham. In our sleeping bags we talked long after dark, not about mountains, but the decline of ship-building and the history of socialism in Glasgow, his home town, and Liverpool.

My most memorable moment was a warm, clear, mid-summer’s day with Sean and Jessica, young cousins born a month apart. We set out for the North Ridge, recommended by the fine guidebook writer WA Poucher as ‘one of the most interesting and entertaining scrambles in all Wales’. It is a demanding route from an immediate steep ascent in a wide gully to the ridge. From here the climb is unrelenting, demanding careful foot placement and a quick search for good hand-holds. Sean and Jessica scrambled up the steep rock sections with ease matched by enthusiasm. Momentarily we paused to help others in difficulty on an exposed outcrop. 

We raced on, along the occasionally exposed rocky ridge that sharply defines Tryfan in the minds of mountaineers and sight-seers alike. Passing the ‘cannon’, a remarkable rock cantilever on which many dance, the path arrives at a cliff face. Then a brief but energetic climb to the northernmost summit. Now revealed were the ‘twin peaks’ of Tryfan, two huge rectangular boulders – ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. They provide the mountain with a crown visible from distant peaks and from the valley below, enticing those who summit Tryfan to jump the gap that separates them. Many do. Not us.

As an outlier from the Ogwen horseshoe, yet central to the 14 peaks, Tryfan gives back to its summiteers the ultimate reward. Mountain climbers are asked constantly, ‘Why?’ On that memorable day, the answer was obvious. We sat, leaning against the warm rock that might have been Adam but could well have been Eve. A spectacular view across Anglesey to Holy Island, from where we had travelled that morning, foregrounding the blue of the Irish Sea. Across to the Glyders, the Carneddau, the lowlands beyond Capel Curig – the diverse greens of the forests, the grey mounds of Bethesda’s slate quarries and distant ploughed fields cut through by rivers. So much to take in, so obvious an answer to ‘Why?’ We finished our lunch, took on more water and scrambled down towards Bwlch Tryfan. 

Singing and laughing, Jessica and Sean ran ahead. I paused at the col. It was from here that the old man had appeared as I coiled ropes. I thought of him while we swam in the Llyn. Silently I acknowledged the bivouac site where I had shared one of my last conversations with John before his untimely death. Rejuvenated, we scrambled down in fine voice. Soon, we reached the easy path to the bridge where I had parted company with my ‘ghost of Tryfan’. This time the tea shack was open.

***

Phil Scraton is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University, Belfast. Author and editor of numerous books including Power, Conflict and Criminalisation (2007), The Incarceration of Women (2014) and Hillsborough: The Truth (2016).  Mountaineering, kayaking and, these days, hillwalking underpin the spirit of his work – freedom. p.scraton@qub.ac.uk 

Previously Welsh Artist of the Year, Rob Piercy is a well-known landscape artist. His Gallery is in Porthmadog, Gwynedd. A mountaineer and member of the Alpine Club, he has published The Snowdonia Collection (2009) and Portmeirion (2012). https://www.robpiercy.com/

Diwali in the House of Shio Mgvime

Photo of Shio Mghvime by George Melashvili, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0

By Gurmeet Singh:

Above Mtskheta the air is hot. 

It is not thin. 

Our taxi driver, tells us Batumi—Batumi is really hot. 

At least this is what I think he’s saying. We—my partner and I—do not speak Georgian, and he does not speak English. Many Georgians also speak Russian, and we don’t speak that either. Only the younger people tend to know English. This is what abstract political events look like in real-life: the Soviet-Union falls, so the young people learn English, while their parents speak Russian. 

“Horrorshow” I say, Nadsat being in part, Russian-inspired: “good”.  

“Batumi”, he nods. 

We’re heading to the the Shio Mgvime Monastery, which we’re told is on the left bank of the Mtkvari river, on the southern slope of the Sarkine ridge, but there is no sign of water. 

Shio is honoured as one of the 13 Assyrian “fathers” who came to Georgia in the 6th Century to strengthen Christianity. Under the guidance of John of Zedazel (‘Saint John’), the group lived in Mtskheta, and then on Zedazeni mountain, where they founded a monastery. 

