I AM sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned coach reading an obituary of John Bachar, the Californian rock-climber famed for his “free soloing” exploits, unroped ascents of cliff faces in the wilder regions of the western American landscape. A fitness fanatic and daredevil who disdained safety measures and who even stopped climbing for a number of years because he felt his sport had lost its dangerous purity, he finally ran out of luck or brilliance last month and fell to his death while free soloing on Dike Ridge, near his Mammoth Lakes home.
Illustrating the obituary is a photograph of the hippieish, athletic Bachar in the 1980s, hanging one-handed from a rock-face above an immensity of hungry-looking granite, a casual expression that could almost be described as a grin playing across his sunburned features. His serene though focused demeanour is similar to that of tightrope walker Philippe Petit in the film Man on Wirewhen, after months of preparation, he comes to his defining moment and, having taken the first steps in his extraordinary balancing act between the Twin Towers, realises that he is good for at least another 45 minutes of dancing (or lying down) on the wire several hundred feet above a growing crowd of disbelieving New York onlookers.
“To me, it is simple: life should be lived on the edge,” Petit states in the film (he’s French, of course). “You have to exercise rebellion . . . Live your life on a tightrope.”
Ah yes, rebellion, tightropes, the purity of danger – it’s an existential triumph, isn’t it? But wait a second, why is this coach slowing down? What’s that jolt? I risk a slight lowering of the newspaper I’m reading, which, I may have omitted to tell you, I have been holding strangely, almost embarrassingly, close to my face. On one side, I see my eldest son smiling knowingly at me and pointing at the window on my other side . . .
What.
Fresh.
Vertical.
Hell.
Is.
This? Peering through a half-closed eye, I find that we have gone round a mountainside bend and that I am now on the sheer-drop side of the coach.
I am looking directly down at the sea some immeasurable distance below, the vista broken only by the splattered remnants of an occasional wrecked car poking out of a jutting ledge. The coach has just hit a hump at the edge of the road and is now, as we manoeuvre around an oncoming car and towed caravan, about two inches from plummeting to oblivion.
The symptoms begin: paralysis, breathlessness, dizziness, fist-clenching, sheets of sweat on face and back. My newspaper falls to the floor, my eyes try to close. Forget about exercising rebellion, I’d be happy to breathe.
Vertigo. Every year I forget that the more interesting the holiday destination the more highs and lows it tends to involve, and that breathtaking landscape can be a painfully literal description. Every year the views get more ambitious as my capacity to look at them declines. My dad, a fellow sufferer, once warned me (while staring queasily down from some castle parapet in Brittany) that it would get worse as I got older, and he was right.
This year we have come to Croatia. It is, unfortunately, a spectacular country. The Dalmatian landscape is a continuous explosion of hurried verticals, with mountains and hundreds of islands flung straight up from the depths, leaving vegetation and human habitations hanging precariously over some of the warmest, clearest sea you could ever wish to swim in.
My symptoms kicked off this year as I was standing beneath Dubrovnik’s ancient city walls, a walk along which was “essential” for every tourist, according to the guidebooks. Feeling recklessly relaxed (but keeping my eyes averted from my destination), I strode into the office and bought a family ticket. Then, outside again, there was a brief delay while my younger son was taken to choose a hat to protect him from the searing heat. This pause was an opportunity for thought, negative thought, and for a glimpse of the distant crowds worming their away up and down the narrow walkways on those high walls.
By the time we had ascended the steps and taken in our first sight of the sweeping panorama below, I was ready to descend again. Which is what I did, very quickly.
This first panic attack set the tone, and brought with it the cumulative side-effect of becoming a control freak. A few days later, on the stunning island of Mljet, we found we had to hire a car as the only way of getting up and out of the isolated cove where we were staying. Our car was a small, bright-yellow convertible, suited to happy gadding about on the narrow mountainous roads, but for days I couldn’t bear the roof to be opened or my wife to drive, as being in charge of our enclosed, snail’s-pace journeys was the only way I could keep visions of falling at bay.
During dream-filled, sleepless nights on Mljet, smoking cigarettes as the dawn came up and watching the fishing boats heading off out of the bay, I would wonder about the deeper meaning of this anxiety about falling and lack of control, but kept coming back to the genetic element of the condition — my sister, like my father and myself, is a sufferer who recently embarrassed her teenage son by lying down on the floor among a crowd of people in a pod of the London Eye, because she couldn’t bear the view.
Never again. Next year I will not forget. I will look back on my memories of height with the fondness of distance, of walks down shifting mountain paths in the Canaries, of bus rides to the highest village in Europe (in Spain’s Alpujarra), of hurtling along Italy’s Amalfi coast while the driver yells gleefully into his mobile phone, of driving over the narrow pass of Mount Brandon in Co Kerry or the terrifyingly diagonal Pont du Normandie.
But now, as everyone (except me) gets out of this Croatian coach to enjoy another spectacular view and a break in a clifftop bar, I am resolved that, next year, I’m going to exercise my existential rebellion by going somewhere flat, with no surprises on the horizon. A nice cycling trip in the Netherlands will do just fine.