Andy Kirkpatrick | Alpinist | International Speaker

High Marks

A story about spelling and climbing

I sat alone in the small white room, watching the snow build on the window sill outside, looking down at the two test papers. I fidgeted with my pencil, aware that time was running out, as the wind rattled across the corrugated roof. Although this was an exam I had sought out, it felt no better than all the others, I felt small, awkward and stupid. The first one had been easy, but the second had turned my brain into a thick slow glue, the numbers falling from their places, lost upon the page. Even though the room was cold, I felt feverish with a familiar panic, something I thought I’d never feel again. An old self loathing returned as I pushed my brain to form some answers out of the murk. None came.

Drifting out of the storm, we trenched through the deep snow until we came to the edge of the loch, its surface frozen deep beneath a winter blanket. Knowing how useless I am at navigating, Dick took a bearing and shouted into my ear that it wasn’t far. We’d left the car in the dark, woken early by the wind buffeting it on the empty high mountain road. Groggy with the long journey North from England, we dressed in our seats, fighting like Houdini, to pull boots and salopettes on in our confined quarters – neither of us really wanting to venture outside until the last possible moment. The early start had proved useful in the long approach through the deep drifts. We stopped for a moment to get our bearings in the first light, gaining a quick glimpse of the wall when the cloud thinned; it was steep and covered in rime ice, which clung to the rock just like ice clings to the inside walls of a freezer, offering an equal degree of security. The conditions were far from perfect, but this was Scotland. Here you just climb routes as you find them, not as you’d like to find them. Dick stuffed the map away. Pulling on his goggles, he took the easy option, and set off across the lake.

I turned the paper over and looked up at the snow on the sill, laying thick as a bed. I had a few minutes left until the examiner was due to return but I knew it would take more than time to get these answers right. It had always been like this. My mother thought I was just lazy, my teachers said I was a slow learner, then they labeled me as having some kind of ‘learning disability’. The schools I went to were filled with ‘problem children’ and I was just one more problem. I remember learning in biology that the brain has two sides. It came as a bit of a revelation at the time. It seemed to explain why sometimes I felt slow and stupid, one of the school’s stigmatized, remedial kids, while at other times I felt bright and intelligent, capable of producing drawings or solving puzzles that were beyond the other kids. Most of the time I kept this dark side in the background, concentrating on what I was good at. But at school that wasn’t easy.

The route looked hard. A tenuous mixed line up a steep wall and arête, it was a classic rock climb in the summer, but now it was one of the hardest climbs on the crag. I visualized the moves, how I’d link up those rounded horizontal cracks and vertical seams, digging through the wall’s thick winter coat of rime for secret places in which to torque and hook the picks of my axes. I’d wanted this route for a long time, storing every scrap of information I could find in my head. And although I couldn’t spell the name of the routes, or the corrie we were in, I could list everyone who’d tried it, what else they’d done and why they had failed. As I stepped up to the base, I remembered the discouraging words of a climber who’d failed on this route twice. ‘You’ll never climb it, there’s a really long reachy move on it – you’re too short’. Flicking my picks into the hard cold turf that sprouted in patches on the climb I closed my eyes and visualized the route as a puzzle, the pieces jumbled in the snow. I saw the first piece and started climbing.

The examiner opened the door and asked me to stop.

I looked out of the window feeling sick and empty.

At school my worst nightmare was the times table. The teacher would start in one corner of the classroom and go around making each child stand up at their desk and say the next figure. As it snaked nearer, the blood would drain from my face as my heart beat faster and faster. I would feel hollowed out and sick. The dark half would scramble any thought as I struggled to calculate an answer. Finally, on shaky legs, I would stand and speak. I always got it wrong. The other kids would always laugh and I would sit back down, thankful the ordeal was over.

Totally immersed in the climbing my brain is powered up and energized, working to its full potential, its limited memory freed up from all those confusing hoops it has to jump through in the real world. Up here everything is real. No numbers. No words. The only calculations are physical, the only questions how to progress and how not to fall off. Winter climbing is 10 percent physical, 90 percent mental. If you’re good at jigsaws you'll probably be good a mixed climbing. It's simply a frozen puzzle, your tools and crampons torquing and camming the pieces to fit. And like a jigsaw, the moves are easy. It's just finding them that's hard.

The examiner picked up the sheets and asked me to come to his office while he marked the papers. Seeing I was pensive he chatted about the storm as we walked through the old Victorian building. It wasn’t leaving school with few qualifications that mattered to me or to anyone else; it was leaving with the belief, created by society, that these things really mattered. At 16 I thought I had been graded for life. The only skill that I knew I possessed was my ability to be creative, initially manifesting itself as skill in painting and drawing. But like anything that comes easy I had no way of knowing that this was any kind of skill at all. I found it hard to get people to take me seriously when they found I couldn’t remember my date of birth or the months of the year, always fearful that I would be found out, that people would dismiss me as thick or stupid. Yet slowly, as I grew older, I found ways around this, trying to avoid any contact with words or numbers. I left home and moved into a squat near the city’s university, and slowly I began to mix with the people that got things right, people I had never met in my remedial world. Like the experience of meeting people from another culture, I found we weren’t that different, and that in some ways I had skills they lacked, or maybe even envied. I slowly learnt that I had to tag abstract words or numbers with images for reference words, and that way bypass the sludgy part of my brain. My party piece back then was trying to remember all twelve months of the year, and get them in order, something for the life of me I just couldn’t do. Only at that point could I see that this and all the others things that once did matter meant nothing at all.

