Chapter 18
As for suicide: the sociologists and psychologists who talk of it as a disease puzzle me now as much as the Catholics and Muslims who call it the most deadly of mortal sins. It seems to me to be somehow as much beyond social and psychic prophylaxis as it is beyond morality, a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.
A. Alvarez, The Savage God:A Study of Suicide
Guy leaves at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, February 6, 2000.
I follow him with my eyes as he walks away from the cabin, then turns right on the winter path around the garden and into the woods. I catch a final glimpse as he climbs the slope on the other side of the stream, his solid shape shifting among the tree trunks dark in the shadow of an early winter morning. He moves upward at a steady pace, his father’s ice ax in his hand, his pack on his back, his form fading to a soundless silhouette, not looking back.
I follow him in my mind as I knead my bread. Where the slope eases he can look down on the sugar shed. Then he will pass our maples—King Lear, Kent, the Fool—everything already steeped in memory. I know when he arrives at the car and how long it takes to unlash his snowshoes, stow his pack, and drive away.
I follow him as he drives to Crawford Notch to get the forecast, then back to Franconia Notch. The weather is clear and cold, so I’m sure he has started up the trail toward Lafayette’s summit. Guy and I have walked the Old Bridle Path several hundred times on the way up and down to do our trail work on the Ridge. We know it as well as our own walk in and out of Barra. So I know how long it takes him to move from the trailhead to Dead Ass Corner, a lookout one-third of the way up where one encounters the first sweeping views of Mount Lafayette, its summit cone scored by slides now filled with snow and ice. My mind casts back to the day when Guy and I stood at the base of a slide we called Gateway Gully because of how it narrowed between rock walls, then shot straight up to the summit. There was a biting wind. Guy hung the thermometer on his ice ax. We had had an agreement that we wouldn’t do such hard climbs when the temperature was below zero. We were above treeline now, and I looked down Walker Brook to where our tent lay in the trees far below and out of sight. Guy read the thermometer, then put it away.
“How cold is it?” I asked.
“One,” he said, and grinned.
After our climb, as we warmed up on hot chocolate in the tent, Guy said he had a confession. The temperature had been one, yes, but one below zero. That was the second time Guy had gotten away with that.
I continue to track Guy in my head as I saw wood that afternoon. The sun streams into the woodshed. I look up from my work many times, half-expecting to see him striding into our clearing. But I know that if I see his figure, he will be approaching with his head down, leaning on his ice ax, his shambling pace radiating a weariness that will reveal to me his dejected state of mind. I don’t want to see Guy returning like that. But my mind keeps jumping back and forth between wanting to see his familiar shape and knowing that if I see him it will only be because he has been forced to come back.
I picture Guy seeking a resting place near the summit. He will be very cold. He will have to suffer in the cold and wind as he seeks this passage from life to death.As dusk fills our clearing I hang up the saw and stand in the woodshed door, gazing at the webbed print of his snowshoes leading away from Barra until I can stand my own thoughts no longer and retreat to the warmth of our cabin.
I don’t go to bed until I’m falling asleep over my book. I want to avoid lying awake with my mind coursing through images of Guy in the wind, Guy in the dark, Guy in the cold and the wild. Orion shines in our west-facing bedroom window.This constellation has defined our winter nighttime landscape, and tonight he gives forth an appalling brightness reserved for the coldest nights. I know Guy sees Orion too.
I’m warm in bed, but I can tell that the temperature is dropping in the cabin. Whenever a gust of wind hits the window, I spring awake with thoughts of Guy crouched among the rocks. I know about strong wind in a cold place. How quickly it numbs the body. How its roaring obliterates thought. How one’s instinct is to flee a punishing wind.
The next morning the temperature at seven o’clock is three below zero, and as the time moves toward noon I am certain he isn’t coming back. If he changed his mind, or if he just couldn’t go through with it, he would have returned by now. I am sure that he has taken his own life. His agony is over. As I look around, the cabin feels suddenly empty. Guy’s place across the table is vacant and in its stead is a throbbing silence that echoes and spreads and seems to stop time. I am hit by the overwhelming thought that what we created at Barra is truly over.
