A climb in the Darran Mountains made David Vass tetraplegic
The night before we leave it rains, and in the morning there is snow on the ground. We leave anyway, confident enough in ourselves and our descent route that we can make it down in bad weather. There’s just a feeling that we should leave, and we’ve descended before in worse.
The weather slowly intensifies as we travel, snow turning to rain as we descend. By the time we reach the end of the abseils into the Donne, we’re soaked and cold and the only thing to do is move on – over the rain-softened snow, down the slipperiness of glacier-worn slabs, through the gathering strength of the headwaters. Everywhere, the landscape is streaked with bright lines of run-off; there’s nowhere that’s dry. After hours of difficult terrain, we escape the open country at the head of the valley and enter the forest. Although it’s as wet as everywhere else, there’s at least shelter here and we feel we can relax a little, although still with the imperative to keep moving.
We’re now confined to the right bank of the river. Although the track further down is on the other side, we won’t be able to cross to it. We’re confident of our route, though, having done it before in similar circumstance. The escape continues, through the sodden jungle, through the dense and rotten greenery, through the continual driving rain. At times we come upon clearings and can see the valley walls of the Donne above and there’s little else I’ve seen to match their scale and majesty in this storm. From the giant walls, rivers arc downward before morphing with the sky. It’s hard to know how the valley isn’t filling up, that we’re not being swept away. Maybe we are.
We crouch under an overhanging boulder in the forest for a short rest. The day is taking longer than we’ve envisaged, but there’s little to do but carry on, one dripping thicket, one rotten log, one racing torrent, one muddy bank at a time. Darkness arrives. The storm, unbelievably, is gaining in intensity. On top of the rain, now as heavy as we’ve ever seen it, there’s thunder; the landscape around us is alive with power. We gather after another stream crossing, the last major one we think, and scoff some food, still a Moro bar to share. I slip to the back of the group, content to follow in the others’ tracks for the last section, dialling back slightly on the continual drive that has possessed me, all of us, so far. We’ll be back at the car in an hour or so.
The moment my life changes forever isn’t much in the scheme of things – a minor event amid the wildness around us. Nothing else changes when I fall. The storm rages on. Boulders lose their grip on the bed of rivers, trees snap and grind as they fall, banks collapse. The mountains shed their skin yet again. For me, a root breaks, a hand fails to grab a saving branch. They are small things in comparison, and the moment only takes a second or two.
The fall, though, headfirst through the darkness, seems to take forever. There is time to think that this time it won’t be alright, and so it turns out. There is an impact; a sickening crunch travels through my head. I lie face down in the wet ground, in the darkness. I can’t move, I can’t call for help. There’s water around my face and I already know; there is an instant knowing. Rich is there quickly. He’s seen from the corner of his eye my headlamp tumble down the bank, and he comes back to check. I hear my voice as a pathetic and distant thing. I tell him what I know – that I can’t move, that I’ve broken my neck.
*
The night, from this point, is a long and arduous one for my friends. There is an order to things. Carefully, within the driving rain, they make a kind of platform of our packs and move me onto it. We do not have a tent, a fly or any kind of shelter. All we have is our climbing gear, clothes and sleeping bags; that is all. Everything firm is piled up to support me and everything soft is heaped on top – everything. It will rapidly become useless in the wet, but it will do – anything to keep away the searching cold for a time.
Tom sets off the locator beacon. Someone, somewhere, will shake their heads in disbelief. A decision is made; Richard sets off into the storm, on foot and alone, to organise the rescue.
Rich and Tom crawl in under the mound of clothes and settle in, if it can be called that, to save my life. We huddle under the heavy mass that covers us, melding with the sodden earth. I lie there for hours, Rich cradling my head on his knees. His hands seldom move and if they do they are replaced by Tom’s, equally careful.
The storm reaches a climax of violence and stays there. Sheet lightning flashes in synch to deafening peals of thunder; we are in the very centre of the storm and the rain is still an unrelenting force. I am positioned in a runnel that has now become a streamway. Rich and Tom crouch around me, the water rising up their legs, the cold racking their bodies. Together, we wait.
*
For me, within those first few hours, something else is happening. Under the heap of sodden clothes, in the driving rain, held close by my stoic companions, there is a decision still to be made and it is mine alone. I knew, as soon as it happened, what my injury was and I knew also what it meant – that this would be the end, perhaps not of everything, but of most of it, that the bulk and heft of my life would be forever different, never again like this one.
I lie there in the storm, aware of the situation but comfortable nonetheless. The elemental world around me is playing my grand finale, or so I like to think, even now imagining a connection between us that is so finally, so obviously, only mine to perceive. It is a vanity, no doubt, that I feel these mountains cry and rage for me; but already I cry and rage for myself and as I lie there under the raucous peals of thunder, within the gothic drama of the storm, I wonder what I should do. There is a decision still to be made.
To start with, it seems that it might be easy, that I might just drift away. I feel for a time that this is indeed happening, as my breath gets slowly smaller and more distant from me. Time passes in reverie, in reminiscence. I am content to float for a while, an hour or two perhaps, but after a time this feeling passes, and I know that if I am going to die here, it will need to be a conscious decision and it is still to be made.
There is a horror in contemplating a life of immobility, perhaps greater if you have lived a particularly physical life, one in which that physicality has given purpose to your existence, but perhaps not; I’m sure most people would understand. But to now do this thing, to decide not to live, I need to involve someone else. I need to talk to Rich, to ask him to just hold my mouth and nose closed for long enough; that would do. We are close and he may be thinking the same thoughts. I imagine he would do this thing for me.
I don’t ask, although I come close. I don’t ask because there is, away deep down, some tiny kernel of hope, a latent lust for life, that stops me. I don’t ask, not because I don’t want to put Rich on the spot, but because I want to stay in the world a while longer. To survive because there might be something more. There is, I know, a massive effort being put into saving my life and somehow the decision is made for me. All I can do, lying there in the storm, in the hands of others, is to follow the small thread of instinctual, primal hope that may mean survival. I wait there unmoving, and hope that survival will be worth it.
Taken with kind permission from Not Set in Stone: The passion and consequence of a mountain life by David Vass (Potton & Burton, $39.99), which last week won the 2023 Nankervis/Bamford NZ Mountain Book of the Year award. Vass will be speaking at the NZ Mountain Film and Book Festival in Wānaka on June 27 alongside Robbie Burton, whose book Bushline: A Memoir was highly commended at the awards.
