Losing the Garden

They say that “Time assuages”—
Time never did assuage—
An actual suffering strengthens
As sinews do, with age—

Time is a Test of Trouble—
But not a Remedy—
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady—

During the early years the light in Guy’s spirit had the upper hand.At the climbing cliffs in 1969 and during Barra’s first decade of the 1970s, he was all April and May. His playfulness, his humor, the pixie qualities that made him so much fun to be with overpowered the damp drizzly November in his soul. I didn’t know it was there. In those days he was the sprite who put jelly beans on the handholds of the Bunny on Easter morning at the Gunks. Or who, on a showery day when the rocks were too wet to climb, led us in pied piper fashion to a nearby iron railroad bridge—a perfect jungle gym for climbers. One very rainy afternoon he created a board game called Fiasco that spoofed the hair-raising situations climbers get into, like finding themselves benighted on the cliffs, dropping crucial gear, wandering off route onto hard rock—all of which made for great stories afterward.

We climbed together all the time, and as I belayed him up some wildly exposed bit of rock, I’d hear floating down, “You gotta love your mama ev-er-y night or you cain’t love your mama at all,”and I’d look up and spot a man with a tam swinging up his hand for a high hold as if he were strolling down the sidewalk.

On April 21, 1981, we awoke to an inch of snow, and the temperature stayed in the thirties all day. We worked inside that morning, me making bread, Guy drafting chapter 4 of a big writing project we’d started—a history of climbing in the Northeast. That evening, as we were finishing up the supper dishes, we heard a step on the porch and looked at each other with alarm. Visitors at this time of day were close to unprecedented. We opened the door to our postmaster, who brought Guy the message to call the National Park Service in Alaska. “It’s about your son,” Paul said. Johnny, we knew, was climbing Mount McKinley, a solo traverse of the largest massif in North America.

The next morning Guy walked out to call Dave Buchanan, whom we knew slightly. Guy continued to call Dave every few days from the phone at our friend Freda Williams’s house in the village. He kept on calling until the Park Service ended the helicopter search two weeks later.

Johnny’s body was never found.

Meanwhile, we’d begun planting our garden.

News about Johnny began to reach our friends, and Guy picked up a stack of letters every time we went out for the mail. One evening as I was getting supper I heard Guy sobbing into his hands. I walked over and knelt down where he was sitting on the other side of the cabin and put my arms around him, not knowing how to give comfort in the face of so huge a grief. “He’s gone,” Guy sobbed.“I’ll never see him again.” Then he said, as though hit by it for the first time, “And Bill must be dead too.”

We knew from Johnny’s letters after his Mount Hunter climb in 1978 that he was having a harder and harder time coping with the world. His solo of the 14,570-foot mountain in the Alaska Range by the unclimbed and dangerous central buttress on the south face had earned him a stratospheric reputation in the rough and competitive circle of Alaskan climbers. He was interviewed by Alaska magazine and often invited to give his slide show of the climb. Brilliant was the word used to describe that route and Johnny’s climbing.

In the course of ferrying his loads from camp to camp, Johnny climbed the mountain a total of twelve times. First he led each pitch, attaching his fixed ropes to the mountain; then he made the multiple carries of his gear. When it snowed he had to dig out his ropes and painstakingly clean off the ice and snow so he could climb them safely. The terrain was so steep and dangerous that rarely was he unclipped from the fixed ropes, even when he was in his tent. Afterward he wrote us what he had named the features of his route: First Judge and Second Judge. The knife edge of ice-encrusted rock that he straddled and climbed by digging in his crampons like spurs he dubbed the Happy Cowboy Pinnacle. Johnny’s letters were full of the kind of detail he knew his father would relish, and indeed, Guy felt Johnny’s glory in a climb that some said had hardly been equaled in the history of mountaineering. But what also seeped out of Johnny’s letters, the thing that dogged him every foot of the route, was his aloneness. Johnny was alone as few ever are on this planet.Alone in an inferno of cold and storm and mind-cracking wind. Alone in enervating sun. Alone in whiteout that flips the world into disorienting, dangerous blankness where depth perception is lost.Alone with round-the-clock danger, and alone with his screaming fear. This route on Mount Hunter took Johnny 145 days.

