PART ONE

It’s a dark day in the metropolis of 武汉*. Like a december storm right before the rain, an electric crowd fills the wet market where — behind the counters — blood, sweat and tears drip away from an unfortunate badger and many other doomed fellow-mammals. Nobody notices the invisible horror when an unnamed virus passes from one marketgoer to another.

Fastforward 10 weeks. The blue Lombardian sky doesn't show a single airplane-contrail anymore. The so-called bat-virus did get noticed eventually. Now Venice’s water shines brighter than anyone remembers. For the first time fishes pop up in the city's canals, in the way the virus now plagues the news. "Breaking: 10% die among the 6% infected ones under the 85-plus people". Though some centenarians may easily make it over the infection, others react differently and soon we see high mortality.

My climbing partner and I drive near Czech Republic. *Triiiiiiing* I take up. Oh? Our vulnerable inviters have to cancel last minute. The rubber on the climbing shoes in the trunk breaks out in sweat, realizing its days are counted because(!)... we drive back through Franconian forests, where we're met with Bavarian hospitality at my trusted gasthof.

 

The water cooker tries to warn us already (cheers if you see it). We climb in the soft wind and sun.

 

 

 

 

Freundschaftsweg on the Napoleon rock tower, lit in the last sun and balancing high above the Wiesent river valley. First climbed by Kurt Albert in 1979.

 

 

After North-Italy and Vorarlberg, the Coronavirus’ exponential numbers kick in everywhere. Alarming figures spark global confusion. We're hardly responsive to the chronic, but react easily on the acute. Total chaos is imminent. We're driving home and roll over the last national border right before it closes. On the ground March promises mayhem, but high above our heads the peaceful open sky seizes power, determined to stay.

 

Right! Here comes the sun.. little darling.. (Eventual cumulative precipitation in Brussels:)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART TWO

Then the unthinkable happens. It's over! Woohoow! Nothing happened... False alarm. Everyone socially distances. People have common sense. 'Course! Figures no longer breathe in my neck in the grocery store, great!

Imagine this pandemic seriously got off ground. We might have seen our governments react like a loose cannon. Or our competition-loving climbing federation echo some kamikaze-macho discourse on rock climbing... saying that it's a high risk place to be on top of being a contagious one, rather than to point to the complex rescue chain that would be the real issue in my opinion. But there's too many opinions already in this period.

No numbers suggest that time spent rock climbing is above-average emergency-inducing. Yet no numbers indicate the opposite, I admit. Sure thing multipitching can transmit contagious diseases. If only we could simul free solo multipitch... Oh, erh... We can! We hesitate... then we remember Daan's magic words: "What could go wrong?"

Birds keep on singing that song! Let's kick off April.. To the Alps! The cassette with The Presidents of the USA... to the radio! *Guitars* *Sudden singing* Moving to the country, I’m gonne climb me a lot of pitches.. As we peer over the horizon which is becoming sharper each glimpse, we are struggling each with our own questions. I can see it in the grim look covering the eyes of my worried companions in the car.

Will we involuntarily recreate the LUAK logo? Would you like to learn to fly, would you like to see me try? Is it a good idea... simul free soloing? Alex Honnold reached stardom by soloing but do we need to? Google searches for “free solo” multiplied by a factor 50 in the period of his release, but can we really single-handedly spike up the searches for “simul free solo”?

Fastforward to granite big walls two days, one bivouac, one couch and some bakeries later. “Numbers got no soul” said John 'Verm' Sherman (founder of V-grading in the pic below). But they sure do warn you when you’re starting something you can’t get out of without making a fool of yourself. We’ll discover this soon in the chosen one: an obscure multipitch estimated at 8c+, which hopefully proves us to be the record breakers, the Kim Kardashian’s, of climbing. (I’ve read something yesterday about this person and the confusing world of people who do not climb.)

In the LUAK library we had found this book, “Secret climbs for badass adventurers”. The rock that it eventually has send us to seems calm though. The landscape is peaceful. Birds call from all sides. I see fields of green. The edges of the fields are not see-through anymore. Bright trees have taken over. The ground far beneath us is speckled with white flowers. You can take pictures there for your kid’s Holy Communion. Or draw a satanic pentagram if you must.

