Dreams of Lost Buttresses

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Red Rocks

‘Long before the advent of literacy, to say nothing of “history” as an academic discipline, places served humankind as durable symbols of distant events and as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them.’

Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith H. Basso

The petroglyphs were etched into the red sandstone boulders of the canyon, millennia-old markings with curious shapes and energy. Animal depictions, concentric circles, chains of people holding hands, a wavy line that Aline interpreted as a river, water.

The people who made them did so by scratching away the hard, thin, deep-ochre layer on the exterior of the boulders to reveal the softer, washed-out orange rock beneath. Aesthetically beautiful, the petroglyphs carried so much meaning. This was enhanced by the feelings that Aline sensed, the things they made her dream and imagine.

Aline had gone to Red Rocks for the climbing. On arrival in Vegas, she quickly fled to the neighbouring mountains. The shadows and cool blue evening light of the desert contrasted with the kaleidoscope of casinos, hook-up bars and the incessant hustle of the Strip. The spirituality Aline felt about Red Rocks and its surrounding landscape was enhanced by the escape from Las Vegas: one an extreme of what the Western world has become, the other what this world has chosen to leave behind.

Aline mentioned these feelings to a climber she’d met at the Red Springs boulders. He told her about the ancient petroglyphs close by, in the Valley of Fire. Intrigued, she caught a bus the next day and soon found herself gazing at these marks of beauty, marvelling at the work of the Ancestral Puebloans, imagining what the symbols had meant to them and what they meant to their descendants now, many centuries later. Was this land liminal for them, a thin place where they could hear the voices and remember the thoughts of their ancestors?

‘This isn’t yours,’ a voice in her head told her. And the voice was right. Aline had feelings of need, but what was she seeking? A place of belonging, a place where she could let her mind go, let it blend into the world around her, like the Ancestral Puebloans and the other Indigenous peoples of the American West would have done, long before the arrival of her own ancestors and their sweeping brutalities. Aline didn’t feel like she could find such solace back home. Was it there, hidden away, long since lost by her society?

In some ways Aline could get close to this state of mind through climbing. ‘Blend into the rock’ – that’s what Clay had told Aline, in between taking drags on her weed-loaded roll-up – ‘let yourself drift into it.’ It had made her smile to think that Clay was a caricature of the climbing dirtbag. Although the numbers of these dirtbags had depleted since the vagabond climbing days of the ’70s and ’80s, Aline had come across Clay one day hanging on in there in north-east Bristol.

Clay inspired Aline to live differently from the expectations placed upon her by family and other friends and soon became a mentor for her. Clay also sold her weed.

Clay had a thing about the ‘old ways’; she loved to craft and make things. Six months after they met, she presented Aline with a jumper she had knitted, a combination of earthy colours and expressive Fair Isle patterns. Over a coffee she retold the story behind the patterns, of the fishers and their lives at sea, and of how such stories were kept alive through knitting with friends and the sharing of patterns and traditional skills. While some of Clay’s friends called her a Luddite, Aline could see that it wasn’t technology Clay despised but the way people forget things as soon as they we forget things when we begin to use it.

Clay hated the climbing wall. Late at night, passing it on the way home from the pub, she would religiously piss in the doorway. If Aline was with her she would wait, embarrassed, at the car-park entrance, nervously eyeing the spying CCTV camera bolted to the wall above her head, protected in its clear plastic bubble.

‘I don’t give a fuck,’ Clay would mutter fiercely, crouched down with her dress hitched up, wee splashing onto her shoes. Aline never did tell Clay she went training there.

Clay would tell Aline of the journeys she had taken – long climbing trips in the ’80s to Canada and the US. The stories inspired Aline’s own dreams of adventure. From afar she imagined the vastness of the American West – British Colombia’s pearlescent snowy peaks, the sheer stark granite faces of the Yosemite big walls, the golden volcanic spires of Smith Rock. It was the rusty-orange desert sandstone landscapes of Utah and Nevada that Clay loved the most. ‘Red Rocks, lass. That rock and those sunsets, every time.’ In true dirtbag style Clay had done these trips living on vapours, hitching between places and with a bit of thieving when she could get away with it.

