Rocky Mountains - Oil on Board

The foreground ridge in this painting overlooks the dense forests of the Athabasca valley, one of those great features on the earth's crust that can clearly be seen from space. Beyond the silver thread of the majestic Athabasca River rise the myriad of white peaks and blue-tinted glaciers of the Columbia icefields.
It is June 1974 and the snowmelt has come a month late on the high slopes of the Canadian Rockies. Innumerable gulches and canyons are discharging heavy cargoes of roaring water at enormous speed straight down the flanks of the mountains. Up to fifteen feet of snow can fall every winter in these regions, and boulders are bouncing along the gully-beds causing such a thumping that the noise and shake of the impact is being emitted by the earth. Nothing I had ever seen in Europe, not even the highest Alps, had prepared me for the awe that is experienced in the heart of the Canadian wilderness as the seasons change. Partly it is the indescribable immensity of the deep and sombre forests, so dark against the white slopes above them, that almost overwhelms the imagination. But most breathtaking of all is the endless procession of mountain chains that march to the furthest horizons in all directions, filling the curvature of the earth with glacial pearls. Somehow these mountains seem to convey such a message of boundless sovereignty in comparison with the puny world of man, that it seems a matter of course that they straddle the earth not on a regional but on a planetary scale. From polar wastes in the north to equatorial regions south of Mexico they are the lords of earth and sky. And their sisters, the Andes, continue the march almost to Antarctica.
The three men in the painting are (from left to right) Sergeant Major McKeown, Second Lieutenant Ian Railey, and Bombadier Rusty Firmin. The four of us have made our way round the north side of Mt. Robson, Canada's highest peak, and are now heading south along the mountain chains that form the Continental Divide of North America, towards the border with the U.S.A. Having come down from the Olympian detachment of an Oxford college into the army just four years before, soldiering was introducing me to a wide variety of experienced and characterful people. Within a disciplined framework, friendship was freely and generously bestowed, and this caused me to wonder and to listen. One man whose example taught me a great deal was Sgt. Major McKeown.
Born just before the Second World War and raised in the Gorbals, then a Glaswegian slum of disastrous proportions and a horrendous mangle of human lives, Sgt. Major McKeown had had one childhood ambition - to get out. His high road to betterment was the Army, and in terms of discipline in his duties I quickly realised that he embodied excellence, as also he did in his unfailing good humour and personal humility. He was also witty in the dry style loved by British soldiers. He was the passenger once in a Landrover, and I the driver negotiating a winding mountain road in the Pyrenees. Being an art-lover how could I help but expatiate on the scenery? "Sir," burst in the Sgt. Major, in his partly modified but still very guttural Glaswegian, "you jus keep yer eyes on the road, and I'll describe the view !"
Quite apart from our everyday military duties, Sgt. Major McKeown must have trekked nearly a thousand miles with me on voluntary expeditions in the Harz mountains, Pyrenees, Appenines and Rockies. However, this three hundred or so mile expedition, though we didn't know it at the time, was destined to be our last together. But it certainly was also the most extraordinary and the most dangerous. It began as a typical wilderness trek, but quickly we ran into the problem of vast stretches of melting snow that in a normal year should have largely gone by mid June. The snow would not support our weight. One step forward, and then crash - through the surface crust and up to the waist or even the armpits in snow. Somehow we made it round the glacial shoulders of Mt Robson, narrowly escaping from a much too close encounter with a grisly, but it took five days instead of three, and that only by trekking sixteen hours a day. We were exhausted. The National Park Wardens in Jasper told us that according to their helicopter reconnaissance any further trekking along the Continental Divide was impossible. Snow lay soft and deep to well below the tree-line, some of the passes were choked, and the rivers and innumerable gullies were too flooded. To have fallen into any one of the many canyoned tornados of water and rock hurtling down the mountainsides into the swollen Athabasca would have meant rapid death.
But it had taken nearly a year to wangle, plan and arrange this expedition, reputations were at stake, we were young and there seemed to be an option. Skis! Sgt. Major McKeown had never skied in his life before, but that of course didn't stop him coming with us. We bought the last four pairs of cross-country skis in town, and continued on our way. They worked perfectly. Even if you sank two feet into the soft melt snow, a firm kick forwards brought the ski and you to the surface. It was hard work but a whole lot better than going on foot and falling through. And at the higher elevations the snow was firm and clean and the skiing rhythmic, fast and effective. The expedition was back on course! Those who have done cross-country skiing will know that in order to grip the snow to make forward progress you have to wax the runners. For the first day Sgt. Major McKeown entertained us as he slipped and slid in all directions, legs apart and face in the snow. Concerned at one point by his fairly dramatic collision with a snow drift, we went to pull him out and asked him how he was doing. "Na problem!" he replied, "Aa'm jus gunta rub wax on ma nose!" Next day he hardly fell at all.
It was, of course an unforgettable adventure. The air was fresh, the sun hot, and the forest scented. There was the joy of movement and the joy of making camp. How lovely was our rest in the evening! - a warm fire and the smell of burning pine resin, an eager hunger, food cooking and ice water to drink, wet clothing dried, pine fronds for mattresses, groundsheets for cover, gurgling water for company, and the fire's embers to ward off the porcupines and bears. The stars at night seemed to crowd the sky to bursting, brighter than I had ever seen them. While frost winced on our sleeping bags, shooting stars plunged in arcs like tracer bullets fired earthwards from their sister lights suspended in the unfathomable overhead jet-black void. To adapt a line from Spenser,

