Called to Climb

Look, I’m no mountaineer. Rock climbing (on a sunny face) with my partner Andy makes me smile. An expedition is grocery shopping, kids in tow. And the most pain I tolerate is easing myself into a hot bath. So my review of The Calling, Barry Blanchard’s long-awaited (and long-incubated) memoir, is not a comment on practical technique, climbing ethics, route choice, or gear placement. Rather, it’s two thumbs up for a righteous read, and appreciation for a man who’s made a masterpiece of his mountaineering life.

In 1964 a five-year-old Métis boy steeped in his (un)fair share of family and ancestral dysfunction, rides the Greyhound from his grandmother’s house in Medicine Hat, home to Calgary. The boy sits alone until a young woman takes him under her wing and reads to him, of all things, from Heinrich Harrer’s classic, The White Spider. The boy, eyeing the looming blue bulk of the Rockies on the horizon, hears the tales of the Eiger, which speak to him of heroism and flame his nascent desire to live “to a higher ideal” than most of the men he’s known in his short life.

Something called to me, writes Blanchard. He has spent the bulk of his life—described in this bulky book—answering that call by climbing the “beautiful, beautiful mountains.”

Over four hundred densely filled pages provide gripping, humourous, scatological, irreverent, historical, geographical, partnership, and climbing details of attempted and successful ascents of the biggest mountains on the planet. Blanchard does not shy away from the disturbing, the dangerous, and the deeply personal.

His clever rendering of dialogue during crux times paints striking vignettes of personalities. And references to Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Rolling Stones add a literary layer to the descriptions. Each chapter includes a musical playlist to accompany the expedition and era, which brings to mind a Twitter feed, but Blanchard is not the type to woohoo digitally after a big day out.

Certainly Blanchard outdoes the proverbial Inuit vocabulary for snow. Spending so much of his mountaineering life plowing through, ducking under, and shivering through it, he prodigiously describes snow in multiple metaphors—I challenge you to notice them all.

If I must criticize, then I will mention Patagonia’s irritating lack of proofreading, which interchanges were’s with where’s, places the apostrophe where it doesn’t belong (its/it’s), allows the flagrant abuse of semi-colons, and leaves in the odd run on and sentence fragment. However, none of that detracts from the fact that The Calling is a compelling read that drips with delicious details.

Mountaineering classics were Blanchard’s first teachers; the teenager raided his high school shelves, and read until the books were overdue. His first attempts were modeled on photos in books, and my absolute favourite story in The Calling is of the fifteen-year-old rapping out his bedroom window on a dog chain secured to his bed and weighted by his younger brother.

Of course there arises the ever-present question why. For most of us the drive, the focus, the adversity, and the physical ability to do what Blanchard and a select few do, is out of reach. In the book’s first chapter Blanchard writes that climbing the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat is like “having sex with death.” Twenty-five years later he concludes his book with, “Climbing mountains is good for the soul.” Reader, you decide.