Guy admired this kind of toughness, the test of will, the solitary quest in a harsh, indifferent wilderness.And after his son was gone, Guy was to make this world, more and more, his own.

Then Johnny wrote: Doesn’t the mere fact that I climbed the mountain diminish my achievement? Was Johnny saying that because he hadn’t died, at age twenty-five, Hunter wasn’t the mountain he thought it was? Reaching for an ultimate climb that offers little chance of success is a concept that only the world’s greatest climbers endorse, and most of them don’t long survive this line of nihilistic reasoning. Johnny had picked this route because of its reputation as “the last great problem” in Alaskan mountaineering, but he was unable to give himself the credit his success deserved. Guy seemed to agree with Johnny’s perspective, and I, always too ready to see things from Guy’s point of view, kept my half-formed questions to myself. Yet I felt that Guy was disturbed by Johnny’s twisted logic; his son seemed snared in a terrible tension between his desire to live and the morbid thought that he had somehow failed by surviving the quest.

After Hunter, Johnny seemed unable to reenter the world of his fellow humans. Despite his fame, at least among climbers, he ended up washing dishes somewhere in Fairbanks. Then, after a fire consumed much of his equipment as well as his journals, in which he had meticulously detailed his daily life, he traveled down to Anchorage and committed himself to a mental institution. He was there just two weeks before he fled, against doctors’ advice, to return to Fairbanks. He wrote us about that, as well as about his decision to run for U.S. president on a platform of feeding the hungry. If elected, he vowed to legalize marijuana. Word filtered back that he had affected a black cape with a star pasted on his forehead, in which garb he delivered his slide shows on the Hunter climb. Toward the end his letters were scarcely legible scrawls with a lot of anguish. He mailed us long fictional fantasies, laced with sex and obscenities, often involving his own demise. Long after Johnny’s death Guy wrote to Jon Waterman (no relation), who was writing an article on Johnny: “One thing he didn’t send me, but which surfaced in his effects, was a very controlled and underwritten (in contrast with the grotesquely overwritten fantasies he did send) short story describing tersely my receiving a telegram notifying me of his suicide.”

As Johnny’s letters grew more and more disturbing we were able to talk about them less and less. I could tell from the way Guy held himself, tense and closed, that he didn’t want to discuss Johnny’s problems and he didn’t want me to talk about them either. Guy thought about going to Alaska, but when? There seemed no good time. It was too expensive. I didn’t push it.As it turned out, he never went.

Then Johnny wrote that he was planning a solo winter crossing of Mount McKinley, a traverse from the tidewater of the Cook Inlet near Anchorage to the Arctic Ocean. It would be bigger and harder than Hunter. Guy relaxed. He took this as a good sign. Johnny was back on track; he was headed into the mountains again!

Johnny started at the Cook Inlet near Anchorage in January 1981, with a gargantuan pack. He began walking up the ninety miles of frozen rivers that led to the Ruth Glacier, the mile-wide highway that led straight toward McKinley. We heard from him next about a month later. He was back in Talkeetna. At the 2,000-foot elevation on the Ruth his stove failed, he wrote. Because of the cold. He was so cold he dreaded making camp at night. He lingered on in civilization for weeks, seemingly stalled. Then he had himself dropped off at mile 141 on the Anchorage-Fairbanks Highway and started walking in toward the Ruth Glacier again. By March he was well up the glacier, poised to strike out over McKinley.

The other climbers on the Ruth that spring thought John looked run-down and appeared less cautious than usual. He was last seen carrying a small pack with food for two weeks that consisted of powdered milk, honey, sugar, and flour. He had neither tent nor sleeping bag, and he was headed up the northwest fork of the Ruth, taking a straight-line course through an area known to be dangerously crevassed.

By summer’s end it was borne in on Guy that his son had not planned to return from the McKinley traverse. Like a wounded, desperate animal, Johnny had walked into the mountains, the only place where he felt at home, to die. What those climbers on the Ruth saw at a glance Guy learned in bits and pieces. Each insight was more painful than the last, and each seemed to hammer a wedge between him and me, sending him deeper into the silent room. Though Guy never tired of talking about Johnny and his climbing achievements, what had happened to his son after the Hunter climb became almost impossible to talk about. I became cautious, even fearful, of moving into this territory, since by doing so I seemed only to keep Guy’s wound raw.