Shio left after four years, and then inhabited a cave on Mount Sarkin. The monastery was founded literally above this cave, and grew over the next several centuries, evolving into six or seven buildings, experiencing growth and decline as the country was invaded, at peace, taken over by Christian powers, Islamic powers, the Soviets, and now after all that, offered as a tourist destination.

Shio is buried in the monastery complex. 

Pathetically, I am feeling nauseous. The roads through the low mountains rise and fall. They are winding, winding. My partner tells me: “you look green”. I close my eyes. My brown skin, so beautifully evened out and darkened by the late Summer heat here, looks green. How pathetic, can’t even take a few winding roads—even a few good winding roads. 

“Batumi”, he says again. “My brother, in Batumi. My brother.” 

“Horrorshow”, I say.

He nods. 

I press my hands against my stomach and close my eyes. Pathetic. 

Motion sickness occurs — they say — when there is a discontinuity between visual and proprioceptive information. Your body expects one kind of motion and experiences another. Your eyes expect gentle slopes, your body experiences long, harsh ones. Your inner-ear and eyes argue. Your brain asks your stomach to regurgitate. 

The advice is to keep your eyes closed. I try to do this but it’s hard to not look out the window. A dry, orange, almost Australian landscape passes by. Australia with hills, and where mountains shimmer in the distance. The outback where greenery occasionally blooms. 

By the side of the road, there are the bones of a cow or buffalo, mostly intact. It gives the place an atmosphere. 

I should not have eaten those jellied peanuts in Mtsketa.  

“Batumi”, he says. “Batumi khorosho”. 

I close my eyes. 

*

What does the world look like to a person like Shio? To someone who believes in God so much that they are willing to leave society and try their luck on a mountain? 

The mountain is dry and seething and the air hot.  

The footprints of animals. The sound of breaking twigs. There is no wind. 

The limestone cliffs surrounding the monastery are bright and pitted with large holes which could have been the caves of other ascetics. Is it hot or cool in them? Stuffy or fresh? Do you sleep in one, bitten by insects, barely able to breathe, and in the morning, emerge into the hot sun and say ‘thank you God’?

TV sound buzzes: taxi drivers are assembled outside the gates of the complex, just waiting, watching Youtube on their phones. 

You walk up a dry, brown path to the buildings. 

Some of them are ruined, their interiors broken, their walls dark and the images of Jesus are faded and fragmented. Some of the buildings do not allow cameras inside. Their frescoes are daunting and huge; God and Jesus together looking down onto the sinful world, the super-ego itself enthroned in red and gold and aquamarine. 

The stones are hard underfoot. There is no matted grass. Dark shrubs, blue sky. 

Does someone like Shio not see ‘mountain’, or ‘cave’, but ‘creation’?

What would make someone spend two years in a cave? 

*

Inside the Church, a few people pray loudly. 

Some touch the glass containing holy relics. 

For at least the third time in Georgia we find a relic which claims to be from the shroud Jesus was wrapped in. 

My partner makes the ‘can you believe it?’ face. She rolls her eyes. 

It just so happens that today is Diwali, the Hindu and Sikh festival. Hindus celebrate the festival to mark Rama and Sita’s homecoming to Ayodhya, after their banishment to the forest. That’s not the whole story of course, there’s a war, a monkey God, a ten-headed demon, a giant who sleeps for years, magic herbs. There’s loads more. 

Sikhs celebrate Diwali, or as it’s known, Bandi Chhor Divas, to mark the release of the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind from prison in the mid-Seventeenth Century. There’s more here too: the Guru helped secure the release of several dozen other political prisoners. 

Both Sikhs and Hindus light divas or candles in celebration. 

The Church in the monastery of Shio Mgvime offers candles to light. 

Having left the Sikh religion some years before, I do not celebrate the festival. But I also do not participate in the kitsch or sentimental renewal or display of faith by lighting a candle ‘just for fun’. I especially do not confuse the various traditions by lighting a candle in the Church to mark an Indian festival. 

And yet, the world offers these possibilities, with traditions overlapping, with meanings reaching over one another, pulling each other inside out, so that if I wanted to, I could join the schoolchildren and pilgrims in lighting a candle in the dark incense-filled Church to honour Shio, and also Rama, or the Guru’s release. 

This is what abstract events look like in real-life: 

A discontinuity between what you see and what you experience. 