That Monday I continued revising a short story I’d started when I’d first begun writing fiction. My childhood is in this story. The central character is a man with the power to draw others to him, yet he holds himself apart, and in the end he walks down his own hidden path to his own destruction. Though I hadn’t seen Guy in this before, I did now. I felt my vision enlarge as Guy merged with this character and expanded into myth in a great jumble of images: Guy as Prometheus in his need to help mankind; Guy as Ahab living with the daily torment of his soul; Guy choosing the mountaintop—from such places are heroes raised up by the gods. Guy, the man of vision—wild places are the terrain of visionaries.
As I worked on this story I felt myself possessed of an insight more penetrating than we are given in the dailiness of our lives. It was exhilarating, yet tinged with wrenching sadness. My sadness for Guy’s life was honest, but even as I mythologized him I knew he had been too filled with a sense of his own failure to have listened to me go on like this. On the other hand, he had been egocentric enough to have been glad I was. At this moment I was in an unreal place, and by letting my mind turn Guy into the Classical Hero, I was writing my own wished-for redemptive ending to his story. I wanted him, after his trial, his suffering in wind and cold, to find peace of mind before the final darkness overtook him. I couldn’t bear to think that his last moments in life on Lafayette’s homelike but indifferent summit might have been full of the kind of anguish I’d seen on his worst days at Barra. With all my heart, I wanted it to all come out right for Guy in the end. With no clear knowledge I was doing so, I was attempting to justify his suicide, to make sense of it. Suicide as atonement.
During those four days I was alone at Barra I took comfort in the grounding of our simple routines: fetching water and reading the temperatures, bringing in wood, keeping the fire stoked, sawing wood in the afternoon. Since writing in the mornings was part of the routine, I kept working on that short story. I could have taken a walk or even read, but these activities would not have occupied my mind so fully. Without realizing it, I had put myself in an entirely other place—the land of fiction—so that I could leave behind the hammering thoughts that collected when I was sawing wood or doing anything that didn’t require my full concentration.
The rub came when I went out for the mail. Beth, who was at the post office filling in for Nancy, always inquired about Guy. She knew we’d been struck down by the flu that past week. I wanted to avoid conversations about Guy, so to Beth’s well-meaning question I replied: fine. In a way Guy was fine. But by coming down to the village, I was placing myself in an awkward situation.
We had talked over when I should notify the authorities responsible for search and rescue in the White Mountains. Guy asked me to wait until Friday to give him plenty of time. We both thought that the state police would contact me first about the car left in a trailhead parking area.
Shortly after Guy had walked away, I had doubts about this plan. The state police wouldn’t become concerned about the car until the end of the week, and by that time the search and rescue effort would be backed up against the weekend. I felt it was essential to get Guy’s body down before the weekend hiking traffic headed up Mount Lafayette on Saturday morning. I decided to walk out to the village on Thursday.
My next problem was deciding where to call from. Guy and I had discussed this also, and we concluded that in the event of no one notifying me directly, I could call from Sarah and Dick’s house in the village. When Sarah’s mother, our dear friend Freda Williams, was alive, we had used her phone for the rare emergency.
But as the time drew closer I began to feel uncomfortable about throwing myself on Sarah and Dick. What was I going to say? Guy left for the mountains on Sunday. He isn’t back yet. May I use your phone to get the search and rescue going? This wasn’t the truth of what happened. I knew I had to tell the whole story.
Wednesday night, when I went to bed, I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I had to make the call early Thursday morning.
During the night it came to me to go to our village pastor, Holly Noble. I knew that Holly’s view of her role extended to nonchurchgoers like Guy and me. I felt that, if I could use anyone’s phone, it would be Holly’s. As I strapped on my snowshoes and mushed out through the woods, I rehearsed in my head how I would phrase what I needed to say.
The previous days had marked the beginning of my life without Guy. I stood on the threshold, and I could feel myself begin to gain a perspective on our life together. In part this came about because of the words Guy left me. His note—four short paragraphs—began, “The one impossible note to write is this.” But Guy had found the words that told me what our life together meant to him. I kept his note, along with the other notes for friends, in the folder beside me on the table as I worked. His last paragraph seemed to steer me into my future: “One part of me will never leave one part of you. But you will also build your own life from now on, and I know you will do it well.” Even though, at that moment, I felt very far from building my own life, something in me lifted every time I read his words.
When I shut the cabin door behind me on Thursday at 8:00 a.m., I knew that I was going to shatter the quiet.At Barra I was living in the eye of the hurricane, in the calm spot. By making one phone call, I was going to set the winds of storm churning in the counter-rotation, hurling myself into them. I was about to open a door that would lead I knew not where, and the territory ahead felt full of obstacles I could sense but not see. But I couldn’t remain in the buffer of Barra any longer. I had to walk straight toward whatever was out there, eyes open, hands in pockets.