Then one night at a party someone said my linear brain function was perhaps a sign of dyslexia and maybe I should get tested, just so that I could find out what exactly what was wrong with my brain. And that’s how I found myself doing one final test. Wondering if maybe at nineteen it no longer mattered.

I get to the place where the other climbers have failed. Two spaced, flared, horizontal cracks, the gap too wide to span with my axe. I hunker down on my tools and try to solve the problem. Hammering my axe into the crack at chest level, I mantle up on it, palming down on its head, straightening my arm, one crampon point scratching near its spike, the other crampon latched around a corner. It feels like I’m about to do a handstand as I blindly scrape away the thick stubborn hoar with my other axe, searching for a secure home for its pick. There is nothing. I think about backing off, about failing, but I’m not sure I can. I imagine the good nuts set in poor icy cracks below and feel committed to the move, as I blindly scrape for something to hang. With my arms cramping, I’m forced to commit to laying away off the rounded arête, the teeth of my pick skittering and skating around until I pull down hard and trust it, wiggling my other axe out as I slowly stand up straight, my body hanging on tenter hooks. I try not to shake too much. I take a deep breath and look for the next piece.

The first test paper comprised a hundred complicated cubes, with four options of how they would look opened out. The other was covered in words and numbers. The boxes were easy and I wondered if I’d been given this by mistake. Then I came to the other sheet and the lights went out. Feeling like an idiot, well aware I hadn’t done well on the second sheet, I sat and watched him mark the answers, ticking them off as he went.

Reaching easy ground, easy in comparison to what it took to reach it, I race up a hanging corner sacrificing protection for speed. I pop up onto a narrow foot ledge, a grassy escape route into a easier climb on left. I hesitate. Above the wall looks compact and steep. It would be so easy to avoid what waits above. Plenty of possible excuses. The dark. The storm. I look down at Dick and think of the hollowness of giving up now. I know he doesn’t care as long as I get a move on. With a nut placed at my feet I boulder out the moves above the ledge until I’m committed. I can see where I’m headed: across the wall to a ledge on the arête. Sweeping away hoar as I go, I try not to think about getting pumped as I scratch until I find one good tool placement on round edges, crampon points poised on sloppy holds that look like flattened chicken heads. Matching tools together I look down at Dick far below as he tries to stay balanced in the wind, his flapping red jacket barely visible through the wind-blown snow. The two ropes arch, plucking out questionable protection, but the big one stays put. There should be great fear, there should be great doubt, but all I see is possibility.

The teacher looked up from his marking and removed his glasses. “Remarkable. You’ve scored 99 percent in the spatial test. I’ve only ever had one other person score so high. He was a headmaster. As for the other test… I’m afraid you only scored 16 percent.” The overwhelming joy was quickly crushed by the realization of how much more important the second test was to real life. Being able to recognize what boxes look like opened out would get me a job in a cardboard box factory. “You’re a classic dyslexic,” he said. “One side of your brain doesn’t work as it should, so the other half compensates.” He told me the symptoms of dyslexia and the pieces finally fitted.

Lateral thinking gets me below a small ledge. Holding my breath on nothing foot holds I tickle at a frozen tuft of grass with my pick. The pick bites with a dull, shallow thwack. With time running out, I blindly swap feet, then hang off one tool as I bring the other across to join it. I feel the dice roll. Will they rip out when I pull? My brain does some quick calculations and says no. I do. They don't. I'm there. I mantle up onto the arête. I’m so aware of everything around me: the snow flakes blowing across my face, the line of sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades, a twist of frozen heather emerging from the snow, the wind, the darkness, the cold. My body is hot, my brain burning as I suck in the speeding snow. The next thirty feet is unprotected. If I fall I’ll die, but there is no time for melodrama, this is where I have always wanted to be. I think how strange it is that brain power can get me here, yet it still fails to do so many other things. Yet I know now that all things are balanced. But on the mountain such details no longer matter. There is no need for words here. With the pieces together I can see the picture. Who needs to know its name? Hooking both axes onto a flake I pull off the ledge and head into the darkness.

The doctor shows me to the door and hands me a brown envelope containing my results. "Andrew, with a score of 99 percent you should find something you enjoy that involves three dimensional problem- solving, something creative, where you can turn these things into an advantage”. I shake his hand and I say thank you, then walk home through the snow, wondering where such a strange gift will lead me.

High Marks may be copied and used by teachers as a teaching aid in any way they see fit