 

.......

 

Today we are pushing our own boundaries. Pushing the boundaries has always been a principal part of rock climbing, but recently I cannot rid myself of the impression that an indoor competition spur permeates to the outdoor*, at least in the media’s offer of superlatives. Olympics here, hardest sports climb there. After some superlatives and Silence The Movie*, we are fed the ‘hardest’ free solo (Free Solo the movie) and then we are plagued again with speed record attempts of the Nose.

We want to go with the hype. So that’s actually the other reason why we ventured into this simul solo operation. It's more rad than what Alex Honnold did. If one of us falls, the others fall too (take that Alex*). Vertical Free Solo Limit The Movie! When in doubt, run it out... But a sudden scream of my solo’ing partner 10 meters lower might indicate it runs differently.

“Shit, I’m gonne fall”. He looks down and corrects. “I’m not gonna falllll!!!” We see a big shark cravingly holding her big mouth full of gyoto teeth open and ready to swallow today’s desserts whole. “Never trust a book from LUAK!!”

 

 

 

 

NOTES

*Climbing federation ridicule: Scorn and rage but save the brutal critique. Some climbing federations may have lost touch, but lots of its people still do the impossible and carry part of the community.

 

*Competition values spoiling the outdoors: Already in 1985 topclimbers bundled forces with “Le Manifeste des 19” in which they averted themselves from commercial narrowminded (competition) values which challenged their passion for climbing.

 

*Silence - the movie: Actually it rather is an interesting movie about Ondra pushing his own limits and own impossible, if you forget for a moment the poster’s superlative taglines.

 

*Free Solo - the movie: To be honest, Alex Honnold is famous for style, not for superlatives or grades. Way to go. 💪

In the movie it is suggested that quite some free solo'ers have died already. What the movie doesn't say is they didn't die free solo'ing. Wolfgang, Kurt Albert,... and recent guys like Dean Potter, Brad Gobright,.. none of them was free solo'ing on their fatal day.

 

*(Online) climbing media: Don't look at the world through headlines, certainly not through commercial climbing media headlines.

 

BONUS: A map of how Europe's most famous disease travelled. Source: a 'History Today' article from 3 March 2005, contributed by Ole Jørgen Benedictow, black death specialist at the university of Oslo. 

 

 

*武汉: Wuhan-city lies around the Yangtze river, that's still 1.000km from reaching the sea in Shanghai. When the Yangtze is 3/4 on its way to the sea, there is Nanjing-city (aka Nanking). Beijing (aka Peking) lies far away in the north, close to Mongolia.

Let me elaborate and place Wuhan in some general Chinese history to which I'll zoom out:

