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 .