Chapter 7
If you don’t go beyond,
you get nowhere—nowhere.
you get nowhere—nowhere.
Nick Clinch,
quoted in Robert Roper,
Fatal Mountaineer
quoted in Robert Roper,
Fatal Mountaineer
Trips to the mountains blended easily, as we had hoped, into our life at Barra. Our homesteading work kept us in good shape for climbing. Our active involvement in the mountain world kept us from becoming isolated.
Though we lived halfway between the White Mountains in New Hampshire and the Green Mountains in Vermont, we traveled mainly to the White Mountains. Here we found the perfect mix of trails and rock climbs in summer and ice routes and mountaineering in winter. Bushwhacking, or off-trail hikes, we enjoyed at all times of year.
We stuck close to our garden during planting, from late April until the end of June, when the threat of late frosts was past. That is not to say we couldn’t take a day to go climbing. But longer trips were out, and we learned this the hard way. On June 14, 1978, we planned an overnight down in the Boston area so I could do some research on Miriam Underhill, America’s foremost woman mountaineer during the 1920s and 1930s. That night, in the suburb where we were staying, temperatures dropped into the forties. This made us nervous, and indeed, we returned home to find that the “blond assassin” had paid a call. Our frost-sensitive plants—five rows of beans, thirty hills of squash, the cucumbers, six rows of corn, and all the tomato and pepper plants we’d grown from seed—had wilted, blackened leaves.
We strategized that the plants shouldn’t have to fight to maintain their hopelessly dead leaves, so like surgeons who clip off frostbitten toes to save the leg, we amputated. Our garden was a pretty sad sight for several days, but the life force kicked in, and we ended up losing very few plants.
After the Fourth of July, when the frosts were behind us and we had the garden well mulched, we always planned a longer trip of three or four nights, timed for that window of time after we’d canned the peas but before canning the broccoli. During the rest of the summer we could go on trips whenever we liked.
We made a weeklong hike in mid-September, after the killing frost and the first stage of our harvest. We covered portions of Vermont’s Long Trail this way; the leaf-strewn paths in the hardwoods spread themselves under our feet like Oriental carpets. We visited less frequented country in the White Mountains like the Baldfaces, the backside of the Carters, and the Wild River region that Guy and his sons had explored over a decade earlier. In late October and into November we fitted in trips around our wood collecting and other tasks that prepared us for winter, often with our friend Lou Cornell. The three of us camped in our roomy two-person tent and sipped tea while Lou read aloud from Murray’s Mountaineering in Scotland.
During the 1970s, for the seven years Guy was on the board of the Mohonk Preserve, the land trust that safeguarded the Shawangunks, we made trips there four times a year for meetings—and of course to climb. We spent, in total, a good month out of the year there, and our life fell into a very pleasant routine—the kind you’re not even aware of when you’re in it, time passes so lightly. But when you look back after it’s gone, you remember you were happy.
After we’d cleaned up from sugaring in mid-April, we headed for the Gunks. We didn’t need to be back at Barra until it was time to plant the peas. We stayed with our friend Brad Snyder during the week and camped at the base of the cliffs so as to be closer to the climbs on weekends.
The Smiley family, who owned the land and created a preserve of over five thousand acres, understood the importance in people’s lives of forming ties to land. Our conversations, often on walks through the woods with the two brothers, Dan and Keith Smiley, instilled in us a sense of stewardship for land as well as a strong desire to reach our fellow hikers and climbers with the message. In the early 1970s land managers across the country were seeing the damage caused by an increasing army of hikers: trail erosion, polluted streams, compacted campsites. It seemed that if we were all made aware of the damage we caused, we would strive to do the right thing out of a regard for the land itself. The themes of the books we would later write, Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics, grew out of our connection to the beautiful land at the Shawangunks and our talks with Dan and Keith Smiley.
Winter! That was our time to climb. The garden was put to bed, the wood collected. In late fall Guy drew up a list of all the places we’d talked about exploring: the trail-less ridges, the cirques, the slides and gullies, the headwalls, the frozen streambeds that often made great routes up mountains. Though we fit in three trips a month of three to five days out, as well as a few day trips, we always had more trip ideas than we could crowd into the short winter months of January, February, and early March, when we were back to sugaring again.