Not until years later—during the summer before he committed suicide himself—did Guy tell me that he didn’t think he would have survived Johnny’s death, or not for so long, if it hadn’t been for me.

The last time Guy had heard from Bill was a letter postmarked May 30, 1973, ten days before we moved to Vermont. This letter mailed from Alaska, where Bill was living, said he was taking a trip, it wasn’t in Alaska, and he’d write when he got back.

Bill had been an enthusiastic Boy Scout and achieved high grades in school. Guy told me that when he attended parents’ night the young, energetic teachers rushed up to say how much they enjoyed having Bill in their classroom, whereas the older, more staid teachers said they found Bill tough to handle. In high school Bill played drums with a rock band. He was gregarious and well liked. People said Bill had charisma.

During the first few years after that letter, when relatives or friends asked if Guy had heard from Bill, he’d reply, “Bill’s off on an adventure. He’s always liked to be mysterious. I expect to hear a step on the porch one day soon, and there will be Bill.” Bill’s aunt Bobbie liked to recount an old story of how one evening when she was cooking dinner, she turned around and there was Bill, leaning in the doorjamb with a grin on his face, just waiting for her to notice him.Years later our friend Brad Snyder told me that, when he asked Bill what he had hoped to see on that train-hopping trip out west when he lost his leg, Bill waved the question away. He was just headed west. It was the sixties.

As the seventies rolled away, the bolder among our friends and relatives asked if Guy was going to look for Bill.

Guy replied that one of the last people to see Bill told him that she guessed he’d gone to live with the Indians—he was fascinated by their way of life. “Perhaps Bill’s living in an Indian village,” Guy said. But this didn’t really explain why Guy didn’t go look for Bill.

Then Johnny died in 1981. With Johnny’s death, Guy began to conclude that the chances were slim that Bill was still alive. Not hopeless, but not much hope.

Then, in an uncharacteristic airing of his innermost thoughts, Guy wrote to an Alaskan climbing friend of Johnny’s, Kate Bull, who had asked about Bill. But perhaps this wasn’t so uncharacteristic. Guy could often talk more openly, more confidingly, with people he scarcely knew. Kate had a right to ask. She had been on the Ruth Glacier and was among the last to see Johnny alive. While east on a climbing trip, she had made a point of seeking Guy out at the Winter Mountaineering School in December 1981 to tell him what she knew of Johnny’s last days.

On January 28, 1982, Guy wrote to Kate:

I’m glad you raised the question why I’ve not “gone to find Bill,” because maybe if I try to write out an answer it will help me to see whether I’ve really thought it through clearly. . . . One reason I never took off to look for Bill was there was never a single point at which I could say, now I’ve got to go see.

Another reason has been the selfish one that our life here is very ordered, and geared to not spending money, and very interdependent as between Laura and me. So there is no chunk of time I could easily take off and go to Alaska, or to wherever the trail (if any) might lead....

Mainly, though, it comes down to this: either Bill is dead or he is living somewhere and quite deliberately not making himself known to me. If the former, it’s probably unlikely I could tie down the fact or the circumstances, much as I’d like to. If the latter, then he would not want me to find him. If I were to show up and he was not happy to see me, it would break my heart. If he is alive and happy somewhere, or at least content, he must prefer not to be in touch.... There were evenings last summer here at our cabin, the day’s work done, when I would stand at dusk and strain my eyes up the wood road that leads to our place, hoping to see a slightly limping form come down through the twilight and the years—before all went completely dark.

Why didn’t I urge Guy to go look for Bill? Certainly I had mixed feelings about Guy going away on an open-ended journey. But if he had said, “I want to go look for Bill,” I would have helped him find a way. When Bill lost his leg and spent weeks in the hospital in Winnipeg, Guy had gone immediately to be with him. What would have triggered the “single point” Guy needed to go look for his son? A year? Two years? Five years of not hearing from Bill? By then the trail would have turned cold. There is resignation in just letting time slip by. There is a certain inertia. The calendar quote Guy chose for May 30, the date of Bill’s last letter, was from Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the final words: “Wait and hope.”