*

Outside, large sheets of shade cast by the brick buildings are occupied by Russian tourists. A family, it seems, and they sip water from plastic bottles and sketch the dry, intensely bright landscape around them. 

The limestone cliffs resound with the hum of sunshine. Dark birds fly overhead. 

My What’sapp buzzes: photos mum sends of her lighting candles in the Gurudwara. 

We walk back down the hard stone path to our taxi.

My partner tells me some monks were back there working with power tools. 

Small, violet-tinged pigeons pick up the bread the taxi driver crumbles for them. 

He wipes sweat from his face with a cloth. 

***

Gurmeet Singh is a British writer living and working in Berlin. He writes non-fiction about art, politics and culture, and is also currently working on a novel. He tweets @therealgurmeet.

The Way(s)

By Ashley Moore:

You are a fraud for entering the cathedral without hiking boots. A fraud for arriving without a sweat-stained backpack you haven’t been lugging along northern Spain’s Camino de Santiago for weeks on end. Nevermind that you recently put your own sweat and tears into 110 kilometers of the Peruvian Andes, or that you finished your first fourteener there at Abra Mariano Llamocca pass, or that you do not need a cathedral at the end of the journey to know that these long-term treks are their own type of religion, one that relies on a fanatical belief in your own two feet: no horses, no mopeds, no cheating. You will recognize the all-too-familiar zealotry of the wanderers as your own, but in Santiago you still feel like a day-tripper, a fraud.

You know the stories of The Way secondhand, some of them from the plane ride in. How modern-day pilgrims begin the trek solo only to form impromptu families that are just as quickly dissolved when hikers decide on their own pace, their own personal Caminos. The camaraderie in the communal songs sung as payment for dinners at the low-cost albergues many trekkers overnight in, how these same people may never encounter each other again. The time and space that the walking provides, the transformative, even spiritual, effect of the voyage on religious and non-religious pilgrims alike. You feel the energy pulsing beneath their fluorescent-colored all-weather outdoor gear, the triumph of the body and mind over the weeks of walking, a mixture of joy and sadness that the journey has been completed, but is also at an end, as they make their way to the final stop of the trek: the Cathedral of Santiago of Compostela.

From the outside, the cathedral feels tiredly familiar. There is a part of you, having seen so many of these, that has bored of this mixture of architectural styles, the ages of renovations running into and over each other, the 11th century Romanesque and the 18th century Baroque, the masterfully crafted yet predictable stone reliefs of Biblical scenes adorning nearly every surface of the structure’s façade. Inside, you expect more of the same. 

Maybe it’s the way the light changes as you move out of the sun and into shadows, which are only ruffled by the flicker of dozens of candles and the smoky incense wafting from some unknown source— the nearly two-meter tall, gold-sheened Botafumeiro hanging unused above the altar. Maybe it’s all the tragedy, that emaciated Jesus, limp upon the cross, an especially foreboding skull staring directly at you from beneath his punctured feet. Or perhaps it’s the knowledge that at this very moment, you are looking at the silver case in the underground crypt that holds the bones of St. James. 

Here, deep inside the cathedral, you and the brightly-colored pilgrims are all frauds. This place belongs to the true believers, whose energy seems to puncture and slice through the gloom. Theirs are not the glad smiles of the hikers, but the fervent conviction of bent knees on stone floors, of clasped hands held so tightly against bent heads that it almost seems as if you can see the blood beating through the wrist veins. 

An instinctual urge to join them comes suddenly, unbeckoned, with the speed of a tsunami. A natural disaster that cannot be predicted or charted like a hurricane, one that has no tornado season or government-installed alarms. The kind of thing that comes from a deep upheaval of earth and rock and water producing a wave, 20-meters high, threatening to smash into you and all these years of agnostic exile. 

You stand there too long— not transfixed in awe, but immobilized by the shock. 

You leave the crypt but not the feeling. Near the altar, you find walls covered in washed-out medieval scenes of horses, scallop shells, and eight-sided stars. The faded blue and red hues complement the 3-D geometry of the marble floors. You reach out to touch the cream-colored shells painted onto those walls, the same shells that pilgrims have gathered along the Galician coast for centuries as proof of their completion of The Way. You pull your hand back before you can disturb the art and turn, only to find Christ – dead again on the cross – and another Christ – still dead – in the arms of Mary and his disciples. Amid the gold and the marble and the lacquer that turns his face pallid and frail, Jesus always seems to be already extinguished here. 

