tdobson
Active member
Gravity has no sense of humour. This is worth knowing.
Many forces of nature have developed, over the millennia, a certain flexibility.
- Weather can be negotiated with, provided you own enough waterproofs.
- Darkness retreats before a decent headtorch.
- Even geology, given sufficient time and a determined enough person with a drill and a piece of conveyor belt, will grudgingly rearrange itself.
Gravity just waits. It has been waiting since before the first stone fell, and it has never once been disappointed.
On a November morning, four people and one instructor had gathered for the express purpose of reaching a temporary agreement with Gravity regarding the going-up and coming-down of ropes.
Gravity, as always, said nothing. It didn't need to. The ropes were already hanging, and everyone present understood, on some level deeper than language, that the ropes were the only thing between "controlled descent" and "uncontrolled descent."
The difference between these two phrases is about sixty miles per hour and a funeral.
--
The instructor was known as Big Malcolm. Nobody knew his surname. He wasn't even particularly big.
Big Malcolm had been teaching people to go up and down ropes for longer than some of his students had been alive. He approached this with the quiet, sustained intensity of a man who has seen what happens when the teaching doesn't take.
"Right," he said, by way of opening the day's festivities. "Blindfolds."
He produced one. It was not new.
Nobody asked where it came from. In caving, certain questions are best left unanswered, because the truth is always worse than whatever you'd imagined.
(In caving, the answer to "where did this come from?" is usually "someone's garage," "a car boot sale in 1997," or "I'd rather not say." All three answers are, in their own way, unsettling.)
--
Big Malcolm pulled the blindfold over his own eyes, clipped onto the rope, and began talking through the changeover manoeuvres. His hands moved with the certainty of a pianist playing from memory. Clip. Slide. Weight transfer. Release. Descend. Metal rang against metal in a sequence that sounded, to an untrained ear, like cutlery falling down stairs, and to a trained ear, like someone not dying.
"You should be able to do a changeover in the dark with water pouring on you," he said, removing the blindfold. "That's probably the most likely time you'll actually need one."
Nobody argued. They had all been underground. They knew what water did in caves, which was essentially whatever it wanted, whenever it liked, and with absolutely no regard for your comfort.
He handed the blindfold to Throttle.
--
Throttle was a good caver in the way that certain people are good dancers: with enormous enthusiasm, occasional flashes of genuine ability, and an unshakeable conviction that the next attempt would be the one where everything came together.
His real name was Keith Throttle. Everyone assumed it was a nickname. It wasn't.
His father had been a Throttle. His grandfather had been a Throttle. The Throttles had been getting into things slightly too fast for generations, and Keith was continuing the tradition with a commitment that would have made his ancestors proud, if any of them had lived long enough to see it.
He put on the blindfold. He clipped on. He began.
What followed was the sort of performance that, in theatrical terms, would be described as "immersive."
Throttle's hands groped for equipment that had migrated since he'd last checked. His feet found positions on the wall that were technically possible but spiritually wrong. The people guiding him offered helpful instructions like "no, the other left" and "it's right there" and "no, THERE, there" in tones that started helpful and ended somewhere near prayer.
In the time it took Throttle to complete his blindfolded descent, everyone else had a turn. Two of them went twice.
Nettie Crowbar, who had been watching from the bottom with the patient expression of someone who finishes crosswords in pen, was already considering a third. (Her surname was real. She'd checked. There were Crowbars in the parish records going back to 1740. She suspected an ancestor had been either a blacksmith or a burglar, and preferred not to investigate further.)
"Was that Throttle's fault or the people guiding him?" someone asked afterwards.
Big Malcolm considered this with the careful diplomacy of a man who teaches for a living and knows exactly whose fault it was. "I think it was a bit of both," he said. "The blind leading the blind."
Throttle removed the blindfold. He had the particular expression of a man who has just been shouted at by well-meaning friends for fifteen minutes and is not entirely sure what year it is.
"Again?" he said.
---
The afternoon turned to hauling, which is the polite word for dragging another human being up a cliff face using rope, pulleys, and whatever you have left.
Big Malcolm was clear about scope.
"We are not doing this on someone who is unconscious," he said. "An unconscious person at the bottom of a pitch is better than a dead one at the top."
Nobody laughed. The sentence sat in the November air like a stone.
He rigged the mechanical advantage systems on the training wall with the smooth speed of long practice, layering them upward. Two-to-one. Three-to-one. Six-to-one.
He had someone try to resist on the rope while he pulled with two fingers. The resister did not resist for long.