I didn’t question Guy about his comment that it would break his heart if Bill weren’t glad to see him. Guy’s reasoning made sense to me—that is, if I looked at it from his point of view. I didn’t want to make him feel guilty about not going to look for Bill. I could see how Guy would be hurt if Bill weren’t “happy” to see him. I couldn’t see then how Guy’s twisted logic seemed to fly in the face of parental instinct. By that time I was living in total empathy with Guy, all my actions geared toward keeping him from further pain. I was in no position to see the similarities to the risk my mother had taken in boarding a plane for Switzerland to “rescue” me from Moral Re-Armament.

Bill’s death was never confirmed. He seemed to have been swallowed up in the wilderness of the Far North. But the question, was Bill alive or was he dead, could not be answered with certainty. Guy had had almost no communication over the years with his first wife, and this did not change with the disappearance of their son. As the years piled up Guy came to dwell in a netherworld about Bill. Always there was possibility that his son could walk down the path, back into the clearing and into his life at any moment.

It wasn’t until after Guy’s death that I began to ask myself why he didn’t go see Johnny after the Hunter climb, when Johnny began writing those disturbing letters. Some years after Johnny’s death Guy began saying, “There’s a lot of Johnny in me, and a lot of me in Johnny.” It was obvious to anyone who saw the two together that there was an extraordinary bond between father and son. Guy was very proud when Johnny had written to him once about a climb Guy had done in stormy conditions that, as Johnny put it, no one would have been out in “except my crazy Dad.” They shared this love of the wild and the testing challenges it offered. Each needed it for deep inner reasons of his own. Each set big goals that were next to impossible to achieve. Neither could give himself credit for achievement, yet each was painfully desirous of recognition.

Guy could go visit Bill when he was in the hospital in Winnipeg, but he was unable to go look for Bill when he disappeared, and he was unable to go to Johnny when he saw that his son was going mad. Did Guy revisit in memory his own adolescent stay on the psycho ward? Did he relive his old defiant feeling during those unproductive sessions with the psychoanalysts? I am led to think, now, that confronting Johnny’s mental problems would have brought Guy face-to-face with what he most feared within himself. He had spent years keeping under control, by prodigious efforts of mental discipline, a debilitating tendency toward anxiety and melancholy. He could not put at risk this hard-won control. But Guy must have known that by not going to Johnny he was condemning himself to an underworld of guilt and self-blame.

Guy wrote Jon Waterman in 1988—seven years after his son’s death—in an attempt to answer questions for Jon’s article about Johnny:

What I recall of Johnny was an explosive energy and ferocious ecstasy on the rock or ice—a masterfully competent but electric, volcanic, creative vitality. When he—or I—got a hard move, his joy was almost uncontainable. . . . As the years went by the lows began to match the highs and he went into these wild swings. I am subject to these same swings. My highs are very high, my lows—usually seen only by the long-suffering Ms. Laura—are very, very, very low. Maybe the reason he’s not alive and I am is simply that I found Ms. Laura and he never found his Ms. Laura. Well, more: I found a lot of things along the 49 years that preceded the spring of 1981, and I can be aware of them even in the midst of the lowest lows. Johnny didn’t find enough such things before the spring of 1981. . . . I do think Johnny was an exceptional climber on Alaskan mixed terrain, and I do think he had the uncommon vision of reaching for the unattainable which is inherently a defeating objective. To me he belongs with Ahab, Mallory, Prometheus, and the Satan of Paradise Lost’s first four books. Do you know what I mean? But he was also mad, in the sixteenth century’s usage of that term. When it was that he went from just having unusual ups and downs to being off the deep end, I don’t know. I didn’t see that much of him after 1974, not at all after 1976, his last visit. . . .At age 18 he wrote referring to “the incredible barriers in my mind toward meeting people and relaxing, the barriers that only let down when alone in my ‘home’ in the mountains. I could go on climbing only and try and forget about other things. Only it would have been a very short and hollow life.” At 19 he wrote: “As far as John the climber goes, I’ve already defined my lines. It’s John the rest of the time that needs to be found now.” It seems like that other John was never found.

