Chapter 13
To say the very thing you mean, the whole of
it, nothing more or less or other than what you
really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
In the fall of 1979 Stone Wall Press published our first book, Backwoods Ethics: Environmental Concerns for Hikers and Campers. That same fall the Appalachian Mountain Club wrote to say they’d be interested in publishing a book with us. So the mortar was hardly dry on the first project before we were off quarrying stones for the next: a comprehensive history of hiking and climbing in the mountains of the Northeast. And so began a project that we thought would take a long time, maybe as much as three years.
Thirteen years later it finally ended with the publication of two books. Forest and Crag:A History of Hiking,Trail-Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains was released by AMC Books in 1989, and Yankee Rock & Ice:A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States was published by Stackpole Books in 1993.
In the end, writing these books proved to be a task neither one of us could have completed without the other.
For about two and a half years we just gathered information. In this honeymoon phase of interviews and research, we traveled around the Northeast to places like the Bangor Public Library in Maine, with its well-cared-for copies of the turn-of-the-century magazine In the Maine Woods and its pull-chain johns in the basement, to the Boston Public Library, where we sat side by side in the high-ceilinged reading room at a long oak table with green-shaded lamps.As we ate our homemade sandwiches in the courtyard we told each other about the exciting discoveries we’d made in the last few hours.
Johnny died when we were over a year into the research. I kept expecting Guy to be derailed, to be immobilized by grief. I half-expected to walk into the cabin and find him staring at the wall or to find one morning that he just wouldn’t get out of bed.At the very least I expected him to lose concentration. But he was always up at 4:15 a.m. He never stopped working. He said he was glad for this absorbing task. “It occupies my mind,” he said.
For December 28 on the Barra Calendar, Guy chose this quote from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King:
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of lesser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags, and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Writing these two books was, at its best, a joyous, headlong journey of learning together. Shortly before his suicide, Guy told me that he had accomplished all he wanted. In a way, he was saying that he had come to the end of learning—that is, all he was interested in learning. There is always more to learn.
By 1983 we were still in the research stage (it lasted for five more years) and waking up to the fact that this was an enormous undertaking, much larger than we had thought. For instance, we had painstakingly documented every mountain ascent in the Northeast during the colonial period. There weren’t many, maybe a dozen. But Guy pointed out that if we went into this level of detail for the entire book . . . well, he’d be working on this project for the rest of his life. “This would be fine if I were a scholar,” Guy said, “but I’m not.” Neither was I, not in the sense my father was. We were climbers who were interested in finding out more about how our home mountains came to be climbed. Guy became panic-stricken that, as he was writing a book on climbing, he himself would have no time to climb.
The material flooded in. Guy organized the filing system, which swelled out of the neat wooden files we had built when we constructed our cabin, into cardboard boxes picked up at the supermarket. These ended up piled three deep and encroached on our limited floor space, often serving as tables if we had a houseful of guests.
Occasionally Guy lost track of some key piece of paper. While we were working on Forest and Crag in the morning, sitting across from each other at our table, I’d be aware of Guy getting up and going over to the files. If he was back in a few minutes, I hardly noticed he was gone, but if the sound of shuffling paper turned frantic, I knew he wasn’t finding what he was looking for. “Do you want a hand, Guy?” I’d ask. Often he didn’t answer, or he mumbled and I couldn’t make out his words. Either way, I stayed in my chair. I knew from experience that if I walked over to him, he would swerve around me to return to the table, grab his pencil, and start writing furiously, hunched over his pages, forcing a way around the detail-gone-missing.