• 2.000 years of imperial China with many internal wars constantly challenging unity of power;
• First three centuries AD: Silk road opens to Europe, Taoism is founded and a tripartite kingdomsystem comes to rule until the Jin take the sole power;
• Sometimes it's a coalition of dynasties ruling, sometimes they're opposing, and then there is a power monopoly again.
• 755: The An Lushan Rebellion (famous example of the many rebellions);
• 1205–1279: First Genghis Khan, and then follow-up Mongols, mingle in the dynasty's internal divisions and after many campaigns and decades the Mongols eventually end the general rule by dynasties of ethnic Han people, installing the Yuan dynasty;
• 1368-±1640: Rule is taken over by a Han-people dynasty again, marking a feudal system;
• ±1640-1912: Manchu-people (an ethnic minority, mainly originating from Manchuria in the north) install the Qing dynasty;
• 1841: UK concludes the first Opium War, claiming the Hong Kong island right in front of the Chinese coast. (The island is in China's far south, immediately next to Macau which was a Portuguese colony already established centuries earlier). Ten years later UK even gets the whole Kowloon peninsula, thus expanding a few kilometers over Chinese land.
• 1849: The French concession is established in Shanghai;
• 1850-1864: Taiping Rebellion (Qing supported by France and U.K.);
• 1899-1901: Boxer Rebellion (Qing splits up because of different views on foreign powers, so they get a military visit from an alliance of U.S., Russia, Germany, France...);
• The Qing dynasty is semi-feudal and semi-colony, but the cracks will largen with every episode of crop failure and hunger;
• 1911: Wuhan's local Wuchang uprising triggers the Xinhai revolution, the final collapse of Qing rule. All provinces in the country renounce the Qing dynasty and join the republic of the revolutionaries;
• 1912: Out the emperor. Behold the republic and its 'Beiyang government' and dictator (soon self-proclaimed emperor) Yuan;
• 1916: Yuan dies. A power vaccuum is left to be filled up by a mess of local warlords looking to establish their power;
• NOTE: Warlord = person exercising regional control; without a strong government; depending on coercive control over armed forces.
• 1924: The Kuomintang movement joins forces with early communists. The alliance is supported by the Soviet and brings stability;
• 1927: Kuomintang's leader Chiang Kai-shek (supported by landowners and businessmen) tries to get rid of the communists, massacring them in Shanghai, and dividing the Kuomintang internally;
• 1927: Kuomintang's administration is overtaken by the communists who make Wuhan their headquarter and base to unite the inland countryside against Chiang's Kuomintang (who hang out in Nanjing);
• 1927: Chiang takes back Wuhan and expels the communists.
• 1930: Tibet invades the north(-west), quarreling over borders and its monasteries, but Tibet is soon defeated by Chiang's Kuomintang;
• 1931: Japan marches into China's very north, Manchuria, which is even north of Beijing, the closest China there is to Japan, with just the Koreas in between;
• NOTE: Threats to China's unity come mostly from the north. In the north-west, west and south-west there are mountains and deserts. In the south there is French Indochina, later in 1954 falling apart in the states Cambodia (Pol Pot will plunge the land in blood), North-Vietnam (the arena for the U.S.A. and communists to wage their geopolitical private-interests-driven pseudo-ideological war), South-Vietnam and Laos;
• 1931: Kuomintang (under Chiang) tolerate the Japanese. Chiang first wants to 'pacify China internally' so for unification he goes after the (Soviet-supported) communists once again, who are now holding up inland even more south. The communists soon are geographically encircled 5 times, so a movement of 69.000 people breaks away through enemy lands and marches 9.000km in one year, escaping encirclement and surviving with 10.000 of them;
• 1937: Japan wants to advance further into China. The Kuomintang (with Chiang kidnapped to forge a deal) reconcile with the communists for a few years (though reluctantly) and fight the Japanese. The Japanese atrocities in Nanjing shock the world and influence international politics in the second World War that soon breaks out.
• 1946: Kuomintang and the communists resume fighting each other.
• 1949: The communists eventually win and purge China's cultural heritage, plunging the country in a reign of terror and famine as the Chinese Communist Party will launch many campaigns: some to eradicate corruption, increase literacy,...But also to centralize and monopolize power within the party, eradicting every chance for internal opposition, this also by organizing political reeducation, indoctrination and ideological reform, even for those who had already proven themselves in the Long March. Now you could have been one of their heros and not involved in corruption, but still be near-randomly executed in a purge or rectification campaign: a powerplay for influence, indirectly leading to civilians killing their own families. You want your system and ideas to rule? Very noble and everything? Uniting? Reform? Change power? Welll... You will be put away by powercravers. How will you keep the Stalin's and Mao's from taking the joint over? They'll be there, lurking! You'll stop them? You'll make sure they don't emerge? Then it's you who's going to be the Mao and Stalin. A big crowded network of opportunists, closing an eye, will rally behind a small group of wackos.
• 1949: Chiang takes to the sea and flees to the island of Taiwan (200km off land, the size of Belgium) and calls Taipei the new capital of China, though really he lost his grip on China, he desperately tries to get some far-off Uyghurs to rebel, and moreover kills people on Taiwan (the White Terror) to nip local resistance in the bud and maintain a fascist-inspired rule.

 



Today's China visualised by 3D population density (courtesy to The Pudding).