Free The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson

winter air, marvelling at the precipitous sight of the mountains as I had never seen them before. It had been so simple.
    Years later I sat and listened to my friends talking excitedly about what they had done and inevitably the subject of close shaves and dangerous moments came up. Exactly as with climbing, the stories, many of them seriously alarming, served as lessons to everyone else. Pilots were forever making mistakes, some minor and some major, and their errors created a wealth of hilarious tales, yet there was usually a reason and therefore an understanding gained of what had gone wrong. The more frightening the story the better the lesson was learned. Like climbers, pilots had a black sense of humour not as a wayward disregard for danger but a way of coping with it.
    It is easy to get lyrical about the aesthetic beauties of flying, but the elemental power of the air can also smash you down with frightening force, punching your floppy fragile wing into little more than a bag of dirty washing. It has the power to pull you up into the sky at 2000 feet per minute and it can drop you in sinking air with equally violent rapidity.
    I heard stories of pilots being sucked into thunderstorms that have the power to wrench the hapless soul up to 30,000 feet and more. Wind shear and downdraughts create extreme winds within the cloud. If these don’t get you then there is a very good chance of freezing to death, being struck by lightning, or rendered unconscious by the pounding of huge hailstones. These clouds are best avoided.
    A friend of ours had been caught in the ‘cloud suck’ beneath a thunderhead when flying in central Spain. She had done everything she could think of to lose height, but in desperation she was eventually forced to put her wing into a full stall. If this manoeuvre had been executed in still air she would have found herself free-falling instantly. If she kept her brake lines fully extended and maintained the stall she would plummet earthwards.
    As she instigated the stall she was alarmed to realise that far from free-falling she was still slowly being pulled upwards. After ten frantic minutes she dropped slowly out from beneath the cloud base and once free of the sucking power of the cumulo-nimbus she was able to fly away to safety, chastened by the notion that there was enough power in these aerial monsters to lift her bodily upwards, despite having no wing flying above her.
    I was fascinated and repelled by the sport. Strangely enough that was exactly how I had felt when I had read Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider at the age of fourteen. I was appalled by the grisly stories and the black and white photos of doomed climbers while at the same time fascinated by what they were trying to do. I was certain that the last thing I would ever do was try and climb the north face of the Eiger, yet at the same time I was inexorably drawn to the experiences of these remarkable men. It seemed that they must live in an extraordinary world. They must see things and sense emotions that few others would ever wish to experience. There was something mesmerising about climbing extreme mountain faces.
    It was the same with paragliding. I could sense the lure of it dragging me forward like the hypnotic attraction that great drops induce when you stand close to the edge of a chasm. I wanted to go with it and see where it would take me and I was scared of where it might lead. It had an irrational attraction. The heady mixture of anticipation and anxious dread was common to mountaineering. I kept reminding myself that I had experienced enough frights in the mountains to last me a lifetime and it didn’t make a great deal of sense to swap the known dangers of climbing for the unknown alarms of flying. I had continued to resist the urge to start flying again but my resolve was crumbling. I found myself thinking about the advantages of taking up the sport and studiously ignoring the disadvantages.
    Paragliding opened up a whole