A misplaced note could really upset Guy, as could his own typing mistakes. Suddenly he would rip the paper out of the typewriter, crunch it into a ball between his hands, and hurl it across the room. These outbursts seemed to rise out of nowhere, and I was always caught off guard. I felt his fury at himself, his self-castigation for a mistake of little consequence, one he knew was of little consequence. His sense of humor had vanished. I was left feeling shaken and helpless, even angry at Guy, while with my whole being I wanted what troubled him to go away. It was the same terror I had felt at my parents’ dining room table, though I had no idea of that connection then. What I did know was that Guy knew the minutes were slipping away, the task he had set himself for the morning wasn’t going to get completed (though it usually did), and he had jumped from the consequences of the missing note to the worst-case scenario that writing Forest and Crag was a lifetime sentence.As I sat there across from him, trying to regain my shattered concentration, he’d break off writing and jerk a three-by-five card out of his shirt pocket. I’d watch him bear down with his pen, then jam the card back in his pocket again. I knew he was making a note to look for the missing note.
This was what Guy had become since Johnny’s death. Since I couldn’t help him—in fact, all his actions were telling me to keep my distance—I helped in the only way I could: I pulled my focus away from Guy and got back to my own work on our joint project. But when Guy got upset with himself, it upset me as well, and these feelings were slow to dissipate.
At lunch I’d ask him again what he was looking for. By then enough time had passed that we could talk about it. Guy was no longer enraged, and I was no longer afraid—or at least I was less afraid. We talked about where the missing note might be filed. Forest and Crag’s topics overlapped, and notes could logically be located in more than one place.
“I’ll look this afternoon,” I would say.
“You don’t need to, Laura,” was Guy’s reply.“Don’t give up something you’d rather be doing just for that note.”
But I would be glad he’d agreed to my searching for it, and if I found it (I usually did), I placed it on his side of the table where he’d discover it when he came back from working outside. Often he’d leave me a note on my side of the table:
Dear Ms. Laura,
You’re swell.
Everyone at Barra loves you.
The Committee
To write Forest and Crag we tried the same approach we had used for our columns, but it didn’t work.
My attempt to write a chapter bogged down. I could have told Guy I was sticking with it until I learned how. But I didn’t. I knew it would have taken time. Guy felt the time pressure from this project, and I knew I would be making it worse if I used this book as a training ground for learning how to write history. “All my life I’ve written short,” he said as Forest and Crag kept stretching out. I wasn’t about to risk causing more anxiety for Guy—and for myself—so I found other work to do on Forest and Crag. It was a disappointment I kept to myself. I liked thinking of myself as a writer. It didn’t come easily to me, and I didn’t have much confidence. “Forest and Crag needs one narrative voice, Laura,” Guy said. On the surface this let me bow out gracefully. Though underneath I knew very well that I could be contributing to the prose, just as I had with our columns, if Guy hadn’t felt so pressured. But that was only half the problem. The part I didn’t see was that I was too afraid to talk with Guy about my desire to contribute to the writing of Forest and Crag. What I did see was the way Guy drew into himself, and what I heard was the tight and distant sound of his voice, and what I told myself was that I’d be making his life a lot more difficult if I insisted on doing some of the writing. I would only be adding to his pain; ever since Johnny died, this was what I kept trying (and failing) not to do.
What I picked up, what Guy radiated, and what I could not name, was anger. He kept the stopper in the bottle. It must have taken enormous effort of will to keep himself under control like that. What I was feeling was his suppressed anger—at himself.When an inconsequential thing like a missing Forest and Crag note gave Guy the excuse to uncork the bottle, his anger was frightening. I never felt physically threatened; that is, Guy was never physically violent toward me. But that made it all the more frightening as I watched him take all his stored-up frustrations—some of which must have involved me—out on himself. At these times, as I watched him trying to contain his actions, trying to do no more than rip a page out of the typewriter, he scared me because I felt what he wanted to do was hurl the machine out the window.
There were plenty of other jobs for me to do on Forest and Crag. A big one was putting into note form all of our source material—books, magazine articles, everything we photocopied on our research trips, our interviews, all the letters we received. These notes went into our files, and Guy used them when he drafted the chapters. I compiled the bibliographic data used in our references. I also served as typist. Guy typed up his handwritten chapter drafts. Then he rewrote, and I typed from that.
