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Easter Henry Barber Reenactment Days at Araps 5-Mar-2008 At 10:58:23 AM oweng

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On 5/03/2008 Dom wrote:
>Who are these guys and are they still alive?
>
>http://www.thesarvo.com/confluence/plugins/advanced/gallery-slideshow.action?pageId=1818&
>ecorator=popup&imageNumber=19
>

The guy doing the jump is Lyle Closs (according to the caption). I dont know lyle, but somewhat ironiclly I remeber this text he wrote, that Bill Andrew's posted on another thread here on Chockstone:

It was written by Lyle Closs and appeared in SCREAMER 84/85

APPEAL (FOR THE UNKNOWN FIRST CLIMBER)

I know a few people who are important. I am sure you'll agree.
Bob Bull, for example. Led the hard bits on the first ascent of Euridyce at Arapiles. Bit of an idiot in his baby days. Lovely family now. Farm in the mountains behind Hobart. Smashing record collection. Great bloke by the fire when the rain's pissing down on the cold Tassie hills, glass of Guinness warming in your fist.
Donny Holmes for example. Led a 14 new route once. Died of cancer a year or two back. Fought it monumentally for many years. Drank a lot with me and the lads a long time ago. You don't know him do you? Bloody annoying I call it.
Reg Williams for example. A great climber and bushman. Stutters. A very important person in the lives of many. On the first ascent of Emperor at Buffalo. Led first ascent of Orang Utang at Arapiles. Not just initials in a book you know. Raising his kids. Making perfect replica steam trains for Christ's sake. What do you care I wonder.
Mick McHugh. Skyhooking in a hurricane at Coles Bay. Abseiling off Frenchmans and leaping fires. Designing kitchens for princesses now isn't he! More than nine point Helvetica bold underneath the climb description.
Peter Jackson, teacher, powerhouse of suburban Hobart. Man of many visions, discoverer of Arapiles, searcher ever since. Lots of climbs with his name on, and many line drawings without peer, but do you sense how I feel here? No, probably not.
Me. I did a few new routes, knew a few people, made a certain short term impression. But what does FIRST CLIMBED: L. CLOSS mean to anyone? Bugger all I suspect.
So what the hell use is this strange appendage at the bottom of each route description? Why bother recording the first climbers?
If it says FIRST CLIMBED; D. WHILLANS, J. BROWN now that means something because you've read the biographies, seen the movie, analysed the photograph. There's some response drilled up from the core of the mind. There's some encouragement there to resurrect the mythology ... My mythology, now. What do you know of that if you haven't read the Tasmanian Climbers Club magazines and Thrutches of the late sixties, early seventies? Most who have have probably forgotten them anyway. I have.
You see, my mythology involves the previously mentioned characters among many others and is wreathed in mists of time, lit bright with the sharp rays of younger perception - all that crap.
And all of these important climbers I have mentioned - each has his own mythology in which I am a peripheral shade drifting through and past. To themselves they are mythologically central.
Memory is just mythology of course. It is not real and deserves less credence than it is allowed - pathos, however, insists.
And it does seem a little pathetic that we insist on forcing our meagre mythologies on to the small guidebook page, forever thumbed with the aim of finding the way to a present, a future climbing enjoyment, not a wistful rememberance of days long past. Probably not to recognise the achievments of the first ascenders. Certainly with no capacity to know of their feelings at the time.
Dammit there is no art in any of it.
The climb descriptions are as much descriptive of human emotion as the rememberance columns of the Saturday papers.
And doing the climbs, well, the physical surroundings are roughly the same, but the actions are different, and of course the feelings are new, personally exclusive.
The actions, well they are just a necessary response to the surroundings.
But the feelings! Now there is something like art, something like real dreams in flood.
And those little words at the bottom of the route description are, of course memorials to other men's dreams.
And perhaps your dreams are every bit as powerful or langorous as were those of the first to climb the climb. But stop your arrogant mental static a moment before you approach the eternally patient stone and think of those that first dreamed the dream.
Even if they no longer breathe, at least, that day, they dreamed where no man had ever dreamed before. It's a thing worthy of the gods, a breath on the window of eternity.
A breath on the window perhaps.
And just as the printing of the names of the first to climb the route is a memorial to other men’s dreams, so to climb that climb is to lie in another man's grave.
The grave may be the same. But it was not dug for you.