Despite her foibles, Clay was kind and was, without fail, generous with her time. At the Avon Gorge in the centre of Bristol she taught Aline to climb on polished limestone. ‘Just passing it on, lass. Sure you’ll do the same sometime.’ Over a couple of summers and one freezing winter, they worked their way up the easier routes of the Gorge, Aline learning how to place gear and lead a route the trad way. With Clay, she soon progressed beyond the city limits, exploring the Mendip limestone of Goblin Combe and Cheddar Gorge, dodging the loose rock and undergrowth of the Wye Valley, taking weekend trips to the sea cliffs of Pembrokeshire and the granite tors of Dartmoor.

Clay loved esoteric climbs, the crags on the edges of places that few others visited. She had a particular fondness for Portishead Quarry, a long-disused limestone cut ten miles south-west of Bristol. Compared to other rock venues close by, the climbing was pretty rubbish – the rock loose and silt-laden from the trees and scrub that overhung the quarry rim. The exception was a clean, narrow, high slab that held two of Aline’s favourite routes. But Clay didn’t go for the quality of the lines.

In one way you could look at the quarry as a post-industrial mess, a hole in the ground where chaos ruled. Just off the road to Clevedon from Portishead, hidden in the trees, they would approach via a little path that passed the old management buildings, long since boarded up and plastered with colourful graffiti. Spread about the quarry floor were termite-like mud-banks that kids built as dirt jumps for their bikes, crushed beer cans, remnants of clandestine sex and broken glass from illegal summer raves. These were intermixed with twisted spikes of brambles, dog roses exploding into pink blooms and the smell of sweet coconut from the golden gorse flowers. Dark green leaves of ivy steadily made their way across exposed rock, tendrils tightly gripping any roughness or crevice to be found in the otherwise smooth limestone walls. So much beauty in the disorder.

On the rock in the quarry, Clay would scrabble around a route with a huge grin on her face, croaking back at the raven that flew over her head, probably imagining she could speak its language. There was a sense wildness was taking over, that nature was reclaiming its own, something Aline could see Clay adored.

Clay was full of an infectious energy that inspired Aline in all kinds of ways. Time with her felt endless. Clay was ageless, or so Aline thought. One sultry summer evening she slipped and fell from the Gorge. ‘Sweaty, greasy limestone, lass...’ Aline imagined Clay telling her, as it was sinking in that she would never hear Clay’s words again. She was probably climbing stoned and that’s likely how she would have wanted to go. Aline was bereft. She felt like she’d lost her talisman, that she’d not learned enough from Clay.

And that’s what took Aline to Red Rocks and, in turn, to the Valley of Fire. Honouring Clay and her memory, she quit her job and was spending the money she’d saved for a house deposit on her own tour of the American West. She wanted to visit places Clay had been, imagine what she would have felt and how she would have climbed the rock. Aline had this weird thought that maybe the carbon atoms contained in the breaths Clay had exhaled might still be around, maybe sunken and captured in the bough of a tree. Aline found comfort in that idea, crazy as it may be. ‘At the end of the day, we’re all shit in the woods, lass,’ Clay had said one night, after a few glasses of red wine. At the time Aline had just thought she was mixing her metaphors.

It was quiet in the canyon. Gazing at the petroglyphs, Aline stood motionless in the still, arid air of the desert. Despite the heat of the day, she shivered.

Did Clay come here? Feeling it, sensing it but knowing she wasn’t there anymore, Aline let out a long slow breath, salty tears streaming down her face. She felt as if she was being kindly but firmly pushed away. At the same time, she understood what she was drawn to.

Aline climbed in Red Rocks for another two weeks before heading to Yosemite through the summer and then to Joshua Tree. It was mid-fall when she caught a flight back home. She’d been away the best part of a year.

A week or so after she returned from her trip west, she went back to Portishead Quarry. The leaves on the trees of the encroaching woodland were vivid in their autumn colours, iridescent yellows and rich ochre-reds. Scarlet rosehips framed themselves against the perfect blue of the November sky. While she had hated rain, Clay had loved the changes in the seasons.

Aline soloed the easy line on the slab, remembering the day with Clay when she first led the route. Clay had crooned gentle encouragements from below, guiding Aline when she’d needed it but generally leaving her to find her own way.

The raven was still there, croaking as it flew.