On Labor Day weekend of 1981 we drove over to join our Shawangunks climber friends who gathered annually at Lou Cornell’s place near Cannon Cliff. We positioned our tent on Lou’s spacious lawn so that we looked out on that glorious stretch of alpine terrain that was the Franconia Ridge.

These climbers had known Johnny; most had climbed with him. Johnny had introduced me to Cannon on Labor Day weekend exactly ten years earlier, when he was not quite nineteen. He led me up Sam’s Swan Song. Following us from behind, as a second rope of two, were Johnny’s dad and our Gunks friend Herb Cahn. I discovered that day that there was nothing like climbing with Johnny. His joy on the rock was unbounded, and he wanted you to love it too. Sam’s was in the center of the big cliff. The climb had a reputation for tricky route-finding on sustained, difficult rock. There were no easy pitches on Sam’s. This climb was at the top of my level of ability and far longer than any route I’d ever climbed. All the way up Johnny’s voice came floating down: “Oh, this is great! You’ll love this, Laura.” Propelled by Johnny’s exuberance, his overflowing zest for climbing, I remember nothing hard that day on Sam’s.

At the top the climb peters out into blueberry bushes that grow out of the cracks in the lower-angled slabs. Climbers can make the mistake of unroping too soon here, thinking they’re off the hard stuff, only to discover they’re making dicey moves that, if they slip, will have nasty consequences. In fact, a party had died a few years earlier from a fall on these slabs. Of course, the specter of what could happen to you on Sam’s enhanced the route’s reputation.

Johnny and I, and Guy and Herb, kept roped until we were well up into the blueberries, off the tricky slabs.As we unroped and began to sort gear I dropped my hard hat. Johnny leapt down through the bushes after it. It is not easy to catch up with a ball-like object that’s rolling downhill, but Johnny sprang over all obstacles and stopped my hard hat before it took its final plunge for the talus slope at the bottom of the cliff. Johnny could do this! Only Johnny.

On this Labor Day weekend of 1981, ten years later, I climbed Johnny’s route on Cannon, Consolation Prize, with our friend Bill Thomas. Guy bushwhacked by himself up to less frequented Eagle Crag on the other side of Franconia Notch. He had built a memorial cairn to Johnny a month earlier on Eagle Crag. This cairn was located at the top of a route Johnny had put up on that cliff, and it overlooked Consolation Prize across the Notch. It was the third such cairn Guy had constructed that summer in his son’s memory.

That evening, back at Lou’s, Guy and I cooked our supper on our camp stove with the other climbers. Then it got dark. There was a party on Sam’s that wasn’t back yet, but no one was too concerned. People began to drift off toward their tents.At ten-thirty I suddenly woke up and knew Guy wasn’t beside me in his sleeping bag. I crawled out and began running around Lou’s lawn looking for him in my nightgown and bare feet. It was starry, a clear and cold early fall night in the mountains. The grass was soaked with dew. I knew Guy was upset when he’d returned from Eagle Crag, and not wanting to talk much with anyone. It was the first time our climbing friends had seen Guy since Johnny’s death, which they knew by now had not been a straightforward climber’s death in the mountains. They had heard something about Johnny’s problems, and everyone was careful to stay off this subject with Guy.

Where was Guy? I began running faster, calling out his name—Guy! Guy!—into the blackness. I didn’t like how I was acting. It was not like me: a little crazy, certainly overdramatic. But I wanted Guy to come back! Headlights streamed across the lawn as a climber drove in and got out of his car. It was Bob Hall. I ran over and asked him what was going on. Where was Guy? He said a rescue party had been thrown together to see about the climbers on Sam’s. It turned out they were fine, just slow, and had become benighted.The rescuers had walked up the trail to the top of Cannon Cliff. All they’d had to do was shine lights down for the party coming up. No problem, just the typical story of Gunks climbers being unused to the Big Cliff. Guy would be along in another car pretty soon.

Guy had left, and he hadn’t told me?

I crawled back into my sleeping bag, chilled and teary.

I left the tent flap unzipped.

In a little while Guy slipped in. He saw I was awake, but he didn’t say anything. “What happened?” I asked. I was lying in my sleeping bag.

He was silent, unlacing his boots, then peeling off his shirt. I started to ask again, when he said, “Nothing. Just a party benighted on Sam’s.”

He felt very far away. I knew he didn’t want me to keep asking questions, but I said anyway, “Why didn’t you tell me you were going off?” I was beginning to cry.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said in this new distant voice that felt so frightening. I knew this wasn’t the real reason at all.

He’d been talking with Ken and John after I’d gone to bed. They’d probably left shortly after that.

“I was so upset to wake up and find you gone, Guy.” Now I was sobbing. “I ran around calling for you.” I was trying to get his sympathy, get him back. I reached up for a hug. He gave me one, but it was like hugging a wall.

A few days later Guy told me that when he was walking up the climbers’ trail to the top of Cannon Cliff, thoughts of running up this same trail with Johnny on just such a nighttime rescue came hurtling, smashing back. His memory was of Labor Day 1968. Johnny was sixteen and already so good that climbers three times his age had stepped back and let this boy direct the rescue when they reached the top.

Well, I thought, this explains why he was so cold to me in the tent. These memories about Johnny upset him. Johnny had only been dead five months. Guy was still grieving for his son. But really, Guy’s grief—or whatever I wanted to call it—explained nothing at all. On some subterranean level I knew this. It was just far easier to placate myself than to push Guy to give me reasons for why he had repulsed me in the tent. That was the frightening thing. Much too terrifying to give words to.

On that Labor Day of 1981 an enormous gulf opened where, it seemed, none had been before. It was wide and deep and hideous. I couldn’t understand it. It yawned between us for the rest of our married life. I devoted myself to finding ways to get across, through, over, or around this gulf.At times we caught each other’s hands, and the void diminished. But I could never bridge it. For years I thought that this inability to span the gulf had to do with me, that I was doing something wrong that was upsetting Guy. Not until after Guy was dead did I begin to see that to make a bridge that would span the divide, Guy had first to make a journey down, deep down, to the place that hurt to touch, the place he felt it was most important to conceal.Again, I consoled myself by thinking: This is the thing Guy cannot do. Or was it that he wouldn’t do it? It took me a long time to see that this was only half the story. To build a bridge that would have closed the gulf and sealed up all the cracks, I needed to understand why I was so terrified to really talk to Guy.

That first spring of 1970 Guy said to me, “I hurt the ones I love the most.” He said this with a serious face and a ghost of a grin. I knew he was telling me something important, but I didn’t understand what he meant. I had recently turned thirty, but I’d had little real experience of love. Certainly I had never been seriously hurt by it. Hurting the ones you love sounded a little overdramatic, a little soap-opera-ish. In my worldview it didn’t really make sense. How could you possibly hurt the ones you least want to hurt? I heard his message: that I was taking my chances by falling in love with him, but I certainly didn’t give the risks a second thought.

A few days before he walked out the door for the last time, Guy reminded me of what he had said years before.

“I have never forgotten,” I said. “And I have never regretted.”

I saw that my task, after 1981, was learning to live with this “new” Guy, a changed man from the one I’d married. A light—and a lightness—had been extinguished. Though this light flickered from time to time, Guy never regained the radiance. His world darkened, and though we might be working side by side in the garden, we were often very much apart. Guy was in some far-off country to which I was never invited. Wherever he had traveled to, it had been a solo crossing, and I could see from the lines about his mouth that this other world was a hard and unforgiving land with signposts that read Regret, Remorse, and Despair. At those times I felt pushed aside. So I became adept at sinking into my own tasks and waiting it out.Asking him what was the matter only seemed to cause more pain. I told myself that I could help him most by not adding to his pain.

On the anniversary of Johnny’s death—Guy had picked April 1—he always spent the day up by the rock cairn he’d built in Johnny’s memory on a trail-less ridge off the Franconia Ridge. Guy had chosen a commanding spot of wild beauty that looked across the deep notch to Cannon Cliff and the route Johnny had put up in happier times, Consolation Prize. In this cairn Guy had placed Johnny’s hiking boots.

