I laughed. I cried. I thought about life.
I couldn’t put down Barry Blanchard’s long-awaited memoir, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains.
Crafted with equal measures of youthful boundary-pushing, heartfelt emotion, deep soul-brother bonding and a young man’s yearning to measure up to great heights, all set to a thumping backtrack of The Clash, Rolling Stones, Jerry Jeff Walker, The Pogues, Joy Division, even a dash of Vivaldi, Blanchard lays it bare on the page, writing as he’s always climbed – with heart.
Such an accomplishment couldn’t be more fitting, since it was through books that Blanchard first felt the pull of climbing the hardest routes on the world’s biggest, most daunting mountains.
In one of the most serendipitous moments of any a disadvantaged kid’s childhood, while riding a Greyhound bus back to Calgary from visiting his grandmother Blanchard sat beside a young woman who read to him from the pages of Heinrich Harrer’s gripping classic, The White Spider.
Hailing from the wrong neighbourhood in Calgary, just an hour’s drive from the Rockies, Blanchard saw on those pages men who acted with honour, so unlike the men he’d known in his life. Any ambition for a fatherless Metis kid to be a mountain climber, however, he writes, “may as well have been to be an astronaut.”
Sharing his stories of growing up poor in a world punctuated by violence was not easy, Blanchard admitted in an interview with the RMO.
“Especially in grade school, I was really conscious of the fact I came from a really poor household,” he said. “I felt I needed to measure up. I spent a lot of time trying to feel good enough.”
After brief exposures to an actual climber and some rudimentary rope skills, by his late teens Blanchard found his path out of the city – and away from potential jail time – to the mountains and the passion of climbing them.
Following a genuinely entertaining apprenticeship on a progression of Rockies’ test-piece routes, it wasn’t until he and steadfast ropemate Kevin Doyle succeeded on the north face of Les Droites in the Alps that Blanchard believed he could really be not just a climber, but one who could climb the hardest routes on big mountains, and do it well. An alpinist.
“It was in Chamonix, 1980, when Kevin and I came down from climbing the north face of Les Droits,” he said. “That’s where it came to fruition - I made the decision to dedicate my life to climbing, alpinism.”
And it was Blanchard’s willingness to commit to frozen nights in coffin-sized ice caves with his partners, exhibiting his finest team-player attributes as he kicked and clawed his way over bulging overhangs to find passages up steep and unforgiving ice-plastered rock faces that rewarded him with purpose and pride.
But the true soul of this book is not just the exuberance and tenderness with which he writes about his climbing partners and the life and death moments they share - alongside laugh-till-it-hurts boyish antics - but the heartfelt honesty with which he shares intimate moments of his family relationships, as when he describes regret for slapping his younger brother across the face for stealing from him.
“We were a young man and a boy trying to figure it out as best we could. And I will go to my grave wishing that I had done better that day.”
While he wasn’t always certain he had done his best in his efforts to help his youngest brother, Blanchard expresses pride in his part on boundary-pushing climbs, particularly a violent avalanche and miraculous survival on Nanga Parbat.
“I’m quite proud of our climb, or more accurately our attempt, on Nanga Parbat,” Blanchard said. “We climbed extremely well, it was probably some of the best I’ve ever climbed. And we got thrown into war and we did well, the four of us, our little band.”
In addition to naming the north ridge of Rakaposhi as another high point, Blanchard said the North Pillar of the North Twin, in the most captivating pocket of the Canadian Rockies, remains special.
“I really cherish the memory of climbing with David (Cheesmond),” he said. “It was a challenging climb, and it was the last big route like that I did with David. I got to hang out with David for seven days in an amazing place and enjoy his company.”
Writing of Cheesmond’s disappearance in 1987 while attempting Mount Logan’s unrepeated Hummingbird Ridge with Catherine Freer was another difficult passage, Blanchard admitted, as was writing about two clients he was guiding falling to their deaths into a bergshrund where they were buried by wet heavy snow, events which thrust him to endure the darkest period of his life.
“There were times I questioned what I was doing, specifically at the time of Dave Cheesmond’s death … and when my clients died in 1986. It was a very trying time, a very hard time,” he said. “But, I concluded I got more out of climbing mountains than not doing it.”
And, fortunately for the thousands of people he’s guided over the decades, and for the family members he’s close to – he dedicated the book to his mother – his passion for books, as well as climbing, hasn’t waned either.
“My desire to write comes from the climbing books I read,” Blanchard said. “Bonatti, Rebuffat, Lionel Terray - that got me excited about one of my callings. A lot of the writing I was reading was really good. It got me to read beyond mountain books to writers like Hemingway.”
And like climbing, it matters to him that he not just write, but write well.
“I think I became a good climber before becoming a good writer,” Blanchard said. “It’s interesting, now the process of being a good climber is going down, hopefully the process of being a good writer is going up.”
As a young student, he admitted, writing was a chore, although he did once earn a good grade on an essay about Hamlet.
“It was like pulling teeth,” Blanchard said. “It’s funny, I did see my Grade 12 English teacher not long ago. She’s as flabbergasted I’m published as I am. Some of my teachers probably said ‘I don’t think he can read.’”
Hopefully those teachers can’t put his book down either.
The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains, by Barry Blanchard, is published by Patagonia Books. He’ll be signing books at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in the Max Bell foyer on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 1:30 p.m.