Friends asked how we shared this collaboration. Do you both write? they asked. I didn’t like this question much and usually answered it by saying that Guy was doing most of the writing. The fact was that he was doing all of it. Then Guy, for reasons of his own, would say something about how we were perfectly suited to work on this together. He was trained to grind out prose fast, he said. I’d been an editor in New York, and it was my editing that honed, pared, and beat his prose into shape. This was far from the truth. While I read his drafts and offered suggestions, I didn’t edit in the way he implied. Sometimes during these conversations I said, in a small voice,“It’s not like that.” But no one picked up on it. I liked being seen the way Guy was telling it, even though it wasn’t the truth and it made me uncomfortable.
What we did do well together was discuss all that we were learning as we delved into the rich storehouse of anecdote and fact on northeastern hill walking. Together we analyzed the major shifts in people’s perspectives on the mountains over the past four centuries. What were the forces at work that influenced the early visitors who saw the mountains as scary and useless? We tried to put ourselves into the mind of a nineteenth-century traveler, for whom the term sublime connoted the rough and uncontrolled in nature. The sublime was tinged, on the one hand, with dread and, on the other, with spellbound rapture. In the chapter “Mountains as Sublime: 1830–1870,” Guy wrote:
The fashionableness of mountains after 1830 reflected a profoundly important change of attitude toward the mountains. To the pioneers in New England, as we’ve seen, mountains had been difficult, useless, hostile, obstacles to farming and travel, sanctuaries for French and Indian enemies, foreboding shrines of frightening superstition. With the conquest of the wilderness on the eastern seaboard, especially after the flush of optimism that followed national independence, fear of the mountains waned. Wilderness began to attract, not repel.
We ate, digested, slept, and breathed this sort of learning for the decade of the eighties. We talked while eating meals, while working in the garden, while hiking, while in bed. We thrived on making new discoveries and new connections, on watching our theories evolve as we unearthed new facts that led to a shift in our thinking. We asked ourselves the much-debated question: Can we ever know what really happened? How can we, as historians, break through to the gold?
It was in the mind-to-mind connection where we were most at ease, most in tune. Here we could be lighthearted. Guy started a list of the nineteenth-century figures we thought would be fun to hike with. I added to it. We were energized by what we were learning, and we energized each other. I knew Guy listened to my ideas and adjusted his own accordingly. This was where we truly collaborated.
The strength I brought to Forest and Crag came from the example of my father. From childhood I had witnessed the countless hours he’d spent in his study with the door shut. I remembered how he’d tacked photostats of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the pine paneling so he could examine the changes in her handwriting and date when she wrote them. This kind of scholarship demanded enormous concentration and meticulous attention to detail. It took years of patient work. If the sheer length of the Forest and Crag writing project held terror for Guy, it held none for me. I understood the strength of mind it took to keep moving forward on a book that stretched into the unforeseeable future. I understood about pacing and not giving up. But my understanding was all at an intuitive level. I never thought of trying to communicate it to Guy in words.
An example Guy carried was his father’s dedication to public service, for which he often expressed admiration. But at a more personal level, Guy labored under an overwhelming sense of responsibility.
One morning he told me he had come very close to chucking the manuscript in the woodstove.
“What stopped you?” I asked.
“The thought of all those people who have helped us.”
Even then I saw this was his way of saying he couldn’t let them down. After he was dead, I understood that if he had thrown our manuscript into the fire, he would have been letting me down and, worse, himself. Whether it was true or not, he blamed himself for letting others down.
Guy suggested we read aloud a world-class history on a subject unrelated to our own. We decided on Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution. It’s a hefty three volumes, so we agreed we could stop after volume one if we weren’t enjoying it. But Carlyle was too good to stop, and we sailed on, picking up many useful historian’s tricks. For instance, he uses the words “sea green Robespierre” over and over, the meaning deepening as Robespierre’s character becomes revealed. Carlyle uses an extended storm metaphor to evoke the Reign of Terror. It starts as single drops, then enlarges to a ringing tempest with the power to sweep everything away, the good as well as the evil.
