Salto Angel – Stephanie Bodet

Salto Angel, the highest waterfall in the world (979 metres), is in Venezuela, a place lost in the heart of Canaima National Park...

These are places from the evening documentary. Places like these, for lazy Sunday couch potatoes, are the wild, dangerous extreme, and few would dream of going there to poke their noses in. And yet there are people who have gone beyond the imaginable: climbing the immense face of Auyantepui alongside this endless cascade of water.

Stephanie Bodet is the generation of change: from the more materialistic generations, worried about their own daily well-being, to a generation more sensitive to nature. But we aren't talking about an ecological sensitivity (perhaps that applies to Stephanie too); without doubt, though, nature for her is a world to be lived to the full. Perhaps it is as a reaction to materialism that she says she has “taken the path of the summits, near and far”.

She doesn't scorn coming back, rest, the serenity of daily and family life. But for Stephanie travel is essential because “it awakens in us an almost childlike curiosity”.

That is how Stephanie feels as she tells the story of her journey: she looks at adventure with the eyes of a little girl, eyes still able to be moved, to be amazed. And for the first time in a climbing book we feel there is no hurry to arrive; what matters is the journey and not the destination. Stephanie understands this when the long climbing route definitively takes over. And in fact both she and Arnaud end up discovering a new pleasure...

So slow is the climb that she says “life on the wall involves, if we may put it that way, moments of emptiness! How nice, then, to have a paper companion beside you, not very cumbersome after all, but able to let us escape from reality...”

As in those tales of extreme mountaineering, when adventures go on for months of exploration, in the end we feel the presence of books appearing. Books that speak of life, books actually carried up the wall, not exactly a comfortable place for reading...

It hardly seems a good place to be, a face so high and overhanging. The question arises naturally: “Where is the pleasure, you'll ask me? Perhaps it depends only on the capacity for abstraction and acceptance. Abstraction from pain, from hunger and from fatigue too, and concentration on external elements...”

But all of this brings with it the “awareness of having lived moments of great intensity. I treasure these moments of life on the wall, because they lighten us of the superfluous: in reality you need very little to live and to smile”.

The book is written in a simple, pragmatic, linear way... as part of French literature is, always accessible and immediately enjoyable. A good book, perhaps too short, for which we compliment the author Stephanie Bodet and also the team of climbers who pulled off the feat.

Another story of big walls is Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold.