With My Head In The Clouds

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Only the church goers are awake at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, as I type barefoot while eating the Nutella I stole from the CAVRA perishable supplies with a spoon and marvel at the extremely Welsh wonder that I was woken up by the sun five minutes ago but now there's a pounding downpour. Based on the weather alone, I heave a sigh of very dry relief that we came back a day early from the Snowdonia camping trip. Based on the sheer number of perfect -if often terrifying - encapsulated memories I've got from the past three days, I want to wake up with matted greasy hair in the £100-for-parking flea-infested campsite at every ludicrously early crack of dawn for the next ten years. I have had my head literally in the clouds for the past three days, clambering up nearly vertical faces of craggy rock beyond the cloud line with seagulls and airplanes actually flying below us. Scrambling up Tryfan (where Darwin did all his fossil research before setting sail on the Beagle. However when you realise that a fossil makes a terrible handhold and you're sort of dangling off the side of a mountain with about three toes and a knuckle drawing the thin line between you and death, you do not give a fig), I have never before actually tasted my heart in my mouth - flavoured of Martin's odd Norwegian cherry toothpaste - more times in one day. Usually stepping into the CAVRA hut so resoundingly male that only the sleeping bags airing out on the wall remind you that you haven't accidentally stepped onto the set of Rocky 7, but all traces of overstuffed macho pride were thrown to the constant buffeting winds as all our muscular-calved men clung desperately to the rocks pretending for forty kilometers that the tears in their eyes were from the cold. I doubt I will ever derive much joy from the school climbing wall again after that day, when there were no ropes or harnesses or convenient plastic handholds shaped like mushrooms. But it was such a fantastically rugged adventure - arriving at the top of Tryfan, with water vapor from the cloud cover beading up on my shirt and my hair whipping around my face as if trying to escape from my head, I overcame a sudden crippling sense of vertigo and was the first person to jump between the two huge boulders at the top, called Adam and Eve. This traditional feat, complete with the traditional accompanying feeling that every instinctual cell in your body is screaming at you to JUST GET DOWN, is meant to make you incredibly lucky in love. Hey, for me every little bit helps. This fact of course is slightly ironic because it was on top of Adam and Eve that I finally weaned the boy who has been silently and deeply in love with me for about five months now into an actual stilted conversation for the first time. Now, based on his past demonstrations, I'll only have to wait until January for his answer to "Do you have enough room in your backpack for the water?" which I asked him yesterday before we left on our second hike. The second one was rather gratuitous - or so we thought at the beginning - because that was the day we were meant to be climbing Snowdonia and the infamous Crib Goch (Ramzi and I entertained ourselves for the entire five-hour car trip to the camp site saying "Crib Goch" in Don LaFountain action-adventure-film-trailer voices and making up slogans like "They set up the mess tent in fifteen minutes. BUT THEY NEVER RETURNED"), led by Dave Booker Man of the Mountain, the theater arts teacher who gives us repetitive lectures on mountain safety which are always fantastic, in the sense that they are always fantasy. I'm convinced that it's his elastic-ankle trousers, which make all the blood which would have been in his feet rush to his head, thereby making him believe that he actually did, during his training for the special ops, carry an unconscious Australian all the way down the steep side of the Glydders with one sprained ankle from when he strangled a sheep with his bare hands and then bit the wool off with his teeth to keep his hypothermic fingers from falling off, with the Gutenberg Bible and the Mona Lisa in his backpack. He was always up ahead, surveying his kingdom, while we took off our hoods to enjoy the first rainy quasi-shower we'd had in three days, stumbling straight through the middle of a magical but ruthlessly windy cloudbank. Whenever I'm afforded a day to just walk and think I always end up either writing songs or devising elaborate hypothetical situations which I follow through with in my head until suddenly I'm an escaped convict on a sugar plantation in Aruba. It was so breathtakingly pristine up there that I actually became a hermit living alone with a vegetable garden, some chickens, and a backpack, alone with the rough-edged white dots of sheep against the spreading mauve clusters of heather on the swooping grey-green curves of the mountain. What with my crippling fear of spiders and my deep subconscious obsession with shoes, I'd never really pictured myself as the rugged adventurer type, and yet I love it so indescribably much. Perhaps the clouds have affected my head, because I never want to come back down to earth.

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