Golden Visions

The Grimer’s head was once filled with Olympic dreams, too.

- Niall Grimes

We lay side by side in our sleeping bags in the small tent, an electric white streetlight above us for a moon. Still in our grubby garb, our daytime-rags now pajamas, we were both propped on our elbows, chins cupped in our hands and eyes turned to the night sky. Both lost in the same dream.

This was me and my new best friend, Brian, a couple of raw Paddies adrift in the big grown-up world of Europe. This was 19-something something; quite a while ago, I’m forced to concede. This was Buoux in Provence, France. It was the capital and the funky cold Medina of the new sport-climbing lark.

Since we had started traveling together a month before, perfect strangers sharing a complete lack of plan, Brian and I had been growing better friends. I was in my late teens, had thrown everything in at home and set sail on the high seas of climbing. At exactly the right time I had met exactly the right person, and it all felt easy, and it all felt fun.

Sport climbing. Devil music. News of it had swept through our dusty Irish trad world like rock-n-roll through the Bible Belt. Didier Raboutou’s lycra-tethered buttocks had the same power over us as Presley’s hips.

The road to perdition had led us to this nylon hovel in the South of France and onto sport climbs. We had bought the story that failure no longer existed; there were only unfinished works. The process was everything. Progress was guaranteed. So we had hung and swung on every one of the metallic bastards we came across, paying homage to this new progress.