Mort / Carter / Dawe Waymaking

An anthology of women's adventure writing, poetry and art
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-910240-76-2
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

Waymaking is an anthology of prose, poetry and artwork by women who are inspired by wild places, adventure and landscape. Published in 1961, Gwen Moffat's Space Below My Feet tells the story of a woman who shirked the conventions of society and chose to live a life in the mountains. Some years later in 1977, Nan Shepherd published The Living Mountain, her prose bringing each contour of the Cairngorm mountains to life. These pioneering women set a precedent for a way of writing about wilderness that isn't about conquering landscapes, reaching higher, harder or faster, but instead about living and breathing alongside them, becoming part of a larger adventure. The artists in this inspired collection continue Gwen and Nan's legacies, redressing the balance of gender in outdoor adventure literature. Their creativity urges us to stop and engage our senses: the smell of rain-soaked heather, wind resonating through a col, the touch of cool rock against skin, and most importantly a taste of restoring mind, body and spirit to a former equanimity. With contributions from adventurers including Alpinist magazine editor Katie Ives, multi-award-winning author Bernadette McDonald, adventurers Sarah Outen and Anna McNuff, renowned filmmaker Jen Randall and many more, Waymaking is an inspiring and pivotal work published in an era when wilderness conservation and gender equality are at the fore.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mort, Helen