When I walked up Holly’s front steps, it was 8:45 a.m. I was shaking from not knowing how I was going to say what I had to say.
“Hello, Laura,” she said. This was the first time I had knocked on Holly’s door, but she showed no surprise at seeing me. She asked me to come in.
I stood in my snowy boots in her hallway.“I’d like to talk to you.” My voice was so constricted I thought I was going to suffocate.
“Take off your coat, Laura.”
After I was seated on her couch, Holly leaned toward me.“How can I help?” Her face showed concern, and her voice was calm.
I forced out the sentences I’d been practicing on my walk out:“I have tough news. Guy left for the mountains on Sunday, without the intention of coming back.”
I watched Holly’s face as she took this in. “Oh, Laura,” she said.
“I knew what was going to happen,” I added. I explained, telling her about Guy’s suicide attempt on July 3, 1998, and what had happened since.
“How can I help?” she asked again.
I had made the right decision in coming here. “You can help me make some phone calls,” I said.
Right away I ran into difficulties. My hope was to reach Rebecca Oreskes, who worked for the White Mountain National Forest and who I knew could put in motion the search for Guy. But Rebecca wasn’t in her office. No one seemed to know where she was.
When Guy and I had discussed this, we both thought I’d call the Fish and Game Department, the organization responsible for search and rescue in the White Mountains. But when it came down to it I couldn’t call the Fish and Game. I knew no one in those offices. I needed to work through a friend. Rebecca was a close friend who had plenty of experience with search and rescue.
But how to get ahold of her? I called Ned Therrien, who had been Rebecca’s boss. Ned had last seen Guy when he came to take photographs of the log house set in place a little over two weeks before. When I got Ned on the phone, I spoke the same words I had said to Holly, adding that I was trying to get ahold of Rebecca. There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then Ned said, “I’ll track her down for you, Laura.” I could hear he was fighting tears.
About ten minutes later Holly’s phone rang. It was Rebecca. She had last seen Guy twelve days earlier, when she had sat beside him at the hockey game. We talked a little about Guy, about what he had done. About how I was. Then the line went silent. I could feel Rebecca trying to pull herself together. When she could speak again she said,“I’m sorry, Laura. Guy was my friend.” Then she said, “It’s almost noon, too late to send a search team up by foot.A storm’s coming in tomorrow. We need to get Guy’s body down before then and before the weekend.” She paused. I knew what she was going to say next.“I hate to ask you this, Laura, but would you agree to a helicopter search for Guy?”
“If you think it’s absolutely necessary. But what an irony! Anyway, I doubt it will work,” I said.“Guy was wearing navy and forest green. He’ll totally blend in.”
Rebecca almost laughed. It was a relief for both of us to make a small joke about calling out the helicopters for Guy, who felt so strongly that these noisy contraptions were overused in the mountains. “Did Guy say where he would be? I’d like to pinpoint his location as close as we can.”
“I know he didn’t want to make this difficult. I think he’s very close to the summit of Lafayette, probably just off the trail as you turn north.”
Though the helicopter made a dozen passes that afternoon, the flyover was fruitless.
Meanwhile, Rebecca had reached our friends who were active in mountain searches—John Dunn, Mike Young, Doug Mayer, Jon Martinson, and Mike Pelchat. They decided to go up early the next morning, storm or no storm, and bring Guy down. I asked Rebecca to tell them not to take risks, but I knew also that they would not come down without Guy’s body.
That evening, as I snowshoed home in growing darkness, I tried to step in a way that left Guy’s track visible. I couldn’t bear to obliterate his webbed print, the last tangible part of him. I had been doing this every time I’d gone out for the mail, and by now his track was so faint, and I had to concentrate so hard to make it out in the stormy light, that I was unaware that I was crying. I was thinking that if it snowed tomorrow, I would lose this last trace of Guy. But I preferred that—the soft sifting down of snow flake by flake—to my own crude crushing of his print now faded to suggestion.
After dark, around seven, I heard a step on the porch. John Dunn, on his way over to the White Mountains, had tramped into Barra with his dog Brutus. We held each other in the doorway, and John’s face was wet with tears.“I had to come see if you were all right,” he said.
