Grand vision of a big dreamer

"PAT, would you have a chat with me," I said.

"I would," he replied.

"Name your pub."

"Ah no, we'll go to the pub after - come for a walk."

"Okay."

"A hill walk."

"Eh. ... okay."

"Carrauntoohil."

Silence.

"That's a big hill, Pat."

"Not at all, it's only a bump."

Well it may only be a bump to 39 year old Pat Falvey, a man who has reached the summit of Mount Everest. And it's probably only a bump to the same Cork man who set off yesterday to complete the final two legs of the Seven Summit Challenge, made up of the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. To the rest of us Carrauntoohil is not a bump. It is a magnificent geographical feature to photograph and admire. Not to climb.

But that's the trouble with Pat Falvey. He has this peculiar and passionate belief that every human being on the planet can push their minds and bodies, no matter how under exercised, further than they ever thought possible. "Have a dream, dream big and try," is the maxim that has guided him all his life. So there's no point saying "ah janie Pat, I wouldn't be able for that at all". It's music to his ears. You've just become his latest challenge, his new Everest. He's going to get you to the top.

Carrauntoohil became Falvey's first Everest in 1985. That was the year the business he had built up since he was a teenager crumbled around him. He left school when he was 14 to work in his father's construction company. By his mid 20s he had reached his goal in life, millionaire status. Before he reached 30 he had lost everything.

"I had become one of the largest builders in Munster, building about 200 houses a year. I had over 220 people working for me and I thought I had the Midas touch. I was a bastard, a workaholic and, well, not a very nice person. Money was my God. Then I got involved in about 10 different companies and ending up losing everything," he says.

He describes the day, in May 1985, when Val Deane walked in to his office as "the changing point" in his life. Not that he knew it at the time. "I was sitting there, you could say partly suicidal, just twiddling my thumbs, trying to create work more than anything at that stage. Val walks in, all chirpy and cheerful and says `Pat I'm going hill walking in Kerry with Cork Mountaineering on Sunday - why don't you come with us'. So, just to get rid of him, I said I would, thinking he would forget." A few days later a reluctant Falvey, who had never been hill walking in his life, set off for the Kerry mountains.

It was on the mountains over Mangerton that day that he had his `awakening'. By the time he climbed Carrauntoohil, the following week, he had vowed to put his old life behind him. "I lost three nights sleep thinking of actually climbing Carrauntoohil, maybe the same as yourself now," he says. (Only three?).

"For a week it became my Everest. I was waiting in anticipation, my adrenalin was flowing and I was just completely intrigued by the fact that I was going to climb Ireland's highest mountain. On the day, as we were crossing the ridges heading for Carrauntoohil, I noticed for the first time in my life that I was actually losing the worry of my business. It had become a place where I escaped to within myself. I could hear the stream as it passed by my feet heading for the river, I could see the colours of the grasses and the mosses, then I looked over Killarney and I found its beauty."

Crossing on to the ridge, heading for Carrauntoohil, he made a statement that only he took seriously at the time. "I looked at Val as he came up to me and I said `Val, I'm going to climb Everest one day'. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. But the seed had been sown. I'd found something I could latch on to. I'd set a new goal for myself in something I loved doing."

He pursued his dream, over a remarkable decade long journey, climbing mountains all over the world, until, on May 27th, 1995, he stood atop Everest with Australian James Allen and Englishman Mike Smith. "When we got to the summit the three of us stood there, said nothing to each other, looked 360 degrees right around the world, then put our hands together and said `Yes - we've done it, we're standing on top of the world'.

"I fell to my knee, put my hand in my pocket, took out the Irish tricolour, placed it on my ice axe and pulled the chord tight. I could hear the national anthem ringing in my ears, like I was standing on the podium at the Olympic Games. At that point James stepped forward and took the shot of me and the tricolour on top of the world. There were tears running down my face. We were the three highest men in the world. There was no one over us.

Looking back he credits another two men for helping him scale the 29,028 foot tall Chomolungma, the Tibetan for "goddess mother". Falvey describes Con O Muircheartaigh, who was head of Kerry Mountain Rescue when they met, as his mentor, a "kindred spirit", the man who sent him on the road to making his fantastic dream come true by taking him climbing in the Himalayas for the first time in 1988.

Gerry Donovan, marketing director of BOC Gases, was the man who ensured that a lack of finances wouldn't end the same dream. When he heard Falvey interviewed on the Pat Kenny Show in 1994, after he returned from climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska, he committed the company to sponsoring him for his Everest expedition.

Since then BOC, Walking World Ireland and the National Lottery Beneficiary Fund (in association with the Department of Education Sports Section) have combined to fund Falvey's attempt to become only the 38th member of an elite group of climbers to summit the highest mountains on each of the seven continents.

