Summit

Christine Curtis

"Final rucksack check then?"

There we were on holiday together for the first time. Our survival provisions were laid out on the Youth Hostel table we had just cleared of the breakfast remains of twenty three hearty young appetites all raring to master Snowdonia's heights. Well, twenty-two were raring.

Seventeen. Little more than a toddler in my father's eyes. "Yes, you can go if. . . if... if. . So we have just enjoyed a second chaste night in single gender dormitories, my booking card suitably stamped as proof of our nocturnal separation. I smile at the innocence of my past plotting.

"Yes, Dad, of course Dad."

But there was always "three o'clock in the afternoon" hiding in my thoughts. What had happened to my imagined tryst by a bubbling stream, or a bracken bower between the secrecy of trees? I had reckoned without the spectre of BP who was proving to be a more effective chaperone than my father. "BP?" 1 hear you ask. Baden Powell of course whose initials had become the constant "fifteen miles is a good mileage for the average fit walker" reprimand of every step of the previous two days. But I was in love with the Art student who had let Chagall' s angelic lovers fly for me, copied out Dali's erotic poems I did not understand, and he could do no wrong. Could he? "There. All packed."

He viewed the duo of BP' s "manageable loads of forty pounds" with the satisfaction of the ex-scout who had carried them to Woolworth's scales to find mine was a little underweight. So;

"You can carry that extra jumper after all," was my reward. Today my size ten hips were already understanding why the rucksack would be only too glad not to bear the weight alone, when I was given the word to lift it on to my shoulders.

"What's that?" he queried. I mumbled casually, busying my face with stiff leather buckles on outside pockets.

"Orange squash... in case..."

"You won't need that."

"But I get thirsty," was my plea.

"You know what BP said don't you?"

But I suspected I would soon be told.

"You can always suck a pebble. Never carry extra weight."

I almost admitted to myself, that for the first time I was tempted to question whether every word BP had uttered might be gospel truth, but I remained a silent acolyte following his advice of, "drink it now, if you must."

In silence I fantasized encountering BP on a dark night, and doing something very unpleasant to his woggle, but offered nothing to break the spell of our first expedition.

"Now the route."

He opened up the map. Again I was conducted over the neat contours which I had come to know belied the ups and downs which were testing my legs in their "if you have little money ex-army hobnailed boots represent reliable footwear for the mountain walker" recommended by you know who. As I laced them over the three pairs of socks which tried to make them fit my feet, I wondered if my stick insect legs would make it today.

"Pyg track. Snowdon summit...drop down the South Ridge, then the summit of Arran. What a day this will be!"

Words were easy. On the sofa I had once listened to his plans of, "twelve miles here, fifteen miles there, a rest day of five miles a skip and a jump," but now I knew the real route to be harder than I had ever suspected.

"Gas capes on, I think. Rain is forecast."

In resilient adoration I moved off by his side.

We walked. And walked. And walked. In spite of my feet feeling glued to the ground, step by step the paper distances expanded into a landscape of sheep, fields, stone walls and houses falling away to the ground we abandoned. Just days before I could never have imagined all this latitude and longitude as the stiletto heeled, hair lacquered, adolescent I was to leave behind. It rained, and it was so good that it did. From beneath each rock a new born frog leaped to an unrealistic height when compared to its tiny dimensions. In biblical numbers they covered the route to my first summit with the joy of something I might never have seen in all of my life to come, as frogs and I learned to conquer our earthbound ties together.

Not one, but two summits waited for me with sky bursting open blue as if it would never end, with room for wind at its wildest, and miles enough for a whole lifetime stretching as far as and over the horizon if I wanted to answer their call. I had now climbed the first of many summits the ex-scout turned art student and I were to conquer together. He gave me this wider than "the world as I had known it" glory as he declared me to be "the tallest thing in Wales," as I stood on top of the trig point to star in an aerial photograph. I learned that day that the muscle less person I had sloughed could stand mountain tall, though I had never guessed it so. We walked on, and walk on still to all the summits, both mine and his, as they rise on our path. There might be a little more "answering back" these days, but so far we have never failed to scale a single height in front of us.