The forests, the floods, the heavens, with one consent
Did seeme to laugh on me, and favour mine intent.

In those great mountains and forests both the power and the beauty of nature was a revelation. Glaciers shining with haloed glory in brilliant high-altitude sunlight descended in curve after curve, fall after fall until they crashed into the deep blue-green waters of a lake, calving icebergs into the water, amidst reflections of heavenly splendour. Others, accumulating landscapes of ice from Polar colds at the highest peaks, went straight over long lines of vast cliff and left havoc in the valleys below, where blocks of ice the size of ships came sailing through the air for thousands of feet, occasionally taking an unexpected trajectory and blasting a cratered circle of smashed wood in the heart of the forest floor. We didn't know what caused these weird rings of chopped timber until a grumble from beyond the cliffs above alerted us to what was coming and we hastened on.
Throughout the day almost every hour was punctuated by the thunder of an avalanche as millions of tons of ice and snow yielded to the sapping effect of floods of melt water, and went crashing down the mountain in a roaring chaos that swept away everything in its path. Crossing a swathe of knocked down forest was difficult because the smashed trees were piled up in complete abandon. We became expert in log walking at crazy angles. More rarely witnessed but most violent of all, shocking if you were close, was the sudden snap and thunder as a glacier reached some unimaginable limit of strain and then broke loose and lurched bodily with the weight of a city of skyscrapers, downwards with incredible force that seemed to break through the sedimentary rock to the granite bones of the mountains, causing great stones to ring, the earth to judder, and the forest to writhe, and issuing in a rolling thunder that echoed almost endlessly from cliff to cliff to cliff to the furthest precipices of the range. It seemed a great and unusual privilege to hear and to see such things, and, having chosen a site carefully, to sleep safely at night. Below the snowline where bears left their giant spoor, delicate Alpine flowers strewed the grass, marmots whistled, and eagles glided by. Lower still, wherever the trees thinned the moose browsed, insects hummed, plump ptarmigan wandered almost within hands' reach, and fish splashed in the lakes.
One day we entered a region of long high snows and towering cliffs, and climbing over a precipitous ridge, descended into the most enormous amphitheatre I have ever seen - a huge shallow bowl in the mountains, surrounded on three sides by immense cliffs. It was so remote up there, days of skiing from the nearest road, and the air and falling snow so exhilarating, that one was beginning to catch the feeling of having fallen into another world where joy can be trusted and disillusionment scorned.
This region was so unspoiled and so wild and so vast that everything seemed to become utterly simple. I seemed to hear a voice of truth asking, "Since neither you nor any man has ever lived here, who or what is responsible for all this ?" I was looking at the majestic cliffs encircling us, not merely awed by their size but held completely still by the beauty of the rocks before me. I shall never forget the sense of order and structure that I perceived in that moment. The aesthetic satisfaction of the folded strata, cut and polished by departed glaciers, was many times more intense than anything I had experienced before. But the experience was more, I believe, than merely aesthetic. The very act of perceiving had become in itself a seeing, a knowing, an arriving at foundations.
The crux, of course, is in the "Who?" or "What?" and in that moment in the Canadian Rocky mountains, the question was not answered by a brave act of faith, still less by a leap in the dark. I do not think it was even answered by me! I simply saw that an artist made these rocks, an artist fashioned this landscape, and an artist loved this world.
In the Rocky Mountains I began to recognise that seeing is believing. All my art is a celebration, however small, of the gift of sight.

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