Wordsmith
The Man with www. kevreynolds. co. uk
the World’ s Best Job
Kev Reynolds remembers Ray Allard, a true hero of the outdoors
Real heroes have gone out of fashion, and in their place we have celebrities. In the past a hero might be a man or a woman who achieved great things through a life of service or by an act of selfless courage. Today it’ s someone with fifteen minutes of fame posing for the paparazzi.
I stopped having heroes by the time I was a teenager. Until, that is, I met Ray, the unlikeliest hero you could imagine, with glasses as thick as the wrong end of a beer bottle and a 9-5 job with Bromley Council. His sight was poor when he moved with his family to a house two doors up from mine. That was in the early seventies, when he had just enough vision to be able to drive, but it wasn’ t long before creeping glaucoma forced him to hand in his driving licence. Yet failing sight didn’ t stop his work as the man responsible for all the trees in the borough, nor affect his role as group scoutmaster, nor his readiness to take part in numerous activities in and around the village where he was always the first to volunteer if help was required or a job needed doing. Ray was one of life’ s do-ers; reliable, self-effacing, trustworthy; a never-say-no kind of fella; the eternal optimist.
The year after he retired the sight went completely from one eye, while the other had very little vision left.
He was in the audience one night when I gave a talk about trekking from Chamonix to Zermatt. He sat so close to the screen that the photos were virtually projected onto the back of his head.
‘ That sounds like an amazing trek,’ he said to me afterwards.‘ D’ you think I could do it?’
I knew he was fit, for he walked everywhere- and at a steady pace. But crossing all those passes with very poor eyesight? That would be a challenge!‘ Sure,’ I told him,‘ as long as someone’ s with you to steer you across some of the dodgy places.’
So he went with two of his other friends to act as his eyes, and had an‘ interesting’ time, especially when it came to descending broken terrain. He was okay on level ground, could cope with uphills on a decent path, but Ray had no concept of distance or the gradient of every downhill section. What’ s more, scree slopes and boulder tips were a nightmare. As a result they had some very long days.
Undaunted, the following year he trekked the Tour of Mont Blanc, then the central section of the Alpine Pass Route and the Tour of the Vanoise, and after that, the Stubai High Route. At the end of every trip Ray would report back to me with bubbling enthusiasm, and ask for a recommendation for his next adventure. He couldn’ t get enough of it, and his wife became used to patching his wounds and mending his clothes whenever he arrived home bruised, battered but smiling.
The year after he retired the sight went completely from one eye, while the other had very little vision left. I drove him to the funeral of a mutual friend one day, and on the way home he told me his only real regret about losing his sight was that he’ d never managed to get to the Himalaya.‘ What’ s to stop you?’ I asked, and the following
16 Outdoor focus | spring 2018 spring he and I, along with my wife and one of Ray’ s alpine trekking friends, flew to Nepal and were met by my Sherpa Mr Fixit who would provide the support crew for our 24-day trek from the Manaslu foothills, across the Ganesh, Langtang and Helambu Himals and down to the Kathmandu Valley.
It proved to be one of the most rewarding of all my Himalayan travels, and it taught me that sight can make you blind. What do I mean by that? Well, those of us with 20 / 20 vision imagine we can‘ see’ the world around us in a single glance- a landscape revealed in the flicker of an eye- when what we perceive in reality is little more than a onedimensional image. But without sight, other senses are brought into play to compensate; senses that Ray now used in order to build a picture of the Himalaya he’ d never‘ see’ with his eyes.
As we walked, he would trail his hand against rocks, shrubs and trees that lined the trail to feel the pieces of the sensory jigsaw puzzle he was creating. He’ d pause, with head tilted to one side, and I’ d realise he was listening to something. So I’ d listen too and become aware of sounds I’ d otherwise have missed – a distant stream, a bird far off, the breeze ruffling leaves.
Ray’ s nostrils were as sensitive as a deer’ s. He’ d catch the earthy scent of a foothill terrace being turned by a wooden plough, the fragrance of damp ground revealed by melting snow, a flower or a dense mattress of moss on a wayside boulder. Ray knew when we were approaching a village, for he was aware of wood smoke long before any of us caught the smell, and being a tree man all his working life, would note the different species we passed just by brushing their trunk with his fingertips.
With unrestrained joy he suddenly raised his arms in celebration and danced across the open spaces...
With a Sherpa to guide him, we wandered through glorious rhododendron forests in full bloom, crossed a series of passes nearly 5,000 metres high, waded through snowfields and yak pastures, stumbled over glacial moraines and shuffled- hearts-in-mouth- across raging torrents on two-log bridges. We camped in remote valleys far from habitation, and sat in smoke-filled houses drinking soup-like tea with globules of butter floating on top. Every day was special, and Ray bathed in the experience.
One day we entered a yak pasture near the head of the Langtang Valley in the very heart of the Himalaya, flanked by glacier-hung, sky-scratching mountains on the border with Tibet. The pasture was almost level and mostly hazard-free. There were no rivers or crevasses to fall into, no boulder-fields or marmot burrows; just an open plain of short-cropped grass surrounded by mountains Ray could not see. But he could sense their beauty, and with unrestrained joy he suddenly raised his arms in celebration and danced across the open spaces singing at the top of his voice:‘ The hills are alive with the sound of music!’
After that, he was everyone’ s hero.