SEEKING SHELTER
SOMETIMES, at high altitudes in the Alps, the Rockies, and elsewhere, one comes upon bleak empty shelters built for protection against wind and snow. Ordinary tramping is not mountaineering, but, nevertheless, it leads one upon occasion to wild and desolate exalted regions. There seems to be no particular danger except that of failing to obtain provisions after supplies have run out. But there is a danger, often unforeseen; the coming on of a great storm.
A raging blizzard of snow is sometimes blinding and perishing. All is veiled in driving whiteness. The wind is piercing. After a few steps the track, if there is one, is lost; landmarks have disappeared from view, and it is safer to stop than to go on. Not a few people have met their deaths in an unexpected snowstorm in the upper Alps. They may be in fairly safe mountain country, but it is easy to misjudge distance in such circumstances, and go over a cliffside by a random step in the snow. Unless you can find some sort of shelter you are changed to a snow man in a few minutes, and get disgustingly numbed. Even if you lie down flat in the snow the storm pierces to your bones.
Fortunately, one can generally see a storm coming, and find a rock or a cave or some sort of kraal or shepherd’s house. The cave is a good place in which to await the storm and then watch it pass.
Thunderstorms may be almost as perilous as blizzards, and certainly more frightening. You are up where the clouds meet; the electric currents surge through you. Something dark comes driving up the wedge between the ranges, roaring below through the ravine. It is the oncoming wind and rain. Thunders prodigious and bellowing, break out upon the right and left. You suddenly find yourself in an island of pale subdued light, with clouds rolling up to you from below. It is an experience worth having if you possess the nerve to take it calmly.
The lightnings are sometimes amazingly intimate, wrapping you, wreathing you, bathing you with fire, almost searing your eyeballs. Criss-cross, flash, blare, effusion, confusion. The explosions are dumbfounding and the many echoes confound in one great infernal battle music. There is an oncoming enemy who always threatens, and never seems quite to arrive. Or you are in the midst of the mêlée with torrents battling across and across you. You get soaked, the knapsack gets soaked, the boots get soaked, the rock under you becomes a water channel; the cliffs on all sides discharge water against you, to say nothing of what is raging out of the sky.
Once more, it is better to watch it from a cave. There is the enormous advantage of keeping relatively dry. In a great storm a certain amount of rain is bound to blow into any cave, but there is the advantage of feeling safer, whether one is or not. The lightnings do not play quite so much about your eyes. You are also out of the way of those rain-loosened boulders which have a way of detaching themselves in a storm, and coming violently from above, falling sometimes at your feet or dashing past your knees to fall another two thousand feet into the abyss below you. In the cave a falling rock is merely a feature of interest, while you watch the grand spectacle of a thunderstorm in the mountains. If the storm last too long, one can generally glean a coffeepot full of water, light a fire at the mouth of the cave, and make some coffee or tea.
In like manner one can take shelter from mountain gales which sometimes spring up with hurricane force and make perilous the passage of some knife-edge track. It is not wise to brave the elements when one false step risks your life. Such gales commonly die down before sunset, and the succeeding calm can be waited for with patience.
These are heroic occasions, but there are others less heroic which bid us seek shelter. One may be down below in the quiet country, and yet as devastating a thunderstorm intervene, or heavy drenching rain, or a bone-searching northeaster. But down below it is easier to find refuge. There are keepers’ huts in forests, holes dug by animals, hollow trees, there are deserted houses, barns, outhouses, bridges. There are human homes, inns, hotels—even railway stations and covered vans. Obtaining shelter, except on wide and desolate moors, is not so difficult. On moorland there is nothing for it but to put on one’s waterproof cape, over knapsack and all, and brave it out. You will find of what enormous value the waterproof cape can be, not only being your ground sheet at night, but saving you your provisions and kit, from a deluge of rain.
It sometimes happens that a storm beginning in the afternoon will last all night. One must judge by the look of the sky. On a shelterless moor or plateau it is no gain to shut one’s eyes to the dire possibilities of the situation. It is an occasion when the art of idleness can be put aside. If it is necessary to walk a steady twenty miles to some place of shelter for the night, it is as well to set the mind to it. After the first mile in the rain the tramp becomes pleasant; after five or ten miles one begins to sing. One generally finishes in the highest of spirits, even though soaked to the skin. Then shines the opportunity of the good inn or the farmhouse with kitchen fire. One hangs up all to dry and, sitting in a pair of mine host’s breeches, makes mirth with a vast platter of ham and eggs, to say nothing of a chicken stewed in its own soup, and a bottle of Burgundy, or a deep draught of cider, or a Yorkshire tea. After that, one burrows deep into the unfamiliar softness of a feather bed and listens to the rain still pouring on the just and the unjust outside.