We were always sugaring on this date, and Guy was scrupulous about returning home in time to help me collect the afternoon’s sap. One year the anniversary fell on a Saturday, and we had eight or nine visitors. The outpouring of sap was enormous, and I sent several people up to the cabin to lug down the washtubs to hold it all. It was exciting, as big runs always are, and everyone was in exuberant spirits.

The afternoon wore on. Four o’clock came and went, as did five. I began feeling anxious about Guy, that kind of nameless fear that came over me when he had gone to the mountains and I had reason to be concerned about his frame of mind. I thought about what I would do if he just didn’t show up. What would I do? I could never carry that thought any further. Today he knew I had plenty of help, but I kept glancing up the path in the direction he would come. By now all the sap was gathered, people were back to sawing and splitting wood, and there was some conversation about when Guy would arrive. The sun sank lower and lower, and a chill crept into the air. Finally he appeared over the hill, his tam at its usual jaunty angle. Though he was moving along at a good pace, I could tell he wasn’t in any hurry to reach us. It was as if he was hanging back, reluctant to leave that shadow world of his own thoughts and Johnny’s cairn. Reluctant to cross the bridge into the land of friends who he knew understood the significance of this day.

He greeted everyone with hugs, except for me.

But I was so relieved, so thankful, so glad to see his familiar compact shape, that I just squashed down this hurt. He was back. But from what stony and isolated Mordor?

“Hello, Guy,” I said, several times, but he seemed not to hear.And then the sad feelings welled up, and I felt utterly pushed away, as I had in the tent on that Labor Day weekend. I couldn’t understand why Guy seemed unreachable, but the way he overlooked me let me know that he didn’t want to be reached, especially by me.At the same time I felt my own love go out to him with longing, with a deep awareness of his pain and with a searing sadness that all I could do was stand as witness to it. Our friends began telling him about the enormous run, showing him all the sap we’d collected, and bit by bit he let himself be drawn back into the circle.

I never told him of my own hurt, because wouldn’t that have only caused him more pain? I just kept picturing him sitting beside Johnny’s cairn, haunted, hounded by his own punishing thoughts. He must have found that mild day—the benign sky, those zephyr breezes—terribly at odds with his mood, which could only have found its match in a full-blown gale wailing out of the north with winds fierce enough to flatten him.

Life went on at Barra. Over the next nineteen years we wrote four books and many magazine articles. I began writing and publishing short fiction; Guy did the same with baseball research. We climbed, and we began our stewardship on the Franconia Ridge trail. We constructed a log guesthouse, Twin Firs Camp, and we hosted countless visitors. We continued signing all our letters “Laura and Guy.” We sugared, gardened, and collected our wood, the seasonal occupations that ruddered our lives.

If I saw that Guy was low, I would ask him how he was. Sometimes he tried to tell me, but most often he’d say,“Talking doesn’t help, Laura.”

“But it would help me,” I’d say.

So he would try again, this most articulate of men stumbling for words, and would end up saying that talking didn’t help, it just belittled what he felt. That was where things ground to a halt between us. Did he mean that talking made his feelings seem less important? I had hoped that by talking he could diminish the pain. Only after his death did I come to see that he needed to keep the pain raw, as a kind of penance for all the things he felt to be his fault.

For May 28, the date on which he last saw his son Bill in 1972, Guy selected for the Barra Calendar this quote from King Richard III:

O, then began the tempest to my soul
Who passed, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that sour ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the Kingdom of perpetual night.

Guy needed to shoulder this burden, more weighty than any pack he had ever hoisted. He needed to carry it alone. He would not allow himself to ease it by sharing it. He was not about to deconstruct it with words. The closest he could come was to say he had let all his sons down. Meanwhile, I stood like Kipling’s Dinah Shadd, ready to drop my hand into Guy’s “like a rose-leaf into a muddy road.‘The half av that I’ll take,’ sez she,‘an’ more too if I can.’”

Sometimes I would ask how he was feeling if I could see that he was in the clutches of a black mood, but I was always quick to back off when I felt his resistance rising. We seemed to be better off—less at odds, tensions not wound so tight—if I said almost nothing at all. So Guy kept his hard shell intact around his unforgivable self. But as this carapace grew more impenetrable by me, it grew more unendurable to him.