The historian Guy felt closest to was Edward Gibbon. He had discovered The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while in college and often quoted Gibbon or read me selections until I too relished the architecture of his sentences. For Guy one of the great reverberating moments in intellectual history was when Gibbon laid down his pen “just before midnight” in his garden cottage in Lausanne. This marked a pause that was monumental, even heroic, with meaning. Gibbon’s enormous manuscript was complete. His labor of years had reached a close.
Often during the Forest and Crag years I felt like the ship’s keel. I wondered if my mother had felt this way as well. My job was to keep our frail little boat upright in a turbulent sea. Guy supplied the bursts of creative energy, the organization, the writing skill, but I see now that he needed my steadiness to reach the end before he laid down his pen.
In 1993 the Countryman Press released a revised edition of Backwoods Ethics as well as Wilderness Ethics, a new companion volume, which carried the subtitle Preserving the Spirit of Wildness.
With these books Guy and I were back to our old way of working together, as we had been when writing our column for New England Outdoors. In fact, much of Wilderness Ethics came from these revised columns as we rethought the issues ten years later. But the 1990s saw a major change in our lives that affected my writing in particular. It had to do with my knees.
One morning at breakfast I told Guy I was going to start writing short stories. I was fifty-one. Because my failing knees made climbing no longer possible for me, I needed something to fill the gaping crevasse that had opened in my life. I knew it had to be something as absorbing and important to me as climbing. I’d never written a decent word of fiction in my life. But I’d been drawn to the short story form ever since I was eight, when I’d read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and experienced a wholehearted terror that would have propelled me to check under my bed except I couldn’t force myself to leave the bed. I didn’t know exactly why I wanted to write short stories. I later found out it had something to do with wanting readers to feel something—anything, including that delicious, palm-sweating terror that Poe had induced in me. Besides, after Forest and Crag I vowed that five thousand words was my limit.
I had never mentioned this interest to Guy. It was a private longing for which I needed a certain amount of confidence—or desperation—to start. That morning at breakfast I by no means felt confident. I didn’t think I had the imagination to write fiction. But I was desperate.
That coming winter of 1992 I would often be on my own at Barra. Guy had taken a part-time caretaker’s job at a climbers’cabin in the Presidential Range. There was no better time for me to start. Nonetheless, stepping into the world of fiction felt like stepping into the void. This wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. As a climber, I had often found myself on hard rock, my muscles tensing, breathing fast, not seeing where to go next, very close to falling. Guy shouted to me once,“Relax your mind.” I took a deep breath. The tension flowed out of my arms, and my weight was back on my feet, my composure on the rock regained. Although a head-first plunge into the world of short fiction felt equally filled with risk, I knew I needed to step into this terrain of uncertain outcome.
Guy’s writing was also going in a different direction. After the publication of our Ethics books, he had returned to an old love: baseball. In the 1970s Guy had written a few articles for Baseball Digest, and now he wanted to explore some baseball ideas he had.
So we continued to sit across the table from one another just the same, but we were now working on separate projects.
For three winters Guy was employed by the Randolph Mountain Club to caretake the hikers’ cabin called Gray Knob, perched at treeline on Mount Adams, on a week-on-week-off basis. I spent the weeks he was away by myself, learning how to write short fiction. These winters were good for both of us. Guy thrived in his role of genial mountain host and could roam his beloved alpine world. He would return elated, with stories of tussles in the high wind of the Northern Presidentials.“All my life I’ve felt inadequate,” he told me, “but above treeline in bad conditions—I feel good about myself up there.”