Then the practical wisdom: "Lots of the time you'll have more people. If you can have a simpler system and just have extra people helping, you're going to have an easier, faster time."
The universe, Big Malcolm seemed to be saying, already provided the best mechanical advantage system known to physics. It was called "other people."
The traverse rescue followed, and with it came the discovery that "rescue" is a word that contains, hidden inside it, the words "repetition," "patience," and "dear God, can you not make us use this for real."
--
Pull-throughs were the last topic. Big Malcolm introduced them with the caution of a man handing someone a loaded weapon and hoping they'd give it back.
"This is one of those things," he said, "that if I'm asked about, I won't dismiss. Because people go and do them. And they're a very, very good way of killing yourself."
The principle is seductively simple. Thread your rope through the anchor. Descend both strands. Pull the rope down after you. No gear left behind. No way back up.
That last part is the bit that matters.
"There is a big difference," Big Malcolm said, "between doing this somewhere you know the way out, and somewhere with eight or nine consecutive pull-throughs."
He told the story of someone in the Yorkshire Dales who went off route. They pulled through a pitch that wasn't on the sequence. A pitch that, on the correct route, would have taken them to the exit. But they weren't on the correct route. They were on the wrong route, with the rope in their hands and nothing above them but dark air and ahead of them, a long wait.
"At that point, you sit down and wait for cave rescue."
This wasn't a hypothetical. It was an experienced caver. A member of cave rescue themselves. Someone who should have known better, and did know better, and did it wrong anyway.
"Experience doesn't make you immune," Big Malcolm said. "It just means you know exactly how badly you've messed up."
--
The day ended in the particular light that November produces in England, which arrives reluctantly, stays briefly, and departs without apology.
They drove home through the dark. Something had shifted. Not dramatically. Not with a thunderclap of revelation. It shifted the way most important things shift: quietly, like a rope being straightened by careful hands.
They knew, now, what they didn't know. And knowing what you don't know is the first knot in the system. Everything else clips onto that.
Big Malcolm could have told them this. He wouldn't have bothered. He'd have pointed at the rope and said: "Right. Again."
--
This is entirely a work of fiction and any resemblance with real people, clubs or sarcasm, is entirely coincidental and does not entitle you to free booze, free food or free tickles
Many forces of nature have developed, over the millennia, a certain flexibility.
- Weather can be negotiated with, provided you own enough waterproofs.
- Darkness retreats before a decent headtorch.
- Even geology, given sufficient time and a determined enough person with a drill and a piece of conveyor belt, will grudgingly rearrange itself.
Gravity just waits. It has been waiting since before the first stone fell, and it has never once been disappointed.
On a November morning, four people and one instructor had gathered for the express purpose of reaching a temporary agreement with Gravity regarding the going-up and coming-down of ropes.
Gravity, as always, said nothing. It didn't need to. The ropes were already hanging, and everyone present understood, on some level deeper than language, that the ropes were the only thing between "controlled descent" and "uncontrolled descent."
The difference between these two phrases is about sixty miles per hour and a funeral.
--
The instructor was known as Big Malcolm. Nobody knew his surname. He wasn't even particularly big.
Big Malcolm had been teaching people to go up and down ropes for longer than some of his students had been alive. He approached this with the quiet, sustained intensity of a man who has seen what happens when the teaching doesn't take.
"Right," he said, by way of opening the day's festivities. "Blindfolds."
He produced one. It was not new.
Nobody asked where it came from. In caving, certain questions are best left unanswered, because the truth is always worse than whatever you'd imagined.
(In caving, the answer to "where did this come from?" is usually "someone's garage," "a car boot sale in 1997," or "I'd rather not say." All three answers are, in their own way, unsettling.)
--
Big Malcolm pulled the blindfold over his own eyes, clipped onto the rope, and began talking through the changeover manoeuvres. His hands moved with the certainty of a pianist playing from memory. Clip. Slide. Weight transfer. Release. Descend. Metal rang against metal in a sequence that sounded, to an untrained ear, like cutlery falling down stairs, and to a trained ear, like someone not dying.
"You should be able to do a changeover in the dark with water pouring on you," he said, removing the blindfold. "That's probably the most likely time you'll actually need one."
Nobody argued. They had all been underground. They knew what water did in caves, which was essentially whatever it wanted, whenever it liked, and with absolutely no regard for your comfort.
He handed the blindfold to Throttle.
