Chapter 3
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping
from rock up to rock. . . .
from rock up to rock. . . .
Robert Browning, “Saul”
We met rock climbing. I arrived at the Shawangunks, the premier cliff east of the Rockies, a rank beginner, in the fall of 1969.
From that first weekend I tumbled down the rabbit hole and landed in Wonderland. I crossed a threshold into another country where I found the meaning of life in the dance up the rock. I was irretrievably drawn to the high spirits of these climbers, who were like kids on Saturday with their silliness and their uproarious tales of hard moves and close calls. I discovered that what mattered was the breeze on my face, the cloud shadows playing across the cliff as I gained height, the trees grew smaller, and I left the world behind.
From my first climb, Easy Overhang, I was ignited by gripping rough edges, by the electric surge of connecting my physical strength and power of mind. My first experience of exposure—looking out over the peaceful valley of the Wallkill across to the Hudson Highlands, high high high above the treetops, my toes overlapping the edge of a belay ledge, my back flat against warm rock in a vertical world—was intoxicating. It took just one climb for me to fall in love with climbing.
It took just a moment—one conversation—for me to fall in love with Guy Waterman. That winter of 1969–70, I ruptured my Achilles tendon in a skiing accident, but despite cast and crutches I was back in “the Gunks” in early April. I couldn’t climb. But I could be there under those cliffs that had the power to shoot lives off in new directions like stars.
That sunny April weekend Guy Waterman was in charge of the beginners who had come to learn from the more experienced climbers with the Appalachian Mountain Club. Since Guy’s managerial position kept him grounded, I could ask unlimited questions about climbs like the Arrow, which had everyone talking about a high thin top move on clean white rock. Guy grinned, extended way up with two right-hand fingers, and lifted his right foot up near his left hand positioned at waist level. He hopped around, trying to maintain his balance as he pushed down on an invisible hold the size of his thumb. “You’re two hundred feet up doing this,” he grinned. I couldn’t imagine it. I was dying to get good enough to climb the Arrow. He resettled his tam and began telling me how he’d driven up from New York City every weekend to climb on snowshoes in the High Peaks of the Adirondacks. He’d completed one-third of the peaks. There were forty-six, so he figured he’d finish up in two more winters. He’d never climbed any in the summer, and he wasn’t going to, at least not until he’d climbed them all in winter first.
I had heard that Guy was recently separated after nearly twenty years of marriage and was living with another climber, Dave Ingalls, up near Columbia University. I knew Dave was talented on rock but famous for “epics”—like getting caught by darkness halfway up a route so that others had to come looking for him with flashlights. He was a student, and as far as Guy could tell, he and his other roommates were the principal suppliers of marijuana to the rest of Columbia. “Little bags all over the coffee table,” Guy said. “They’d be sorting them when I went to bed and still at it when I left for work in my three-piece suit. Bill was living with me too. My oldest son.” I had seen Bill hopping around on crutches at the cliffs the previous fall. Then nineteen, Bill was the epicenter of a whirl of young climbers, especially girls, and recovering from a run-in with a train he encountered in a freight yard in Winnipeg. So far the doctors had saved his leg. By spring Bill had gone back out west and Guy had found an apartment over a print shop in the Hudson River town of Marlboro, a short thirty-five minutes from the Gunks and a long two-and-a-half-hour commute from the eleventh floor of the General Electric building where he worked. It felt right, he said. He’d bought dishes and sheets and towels. “So now I live there with Ralph.”
“Is Ralph your son?” I asked.
“My dog.”
I laughed. He was standing in front of me with four or five climbing ropes draped over his shoulders. He wasn’t very tall. But he was compact, with muscled arms, a broad chest, and a narrow waist.
“Then Jim moved in,” he said.
“Is Jim your cat?” I asked.
“He’s my youngest son. Bill, Johnny in the middle, and Jim.” Guy laughed. I saw that he had blue-gray eyes, darkish red hair, and strong teeth. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the Kennedy brothers.
“The Planks, my landlords, are out of Dickens,” he went on.“It’s a tiny print shop with a huge black press. Type in heaps. Flywheels, belts flapping.” He waved his arms. “When Mr. Plank throws a lever, that press makes a noise not heard since the nineteenth century.”
That might have been the igniting moment, I told Guy afterward. Though I probably fell in love with him as soon as my eyes met his, like falling under a spell. This enchantment could only grow stronger when I found out he’d read every book written on the expeditionary history of Mount Everest and in fact had them on his bookshelves.
“I read Annapurna when I was twelve,” I said, but didn’t add that it had taken me most of the book to puzzle out what a crevasse was. “And when I read Sir John Hunt’s Everest book I wanted to be the first woman to climb Everest.” This was actually true; I wasn’t exaggerating.
