Stars in their Eyes

Drink and drugs and climbing.

I was once sitting on the top deck of a London bus, coming home from a nightclub in Camden, when a woman, maybe more a girl, told me what it felt like to take heroin. She said that it was better than any orgasm, and right then and there, I thought to myself – having been granted a key to superhuman ecstasy –"Well, I'm never going to take that".

This pretty much sums up my view of most drugs, be they legal and taxable, like smoking and drinking, or illegal and untaxed. Take your pick. This isn't to say that I haven't got drunk, smoked or danced the night away on something or other in my youth, only that I was only ever a tourist to it, and only ever allowed me to take it, not it take me.

Maybe coming from a single-parent home with a mother who didn't drink or really afford to drink was part of it, or perhaps it was seeing other single-parent homes in which the mother did. Maybe, when I was old enough to drink, I thought it wasteful to blow my money on booze and drugs, I found how people always seemed to be in debt to each other or some dealer kind of grubby. Maybe it was older than that, going into the sergeant’s mess as a five-year-old, on my dad's camp, and thinking the beer and the people who drank it were a bit smelly, reinforced later in life by seeing what drink did to people who made them sick, violent, untrustworthy, and dangerous.

One winter's night, a schoolmate of mine, Mike, jumped into the river Hull on the way back from a nightclub, his way of demonstrating some adolescent frustration with unrequited love. A booze-free brain would probably have looked down into the midnight black water, the tide rushing out into the even darker and vaster Humber estuary, at the towering and unclimbable banks of the river, built for barges to tie up, not teenagers to climb out; grasped his own body would soon fail to function, to either swim or keep his head above water, or function for those that jumped in after him; but he didn't. His booze-filled mind, invincible and bent to grand romantic gesture, climbed over the railing, said some words fitting of Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain and jumped. The last they saw of him, as his friends who jumped to save him somehow found a way out of the water, was his glow-in-the-dark, Teenage Fanclub t-shirt floating out into the forever darkness, his body not discovered until months later.

For me, booze, fags, dope, the hard stuff, as well as betting and the addiction to fools' drama, all seemed like the manifestation of weakness to me, both in the inability to get control but also the giving up of control and folding to social pressure. Yes, I was, and am an oddball, but I wasn't some radical temperance nut; I just kept to myself.

And so, I feel like I've always been a bit of an outsider in climbing too; first, in the early days when it was drink, that no climbing or event was complete without going to the pub and getting pissed, or later, especially when climbing in the US when it was dope on offer; that every climb had to end with getting stoned, but later, how most climbs had to start that way as well.

If you're a drinker or a dope smoker, then it's maybe best to stop here, as I'm going to set out my outsider view, which is going to sound a bit counter-cultural, even reactionary, but it's not; it's just how someone sees these things unfold.

I have many stories about the long-term effect of drink and drugs on the lives of climbers I know, and climbers we all know, where that youthful devil may care rebel spirit, which is excellent in the short term, took them in the end. When I watch some old footage of some of my Yosemite heroes who have died suddenly, tragically, behind all the stale platitudes given to a life lived on the razor's edge, how many ask the question, when you look their junky eyes, slaves to the fix, unable to function unless they're half fucked, how sharp they really were? Would you like someone to carry out an operation on your eyes after they'd just smoked a bong or drank five cans of Long Island iced tea? No, but how about trying simul-climbing up El Cap and then BASE jumping off the top?

When it comes to drinking, the biggest problem I have with it is not drinking, as being drunk is fun; it's everything else. When people drink a bit, you can make exceptions for them, even join in now and again, but there comes a point in which the drinking becomes a problem, first a little problem, then a big problem, until drinking isn't a problem, everything else is.

I've seen this most of all climbing in Yosemite over thirty years, in that what begins with cans of Olde English after a climb becomes a few before the climb, then on the climb, and then. Eventually, there is no climb, just the drinking Olde English "800" and talking about climbing (the final step in this process is drinking Olde English alone, talking to yourself about Olde English, only talking about climbing to anyone who might pay for the following can). And don't get me started in Tequila!

It's the waste of the opportunity to climb and of a functional climbing life that makes me so sad. I just like to get on with shit and get shit done; up at 4:30am, not 12:30pm, and finish my day with a cup of tea, not a bottle of wine.

When you're an addict, yes, that's right, an alcoholic (you're always the last to know), a sure sign that you have a problem is that you can never be beyond arms or a rope length from booze. It's the first thing you think about in the morning, and it's the thing that stops you thinking of anything when you go to sleep. Such fucked-uppery soon alienates you from functional people, people who want to climb, as you just become a drag or a logjam to getting up routes, and so, you seek out fellow travellers and climbing bar flies, people who, being a fucked as you, make you feel normal.