For me the time at Barra was vacation. A vacation from Guy. I didn’t see it then, but with Guy not there, I could relax my vigil. I felt an unnamed relief as I waved him off down the snowshoe path leading from our door, even though, as soon as he was gone, I was aware of how empty the cabin felt and how I missed him. But I became absorbed in my work and settled into my own routine, which varied little from the routine when Guy was home. On the day he was due back I began to look for him in midafternoon—listening for the crunch of his snowshoes as I sawed wood in the woodshed—even though I knew he wouldn’t appear until dark.
From the beginning I showed my fiction to Guy, and when he returned from Gray Knob I often had a new story drafted. I learned that the more comments he wrote in the margins, the better he liked the story. So I kept glancing at him when he was reading to see if his pencil was moving.After I had read his comments, we talked, and the discussions left me energized and full of ideas about how to revise.
I was on my own, though, if he read a story in no time flat, dropped it on the table, and went outside. The first time this happened I thought: he must really like this one since he made no comment. But the way he strode past not wanting to be stopped said something different. When he came in I said, “This seemed all right?” I wanted him to reply: Sure. Send it out.
“I didn’t get anything out of it, Laura,” he said.
“But you didn’t give me any comment!”
“I didn’t get interested.”
During my first winter of writing fiction Guy tossed me back a story and said in that tight, careful, reined-in voice, “I don’t like seeing myself in your fiction.”
I was aware I was basing a character on him, but I expected him to shrug it off because, after all, this was fiction. Nonetheless I was anxious about Guy’s reaction. The character I knew Guy would see as himself had communication problems with his wife. But I had made Joe and Alice’s problems so different from ours, or thought I had; besides, Guy and I didn’t have “problems” exactly . . . .
This story was about two couples who are close friends. Mercy and Steve are visiting Alice and Joe after a long absence. Mercy is fighting cancer.Alice is coping with the disturbing changes she sees in her friend: hair loss necessitating a wig, an unhealthy pallor, physical weakness, a missing breast.Alice also observes Steve’s loving care for his wife; in fact, Mercy and Steve,Alice thinks, have drawn closer because of Mercy’s life-threatening disease.Alice wishes she and Joe could be the way Mercy and Steve are. In the end Alice makes peace with her grief over Mercy, and she and Joe have reached a comfortable moment, even if she has no greater understanding of the underlying problems in her own marriage.
Guy saw himself in Joe and me in Alice, and what he saw alarmed him. The reader doesn’t know what it is Joe can’t talk to Alice about, but does see her being shut out by his stony silence. This causes Alice to feel an anger she never voices toward Joe. Since I never allowed the word anger to surface in me—I denied all feelings of anger—I wasn’t aware when I was writing this story that I was showing Alice as angry.
In retrospect, I remember the feeling of holding back, keeping in check all my unformed thoughts. The censor in my head had Guy’s face. Despite this, I had showed enough of what was going on for Guy to pick up on it.
Even in fiction I was not able to look squarely at what was happening between Guy and me. What would have happened if Alice had told Joe how much it hurt her that he couldn’t talk? Alice never confronts Joe. In the end we leave them at a tender moment but no closer to solving their problems than they were at the beginning, a recurring scene for Guy and me.
When Guy returned from Gray Knob I showed him this story, hoping he wouldn’t see himself, fearing he would. But I didn’t expect that the anger he radiated when he said, “I don’t like seeing myself in your fiction,” would come close to derailing me from writing stories.
At the time I chalked it all up to his feeling of privacy. His strong sense of his own autonomy, I rationalized, gave him a built-in resistance to seeing himself as a character. But deep down I was angry. I wanted to be able to write what I wanted to write. But I couldn’t hurt Guy, who hurt so much already. I solved this by telling myself I’d leave him out of my fiction. I had a thick folder of story ideas, none of which included Guy.
I put Joe and Alice’s story away for several months. Eventually I took it out again and revised it. After a while I showed it to Guy. “Send it out,” he said. He ended up being as delighted as I when this story was published.
Now I see that even in my revisions I had taken the story no further. Alice’s anger and her fear of her husband’s reaction—the real story, the truth I didn’t write—never come to the surface. Guy must have felt he had nothing to be concerned about. I had managed to sidestep our problems, even in fiction.