You finally begin to come back to yourself. No living God could ever call this place home, his love abandoned by his people, no apologies for the burnt stakes or bombed hills, the altar boys or unwed Oklahoma girls secreted off to abortion clinics in order to be married in white, the “rehabilitation” of same-sex attraction. God was forced out of this place a long time ago. All that remains here are the red robes and starched white shirts of the men who ran him out. Them and their relics: the kneecaps and femurs and severed heads of saints and apostles. All the church’s evidence, stamped and approved by its own authorities. An autohistory on repeat, slowly calcifying under the pressure of time into something that they can call proof. 

You do not want their evidence. You want to join the believers, to feel the conviction of your youth. You want to kneel. It’s an ache, a fundamental need to know the communion with God you once felt in prayer, that otherworldly plane of being you’ve only ever been able to replicate in meditation. You want to believe not just in that God of your youth, but in the only living things in this place: his people. 

Garish gold angels look down on you from the altar. More smoke hovers near the winged pipes of the organ, the Botafumeiro impotently hanging, so heavy and so high. The candles, you notice, are all electric, activated by slipping coins into slots, as if this were an arcade. Behind them, the severed saints’ heads are hidden away in gold-sheened boxes, kept behind intricately-designed bronze bars, in the shadows, off-limits, and, for all you know, long-ago turned to no more than dust in their beautiful encasings. 

You won’t kneel, but you still talk to him, unconsciously, the way you’ve always talked— like old friends, apologizing for the time it’s taken to get back in touch. You tell him it’s been so long that it’s almost like he doesn’t exist. You ask him where he went, why he didn’t call. You probably cuss at him, and then apologize for cussing, and then thank him for forgiving the cussing and the doubt. You tell him you’ve missed him, that it hurts to see him there – it always hurts to see him there – all locked up in the stones they’ve carved him into, bleeding in eternal enameled submission to their image of him. 

You know it’s unlikely and that there may well be a special circle of hell for this kind of thing, but you still ask him to come with you, wherever he is. You want the pilgrims to find him living in the sunsets along the Camino, the same way you thought you saw him in that baby sheep that wouldn’t stop following you outside of Yanama as you made your way up that 5000-meter pass in the Andes, in the few minutes that Salkantay’s peak broke free of the cloud cover at the exact moment you made it to the top. You want him to live in the impromptu harmonies of the pilgrims’ amateur songs, in the urge they have to sit a few days out, to stay in one place for long enough to sing new harmonies and form new families. You want him to be found along all of The Ways.

Outside, you are relieved by the brightness of the sunlight and the glad chaos of the fluorescent-tinged tourism. In the large, flat square that opens out before you, cameras click and selfie sticks abound. You rejoin the wanderers, none of you frauds. You take your own photos of 11th-century doorways so short that they only come to your shoulders and notice that the large, centuries-old stones at your feet seem to be opening out as the waters and winds of time work them over. There, among the gaps, are the modern-day bronze versions of the ancient seashells that have marked the Camino’s path for everyone who’s ever walked this way. At the windows of the cathedral, and even along the walls, young green leaves seem to burst right out of the stone. Maybe someday they will be bushes or trees. You wonder how they managed to sprout there, how deep their roots can go before the marble starts to crack. You wonder how long they will be allowed to grow. 

***

Originally from Oklahoma, Ashley Moore is a writer, editor, and educator based in Bayreuth and Berlin. She is a fiction editor at SAND literary journal and teaches at the University of Bayreuth. Her flash fiction was chosen for Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2018 (selected by Manuel Gonzales), and her other prose can be found in The Rumpus, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and other publications.

PEN & Paper Aeroplanes: Sam Jordison for Narges Mohammadi

PEN & Paper Aeroplanes: Over the next two weeks we are handing over the Elsewhere blog to a series of literary tributes from UK-based writers in solidarity with writers at risk around the World who are supported by English PEN. As they are added, all the tributes will be collected together here. Today is the turn of Sam Jordison for Narges Mohammadi:

In May 2016, the Revolutionary Court of Iran sentenced Narges Mohammadi to 16 years in jail. Charges included being a member of an organisation called “Step by Step to Stop the Death Penalty” and “committing propaganda against the state.” 

