legends · 4 min read ·
Mast
A mast climber hears a voice reading names alphabetically down the steel, and the last name after Z.
Climbers talk about the silence at height as though it were peaceful. It isn't. Up there, a hundred and forty metres on a lattice tower, with the wind in your harness and the earth a long way off, the silence is a pressure. It has a shape. You learn to read it, and then you don't hear anything else.
I climb masts for the telecoms. Antenna swaps, cable runs, microwave dishes, aviation lights. I've done it fourteen years. I have a partner on the ground, always, a man with a radio called a banksman, who watches the rope and the weather and calls me down if the wind rises.
The mast at Crow Hill was a three-section lattice tower, guyed, with a red aircraft light at the top and an array of old broadcast panels half the way up. The job was to take the panels off, a decommissioning. Eight bolts per bracket, two brackets per panel, nine panels. A day and a half of work.
My banksman was Gethin. We worked well together. He was a stocky, cheerful man with a flask of soup and a voice like gravel.
The first day went smoothly. At four, with the light going, I came down. Gethin said the wind had picked up and that we'd finish in the morning. We locked the compound and went to the pub.
On the second morning, at seven, I started my climb. Cold, bright, no cloud. I went hand over hand up the ladder inside the leg, clipping and unclipping. At fifty metres I paused, as you do, and looked out. The valley was filled with white mist, the hills standing out of it like islands.
At ninety metres I heard something.
I was above the panels, near the top section. There was a sound coming from the steel. Not the wind in the guys. A voice. A thin, sourceless voice, as if the tower itself were carrying a signal. It came and went. I could not make out words. I thought, radio. A stray transmission. These old broadcast masts do pick things up. I thought of the old story of a man who heard the BBC in his fillings.
I climbed higher. The voice sharpened. It was a man, reading. A calm, plain voice reading from a list. I could pick out numbers. Then names. Then a long rhythmic passage like a roll call.
At the top platform I stopped and clipped on and put my ear to the steel. I heard: "...Aldous. Aldred. Ames. Anselm..."
I realised they were names. A great long alphabetical list, and the voice was moving through it, slowly, carefully, not missing one.
I waited for a gap. In a gap I called down to Gethin on the radio. "Gethin, are you getting anything on the tower?"
The radio crackled. Gethin said, in a very odd voice, "Come down."
"What's up?"
"Come down now, mate. I'm hearing it down here too. Come down."
I started the descent. As I went the voice followed me, down the steel, from rung to rung, always a little below. It was at the "G"s. Then the "H"s. I heard "Hargreaves," and "Hepple," and a name I knew, and I did not stop.
Gethin was waiting at the base. His face was grey. "It's got to M," he said.
"What?"
"It started at the beginning an hour ago. When you were on the platform. It's been going down through the alphabet. It's at M." He took my arm. "It's the names of everyone in the village. I heard my own mother's. And there's one name that comes after it. After Z. I'm waiting for it. I don't know whose it'll be."
We stood in the compound, listening. The voice came down the structure like water running through a pipe. N. O. P. We looked at each other. Neither of us said what we were thinking.
At the end of the Ws, the voice stopped.
The whole mist-filled valley was quiet. The red light at the top blinked. We stood, I swear, for a full minute. Then the voice began again, in the same even, kindly tone, but speaking now of things that were not names.
It said: "Climber."
I felt Gethin's hand tighten.
It said: "Banksman."
Then it said: "Thank you. Everyone's present. We can take the mast down now."
The brackets came off by themselves. I don't know how else to put it. A hundred and forty metres above us, in the clear morning air, nine panels slipped from their mounts one by one and fell, each trailing a thin bright line of coax, and hit the ground in a perfect circle around us, a ring of broken steel. The mast shivered. And the voice said, in a tone of such gentle satisfaction that I have never forgotten it:
"Good. Now we can all come down."