Guy had been writing fiction for years. He hadn’t turned out many stories, but nearly all were published. My foray into fiction writing rekindled Guy’s interest. He gave me his stories for comment, and we discussed them. I suggested we try collaborating on fiction. But this never went anywhere. I told myself it didn’t interest Guy to labor over stories, to work through revision after revision, the way it did me.
But I think now that it was more than that. Fiction comes from deep within. Guy wrote a father-and-son story. The son has a job—his first—at a garage. He longs to enter into the camaraderie of these guys who live for cars, but his feeling of inadequacy, the risk of looking foolish, keeps him outside the circle. The father sees all this and is filled with heartache for his son, but he is unable even to start a conversation. All the father can do, when he drops his son off at work, is watch the young man get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror as he drives away.
Guy wrote another story about a man who can make the neighborhood kids laugh but lives at odds with himself and ends up jumping over a waterfall. Guy called this story “Over the Brink.” These stories came from painful territory that he didn’t want to explore any further, especially not in conversation with me. Though I sensed no outright resistance to my idea of collaboration—he enjoyed talking about his stories—I often felt our discussions ended too soon.After his suicide, friends told me that when they trod on conversational ground that Guy didn’t want to stay with—even if he had brought up the subject—he just skittered off, a figurative elf escaping into the deep woods. The friend would be left with the impression that Guy had just played the Ace of Trumps, picked up the deck, and slid out of the room, closing the door on the subject as he left.
Guy began writing poetry in the last few years of his life. If he revealed his inner turmoil anywhere, it was here.Again, he showed me everything he wrote. He showed close friends his poetry as well. He and I could discuss what worked line by line and what didn’t. We could talk about word choice and clarity. But we did not talk about what lay behind the words, what the poems meant for Guy. I was pretty numb myself by that time. By the mid-1990s, I too was doing anything to avoid conversations that seemed to drive the wedge deeper between us.
His poems were often about his feelings of isolation and loss, regret, remorse, shame, and blame. Though I saw he was writing about his own darkness within, I responded as if it were a painting on a wall. I’d been looking at this same painting for years. Guy had made it so clear that he didn’t want me to do more than look at it that looking was all I was up to doing now.
He wrote a poem called “Together,Alone” that ended,“So why do you smile? I do not / Understand how you can smile.” I read it at breakfast, the time when he showed me his completed poems, and he spoke the last line looking at me: “How can you smile?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I understood what he meant: How can life look rosy to you when it looks like hell to me? I remember his face, woebegone, lost, the face of a traveler who’s nerved himself to ask for directions one last desperate time for a place he has been trying to locate for years.
“It’s just how I am,” I added in a bright cheery voice. I remember thinking that I was in some way better than him for being able to smile. That smiling was easy for me and it would be for him too if he’d just decide it was.
I so rarely felt I had the upper hand with Guy. I had it now, and I seized it. I gave a truthful answer that showed no understanding. And oh! what an opportunity I missed. Guy had started across the bridge—he was holding out his hand. This time it was I who remained unbudgeably planted on the other side. By the end I was no more capable than Guy of spanning my side of the bridge.
After Guy was gone I reread his poems. Then I felt his overwhelming isolation; I felt too his desire to overcome and connect on a deep level with those closest to him. And I felt as well his inability to do this.And mine.
There was much in Guy that lived to make the world a better place. In Washington he saw himself fighting for rights and justice; through our work on the Franconia Ridge and in our books he fought to preserve wildness for future generations. He felt that he failed in Washington, and he felt that our books hadn’t lived up to his hopes for them. In his own eyes he had “let down” his sons. He had warned me when we first met: “I hurt the ones I love, Laura.” The quote for January 8 on the Barra Calendar was one that Guy took from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
What do we live for, if it is not to
make life less difficult to each other?