One of the main focuses of that propaganda campaign was to stop the state killing juvenile offenders. 

Which is to say, children.

She’s now in the Evin prison alongside Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.  There she sometimes endures solitary confinement. She’s ill. She has a neurological disorder which causes muscular paralysis…  Yet, Evin prison officials denied her access to an neurologist for over a year. It’s partly for that reason that early this year Narges went on hunger strike. Since then, her health has deteriorated further. And it’s all too clear she hasn’t had the help she needs.

There’s a lot more to her story that I’d urge you to look into. And, of course, when you read that story, you’ll want desperately to help. And for Narges, there is something you can do. If you visit the website her friends and supporters have set up, the first thing you will see is a gallery of photos of mountains from around the world. The website explains:

“Foremost, we hope to raise awareness for Narges Mohammadi’s case, so that she is released and free to explore all these mountains and places, along with her family.”

Narges Mohammadi’s hobby used to be mountain climbing. When she was a university student, she was banned from mountaineering because of her political and human rights-related activities. She has been kept from the mountains ever since – but now people are sending her these pictures. I don’t know if she can see them in prison, but there’s still something  about this gesture. The photographs represent beauty and freedom: an alternative world were Narges is able to roam where she wants, enjoy nature on her own terms and feel the wind on her face. These pictures are also touching as individual acts of kindness. The people who have gone to the trouble of sending them are really sending solidarity and hope. 

I’ve tried to take inspiration from those people in what follows. I want to give my own small gift to Narges, which will be a walk on the mountain I love the most.

Actually, it’s more of a hill. It’s called Whitbarrow and it lies on the edge of the Lake District. Its summit is only 705 feet above sea-level – but that summit does glory in the name of Lord’s Seat. 

The rest of the hill, meanwhile, a long, exposed limestone escarpment laid down in the carboniferous period 350 million years ago, is a site of Special Scientific Interest, full of rare habitats, glacial erratics, and unusual rock formations. 

It’s an incredible place – but don’t take it from me. In his book the Outlying Fells of Lakeland, the great bard of fell-walkers Alfred Wainwright describes a walk up Whitbarrow as “the most beautiful in this book; beautiful it is every step of the way. ... All is fair to the eye on Whitbarrow.”

Which is true. But I love it especially, because it’s the hill behind my Mum’s house and I go up there all the time. 

From her front door, I just turn left onto a farm road, and I’m climbing. 

I go through a wooden gate at the top of the lane, and up though a steep field where lambs play in spring, and where, in winter, if it snows, the sledging is second to none.  At the end of the field there’s a style leading into a small wood, carpeted with bright bluebells in April and May, or where in summer, the air is thick and potent with wild garlic in and in late Autumn everything is dark and dripping. 

A short slippy trudge through this wood takes you to three old stone steps up the side of the wall. Then, a steep diagonal path up a bank and on to a stony, muddy track (which is inexplicably marked as a road on some maps, and so, every so often destroys a luckless lost saloon car… )

Leave this path quickly, cutting upwards to the right, through another, field, stonier now and scrubbier. There are thick bramble bushes that deliver sweet and tangy blackberries in early Autumn ---  and scratches for the unwary the rest of the time.

Another gate, a short climb and then it’s just sky and the long stretch of the escarpment. The path cuts through a small declivity, so you don’t get the full view yet, but no matter. The hill top itself is lovely enough, a big empty expanse of brown grass and heather and rocks, punctuated by just a few wind-battered trees and hawthorn and juniper bushes. It’s bleak and stony – but that has its own rugged charm. Not to mention its own unique interest. There’s a limestone pavement to the left of the path. It’s a geographer’s dream of clints and grykes and a special, ancient place… 

And on we go. Don’t get too distracted because the track is generally pretty muddy and there are loose rocks to watch for. Also, gigantic hairy red cows with long horns. They don’t do much more than stand around chewing the cud and looking scenic, but let’s not bump into them…

The path is flat now, riding the top of the outcrop.  After a gentle, but nonetheless elating couple of kilometres, we get to a high dry stone wall, built over a hundred years ago, by unknown hands, one carefully selected rock at a time. It stretches out over the top, as far as the eye can see… After that a small pine copse, before the path leads you past some miniature limestone escarpments that look for all the world like scale models of the hill you’re on… Then take a sharp right for Lord’s seat and the summit…

Which is where the magic really begins. 