Since June 1994 he has climbed five of the seven mountains - Mount McKinley (North America), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Everest (Asia), Aconcagua (South America) and Elbrus (Europe). Before the end of March he plans to have completed what he calls his `odyssey' by climbing Mount Vinson in Antarctica, and Australia's Mount Kosciusko, where he will be joined by O Muircheartaigh and two other Kerry friends, Gene Tagney and Mike Shea.

After that it's a lecture tour, a book before Christmas (The Sky's The Limit) and, he hopes, opportunities "to bring people to the places that I've seen, to meet the people I've met.

"I'm a traveller as much as a mountaineer, a person who has an interest in people as distinct from getting to the top of the mountain. I've met beautiful, beautiful people over the years, like the Sherpas in Nepal, the hunters and trappers in Alaska and the people of Tibet. In the next few months I'll spend time with the Aborigine, Dani, Maori and Audson tribes, learning about their cultures and traditions. That's what this is all about, meeting people, spending time with them and learning from them."

He recently took 37 children from a school in Knocknaheeny in Cork to the top of Carrauntoohil and it gave him as much pleasure as anything he has achieved in his life. "I'll never forget the day I brought them up. It was their Everest. They went through floods, they were freezing cold, they were roaring crying, but every one of them pushed each other to get to the top. When we got there they asked me to ring the school on my mobile and tell the head teacher they'd done it. So they rang and the head put it out on the intercom. They had had an achievement, they had climbed their Everest, Carrauntoohil.

"I'd like to do more work with kids, but I'm pragmatic, too, I have to make a living because I also have responsibilities and I can't ignore those responsibilities to provide. I've two children and one of the most exciting points of my life was when I took my 17 year old son to Kilimanjaro. He didn't think he'd make it to the top, but he did and he turned around to me and said, `Dad, you're a weird but I love you'."

His favourite quote? "All men dream equally in the dusty recesses of their minds to wake in the morning to find it was vanity. The dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may enact their dreams with open eyes and make the dreams a reality." A dangerous man, that Pat Falvey. Eyes wide open. Dreaming. Dreaming big. Trying. Succeeding.

WHEN Falvey bound in to the Great Southern Hotel in Killarney, after a day training in the mountains it seemed sensible to advise him that it wasn't mountain climbing weather at all, now that the snow had arrived. "Erra, they're only a few flakes," he said. "But good try."

An hour later we collected Con O Muircheartaigh from the foot of a mountain he had been climbing that day. The `Mountain Man' they call him, not just because he owns a shop of the same name in Dingle, but because he stands 6'4" in his socks and about 7'3" in his climbing boots.

It was after eleven when we arrived in Kate Kearney's Cottage to meet the rest of Con and Pat's gang. They all had that mountainy climbery look about them... except for one man staring gloomily in to his pint in the corner. "Meet Ken Wainwright," said Pat. "It's his first time tomorrow, too." Our eyes met and we suspected the bond just formed between us would never be broken. Con and Pat me and Ken - two entirely different types of kindred spirits.

Ken, a native of Chelsea in London, retired from a life of globetrotting with IBM when he was 40, two and a half years ago. He moved to Killarney, his wife Catherine's home town, where they now have a baby - whose accent Ken says, he can barely understand. He came in search of peace and tranquillity. Then he met Con and Pat and he hasn't had a minute's rest since.

We sat together, cried a little, shared our fears and howled at Pat when, with a grin on his face, he described the ordeal ahead of us as an `expedition'. "Just two pints and I'm off to bed," said Ken. "Good thinking, me too," I said.

The best laid plans and all that. At four in the morning me and Ken found ourselves standing with the gang in the middle of the Black Valley, in sub zero temperatures, toasting the mountains with peach schnapps while Timmy the Brit serenaded us with `Wooden Heart' on his accordion. "I'd like to propose a toast to The Irish Times," said Con. "I bloody wouldn't," I replied, somewhat bitterly, as I stared open mouthed at the snow covered mountains before me.

Bed in the Black Valley Hostel at 5.30 am. Awake at 8.0 am. "Ugh, what a nasty nightmare. Peach schnapps, two hours sleep, a mad Cork man by the name of Pat Falvey and a ginormous mountain to climb," I thought as I readied myself for another 12 hours sleep. With that a mad Cork man by the name of Pat Falvey knocked on the door. "Are you right? We've a mountain to climb."

Ken was waiting outside, in the bitter cold, reminiscing fondly about the rat race he had abandoned for this new life. Con was there, too, but most of the crowd, who had been drinking peach schnapps in the Black Valley just a few hours before and who had promised to accompany us on our climb, failed to appear.

We were driven to, no, abandoned in, Curraghmore by Con's girlfriend, Mary, at 10 am and from there the fun began. Mary could have driven us closer to the mountain, but a locked gate blocked her way. "Are you going to ram it," I asked, eager for us to drive as far as was possible. "Ha, you're not in Dublin now," answered Pat. My life would be in this man's hands for the rest of the day, so it was best not to stir up old Dublin Cork battles.

As she drove away Mary wished me and Ken luck, but she had no idea just how much we needed. We walked for about an hour and then I suggested that I might go back and wait for Mary to return with the jeep. "She's collecting us on the other side of the mountain," said Ken. The music that accompanies the shower scene in Psycho rang through the valleys. There was no turning back. It would be another seven and a half hours before we would see Mary (and her heated jeep) again. Falvey grinned.

"We're over the worst now," Con and Pat said every time me and Ken asked if we were nearly there. They lied, compulsively. We were never over the worst. It got steeper and steeper and steeper. Three and a half hours later the cross on the summit was in sight. "You might not feel good now, but you will next week," said Pat, who was about to conquer his latest Everest by dragging our broken bodies to the top of Ireland. "Agghulmn," answered our lungs.

The experience of reaching the summit would have been, should have been, overwhelming, but for Pat's words of the previous night ringing in our ears. "The question for me was never, ever could I get to the summit, it was whether I had the ability to return safely - therefore every step I took going up, I had to think about each step coming back. He was talking about Everest of course, all 26,000 extra feet of it, but still.

For one minute me and Ken tried to forget our next ordeal and, like Pat on Everest, turned 360 degrees to take in the breathtaking vision before us. The peace, the stillness, the blissful tranquillity, the . . . ring, ring. Falvey's mobile phone. God Almighty Falvey. "How's it going? Yeah, I'm off next week. I fly to Paris first, pick up Thierry Renard, then on to Tierra del Fuego in South America, then on to base camp in Antarctica. Thanks very much - sure I'll see you when I get back. Right. Thanks for ringing. See ya."

Gravity helped me and Ken to run, slide, skate, fall and tumble down the first phase of our descent, but what confronted us next sent Ken off to go to the toilet and me reaching for my first 12 cigarettes of the day. The Devil's Ladder. Not a proper ladder of course, that would be too easy, but as Satanic as you can imagine. Picture a vertical wall, only slightly tilted, of thick ice and rocks. That's the Devil's Ladder.

"Ah Jaysus Pat, you're not serious," we said. With that Con produced the only spare pair of crampons - steel appliances, with lots of steel teeth - that fit on to the soles of your boots and enable you to walk, Spidermanlike, up and down walls of ice. It was Pat and Con's decision. Who would get the crampons? Me and Ken tried to look as pitiful as possible, which, at that stage, came easy.

"As revenge for Cromwell, for Skibereen and for the black and tans, the Sasanach will have to slide down on his arse," declared Con. "Oliver was a bit of a bowsey, Ken, you have to admit," I offered, but he didn't answer, our bond was irretrievably broken, there was only hatred in his eyes now.

"Keep your feet apart, stick your behind up in the air and walk like a duck," said Con, as he attached the crampons to my shoes and a rope around my waist, not noticing that I had been walking like that anyway for the previous three hours.

After half an hour or so of running down an ice covered wall, with Con behind me attached to the other end of my rope, an air of cockiness set in.

"These crampons are brilliant, they make you feel so secuuuuuuure ..." Gadunk.

"Are you alright Mary?"

"Eh. No."

"Where does it hurt?"

"There."

"You won't be wearing a mini-skirt for a while then."

"Not for a bit, no."

Then the magical words `rescue helicopter' came to mind.

"Oh, that leg there could be broken, Con."

"Not at all. Come on."

Onwards and downwards.

After an hour or so we finally reached the bottom of the Devil's Ladder, me on my crampons, a bitter Ken on his bottom. "Nearly there," said Con. "Just two miles to go.

"Two miles?, Two miles?"

After what felt like eight weeks the headlights of Mary's jeep appeared through the fading light in Hag's Glen. "Jeep? Jeep? Jeep? Jeep?," said me and Ken, with tears streaming down our faces. It was over. "Well, did you enjoy that," asked a chirpy Pat. He knew not to grin this time.

A week later the phone rings. "Well, how are you," asks Falvey. "Not the best. I haven't been able to sit on my right side for a week, my knees are banjaxed, my left arm just doesn't work anymore, my right shoulder is ..." I just knew he was grinning.

"We'll do it again then when I get back," he says.

Begone Pat Falvey. Climb your mountains, alone. A pint in Kate Kearne when you get home, maybe. But no more mountains.