Here are some of Guy’s poems:
Outside the Room
 
Harsh footsteps echo down the corridor
And round the corner. Shouldn’t you assume
That backward glance was meant for you, before
They all withdrew into that other room
And someone closed the door? But that was one
You tried, remember? Do they want you there?
What would you say? Again some feeble pun?
Obscure allusion? Would you really dare
To tell a story of your own—and botch
The point? And shrivel up within. Quick drop
Your eyes from patronizing smiles, not watch
Their cruel kindness, wishing you could stop.
 
Shriek anger, anguish, tear the place apart!
You know you won’t. Does that not break your heart?
Spring 1998
 
 
Red Squirrel in the Attic
 
Red squirrel in the attic
Tearing up the place. What a mess!
Don’t know how he got in or when—or why—
But he must’ve been in there some time.
 
Getting into everything:
Bits of insulation scattered about
(Remember how hard it was to put that insulation in?)
Torn corners of old memorabilia,
 
Old speeches penned for famous men,
Ideas buried in gloom of irrevocable past
In darkened dusty corners of the loft.
Did he seek comforting material for a nest?
I could have told him it won’t work for that.
 
No way to keep him out now.
They don’t see the dark corners of the loft.
Maybe we could just leave it alone.
But what a mess!
Of course it’ll get worse.
 
June 13, 1998
 
 
Living Will: To Laura on Christmas Day
When time has run his course for me,
When mountains lie beyond my power
And neither woods at twilight hour
Nor charms of garden do I see;
When troubles come too thick and fast
And useful work no more is fun,
And that dark fiend who took each son
Perhaps has come for me at last;
When mind and body seem to rust,
And all my dreams have turned to dust,
And nightmare darkens all my day;
I hope I’ll smile once more and say—
Just once, though all my world’s awry—
Merry Christmas, with love,
to Laura
from Guy
January 12, 1996
At the last possible moment we were given a chance to collaborate again.
Guy’s cousin, John Daniel, ran a small, independent publishing company in Santa Barbara, California. In 1998 John wrote us saying he was sure we must have a lot of material—mountain stories—kicking around, both fiction and nonfiction. Why didn’t we put something together and send it to him? He’d act as our agent and market it.
So we sent John a manuscript of twenty pieces. Five were short stories by me written in the last few years. Five were climbing stories Guy had written a decade or two earlier. The remainder were nonfiction pieces, mostly collaborations. John found a home for this collection with The Mountaineers Books. It was published as A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True in the summer of 2000.
We fell back into the rhythm without missing a beat since our last big writing project together in the early nineties. We sat facing each other at the wooden table, its surface scarred from our typewriters. We wrote introductions to each of the pieces. We “exchanged papers” and penned in some suggestions on each other’s work. Guy invariably made tweaks that tightened the meaning of my sentences and drove my half-thought-out points right into the bone. We both found this an exciting, energizing few weeks.
By that time we both knew Guy wouldn’t be around to see the results or bask in the kudos, if there were any.
Over the years we often told each other that we had created at Barra the perfect writing environment. The ideal writers’ colony. Why, we joked, writers would gladly pay to come here and be free of phones, faxes, and e-mail. When we sat at our table on writing mornings we knew we were guaranteed uninterrupted hours. Our windows faced south. We looked out on our garden. We watched it evolve from the end of April, when we planted the peas, until around Thanksgiving, when the snow came to cover the Brussels sprouts stalks; with all their sprouts picked, these had just a tuft of leaves left at the top that turned them into incongruous palm trees.As the snow deepened the Brussels sprouts stalks disappeared.
Guy was always the early riser. Now it is I—the one who considered 7:00 a.m. the only sane rising hour—who is up in the predawn hours, sitting at my desk, a different desk in a different house, my pencil scratching a rhythm across the paper. I pause. I listen. I feel what needs to be said next. I’m writing solo now, but because of half a lifetime of shared thoughts, it can still feel like collaboration.