Because my mum’s house is so well situated for the hill, and because I’m a father and early mornings no longer hold any fear for me, I’ve quite often made it up there just after sunrise. I ran up there this winter just past on a day so foggy that it felt as if it was actually getting darker as the dawn progressed – until, at least, I got to the last slope towards the cairn at Lord’s Seat. That took me above the mist, and I found myself looking out over splendours suddenly visible under the rising sun. Morecambe Bay and the Kent estuary and the Irish Sea to the south, another temporary sea of rolling fog in the valley below and to the West and beyond that the outlines of the Lake District mountains brightening into sharp focus: Cartmel Fell, the Old Man of Coniston, the Langdale Pikes… The names are evocative enough in themselves. But it’s the feeling you get. The strange elation of mountains… Of their long campaign against time. Of their hugeness in the face of humanity. Of their stillness and silence. These are places we can’t touch, we can’t spoil. I can’t properly verbalise that feeling. But it’s the same excitement that moved the romantic poets to write about sublime nature – and, I’m guessing, which motivated all those people to send in pictures for Narges.

In the early morning there’s an extra selfish pleasure too. If you get there early enough, Lord’s Seat can be yours. You can be king or queen of the mountain. Later on there will be more panting joggers,.  Walkers will enjoy well-earned cups of tea here. There won’t be so many people that it ruins things, and everyone I’ve ever met at the summit has been cheerful. But there’s something special about feeling alone amongst all that beauty…

I enjoy this solitude especially, because I know it will soon end. In fact, most of the time when I’m there, I’m not even really alone. My dog will be with me, tail wagging, making the most of things, sharing and adding to the joy of being there. I also know that when I get back I’ll get to see my family… My Mum’s house has a glass front door leading to the kitchen, and as I approach I generally see my daughter sitting at the table having breakfast --- and that’s better than all the other views in the world. 

And I wish that simple delight for Narges. I wish the day will come soon when she can enjoy the companionable loneliness and freedom of mountains.

As it is, we know what she has to endure. Harder still, she’s a mother of young children and she has been denied the most basic and deepest joy of knowing that the next hello is just a short walk away. 

If I may, I’d like to finish with an extract from a poem she wrote in September 2017 called Three Goodbyes:

Three goodbyes and a separation, like dying three times
When Ali and Kiana were just three and a half years old
I was arrested by the security guards when attacking my home
Kiana had just had an operation and it was only a couple of hours I had come home.
She had a temperature
When the security guards were searching the house, they allowed me to put the kids to bed.
I put Ali on my feet, and rocked him, and patted him
And softly sang him a lullaby
He slept
Kiana was restless. She had a temperature, and was scared.
She’d felt the fear
She’d clung her arms around my neck
And I, as if gradually sinking,
Was separated from them
When I was going down the stairs, leaving the house
Kiana was left crying in her father’s cuddle
She called me back three times
Three times I came back to kiss her…

When Ali and Kiana were eight and a half, I got them ready for school in the morning
And they left
The security guards attacked my home again
This time Ali and Kiana were not home
I picked up their photo from the bookshelf
And kissed them goodbye
And was led to the car
With men who had no mercy
And now in September 2017
I have not seen them in two and a half years
My writing might not be correctly worded
But it has the certainty of feeling – the pain of mothers throughout history
The mothers who take pride in their convictions from one side, and feel the pain of conviction being away their children taken away.

Narges Mohammadi
September 2017, Evin

It’s June 2019 now. It’s time she was allowed to see them. 

***

About Narges Mohammadi: Narges is an Iranian journalist and human rights defender, who is currently detained in prison – the same prison as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – has frequently been kept in solitary confinement, and suffers from a chronic and painful health condition that is not being properly treated.

About Sam Jordison: Sam is an author, journalist and publisher. He is the co-director of the award-winning Galley Beggar Press. He writes about books for The Guardian. He has also written over ten non-fiction books including the best-selling Crap Towns series and a book about Brexit and Trump called Enemies Of The People.