--
Throttle was a good caver in the way that certain people are good dancers: with enormous enthusiasm, occasional flashes of genuine ability, and an unshakeable conviction that the next attempt would be the one where everything came together.
His real name was Keith Throttle. Everyone assumed it was a nickname. It wasn't.
His father had been a Throttle. His grandfather had been a Throttle. The Throttles had been getting into things slightly too fast for generations, and Keith was continuing the tradition with a commitment that would have made his ancestors proud, if any of them had lived long enough to see it.
He put on the blindfold. He clipped on. He began.
What followed was the sort of performance that, in theatrical terms, would be described as "immersive."
Throttle's hands groped for equipment that had migrated since he'd last checked. His feet found positions on the wall that were technically possible but spiritually wrong. The people guiding him offered helpful instructions like "no, the other left" and "it's right there" and "no, THERE, there" in tones that started helpful and ended somewhere near prayer.
In the time it took Throttle to complete his blindfolded descent, everyone else had a turn. Two of them went twice.
Nettie Crowbar, who had been watching from the bottom with the patient expression of someone who finishes crosswords in pen, was already considering a third. (Her surname was real. She'd checked. There were Crowbars in the parish records going back to 1740. She suspected an ancestor had been either a blacksmith or a burglar, and preferred not to investigate further.)
"Was that Throttle's fault or the people guiding him?" someone asked afterwards.
Big Malcolm considered this with the careful diplomacy of a man who teaches for a living and knows exactly whose fault it was. "I think it was a bit of both," he said. "The blind leading the blind."
Throttle removed the blindfold. He had the particular expression of a man who has just been shouted at by well-meaning friends for fifteen minutes and is not entirely sure what year it is.
"Again?" he said.
---
The afternoon turned to hauling, which is the polite word for dragging another human being up a cliff face using rope, pulleys, and whatever you have left.
Big Malcolm was clear about scope.
"We are not doing this on someone who is unconscious," he said. "An unconscious person at the bottom of a pitch is better than a dead one at the top."
Nobody laughed. The sentence sat in the November air like a stone.
He rigged the mechanical advantage systems on the training wall with the smooth speed of long practice, layering them upward. Two-to-one. Three-to-one. Six-to-one.
He had someone try to resist on the rope while he pulled with two fingers. The resister did not resist for long.
Then the practical wisdom: "Lots of the time you'll have more people. If you can have a simpler system and just have extra people helping, you're going to have an easier, faster time."
The universe, Big Malcolm seemed to be saying, already provided the best mechanical advantage system known to physics. It was called "other people."
The traverse rescue followed, and with it came the discovery that "rescue" is a word that contains, hidden inside it, the words "repetition," "patience," and "dear God, can you not make us use this for real."
--
Pull-throughs were the last topic. Big Malcolm introduced them with the caution of a man handing someone a loaded weapon and hoping they'd give it back.
"This is one of those things," he said, "that if I'm asked about, I won't dismiss. Because people go and do them. And they're a very, very good way of killing yourself."
The principle is seductively simple. Thread your rope through the anchor. Descend both strands. Pull the rope down after you. No gear left behind. No way back up.
That last part is the bit that matters.
"There is a big difference," Big Malcolm said, "between doing this somewhere you know the way out, and somewhere with eight or nine consecutive pull-throughs."
He told the story of someone in the Yorkshire Dales who went off route. They pulled through a pitch that wasn't on the sequence. A pitch that, on the correct route, would have taken them to the exit. But they weren't on the correct route. They were on the wrong route, with the rope in their hands and nothing above them but dark air and ahead of them, a long wait.
"At that point, you sit down and wait for cave rescue."
This wasn't a hypothetical. It was an experienced caver. A member of cave rescue themselves. Someone who should have known better, and did know better, and did it wrong anyway.
"Experience doesn't make you immune," Big Malcolm said. "It just means you know exactly how badly you've messed up."
--
The day ended in the particular light that November produces in England, which arrives reluctantly, stays briefly, and departs without apology.
They drove home through the dark. Something had shifted. Not dramatically. Not with a thunderclap of revelation. It shifted the way most important things shift: quietly, like a rope being straightened by careful hands.
They knew, now, what they didn't know. And knowing what you don't know is the first knot in the system. Everything else clips onto that.
Big Malcolm could have told them this. He wouldn't have bothered. He'd have pointed at the rope and said: "Right. Again."
--
This is entirely a work of fiction and any resemblance with real people, clubs or sarcasm, is entirely coincidental and does not entitle you to free booze, free food or free tickles
