Handfuls of sandflies
First things first. Earlier this year, when I heard that Geoff Spearpoint had written a book about tramping and climbing in the Southern Alps, to be published by Potton and Burton, the news stirred a feeling of anticipation for a New Zealand climbing book that I hadn’t experienced for a long time. Geoff’s knowledge of the mountains and the people who’ve travelled through them, his ability with a camera and a keyboard, his enthusiasm, and the sheer length and breadth of his experience – who wouldn’t be excited by the prospect of all that between two hardback covers?
If you are a person who habitually reads the first paragraph before moving on to the next article, this is all you really need to know: in November, the Hutt Valley Tramping Club hosted a launch evening for The Great Unknown where John Nankervis gave the oration, as it were, and began by observing that it is not a question of whether to purchase this book but, rather, how many people in your life need to be given a copy of their own.
Yet when I had a copy in my hands and first thumbed through the pages my excitement was tempered by a small suggestion of disappointment. It turns out that I was wrong to think that, and it’s worth spending a little time explaining why, because that in turn helps to explain some of this book’s real strengths.
This is a deceptively simple book. It starts at Bainham right up in the northwestern corner of Golden Bay and makes straight for the Dragons Teeth, barely letting up until reaching the coast at Precipice Cove in Fiordland, by which time handfuls of sandflies are trapped between the tent outer and inner. It was this outwardly simple structure, one trip after another, that worried me. The accumulation of experiences is one of the less appealing traits of our time, expressed as bucket lists, social media posts and the barely conscious fidgeting of mass tourism. The nature of climbing, with its discretely parcelled rations of gratification through problems, routes, projects and trips, may I think put climbers at particular risk. I suffer from this kind of thinking and so do most climbers I know, to greater or lesser degrees. We make lists and busily and deliberately tick our achievements, but never seem to find the list getting any shorter. The American Mark Greif (not a climber) writes that by focusing on peaks, ‘ordinary topography loses its allure. The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our life a waste.’
So when I first opened The Great Unknown I thought: is this just a coffee table list?
More fool me. Read that three-word title again. You could think about the form of this book as being like a tent: designed so you can throw it up in a moment, wherever you happen to end up at the end of the day, over and over, night after night. What Geoff has to say is revealed in the details of fifty-five trip reports from fifty-something years in the hills. Every night brings a new sunset and every day promises a different adventure but, as Geoff writes: ‘The mountains, the gorges, the forest, the scrub, the tussock, the rock and the ice are all seamlessly connected. The experience of that completeness, in which both tramping and climbing skills are required, is what sparks and attracts me.’
Mark Greif offers a similar path to, as he calls it, radicalize experience. He ‘asks you to view every object as you would a work of art . . . art is essentially an occasion for the arousal of emotions and passions. You experience a work of art. You go into it. . . . The discipline is to learn to see the rest of the world in just that same way.’
I don’t know whether Geoff would agree. I am sure of two things, though. The first is that with this book Geoff has created a work of art. The second is that he has also written a manual. More exactly, The Great Unknown documents a method of living in the mountains of Aotearoa. Working that out has been the project of a lifetime for a man who I think has thought harder about what that life might look like than almost anyone else.
If that sounds too much like a eulogy, it isn’t. Mountain journeys continue. At the launch, I mentioned to Geoff I was about to go to the Spenser Mountains and instantly had his attention. ‘There’s a great high traverse to do. Beautiful campsites in the tussock basins to the west . . .’
The Great Unknown: Mountain Journeys in the Southern Alps, by Geoff Spearpoint
https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1125975591
This review appeared in the Climber 110, Summer 2019
