Just a few hours after our Rockwall Highline adventure, we met up again with our fellow intrepid trekkers for a final meal. There is always a risk that the close camaraderie shared on the hillside dissipates or, heaven forbid, disappears after a break. The risk is that in changing our uniform we also change our personality, reverting to type, retreating back in to the solitary, individual shell that modern society tries to impose on us. Gone is the outgoing, outdoor personality, along with the all-enveloping layers of cold-defying clothing, the huge backpack, the excitement and the sense of shared dangers. In its stead is the buttoned-up, suspicious and defensive character determined not to be taken for a mug.
The doubt didn't last for long. Put a group of individual hikers from across the world together at the same table and pretty soon they are sharing stories about their adventures. A route walked here, a distance there, the weather conditions faced and the problems overcome.
Part of our discussion centred on the weather conditions when we were close to the highest point of our endeavour. Traversing on an open hillside in the midst of a blizzard at about seven and a half thousand feet, with boots slipping and sliding on crusty ice, strung out along the flank of a col thinking one wrong step and you are gone, it was easy to think we were out of our depth. But we never did think that and the reason was that we had a wonderful guide who, confident in herself, her knowledge, skill and experience of high mountain hiking, believed in us and our capacity to meet the challenge and quietly imbued us with the same self-belief.
Crossing the col I remember looking up in to the teeth of the blizzard and asking what on earth was I doing there? Why, at my age, or at any age for that matter, put yourself in this position? Part of it is the excitement, the little thrill that you have when you realise you might just have taken on more than you expected and will be called upon to dig deep to find untapped sources of strength and courage. Sitting in front of my computer at home planning the trip there were no bears, snow storms, ice-crusted narrow pathways or five hundred-foot drops. So, excitement yes, but it is also about stepping out of your comfort zone to challenge yourself. While I admit to a frisson of fear at times during our adventure, particularly during the last two days when winter weather set in and the temperature dropped to about minus five, nonetheless on the col I wanted to raise my arms and shout out to the world 'I AM ALIVE'.
Of course I didn't. To have done so I would have had to let go of my walking poles and I was too scared to do that. Nonetheless, that sense of exhilaration in the face of adversity is addictive and is probably what keeps me seeking out new and ever-more challenging adventures as I race towards my seventies. My mother used to say to me, even into her eighties and nineties, that when she looked in the mirror it was a sixteen year-old girl who looked back not an old lady. I never fully appreciated what she meant. I do now!
In his villanelle, 'Do not go gentle into that Good Night', Dylan Thomas captures the essence of making a mark on life in your later years:
Do not go gentle in to that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
When my time comes, I hope my family and friends will remember that I raged and did not go gently but to fight the end.