Guy had started climbing in 1963 and was rarely seen at the cliffs without his young sons, Bill, John, and Jim, who was known by everyone as Scooter. Since their dog Ralph, a golden-collie cross, was a fixture at the cliffs as well, when I first heard about Guy I thought he had four sons: Bill, John, Scooter, and Ralph.
That spring of 1970 rock climbing changed my life, and so did Guy Waterman. I was twenty-nine when I met him. I had not yet met a man with whom I wanted to spend much more than a weekend, let alone a life. From that first conversation I responded to Guy on a level I had never known existed. It was his sense of fun and the range of his mind. It was the way he made a game of climbing as many routes as possible, coiling his rope as he trotted down the trail along the top of the cliffs after a climb, whistling between his teeth, casting a glance back with that flashy grin to make sure I was on his heels. That green and blue tam in his McNeil family tartan was his trademark. During the week it gave way to the three-piece suit, but come Friday nights it held sway on his head again and he was a pixie, a leprechaun. He was also a joke-teller, a storyteller, the more convoluted the better. And I was a good audience. We always talked about things I found interesting. Immediately, it all went deeper than that, and I held Guy in some unspoken place beyond my ability to articulate.
On our first commute into New York City after a weekend of climbing, he pulled out Macaulay’s History of England. “How do you like it?” I asked. I was impressed and not quite willing to admit that I had never thought of reading this great British historian.
“He’s a bit dry,” Guy smiled. “No comparison with Gibbon.” I owned a paperback of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, bought with the intent of reading all three volumes, but I had never gotten more than a few chapters into it. To make a good showing, I mentioned enjoying Herodotus.
A few days later on the train Guy pulled out Ogden Nash. “Listen to this,” he said with a puckish grin.“‘When I consider how my life is spent/ I hardly ever repent.’ And here’s one for your dentist appointment this afternoon:‘Dentists’ anterooms / Give me tanterooms.’”
I already knew that Guy could recite the first seven books of Milton’s twelve-book epic. During his lunch break, he told me, he strode from the General Electric building at Fifty-second Street and Lexington Avenue, up the length of Central Park and back again, working on memorizing from the pages torn out of a cheap paperback.
I had read Paradise Lost in college but got next to nothing out of it. My world was the Canterbury Tales and Twelfth Night. For me, Milton was as ponderous as an overcooked slab of beef.
“Do you subscribe to the Milton Quarterly?” I asked him.
“What’s that?”
“I bet you don’t know about the Milton Society either,” I kidded him.
“Tell me.”
“Well, this year their dinner is at the Princeton Club. Want to go?”
A few weeks later we walked into a crowded room, everyone brandishing glasses, the conversation at a noisy convivial pitch. Guy looked around. “‘Fit audience find, though few,’” he quoted.
“And where do you teach?” asked a pleasant-looking tweedy man who stuck out his hand to Guy.
“I don’t,” Guy replied with a grin.
“Then what brings you here?” the man asked.
“Well,” Guy said,“I just love Milton.”
“Gosh! He’s here just because he loves Milton,” the academic said in amazement, gesturing to Guy.
Conversation stopped. People smiled at Guy, and someone said in a cheery voice, “The president should make an announcement.”
If I had not met Guy, I doubt I would have married anyone. He fully revealed himself in the very first conversation we had about books, though I saw nothing then. We were sitting on a stream bank talking about Moby-Dick. “Ahab knows what he is doing, and he knows he’ll drag the others down with him,” Guy said. “He knows Starbuck can save him, but he can’t accept it.” He turned toward me. “Ahab cannot act, will not act, otherwise.”
He spoke in a quiet voice, and when I looked into his eyes I saw that they were bleak. But I did not understand what he was telling me about himself. His arm was around my shoulders, and already I was blinded by the desire to spend my life with him. I saw nothing of what his words foretold.
I remember also a conversation on a morning train ride into Manhattan. We’d been together more than a year and in fact were planning our future life as homesteaders. I was distressed. I was in tears. It was something about “us” that I can’t remember now. But I remember the feeling of trying to get Guy to talk about something it was hard for him to talk about. His face was open; he was trying, but having trouble reaching the words. The whole conversation was a swim against the current, though before we arrived at Grand Central I’d ended up at something that felt like a comfortable spot.As we were walking off the train Guy slipped me a note he’d written on a three-by-five card. It read, “I wish I could give you a large-ish hug.”
Years later, after painful conversations that Guy ended by saying,“Talking doesn’t help,” I recalled this conversation on the train. It was perhaps the only time I felt Guy’s wholehearted willingness to dig down down down and not to cut off what he found there.
Not long after we began climbing together we were in Guy’s tan VW bug, driving up to the Gunks, and he was talking about his plans for the Fourth of July weekend: he was going to the White Mountains with Ralph to spend three nights out in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. That name alone was full of wild mystery to me. I couldn’t always follow the byzantine pathways of Guy’s former political life in Washington, but this present life of hiking and climbing was very real for me. I wanted to explore this territory. I also wanted to make mountains my world.
“What will you climb?” I asked.
The first day, he said, he’d pack up Mount Willey, that graceful peak at the top of Crawford Notch, and camp on the other side in secluded Zealand Notch. On the second day he’d “bag” three 4,000-foot peaks—Zealand Mountain and North and South Twin—and camp at Guyot shelter. The third day he’d scamper out at dawn to West Bond, an isolated summit hanging over the Pemi Wilderness. Then he’d make the long pack over Bond and Bondcliff, down the steep path to the Wilderness Trail, and turn toward Carrigain.
“Carrigain’s remote, right in the heart of the Wilderness. I’ll spend the night in the summit fire tower the way I did with Bill, John, and Ralph that last night when we climbed all New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers in two weeks.”
I had never experienced anything like what Guy was talking about. My cast had come off a month before, and I’d begun climbing again. My lower leg still swelled if I overdid it, but if Guy asked me to come I was going to say yes. Being with Guy on this “remote” Carrigain—I could have climbed it on crutches!
“More remote than Carter Dome?” I asked.
“It’s surrounded by mountains, not a road in sight,” he said.
Carter Dome and Wildcat were the only big White Mountain peaks I’d climbed. I’d been up some smaller mountains, however, and had made sure Guy knew about all of them. Mount Haystack was in southern Vermont near where my family spent the summer when I was a child. Then, when we changed allegiance to southern New Hampshire, Mount Monadnock became a daily presence for me. It occupied the horizon out my third-floor bedroom window, and every morning when I opened my eyes I beamed in on its solid shape, its rocky top glinting in the sun or darkened with cloud shadows.
I had tried to describe for Guy how I’d been affected by Carter Notch, that rugged spot with its jewel-like pond I plunged into for a sharp, cold swim. I tried to describe my utter elation as I’d sat on those huge boulders, called the Ramparts, at night, surrounded by rocky peaks. One of the boys who worked in the hut that summer pointed out the lights of the small city of Berlin, far down in the valley. It was odd to think about those people in their stuffy houses, all shut up for the night, while I sat on this enormous rock pile, formed eons ago, that filled the notch separating steep-sided Carter Dome from Wildcat.
I knew the Ramparts carried memories for Guy. It was here that Dave Seidman, a hut boy who a few years later died on a climbing expedition to Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas, first tied a rope on Johnny.
Guy knew about a trip I’d made in 1967 on a Greek freighter that called on ports within the circle of the Mediterranean and up into the Black Sea. I ended those four months with a ten-day trip through the Bavarian Alps. I had thought of it as a backpacking trip, but now I knew it wasn’t since I carried neither tent nor sleeping bag and stayed at mountain lodges that served meals. I coped with bloody blisters because I was wearing new boots, something an experienced hiker would never have done.
After I returned, New York City, where I was living, had changed for me, or I had changed. I wanted to be outside in the woods on weekends. Someone told me about the Appalachian Mountain Club, and I began going on their hikes in the Hudson Highlands, in Harriman Park, and on Bear Mountain, precious wooded land for urban hikers. I was amazed to find you could go hiking in seasons other than summer and went out on a November Saturday of sleet and wet snow and soggy trails that soaked my boots. When we huddled under a shelter for lunch, I crunched a frozen peanut butter sandwich and couldn’t unscrew the iced-up cap on my water bottle. Back at the cars, everyone changed out of their wet clothes except for me, who hadn’t known to bring extras. Later, in my warm, dry apartment, with every stitch I’d worn draped over the radiator, I couldn’t wait to get out there the following weekend.
As Guy outlined his itinerary of trails and peaks, he glanced at me from behind the VW’s steering wheel. Finally he stopped talking.And I stopped showing enthusiasm for his plan. What happened next was up to him. I wanted to see whether he wanted to take me along—unproven, hardly tested, a novice with a not-yet-healed Achilles tendon.
I knew from Guy’s stories that bagging these peaks was important to him. I saw from the way he climbed at the Gunks that he wasn’t going to take someone along who would jeopardize his trip. I watched his face in profile. It looked like he was concentrating on the road ahead, but from the way his mouth was turned down slightly at the corners, his habit when he was thinking, I knew he was weighing this over. When he turned to me and asked, “Would you like to come?” I heard in his voice that he was taking a chance, but I also heard that he was hoping I’d say yes.
The first day didn’t seem hard, but then we’d climbed Willey without our heavy packs. After supper Guy asked Ralph, who always slept inside the tent beside Guy, to sleep outside. Ralph was a big shaggy dog, and at that point a muddy dog. I think Guy felt I should be introduced to Ralph’s sleeping preferences in stages.
But Ralph had other ideas.As darkness came on and Guy and I settled into our sleeping bags, all three of us heard the heavy tread of a large animal, very close. Suddenly Ralph melted right through the mosquito netting, even, it seemed, before Guy had a chance to unzip it. Ralph’s golden fur stood up along his back, and he was trembling. Guy looked at me with eyes as pleading as Ralph’s, and I knew Ralph wasn’t about to be banished again. Guy encouraged him to sleep in the back of the tent, but it was not long before Ralph had crept up between our sleeping bags, his long body fully on our pads. He had positioned himself where he wanted to be without either of us detecting any movement. So Ralph slept between our sleeping bags, and this became his accustomed place, beginning with that night spent in wild Zealand Notch.
What was it that had scared Ralph? A moose? A bear? A fabled cougar? We looked for tracks in the morning but could discover nothing. We decided Ralph had been frightened by a Heffalump, the very creature that had so terrified Pooh and Piglet and, we were certain, had never been spotted in the lonely vastness of Zealand Notch.
The next day Guy introduced me to his style of hiking. He had written out on three-by-five cards the mileages to trail junctions and summits and how long it would take to reach each point. He allowed time for rest stops—eating and drinking—and to take in views, but as he had shown me on the map, we had a lot of ground to cover, so it was important to stick to the schedule. I would be comfortably settled on a summit, Guy naming for me the distant peaks, when he would pop up and shoulder his pack and it was time to move along. Keeping an eye so closely on the time, I said as he replaced his cards in his shirt pocket, didn’t seem to belong in the mountains. It depended on what you wanted to accomplish, Guy pointed out, how much ground, how many summits. “When Bill and John and I hiked the 4,000-footers in two weeks, it surprised us that we kept passing people. We never felt we were pushing.”
I knew that Guy could hike much faster than I, and that he was holding back, hiking at my pace. I thought over what he had said and found I liked moving along too. Like rock climbing, it just plain felt good.And it was thrilling to at last get to the summit, throw off my pack, and relish the accomplishment and the views. Peak-baggers are often criticized, Guy said, for not taking in the sights along the way, but he didn’t think he took in any less for moving at a good pace. He thought the most important thing was to enjoy the mountains however you liked to hike.
The third day we hit the Desolation Trail up Carrigain; just as Guy had warned, it was one of the most relentlessly steep trails in the White Mountains. By now I was curious to see how steep steep was. “Bill and John and I flew up this trail,” Guy said, “but it was our last four-thousand-footer, and we’d been hiking for two weeks.”
By this time my Achilles tendon was swollen, and my feet were sore from the unaccustomed pounding on the rocky trails. My pack seemed heavier than ever, and steep, I discovered, was steep. So Guy suggested that we try something that had worked with his sons when they were starting out. We’d walk for fifteen minutes and then take a break for five, to eat and drink something. We’d take the Desolation Trail in sections and in this way reach the top. I’d go first and set the pace. He told me the story of how one summer Bill and John had stepped aside and made a sweeping motion for their dad to go first!
As I lumbered up the Desolation Trail Guy told me more stories of his hikes with Bill and John, as well as with Jim when he got old enough to join in. The summer after their successful two-week trip climbing all of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers, they’d concocted an adventure in the Presidentials that took them up the great headwall trails like Great Gulf and King Ravine and down all the ridge trails like Six Husbands and Caps Ridge. After several days, high on the jagged boulders of Mount Adams, they saw that Ralph’s feet were bleeding. Guy half-carried ninety-pound Ralph down the Buttress Trail. They backed off the Presidentials for Ralph’s sake and finished the trip with hikes on easier footing in the Baldface Range, the Carters, and the Wild River.
Guy recounted another story about a November hike just with Ralph in which they covered seventy miles and six summits in three days. Coming out toward evening on the last day, Ralph was so tired that he finally lay down and refused to get up. Guy thought he’d have to spend an extra night beside Ralph in the woods. But he kept Ralph moving by walking ahead of him at a slow pace. “Every time I slowed down, Ralph would too, so the distance between us stayed the same, as if a rubber band was stretched between us,” Guy said.
In this way I gained the summit of Carrigain and heaved off my pack. We scampered up the fire tower, and Guy began pointing out the high ranges of the White Mountains—the Franconias, the Presidentials—naming the peaks, including the ones we’d walked over in the past few days stretching back into the blue distance. Now I was beginning to distinguish the individual mountains too, each one looking a little different as the angle I saw it from changed. Then we fell silent, and I breathed in the remote feeling of Carrigain, this peak so in-the-wild.
That last day, slogging out the Nancy Pond Trail, I suddenly found myself in Ralph’s position. Aching feet. Sore Achilles tendon. And like Ralph, I knew I was going to keep going. I discovered then that no matter how I felt, I could always walk that last mile.