Carter, Claire

Dawe, Heather

Barnard, Camilla

Leseproben

Excerpts from ‘La Fuente’, an essay
KARI NIELSEN Evaristo opened the barn door and kneeled beside his sick goat. She quivered and her eyes rolled upwards. Rain reverberated on the tin roof. Evaristo offered me the syringe after he had filled it with medication, tapped the side and pushed the priming liquid out the needle. I reached for it, but he pulled his hand away and smiled. As he injected her hip, she resisted, her hooves scraping the dirt floor. I rubbed her back until Evaristo withdrew the needle. My climbing partner Joshua and I followed the short, sinewy man along the tight wooden rails of sheep fencing and across the yard. His simple house had been constructed of shakes and expanded with government-issued particle board siding. A skinned mutton leg hung by its ankle beneath the awning. Inside was dark, warm, and smelled distinctly of sheep fat. Evaristo’s latest calendar girl held a STIHL pressure washer and wore black stilettos that lengthened her pale legs. The cook-stove occupied most of the kitchen, and the oven door creaked when Evaristo opened it to check on the meat and peeled potatoes. Chelo, his nineteen-year-old son, stood from his stool at the small table to kiss my cheek and shake Joshua’s hand. In his tired shuffle, Evaristo neatly set out metal cups, Nescafé, tea and powdered milk. His acid-washed jeans hung loosely around his thin legs. With worked and leathered hands, he lifted an aluminum tea kettle and filled the mate gourd slowly, allowing water to bubble down beneath the yerba. Grinning, he passed me the gourd and then served me a metal cup of home-made strawberry wine. Evaristo shared the mutton and passed a plate of stiff tortas, a Patagonian fried bread. Only then would Chelo don his chaps and find his horses so he could pack our gear to the crossing at Río Colonia. Evaristo would be our closest neighbour for the next two months. His campo, Tres Limones, was a three-and-a-half-hour walk down the valley from our destination. Joshua and I had returned to the Chilean Patagonia in order to care-take Jonathan Leidich’s homestead, Sol de Mayo, which was cradled at the U-shaped head of Valle Colonia. Jonathan was Joshua’s long-time friend from the US and had made the three-hour drive up the valley with us on an improvised road that morning. The previous autumn, he had allowed us to base camp at Sol de Mayo for a ten-day trip so that we could climb Cerro Colonia. After four months of travelling alone, the oasis of the campo had felt like an arrival. My perpetual search for connection to a place had ceased at the isolated refuge of Sol de Mayo. But the essence of the campo lingered after I had left Patagonia in May. I had forged an instinctual bond to the place that I could not forget even after seven months in the States. And so Joshua and I returned when I had space and time in my college schedule. Drawn to a life that seemed to be encased in the memory of my birthplace, Montana, I wanted to live the campo, to understand the ground’s scale, based on my own body’s capacities for work and exploration. Sol de Mayo is situated just over glaciated domes and mountains on the edge of the Northern Patagonian Ice Field in the Aysén region of southern Chile. The land is isolated from both the north and south by two rivers, the Claro and the Colonia, which wall it off from both sides of the valley. Until 2011, when two landowners on the north side of Río Colonia bought trucks and began to drive to their campos, access into the valley was limited to horseback. On the day we arrived at Tres Limones, we finished our lunch and began to walk westwards on the trail, beneath the double-horn summits of Cerro Puño. Forested slopes rapidly rose to a distinct tree line, before glaciers and rocks capped off the peaks. The road ended in less than two hours at the final uninhabited campo on the north side of Río Colonia. We waited in a barn until the rain cleared and then navigated the open gravel bar to the river. The caretakers met us with an inflatable kayak at the crossing, and we ferried our packs and the resupply across the river. Río Claro meets the Colonia just downstream from the crossing. It swoops in an S-curve, its glacial brightness carving into the shore, down to where the clear water meets the churning silt of Río Colonia. A clear line extends downriver from the triangulated apex of the gravel bar that isolates the rivers, dividing blue-green from grey-brown. It zippers up the island of Sol de Mayo with clean finality. We were isolated, cut off by ice and water. We would control who or what moved in or out. We walked the final forty-five minutes across sand and rock, following the Claro towards the mountains. A loosely closed hand could strip purple and red berries from the abundant chaura bushes along the trail. The path finally dipped and turned to reveal a three-sided barn, a corral, a tin-sided house. We walked through a wooden gate, then into a grassy yard where chickens pecked at the ground. The dark and drafty one-room house behind the apple trees would be our home, as it was before. I propped my pack against the inside wall and removed my wet boots. The caretakers brought us to the three-sided barn and showed us where they kept the animal feed. The dust, greying wood and lingering smell of horse sent my memory to my mother’s first partner after her divorce from my father. John was a veterinarian who owned a horse and buffalo ranch on the north side of Bozeman, Montana. The outbuildings and fences had held up to a century of long, snowy winters under his family’s name. I remembered walking through a long, dark barn when I was seven, past a row of tanning buffalo hides still sprinkled with salt. Dust caked the frosted windows, but the organisation of saddles, bridles and tools along the walls was immaculate. My mother loved the idea of this quiet man, of the romantic past that she saw alive in him. He allowed her to escape the subdivision where she and my father had created a life for a short time, before new neighbours added houses and turned over the tall brown grasses into landscaped lots. Our new neighbours never came to approve of the chickens in our yard, nor of my sister’s horse that mowed his section of the three-acre lot down to dirt. John did. He showed us how to clean fish in alpine streams, pluck the feathers from the geese we raised, and press apple cider. Stepping into the Chilean campo, I was returning to a life that I had wilfully forgotten since moving out of my mother’s hard-pressed household at sixteen and then escaping to Vermont for college. The land-based life-ways that were being lost to subdivisions, roads and resorts in Montana were still alive, though threatened, in Aysén. But it wasn’t until I lay the woven blanket, sheepskin cushion and lightweight saddle on a horse’s back at Sol de Mayo that I realised what brought me back to this place. The smell of dust and hay propelled me back to the primal sanctuary of my memory.      […] I stopped at the gate, where the grass grew tall. A bull’s skull faced the horns of Cerro Puño. Eighteen sheep rested in the shade of bushes in their pasture. The horses swished their tails, though the swarming tábanos had mellowed in the cool evening. I had never been so satisfied living within the bounds of that fence. The Río Claro tumbled while I stood beneath the protective stare of Puño, a mountain that signifies where you stand in the world and where you are going. I slid down the cut bank and stood in the river. The water curled and tripped over rocks on its way out of the valley, into the Colonia, the Baker, the Pacific. The word claro is most directly translated as clear. Frequently used in conversation, it is a word of encouragement, to express agreement with another’s ideas. It is often spoken in the same instances as verdad, or true. Claro is said with a drawn-out ‘a’, which encourages the other speaker to slow their words. Claaaaro. Nothing more needs to be said; the conversation stands as it is. Claro is truth. You could see the Claro’s source from Lago Colonia, which is two kilometres north of Sol de Mayo. That open gap to the south remained a blank emptiness in my mind’s geography. The wide space that the mountains permitted to the sky, the swift and clean slope of subalpine vegetation that was dotted with rocks, the deep colours reminded me, joyously, of Montana. It was not a painful and nostalgic reminiscence, but a realisation that maybe this place could be home as well: these shrubs, these mountains, this sweeping open sky. At the end of January, Joshua and I set out on a brief trip to the source of the river, into that empty space.      […] The slope mellowed as I met the glacier’s spidering crevasses at eye level. A great whip-crack broke the still air. I turned to the glacier, belly dropping, expecting a great sheet of ice to tumble into the lake. Black scree clicked, but nothing more came of it. I continued in silence but remained on edge. Life in the alpine environment had faded, and I had softened. Evaristo once made an unexpected visit to Sol de Mayo during a resupply. He expectantly sat in the Zodiac as we prepared to cross Lago Colonia. His brown hands held an oar, and he...