Guy also set aside five or so days for what he called his “solos.” These trips gave him a physical challenge, but I came to see that he needed the encounter with wildness most of all. He returned from these solitary tramps easier in his mind.These pilgrimages, his tussles with the wild and uncontrolled in nature, somehow appeased for a time the turmoil within. I saw also that whatever drove him out to be alone in the winter woods with a week’s food in his pack was not in me.
I said good-bye to him many times and watched him walk down our snowy path. I could not be sure he would return, not because he had thoughts then of not coming back, but because his trips took him to isolated places. His was a quest for the unbeaten path. If he had fallen in a steep place, broken an ankle above treeline, or become hypothermic in a driving snowstorm, he would have had a hard time rescuing himself. But he always came back, and at the hour he said he would, because he never wanted me to worry.
Each day I followed his progress in my mind. He wrote down his itinerary on a three-by-five card that I kept next to me at the table where I worked and ate and read. During the days he was gone I settled into my own routine, though I kept to our same schedule of meals and water fetching and weather readings. The cabin felt silent. I felt silent, as if half-alive. I was not so much lonely as aware of the absence of that vitality that was Guy. But I made the most of this time by myself. As the years passed and Guy’s dark moods deepened, this time alone came as relief. I could not admit it then; I was not even aware I had let up on the vigilance.
On the day he was due back I went out and sawed wood in the late afternoon, often looking up from my work and down the path, even though I knew it was too early to expect him. As the light began to fade I went inside to lay the fire, keeping an ear cocked for the sound of his snowshoes crunching back toward the house.As soon as I detected this I dropped what I was slicing for supper and rushed out to the porch without my coat. He was back. It was too dark to see anything more than his shape, bulky with his pack on, but as I hugged him I smelled the woods in his clothing and felt his face fresh against mine. Holding his rough fingers in my hand, I drew him into the warmth of the cabin.
“Tell me how it went, Guy.” But already I knew. I could tell if his trip had gone well, or ill, by the way he took off his pack. I could tell by how he plopped down on the ash log seat by the door whether he was weary because of a hard trip successfully concluded or whether he was dissatisfied with himself, second-guessing his decisions, feeling that he had failed to meet the challenges.
If it had gone well, he launched into the story as he unlaced his gaiters, grinning up at me and saying, “Some kind of large cat paced around my camp. I saw his fresh tracks every morning.” The mellow glow of the kerosene lamp fell upon his hands. And I was filled with joy because he was sitting so solid on the ash log seat and the cabin was alive again.
Guy needed big goals, big projects. His most ambitious was a plan to climb all forty-eight White Mountain summits over four thousand feet in winter from all four points of the compass. This meant that he would climb each peak four times. He had gotten a good start on this project from previous years of climbing, and continuing to pursue this goal sustained him for around four years as he fit these trips into all the other hikes we did in winter. I joined him on some, as did our friends, but he did many solo. It was his practice to write up his day of climbing, while sitting in his tent at night, as a letter addressed to me. It served as a record of his trip, but for me his notes carried an immediacy that told far more about what really happened on the adventure than he ever could have conveyed to me later. Here is an excerpt from a weeklong trip in 1987.
Sat. Jan 10 (Camp of the Unknown Ladies)
Dearest Laura,
. . . Today I got casual and over-confident. Before I knew it I became very confused. An all-day snowstorm began about 9:00 am., so I had no views at all to help guide me. Soon I felt genuinely lost, but knew that if I kept going uphill and south I would have to cross the Appalachian Trail. Then I ran into the famed Twin Range Scrub, and battled it for about 2½ hours. Dense! Not even any tracks of Rashleigh the mad hare, and it is well known that he is a hair mad. All this time the snow never ceased, and I got completely drenched. Then, crossing Guyot there was a terrific wind, so I became ice encrusted as well. You recall what wind on Guyot can be like!
What worried me was having 5½ miles to go after that even had I not gone over to West Bond, which made it 8. I came very close to passing up West Bond for fear of being too tired later, but really wanted that peak. I noted my time at each landmark, and realized I’d be OK as long as I didn’t strain a muscle or something. I thought a lot about our first hike, when you were so tired on that very trail. I tried to figure whether you were more tired that day (17 years ago this summer) or me today. I realized that I probably never appreciated how tired you had been....