For a long time I thought it was I who had caused this low mood that sprang up so suddenly when we were planting the peas on a mild morning in early spring.“ Is it something I’ve done?” I’d ask. I believed he loved me less because he wouldn’t talk.

Finally he said, “My moods have nothing to do with you, Laura.” It took years for this to sink in. It wasn’t me. It was nothing I had done.And when I thought about it, I felt demonstrations of his love every day. Guy making the trip for water one last time when we watered our young plants on a May evening. Guy pulling out my chair every night at dinner, giving me a kiss, then saying as he began to eat,“I sure do like our Barra meals. Your cooking is just right.” Guy writing me these lines in a letter, dated April 18, 1983, that I read in Lawrenceville, where I was visiting my parents. He had just spent the day at Dartmouth’s Baker Library.

I had a very productive day at the library, but it was strange being there by myself. I found that all morning I kept carefully using only one half of our table (the one we always use in Special Collections); by afternoon I finally realized there was really no reason I couldn’t spill over onto the other half too. Several people asked where you were.... Going in and out of the building through the revolving doors, it seemed strangely empty, only one person in a revolving door section at a time. I missed you.

Or in this note penned on a three-by-five card and left on the table for me to find after another trip away:

Jan. 15, 1987

Dear Laura,

I love you very much and am so glad we’re together again.You are very very good to me and make our life at Barra a world unlike any other place—our world.

Guy

For a long time—years—Guy couldn’t say he loved me. And I stopped too, until I realized that even if he couldn’t say it, I could. I didn’t say it often. It was hard to say. Many evenings when he called for me to come in to say good night, I’d find him lying on his back, staring straight ahead, looking sad. I put my hand on top of his, and he twined his rough fingers in mine. If he looked sadder than usual, I’d say, “It seems you had a hard day.” I felt it was important to let him know I saw. He might shift his gaze to me, still not saying anything, though he showed me the pain in his eyes, and I saw the way he had pulled the covers up tight against his neck and surrounded himself with Lion on one side and Ben the Bengal Tiger on the other, two of the animals who gave him comfort. Then he might say: “It’s a hard world for animals, a cruel hard world.” When he was past sixty, lying like this in our bed with the two candles illuminating our small bedroom, he looked like a little boy lost in a bewildering world, just trying to hold on till morning.

It was at those moments that I could say: “I love you.” I’d give him a kiss, douse the candles, leave the room, and return to the table and pick up my book. But I would find myself listening. I’d hear him roll over, searching for the right position.After a few minutes his breathing would ease and mine could too and I knew he was asleep.

As I was kneading bread one morning—often a time when thoughts came to me—the words I could get divorced flashed across my brain. I tested this. I looked over at Guy, who was writing at our table, drafting a chapter for Forest and Crag. He was absorbed. His forming thoughts worked the pencil across the page, without, it seemed, a pause for breath. I realized then that I had no wish to be divorced. But it was a necessary thought. A liberating thought. A feasible option to pass in review across my mind. My mother must have thought it years before. Recognizing that I could leave Guy left me free to stay. I saw for myself that I had no wish to be where Guy was not.

After that, I began to adapt, though incompletely and in fits and starts. It seemed never enough over the course of the rest of our years together.

I learned that he wasn’t asking for my help. Since his refusal to want my help was devastating, I had to learn, over and over, not to offer it. I had to learn not to walk into that place where I felt myself pushed aside. I had to learn not to take his dark moods personally, and not to get pulled down into resentful spirits of my own. I felt anger, but rarely, and kept it as well hidden from Guy as from myself. The consequence was that I squashed down my own feelings of hurt. I did not see then what I was doing, and I didn’t understand the danger I was putting myself in. But I did know I couldn’t lose my own lightness of spirit. If Guy needed anything from me, it was this.

Even though I was learning what I needed to know to be myself and stay married to Guy, I had no objectivity and I continued to live in Guy’s world. A world we had built together but Guy had conceived. A world I never would have come to without him, but in which he couldn’t live without me, if Barra were to last.

Mostly, during the next nineteen years after Johnny died, I took one day at a time. I was like a fish swimming around and around in her watery medium, unable to see into the larger world over the grassy edges of the pond.