Chasing Midas - Toby Floyer

In re-reading the rag-bag collection of memories and thoughts which masquerade here as a journal article I feel compelled to defend myself by letting it be known that I couldn't think of anything else to write. If the diverse experience of the GUM Club can indeed be reflected in merely a few perspectives, then these are mine. In the interests of the truth I leave out the epics (wot epics? ed.), the contribution to club life (?? ed.), and the achievements (???) of my time here in its capacious bosom.
It once struck me powerfully what the point of climbing, of gaining height, was. Since at that moment, however, I was improvidently halfway up one of the steepest switchback roads in Greece, in the mid-forties heat with no shade, and dying of dehydration, I shall spare the hallucinatory drivel and admit that the feeling has never come back. But cycling in Greece did affect my attitude to hills. The Greeks possess lots of mountains, many taller than ours, but they are more modest about them and with the honourable exception of those who work the tortured high slopes, in the main they prefer to live in the shade at the bottom near the kafenia. This leaves a kind of void at the top, and while there is little of the Alps about those mountains in summer, they hold a vast hazy desolation broken only by the odd clanking goat (they have bells which make them clank; they also climb trees: don't ask me why), ruined settlement, and bullet-riddled signpost. This is a different scale of things, and it decreases your sense of movement. But it increases somehow the drive to get there, and I came to enjoy the reduced priorities in the endless world of going uphill.

Sitting on the train from Milan to Chiavenna on my way to Bregaglia, watching Lago Como creep past, I wondered if this idea would survive the walk-ins. It did, and was a similar sort of thing: sweating in the sun; a kind of emptiness in the known way. Thinking with your mind came later, in sorting out the route and your timing, feeling embarrassed about the spectacle of you safely geared up for glacier travel while a load of Belgian trekkers skipped about up ahead armed only with walking poles and Pentaxes; later contemplating the sometimes gigantic rockfall that devastated the glaciers below, forcing avalanches through sheer weight of rock on the otherwise dry surface. I remember the marmots, large brown crosses between a badger and a squirrel, streaking like fat nudists caught in a spotlight between rocks, there to pretend you couldn't see them.
Perhaps, apart from the mountains, the most enduring memory is of the warm evenings in Bondo. The sun having gone early into the gap between Switzerland and Italy and leaving behind a long twilight, inevitable GUMC meet traditions emerged; an al fresco mess of dinner and argument and alcohol blending seamlessly into darkness, the toys MSR flamethrowers and boules at the café, the subjects of ingenuity tarpaulin sheets and candle windshields - the craic, well, enough said. Dawn brought hangover and a site bestrewn with the nocturnal detritus of people's possessions, rubbish, maps and guidebooks flapping quietly in the breeze, and the early bus growling away down the valley. Who knew what wild beasts had been foraging in the night? I did: they were from Glasgow and they were looking for buckie.
I have a great grandfather who must, I suppose, be reckoned among the early Scottish mountaineers. Allan Arthur was climbing from about 1898 onwards; he was an early member of the SMC. There are photographs of him climbing on Skye with hemp rope, wearing a tweed suit, a necktie and hobnail boots with puttees. There is a photo of an SMC meet, the men holding shoulder-high alpenstocks, slung with rope and scarves as they stand in deep, long-lying snow, gazing solemnly through you. There is snow on the trees in the background; snow on the roof of Glenmore Lodge beside which they stand. It looks cold. The photo is dated Easter, 1917. In an article he wrote for the SMC journal in around 1910, Arthur recounts skiing in the Alps, and with Naismith on Ben Nevis. He describes snow conditions at times of the year that seem utterly alien to our Scotland: Tyndrum and Pitlochry are good bases for skiing until March; one can often expect to ski back to one's hotel. Springing out of bed on a February morning in 1906 he reckons on twenty degrees of frost - whether Fahrenheit or Celsius this is pretty bloody cold. His climbing diary again records almost incredible conditions for the time of year. The climate has changed, the winters are shorter and milder, and I think in some ways we are worse off for it. One last image: the same SMC members stand in an almost identical line, still grasping the tools of their trade, still festooned with scarves and comforters, with the same snow underfoot. But all is white, and the solemn look is replaced by slow grins and glints: now they are at the top of their hill.

Rum is surely one of the most extravagantly arduous of the club's methods of travelling to a hill. After fiddling with survival bags and tarp on the roof of the bus in the pouring rain outside the GUU, lurching all the way along the roller-coaster ride that is the road to Mallaig, sleeping in the dismal carpark at the ferry terminal in the now freezing bus, energetically and deafeningly revved from time to time by the seemingly impervious driver for an elusive bit of warmth, competing with a crick in the neck for a ticket at the CalMac booth, throwing gear into the cargo nets, scrambling for benches to sleep on the boat... several islands later you are deposited on Rum via a tender, where you put up a tent which you will spend approximately five minutes actually sleeping in, and then you wander up Hallival and Askival in the cloud. So it was sunny when you set out; what now? A ceilidh full of barmy islanders and a bear, a self-proclaimed bluesman and an Irish poet fuelled by whisky and political invective. Thus did Sean (I forget his name) captivate his audience with drunken recitation and booze from the island shop. Megalomania is catching; the Victorian owners previous to Natural Heritage had built a castle for themselves out of stone quarried at vast expense on the other side of Scotland, and filled it with antique furniture and debauched guests. Despite this they retained enough of a sense of propriety to try and avoid any alcoholic connotations by calling the place Rhúm, a name as genuinely Gaelic as I am.
King Midas once did a favour for the god Dionysus, and in return he was granted a wish. He said 'pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.' He soon regretted his wish and begged to be released, as he was dying of hunger and thirst; for as well as everything else he laid hand on, the food he ate and the water he drank turned to gold too. But he has left something to mountaineers which I last saw in December whilst ambling about on Stob Coire Sgriodain: Midas' light is the name given to the low sun streaming across snow, and during a break in the weather I felt enveloped by a more solid kind of light; a more permeable kind of gold.
So much is about people: the pub, the expeditions to the Garage, the characters, the awful music which is always in the background, the stories and the drinking games, the triumphs and the tragedies that occur as the club wends its way through the world. Sometimes, though, I am reminded of the fact that all these things are just a part of the picture; that we are all, one way or another, chasing Midas.