Sun. Jan. 11 (Zealand Hut)
The snow which began yesterday continued all night, so I awoke to find a foot or so of new snow. I broke camp, and when I started up the slope it did not take long to see that I would be totally exhausted trying to pull the Bemis Tiger up that one mile and 700’. So I elected to ferry loads. First I went up with my day pack, encountering very tough trail-breaking and terrible spruce-traps and getting very wet—it was still snowing. Then when I finally reached the trail (between Hale and the Hut), I was so wet and cold I put on my wool nets, left my pack and started down. This gave me a bit of a pause, with no life support system —no 1st aid kit, no parachute cord (if a snowshoe broke), not even my wool shirt and sweater. But I got back down fine and put on the other pack and towed the Bemis Tiger empty. The Tiger was great, bouncing along behind, rushing up on my heels at the slightest downhill and responding enthusiastically every time I cried C’mon Tiger. So about 2 pm I finally had everything up to the trail, but I was so cold and ice-encrusted I gave up on Hale, and slowly sledded into the Hut. As I got closer, I was sad to realize that my time alone was coming to an end, and went slower making little side-trips to the cliffs and caves of Cioffredi Peak, even though I was so wet and cold. I expected to see a sizable Sunday night crowd at the Hut, but to my great surprise, I turn out to be the only guest, and the caretaker is the floater, Bobby Dery. So now I am drying everything out on the ceiling racks, and sitting at a table to write. I had a warm meal for the first time since last Wednesday. ...
I sure like being out by myself in the middle of the mountains. I appreciate your tolerating my doing so. This time I was 80 hours without seeing anyone. But, boy, you do get wet. So I am not sorry to be at the Hut tonight. O boy! Tomorrow I see you.
Love,
Guy and
Ludwig [the Hut cat] (who has been trying to sit
on this letter pad as I write)
on this letter pad as I write)
and
Rashleigh (the Mad Hare) who is a hair mad:
and
CLEM (guardian angel of the mountain men.)
When Guy completed the four-points-of-the-compass project—on Mount Moosilauke with me and our friend Dan Allen on March 8, 1987 —he felt both elated with the accomplishment and bereft of the goal. He thrashed around for a few years, trying to recapture what he had so recently enjoyed. During Christmas week of 1989 he went over to the White Mountains to explore the remote and steeply wooded flanks of Carrigain, one of his favorite peaks.
Dec. 22, 1989
Dearest Ms. L—
Our first message from Fort Pileatus—so named because on our arrival, a pileated woodpecker flew off. We are about 6 miles in from Rte. 302, at about 2000’, with splendid views of Carrigain, the Captain, and the sprawling massif of Hancock, the White Mountains’ most underrated mountain. Sheep and Mr. Rat are comfortably seated by my side, and dinner is started. We are having no trouble with black flies or mosquitoes. As we came in for the last time at 4:30 pm it was—1°. The air has that deep cold feel of Jack London’s prose or Robert Service’s poetry. Sheep and Mr. Rat are being very brave, and I have told them that I am very proud of them, and that Ms. L will be very very proud of them. The sterno is humming away, plus 3 candles—4 candles now (just added a tall one for seeing into the pot better).
Dec. 24, 1989
On the whole, I am quite discouraged tonight. I had difficulties with these snowshoe bindings on the descent again—just after I thought they had done quite well on the ascent and in the thickets on the ridge. I fixed them, but I don’t know how much downhill they can take.
But it is all part of a general deterioration in our winter gear, which money cannot fix, because we have no money. These snowshoes, my old and not very warm sleeping bag, Johnny’s windpants, old REI gaiters, etc. Well, really it’s not so much the equipment as the deteriorating man inside. I just seem to move very slowly these days. Partly it is less strength due to age. Maybe some general waning of the fire inside. Perhaps the completion of Forest and Crag [a book that took ten years to write and came out that fall] coming on the heels of completing the 4000ers-from-all-4-compass-points has magnified my sense of having no more goals. I do have goals, but only the ones involving Barra seem definite. Well, it is too cold to continue writing tonight, I just finished dinner and stepped outside, and the temp is—6°. I still do have some gut left, tho, just to be sticking out my full 4 nights in this cold. The sleeping bag is not worth much, but I am using all the resources I have—keeping clothes dry, using candles just right, getting hot drinks. Wonder how the last night will be. Wonder how cold tonight will be.
On Christmas Eve, three of your beloved animals send their warmest love to you—
S, Mr. Rat, and G
[Sheep and Mr. Rat were small animals that could easily tuck into a corner of a pack. They made many trips to the winter mountains, alternating with Ben the Bengal Tiger or Lion or Rocky the Raccoon or Hazel the Rabbit or Killy the Snow Leopard, whom Guy had come across in a wild part of the White Mountains called the Kilkenny. These animals, among others, inhabited our bedroom and maintained a close watch over us by day and by night. Killy and Ben accompanied Guy on his last trip up to the Franconia Ridge.]
Then, as if to belie his concerns about his strength, Guy climbed a major ice route called the Black Dike with our good friend Mike Young on the second day of the new year. My journal entry read, “Mike and Guy were back by 4:00—with big smiles on their faces. Guy just loved it! He said he’d thought about me a lot when he was up there—that climb, which we’d done 13 years ago—is so vivid still for us.”
Mike Young gave Guy a pair of boots he couldn’t use anymore, and our friend Sue Deming made him a pair of windpants just like his beloved old orange pair that had belonged to his son Johnny, who had been given them after climbing McKinley by his teammate Tom Frost, who was getting rid of them. That was in 1969. Johnny passed them on to Guy in the early 1970s. I had patched those windpants, so often snagged by his crampons or on White Mountain scrub, until there was very little of the original orange left.
Replacing worn-out gear turned out to be easier than finding another big project. Nothing seemed to work. He talked about exploring in the Kilkenny Range, a nearly trail-less area in northern New Hampshire. He talked about tackling some wild country in Maine. He seemed to be looking for wilder mountains with greater opportunities for solitude. I wasn’t so sure I liked the Maine idea. I didn’t know those mountains. Because I could visualize where he’d been when he came back from his White Mountain trips and told me about everything—the ridges he’d climbed, where he’d camped, every summit he’d been on—I felt connected to what he had experienced and it felt safer somehow. I didn’t want him to make the long winter drive to Maine, over unfamiliar roads, so far from home. But if Guy had found such a project, if he had found the spark to light again the fire within, I would have been happy to watch him pack his pack, readying himself for the next adventure.
Though I often stayed at Barra, I also used the opportunity of Guy’s solos to climb with some of my women friends. We women climbers wanted to see what we could do in the winter mountains on our own, without boyfriends and husbands, who somehow ended up making the crucial decisions if they were along.
In the winter of 1980, Natalie Davis, Debbie O’Neil Duncanson, and I made a successful winter crossing of the Presidential Range, the first ever for women. The next year, 1981, ten of us traveled to Katahdin in northern Maine. Again it was a first winter ascent for women, but after that I decided I preferred smaller groups. Perhaps my most successful trips were with my friend Sue Deming. We used the same tactics to climb mountains that Guy and I found so satisfying. On the first day we hauled sleds into the area we wanted to explore and set up a base camp. During the next few days we climbed the open slides with crampons or bushwhacked up thick slopes to the summits.
These trips with Sue gave me confidence in my own mountain judgment that I could never have found if I had only gone on trips with Guy. As did the years we spent instructing at the Winter Mountaineering School. For fourteen winters—from 1973 to 1987—Guy and I taught at this program run by the Appalachian Mountain Club and held between Christmas and New Year’s.
The ice climb that meant the most to Guy and me was the Black Dike, the route that the world-renowned climber Yvon Chouinard described as “a black, filthy, horrendous icicle 600 feet high.” It occupied the shadowy void separating the Whitney-Gilman arête from the rest of Cannon Cliff in Franconia Notch. The sun never shone on this north-facing strip of ice-and-snow-plastered rock, a “frozen maelstrom of malignancy,” as Guy called it. It just sat there in the gloom, the ultimate dare for any ice climber.
On our first attempt in March 1975, we didn’t even reach the bottom of the ice. We arrived at dawn to find Franconia Notch enjoying its own private blizzard, but we walked up the snow-covered talus slope anyway because, who knew, it might suddenly clear. It took us fifteen minutes to strap on our crampons—normally a four-minute job—because of the swirling snow.
We’d seen, with some surprise, another car in the parking lot. Now we heard scuffling and calling from a party directly above us, in the act of rappelling down the Whitney-Gilman route. This turned out to be Andy Tuthill, a young climber of our acquaintance, the only guy we’d expect to see out on a day like this. Andy, crampons scraping on the rock, landed beside us with a thump and said, “Hi.” Then he began coiling up his rope.
If it wasn’t a day for Andy, it certainly wasn’t a day for us, but I began uncoiling our rope anyway, getting ready to belay Guy up the snow ramp that led to the first pitch of the Black Dike, when suddenly, appearing from behind us out of the mist, up strode Big John Bragg. The only other climber we weren’t surprised to see up here.
We suggested that John precede us up the Dike, since he was a party of one (and a much better climber) and would move faster. Meanwhile, Guy was cramponing up the snow ramp when we heard an unmistakable woomf and the snow sheared off, taking Guy with it. He whizzed past John, who leaned out to grab Guy by the scruff of his neck but stopped himself, considering what might happen to him if he grabbed hold of a fast-moving object. The mini-avalanche petered out; Guy stood up, and we exchanged looks that said, Enough of this nonsense.
“Why don’t you come over to my cabin and have a hot drink,” Andy said.
Indeed!
As we headed back down the talus slope, we kept looking back up into the swirl. Our last view was of Big John Bragg hanging on his ice tools, head bent, parka hood up, as the spindrift passed over him.
“He’s off to Patagonia day after tomorrow,” Andy said. That explained it.
We were back a few days later. The weather was with us, and this was lucky because we were terribly slow. On the second pitch I stood, my back to the ice, belaying Guy for two and a half hours as he tried a way that turned into a cul-de-sac; he had to down-climb and try another. During that long belay, as I wiggled my toes in my boots to ward off the cold, I tracked the sun as it moved along the cliff face on the opposite wall. Occasionally huge icicles would drop and crash down to the talus slope.
I climbed the last steep pitch in fading light, and it was hard. We were using long axes then, and my arms were tired; I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life flailing away on that last bit of steep ice. I was mad at myself that my wrists had turned to jelly. When I finally popped over the top onto firm ground Guy reached for me in an enveloping hug. Suddenly he was sobbing, his wet face against mine. Perhaps at that moment he sensed, in the way we can know the unforeseeable, that the climbing wasn’t going to get any better. Like that ultimate football match between the orphans and campers so long ago, Guy had given this great climb all his energy, concentration, and desire. There had been less than a handful of previous ascents, none by a woman. Perhaps Guy had seen that together we had reached a summit, and that the long path ahead lay only downhill.
In 1980 we began taking care of the Franconia Ridge Trail—1.8 miles, all above treeline—under the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Adopt-a-Trail program. That work grew to mean as much as our work at Barra: the Franconia Ridge became an extension of our own backyard. Our routine was to pack up to Greenleaf Hut, located a mile below the summit of Lafayette, and spend two or three nights there. As trail workers, we were granted free lodging in exchange for work.
Forest managers were concerned about the beating the fragile alpine vegetation was taking from the heavy foot traffic. The sheer exposed beauty of the Franconia Ridge trail attracted the crowds. Hikers who lived in Boston could make the eight-mile loop as a day trip: ascending the Old Bridle Path to Lafayette, crossing over the summit of Lincoln to Little Haystack, and descending the Falling Waters Trail. In the late 1980s we counted as many as three hundred hikers up there on sunny weekends.
We saw the challenge as twofold: protecting the plants and educating hikers into wanting to safeguard these plants. It was really threefold: achieving both of these goals without compromising everyone’s experience. It was important, we thought, that hikers not lose that precious sense of freedom, that sense of wildness, that being in the mountains gives. It might seem hard to find on crowded days, but the wildness was there on this narrow windswept ridge, this sky traverse through alpine glory. It was embedded in the rocks, held fast in the impenetrable scrub at treeline, and heard in the heartstoppingly clear note of the white-throated sparrow.
It was our profound privilege to think deeply on these things for nearly two decades. The terrain in which we worked, and the hikers we met up there, gave back to us far more than we could ever give.
Friends got interested, and several of them adopted adjacent trails. By the mid-1980s we were helping each other on our trail sections and had dubbed ourselves the West End Trail Tenders.The Franconias are located at the western edge of the White Mountains, and the acronym described the conditions we often found ourselves working in: WETT! We formed a sturdy, dedicated force that appointed no officers, held no meetings, charged no dues, drafted no bylaws, hired no staff, and built no clubhouse. We had one “rule”: when we were working on your trail section, you were the boss.
The WETTS got together for two long spring and fall weekends, but Guy and I didn’t let three weeks go by without getting up on the Franconia Ridge. Over the years these trips took their toll on my knees, and it all came to an end on May 26, 1991, when I was descending the Falling Waters Trail on a muggy day. I’d just gotten off a steep section and was feeling the relief in my knees when my left knee gave way. I stumbled, but saved myself from falling with the aid of my hiking poles. I was about a mile from the trailhead and limped on down. It had been a big weekend. Everyone’s knees were hurting. Since I didn’t want this to be anything worse than the way I normally felt after a big descent, I didn’t say much. But I knew it was worse: as it turned out, I’d torn the cartilage in my left knee—and that was my good one.
I was fifty-one. I had always struggled with what Guy and I referred to as “Laura’s bad knee.” Many climbers suffer from knee problems. Mine began when I was seventeen. My first knee surgery was in the mid-1960s. I felt a strong identification with Mickey Mantle and his problem knees. But he kept going, and I kept going by lifting weights, wearing knee braces, chewing anti-inflammatories, and using trekking poles, which turned me into a four-footed creature, as my doctor put it.
As my knees worsened, when Guy suggested a bushwhack, I could feel myself twinge, and I pictured the downed trees stacked like jackstraws, their crisscrossed trunks making up the terrain of the summer bushwhack. I could see in the way Guy held himself, watching my face, that he wanted me to say yes. We didn’t do that much summer bushwhacking, and in winter this underbrush was covered in snow. I didn’t want to confront the fact that I couldn’t do anything I wanted in our home mountains. I didn’t want to say no, so I kept on saying yes and felt a twinge (which I ignored) for the “discomfort” I knew my knees would feel. Just as I could not see into the pain of Guy’s soul and he wasn’t talking about it, much the same was going on with my knees. Guy knew they gave me trouble, but he could not know how much because I wasn’t talking—not to him, not even to myself.
I continued to cling on. In January 1991, we packed up to Tuckerman Ravine with a group of ice-climbing friends with plans to climb in both ravines, Tuck’s and Huntington. I could tell I made the others nervous as I stumbled over ground where, if I fell, I would land on the rocks below. It was an awful feeling, knowing this terrain was too much for me now.
Later that same winter I went with friends to climb some ice that was an easy walk from the road. That should work. No big descents. But this experience was, if anything, worse. I found myself flailing at the ice, unable to make my crampons grip. I knew this wasn’t just an off day. I was awkward and ineffectual and weak. I felt my hold on the mountains loosen.
It made me think of Hans Kraus, who put up many first ascents at the Shawangunks back in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time I met him, Hans was gray and a little bent, but I never thought he would stop climbing. One day Guy and I passed Hans as he was starting up a climb, a route he’d put in years ago. We took in the rope coming down from above that attached Hans to his climbing partner up on the cliff. Hans wasn’t leading and Hans always led. Then we took in Hans’s form. He was clawing at the rock. He was unable to move upward. We knew about his arthritic hands. As a teenager climbing in the Dolomites, Hans had caught his partner in a long fall, and the rope, running through his bare hands, had burnt them to the bone. We hurried past. This was too painful to witness.
I promised myself this would never happen to me.
But it did. On that ice an easy walk in from the road. I sold my ice tools later that winter.
In early November 1992, I had surgery, but my knee didn’t recover well. My last crossing of the Franconia Ridge was July 24–25, 1993. We met a group of friends at Greenleaf Hut, two of whom dated back to Guy’s Shady Hill School days. Everyone had come to see the alpine plants, and it was a glorious mountain day. The descent was laborious—very unpleasant—for me. If others hadn’t been along, I would have been in tears. Not just because of the pain, but because I knew I had no right to be in the mountains anymore. Because of my weakness, I put my companions at risk. Finally we reached the trailhead. As we gathered for a group picture, I took in some young hikers nearby. They lolled on the grass, their boots unlaced, their damp gear spread out, exuding that sweaty, dirty look of having been out for several days. I heard the joy in their laughter with a stab as our little band threw arms about each other’s shoulders for a snapshot. I was filled with longing for something I knew was already in the past.
As my knees began winding down, Guy had begun contouring our paths at Barra. He put in a zigzag path to the outhouse, eliminating the steep uphill. He established what we called “the Winter Route” for our walks out to the village. This eliminated the steep parts of our road.
Now I had time to plant more flower beds at Barra.
Guy and I had time to volunteer at the library.
I encouraged Guy to go to the mountains. He went, but not as often, and he began saying to friends who invited him on trips,“I’d rather have Laura without mountains than mountains without Laura.” I took this as a joke, a kind and thoughtful joke, but a lighthearted remark nonetheless. But I have come to see it was not a joke. It was lighthearted perhaps—Guy was often that—but being in the mountains together had meant everything.
Surprises sometimes happen.
That summer of 2000, after Guy had died, my friend Lou Cornell asked me to join the Labor Day crowd for climbing at his place near Franconia Notch.
I said yes. Right then I was saying yes to everything.
But I was putting myself in a tough position. I found it hard to be around climbers when I couldn’t climb too. That’s why I’d stopped going to Lou’s Labor Day events.
I wrote Lou that I planned to arrive late Friday afternoon, stay for dinner, and spend the night. This would give me a chance to catch up with old friends, and I’d head for home when everyone left to go climbing.
Then my old climbing buddy Bill Thomas wrote to say he’d pick me up. He was going to show his slides, many from the old days at the Gunks, some of them of Guy. He had so many slides that showing them would take two nights.
Two nights!
I wrote Bill that I absolutely had to be back home on Sunday morning. I had a commitment to friends to meet them in Bradford at 3:45 for our monthly play at the community theater.
I resigned myself to being stuck in Franconia for a whole long day while everyone went climbing. Except that I kept thinking about climbing myself. What about those slab routes on Whitehorse Ledge? I was pretty confident that my knees would be fine on that easy-friction, low-angled rock that involved no big step-ups.
Lou called, and I heard myself saying: “I’m going to bring my climbing shoes.”
And he said:“If you can get up, Laura, they can get you down.”
That Friday evening Linda Collins said she wanted to climb Beginners’ Route with me the next day. I was so excited I could hardly sleep.
Saturday morning was overcast and misting. The plan was for Linda and me to leave her husband, John Dunn, and their three-year-old Laura —my namesake—to spend the day at Santa’s Village. In the parking lot there was some dithering around as we debated retreating to North Conway for a second breakfast while the weather made up its mind. Finally, Linda and I decided we’d go check out the slabs. We told John we’d very likely be back.
Beginners’ Route wasn’t exactly dry, but it was dry enough. Linda led. As soon as I started up the rock every sinew, tendon, joint, blood vessel, and brain cell clicked in, and I was taken over by the pocked and dented granite under my fingers as I padded up those beauteous slabs that swelled like motionless waves. The rock was gray, like the sea on a cloudy day. Linda said, as I stepped onto the belay ledge high up the cliff, “Are you thinking of Guy?”
“Oh, yes! He’d be so happy!”
I made plans to climb the next day with John.
Sunday was, if anything, more threatening; the cloud level rested halfway down the cliff face and never lifted. As I climbed upward, I slowed my mind to focus on the roughness, the dull sparkle, the secrets hidden in the granite. I felt possessed of an enlarged vision that pulled the past—all my climbs, so many with Guy—up into the light of this present. It was as if I were held in the firm embrace of a dear friend not seen in years, one with whom I felt an abiding connection that could never be broken, even if I never saw my friend’s face again.
When John and I reached the top a raven flew in, croaking, and touched down on the slabs about twenty feet away.
“Do you think that’s Guy?” John said with a quiet smile.
Neither of us believed that large black bird was Guy, but we saw in the raven’s flight, and heard in his raucous call, the delight that Guy had taken in the romp up the rock.
Bill drove me back home on Monday morning.As we motored slowly through the town of Bradford I pointed to a building and said, “That’s where we go for the thea—” I gasped, clapping my hand to my mouth. Bill threw me an alarmed glance.
“I forgot! I totally forgot! I was meeting Sally and Tek here yesterday at 3:45!”
Bill started to laugh. “You were drugged, Laura,” he said. “Drugged on rock!”