Traffic Jam

In November 2021, professional climbers Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker made an audacious ‘ascent’ of the underside of a near kilometre long motorway bridge in Devon. And it caused a stir. So much so that it was documented by an international film crew, destined for the big screen and a global film tour. It was a text – part in jest – from local Mark Bullock that sparked the whole thing, and soon enough the project was unfolding in front of his eyes.

His eyes widen when he looks at me. You know the look, when you can see white all the way around the irises. ‘Holy fucking shitballs, it’s freaking perfect!’ he half-shouts above the din. Tom is excited. He downclimbs the railing and picks up his phone from the small pile of jackets and gear on the metal grate gantry. He begins a video message, speaking into the phone selfie-style, retaining the mania in his expressions and the feverish excitement in his voice. ‘Pete, this is it, this is the big one, the Motherload, the one we’ve been searching for all these years, you won’t believe this thing, it’s absolutely frickin’ unreal. Book your flights!’ 

I’m relieved. Tom has already put what I considered to be an elaborate amount of time into what might popularly be described as a harebrained scheme. He’s just driven here (Devon) from Sheffield, via Bristol, off the back of a picture message. That’s a ten-hour round-trip, just to physically touch a crack in some concrete. He wanted to know this crack’s exact width, almost to the millimetre. And then he’d walk back to his van and drive home again.

We walked in, crossed some boggy dairy-farmed fields, then had to divert around a drainage dyke that was too wide to jump, and too deep and murky with thick silt to wade. The diversion led us into extremely dense undergrowth that I can only describe as jungle. But not pristine rainforest, this is grubby. There was litter but not from human passage. I don’t think anyone has been here for decades, this was litter that had fallen from the motorway above. Nettles and thick-thorned vines grab at our ankles and tare clothing and skin. Steep, slippery, sandy, earthy mudstone, almost like clay, makes grabbing at tree vines and hanging branches essential. 

At the end of day two on their first attempt, I was collecting pizza for the team when I got a text from Diff: ‘The Police are here.’ Zac and I had been taking turns to speak to intrigued passersby and without exception everyone was amused, bemused, curious and impressed. Cyclists and ramblers perhaps bound for the nearby Turf Locks pub went on their way wishing us well. But some people telephoned their concerns to the police, and by a twist of fate the climb was happening at the same time that Extinction Rebellion were protesting on motorways near London. The police feared a road closure and were straight on the scene.

Brett Lowell, the Brett Lowell, hid in a hedge, taking his SD cards out of his camera & drone and hiding them in his socks, for fear the footage would be confiscated. As I skulked back with seven large pizzas stacked into a duffel bag prepared to act as a stranger and walk on by, I found Tom’s friend Anna Hazelnutt also skulking in the trees about 50 metres away from the team and the police. 

The discourse that followed was slightly surreal. There was even perhaps a little fib from the police, saying the motorway would be closed, which spooked Zac. Professionally, he didn’t want his film company to be making the headlines for closing a motorway. During the radio comms to police HQ, a sergeant asked for the climbers’ names, and when he heard them he comically blurted, ‘I know who they are! Get their autographs and tell them I climb VS!’ The whole conversation was very amiable. The climbers descended, a bit dejected, and I thought that was game over. The police suggested we conclude our conversations in the Double Locks pub a little further down the canal. So, the team slouched to the pub in the gloaming. Tom and Pete snaffled the lukewarm pizza en route, we ordered beers and waited, but the police never showed.