Tuesday, 08:05, Annecy
I was blessed with encountering nature immediately in the mountains. Visiting Nick in Chamonix, and Steph’s older cousin and his wife in the shadow of the Aiguilles d’Arves, I hadn’t known what to expect.
I grew up on rippling land at the southern reach of the Pennines. I’ve clambered British Peaks. I’ve been through the Alps on a train, flown over their snow capped peaks, but never have I been close enough to feel them. Never have I been completely dominated by beautiful terror, by mountains rising into unsurvivable peaks with glaciers suspended on their shoulders.
In its beauty I was transfixed. Ice rivers teetering over ledges, flowing in slow motion down crevassed nooks of sharp, edged peaks. Valleys rising into alpine forest, scree and bare-faced rock. Mountains lofted into in towering shards and pyramids, touching the clouds.
The way the weather responded so keenly to the landscape, the way the mist and cloud clung and rose and parted, the way it lifted after sunrise, torn apart in swirling torrents at the end of the valleys; I can’t recall experiencing the air so quickly transformed.
The hard silicate of deep mountain forces the air to reveal its tricks. Fog and cloud sunk into the valley in the mornings. Ice-cold clouds hugging the mountainside, tethered to peaks. Crystal blue sky in sharp contrast to white, copper and green. Hidden sunsets watchable rose-gold and magenta in the mirror of the mountains. Alpenglow.
It was a stunning and shocking experience, imprinted deeply already.
I had moments on the mountain, a couple of thousand-metres up, surrounded by snow dusted peaks falling into the vast and close glacier-etched valley, where I thought to myself, ‘how’ve I any basis to write about nature when my experience of it has been so limited’.
I know, in theory, that wildness is relative and everywhere. Robert MacFarlane taught me in The Wild Places to see it growing in the cracks between paving slabs. Cal Flyn, in nature returning to human-malformed landscapes in Islands of Abandonment. But still, it didn’t prepare me for the immensity of the terrain on those scales and in those shapes.