Spilt Wine

36. Realisations

Catherine and I sat on the couch in the long salon with a board of cheese, a slab of jambon persillé and a baguette to accompany our wine. We stared into the crackling fire for a long while in silence before she said, "I would love you to tell me another story."

"Pick a topic then. Do you want something from my childhood? Coins? Air Force? Navy? Climbing? Wine?"

"Talk about climbing – Mont Blanc this week, that was amazing." She tilted her head and peered into my eyes. "Tell me why you climb."

"I don't know. Something inside. A drive. I've never really asked myself. I was simply drawn to the mountains the first time I saw them, and I had to go stand on one. I don't know why. Maybe it was to get a broader view. More than that, though. The view of the mountains from below is often as fine as the view from tops of them." I paused to gather my thoughts.

"I had a student one summer, part of a group of naval Officer Cadets, officers in training. I was conducting leadership training using mountaineering and wilderness survival as teaching vehicles. On the first day of a week-long exercise, we had paused at the crest of the ridge, up out of the treeline and into the alpine. We sat on the heather slope by a tarn, quenching our thirsts, resting and looking at the view. Most were in awe of it – most had never been up into the mountains before. They talked excitedly about the spectacular view and of how they had never seen anything to compare.

"Then, one of them commented with a puzzled look on her face, I can't see much view, the mountains are all in the way of it. We didn't understand what she meant until she added, Out in the wheat fields there's nothing in the way of the view." I shrugged and smiled.

"View – point of view is so different in each of us. Some see things invisible to others while looking at the same scene. Our minds are our eyes; they interpret the messages that come in. Each mind has a slightly different interpretation, though most are nearly identical. Some, a few, like that young Officer Cadet from the flatness of Saskatchewan, see some things very differently."

I paused to take another sip of wine and a bite of cheese. "I'm not boring you with this, am I? Your eyes just went strange."

She reached across and laid her hand on my arm and gently squeezed. "Oh my goodness, no. Not in the least. I'm fascinated with your thought that our minds are our eyes. That makes so much sense. Everybody sees things differently. Please continue."

I smiled and took another sip of wine. "But the view wasn't why I climbed. When I arrived in Comox on Vancouver Island to serve with Search and Rescue, my first view was of the peaks around Comox Glacier. That sight compelled me to go stand on top, up there at the end of the view that dominated the valley.

"My first few weeks on base, I asked nearly everyone I met how to get up there. Nobody seemed at all interested in it, satisfied with simply looking at the view, some not even interested in that.

"During breaks in the hangar, I started going upstairs to the search coordination office and looking at the quilts of topographical maps mounted on the walls. I quickly found the map area showing the end of my view – the peaks around Comox Glacier: Mount Harmston, Mount Argus, the Red Pillar – they had names now. I stood there studying the contours, pulling the lines into three-dimensional images in my mind." I made a series of grasping and pulling motions with my hands – a feeble attempt to illustrate.

"On one of these frequent trips, a young flight lieutenant asked me what I was looking for. He said he had seen me there often, and his curiosity finally overcame him. I told him I was looking for the best way to get up onto Comox Glacier and the peaks around it. He told me to wait a minute, then came back with a large sheet of paper, about a yard square, the sheet of topographical map I had been poring over. I still remember the sheet number, 92F/11. He folded it on the counter, explaining how to accordion it with the printing outward. As he gave it to me, he asked, Why do you want to go up there? I told him I didn't know; all I knew was that I had to.

"He told me about a sporting goods store in Courtenay that had some hiking and camping equipment. That Saturday, I hitched a ride into town and made my first visit to Happy's. I explained to the sad old man behind the counter what I wanted to do, and I asked him what equipment I would need. He asked, Why do you want to go up there? I told him I didn't know, except that something inside was pulling me there." I shrugged and took another sip of wine.

"A few weeks later, after work on Friday afternoon with a clear weekend weather forecast, I headed out. On a rugged, second-hand bike I had bought, I pedalled through Comox and Courtenay and then on the logging roads around Comox Lake, up the Cruickshank Canyon and then along southward to a branch heading toward my goal. Thirteen miles on pavement and a very rough fifteen on gravel. I very quickly lost sight of my goal, lost behind the ridges growing in the foreground, but I could still feel its pull, it was not lost inside – it was stronger.

"The pedal took me almost four hours, balancing a large pack on my back, and it was nearly dark when I reached the end of the last spur of the logging roads. I watched Saturday morning's sunrise from a rock outcrop a third of the way up the side of the ridge. An hour earlier I had struck my camp into my new pack and headed up through the forest. I had awakened well before dawn and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and headed up the ridge in the brightening twilight, pulled by an unknown force." 

Seeing Catherine was still interested, after another sip of wine, I continued. "Late morning I was sitting on the summit at the far side of the glacier. An hour and a half later I was down off that peak, back across the glacier, along a ridge, down into a col and up onto the top of Mount Argus, about a hundred feet higher. The Comox airbase was below me, off to the east, beside the Straits of Georgia.

"It's the same line of sight between the mountains and Comox, but I felt no compulsion to go there, unlike the pull I had felt in the opposite direction. I still don't know what that pull was – or is. I don't know why I climb." I shrugged.

"I see all of this so clearly still, as though it has just happened. The details become more vivid as I relive them. I suppose the more intense the experience, the more deeply the records are engraved into our memory."

Catherine added, "Maybe sometimes so deeply, they get buried. They get lost in the folds of pain, of shame, of guilt ..."

I reached over and put my hand on the back of her head as she continued, "I have so many dark patches of memory from my past, but there are some happy ones, which are still so clear."

She leaned against my chest and started pouring out a story, rambling through adventures from her joyous summer on the péniche and then more slowly and with frequent hesitations, about her return to Rennes and the drive home from the train station.

Catherine stopped. Shook herself. Sat up, and turning a slow no with her head as she haltingly said, "I am not – I am not the guilty one. He had turned around from the wheel to hit me when he veered the car off the road. The crash wasn't my fault." She shook her head. "All these years, I've ..."

She paused and stared wide-eyed at me. "He had turned to hit me for saying I didn't want to go back to school."