Worst of all, it's funny when you're in your twenties and thirties but not when you're in your fifties or sixties. It's tragic, especially if it robs climbing of people who did, and could continue, to define what a climber is and should be.

But, drinking, being drunk, is a bit baby boomery, a bit GenX, now, drugs are where it's at.

I often point to the change in Yosemite pre and post-legalisation of cannabis in California (as well as the practical legislation of it everywhere else in the West), in that although it is illegal in Yosemite, as it's federal land, its effects within and without the park have been slow, but toxic.

Long before it became a trope, I'd point out that California didn't have a homeless problem; it had a people-fucked-up-on-drugs problem, a problem I felt got rapidly worse after 96 when medical cannabis was legalised, and I'd come across 19-year-old climbers stoned out of their heads who apparently had a prescription for the stuff (it was fully legalised in 2016).

Where once you'd come across the prominent 'stoner', a comedic figure right out of Hollywood casting, slowly, the 'non-stoner' seemed to be the standout. You went from people hiding out in the meadows smoking a joint to people stumbling around the base of the Nose at 8am, stoned out of their heads before setting off (maybe it's good for fear).

Again, smoking or doing any drugs is a personal thing, and for most people, their instinct kicks in before it becomes a problem, but not for everyone, and to an increasing degree.

Where once upon a time, the only people you knew who had a drug problem were film and pop stars, all of a sudden, it's people who you know who find they can't get through a week, and then a day, and then an hour without being on something. They can't sleep, they can't work, they can't be 'normal' unless they're a bit, and then a lot stoned. Do you know people like that?

Cannabis, for some, is just the start of it, and I know, or know of, several climbers who went from being top climbers to top junkies. Some made it back, some didn't, killed either by the drugs or in a bid to escape the person they'd become.

Probably the most tragic case was a climber, Chris Willie, whom I met in Canada, who seemed to be the definition of vibrancy and full-speed life. He said he was working on a piece of writing about drugs and addiction, which I thought, as we drank in a bar, must be a journalistic view of the subject. But, before his piece was even published (My Life and Death on Opioids), which was a personal story of addiction, Chris was dead from a fentanyl overdose.

I have a story that I'll round up with about a climber I once met in Yosemite, probably one of the most beautiful women I've ever met, by which I don't mean how she looked, but how she was, a human comet, someone who cast heat and light and energy over everyone lucky enough to meet her. Everything about her sparkled and fizzed. Everything about her was a possibility. If people are either radiators or drains, she was an atomic reactor. I nicknamed her' Stars in her eyes', and like everyone, man or woman, I fell in love with her the moment we met. True love is not wanting to sleep with someone; it's about wanting to be the one in eight billion lucky enough to spend more time with them than anyone else. She didn't feel the same (not that I said anything), but that was OK, as I'd already found my own stars in her eyes.

Like any unrequited love, I lurked and watched as gobbled up life and made the most of all that could be done. Here was someone who could be a role model for the climbing life; no time for boo-hoo victimhood histrionics, just action.

A few years passed, and I found myself back in Yosemite. By coincidence, on my first day on El Cap, I ran into Stars, but something was off. Gone was the spark, gone was the fizzle, gone was the energy. Love turned to concern, even though, really, I didn't know her.

Later, down by the road, I didn't see stars, only that junky look in her eyes, that slight panic, trying to work out with her partner where they'd go and smoke, safe from the eyes of any rangers. I don't know if she saw something in my own eyes, sadness, judgement, I don't know what, but the last thing she said to me was, "I need to get out of Yosemite".

I've looked for her since to see if she did or where she went, but I can find no clue. I hope she did.

I know this story might be grossly unfair, maybe not even true. Still, to me, it sort of defined a problem for me, a warning to others, a problem I'd seen get bigger and bigger, in that people with so much to give can easily find themselves in a culture where excess is the norm: excess risk, excess life, excess drink and drugs, living just for the now and screw tomorrow, the dirtbag ideal. But this is not the 1960s of Harding and Chouinard; it's 2025. But for some, the possibility of their lives will be stolen from them, only a bit at first, a late start here, a lost climb here, but eventually, you can lose everything, even the brightest of flames snuffed out, all that could ever be, swapped from some fleeting moments of the darkest, and loneliest, ecstasy.

Do I have a point? No, this is really me trying to get something off my chest, something that worries me - perhaps irrationally - but something I want to share, perhaps as a way to say it's OK to buck the trend, to decline, to say "no thanks", or "I'm getting up at 4:30". Maybe the current generation of climbers will reject drink and drugs anyway, as doing so is the new counterculture (maybe drink and drugs, like Facebook, are just old-person stuff?). But then perhaps it's easier for me, as I'm a Yorkshireman, and my drug of choice has always been tea.