The next day, Friday, while the searchers were up on the mountain, I made calls to Guy’s family from Holly’s house. Then, in the early afternoon, Holly and I walked into the village to tell some key people about Guy: our postmaster Nancy Frost, our friend Polly Stryker, and John Nininger, who was building my house. Holly and I knew that each of these friends would help us let the community know about Guy.
John was at work in the basement when Holly and I arrived. I leaned down and said, “When you have a moment I’d like to talk with you, John.” In a few minutes he came bounding up the cellar steps with his usual expectant grin. Holly stepped aside, and I stood alone in the snow facing John. I braced myself, trying to control my shaking voice, willing my mind to speak the same sentences I had said many times in the last two days:“I have bad news, John. Guy went to the mountains on Sunday, without the intention of coming back.”
John’s eyes bulged. “Laura,” he said. “Oh, Laura.”
He put his arm around me, and I stretched mine around his shoulders, and we began striding up and down in the snow beside the solid log structure John was building. We couldn’t stand still. We paced away, and then turned about again. John flung out his arm toward the house and cried, “Guy won’t see this. He won’t see the house finished!”
It was past midafternoon by the time I returned to Barra. I had just lit the fire when I heard a knock on the door. It was Ginny Barlow, whose aunt had taught me eighth-grade English back in Princeton, New Jersey, one of the best teachers I had ever had. Ginny was in tears.“I was afraid, when you heard the steps, you’d think it was Guy,” she said.
The next day, Saturday, was cold and sunny, a classic winter day. Seventeen people and four dogs found their way to Barra, friends who lived nearby as well as ones who had driven up from Massachusetts or over from New Hampshire. The three who had brought Guy’s body down off the mountain came to tell me the story. “Guy picked the perfect spot, Laura,” Doug Mayer said. “He was a few hundred feet from the summit on a shelf of rock, a big boulder behind his back.”
“I can picture it. Just before the trail dips down toward North Lafayette.”
“Guy was lying on his side,” Mike Young picked up the tale, “that long wooden ice ax of his father’s planted in the snow behind him. His body was curled in such a way that he faced north, where his sons had gone, and west toward Vermont and Barra.”
The sun was warm on my back where I sat on the window seat, listening. I could hear people sniffing. A few were sitting on chairs, but most were spread out on the floor. I knew Guy and I had formed strong friendships. But I felt the depth of it for the first time that afternoon. I couldn’t have felt this before, because Guy couldn’t. He couldn’t allow himself to feel how much he was loved. He had blocked himself, and I had placed myself in his lengthening shadow. Now he was no longer here, and he had taken his shadow with him.
Guy’s leaving had swung open a door that for me led into a sunny room. Indeed, in our cabin that Saturday the sunlight streaming through the windows seemed unstoppable. I looked around at the faces of our friends as they told stories about hikes with Guy. I watched the tears in the men’s eyes squeeze out in drops that contorted their faces. They didn’t like to cry. They had tried to be the sons that Guy had lost. He knew this. But he would not let it heal him.
I had a story of my own to tell. One I knew they didn’t know: Guy’s suicide attempt of July 3, 1998, and what came out of that.
“Now I understand about ‘Laura’s house,’” Doug said. “We knew he might do something like this, but we thought it wouldn’t be so soon. I wish I’d tried harder to let Guy know how I felt about him.”
“Me too,” Rebecca said.“I wish I’d let him know I understood about his demons.”
“Would it have helped him?” Doug asked, looking at me.
I didn’t know.
“Guy was at bottom such a private person,” Jon Martinson said. “I thought about talking with him, but felt he’d find such a conversation an intrusion.”
Mike said, “Guy told me once: people come to Barra to see Laura.”
“I know, Mike,” I said.“Guy said that to me too. I couldn’t understand why he should think that. All I could say was,‘And you too.’”
The tears I shed that day were for all that love Guy had cast himself adrift from. The enormous sadness of that. But on another level my spirits soared. Then it hit me: Guy wasn’t here. My life was growing lighter without that self-imposed vigilance. I expected to feel a wave of guilt, but I didn’t. It’s just me now, I told myself, feeling a shift. I seemed to be righting myself. Something within was opening. I was rejoining my old self, the self I had been when I first met Guy and during Barra’s early years. Then I remembered that final morning, only six days before. Guy had said: “I want to get out of your way.” Prospero had indeed freed his Ariel.
As the sun lowered and the light in the cabin dimmed, people began to say good-bye. I was hugged many times, hug piling on hug, infusing me with lightness.
A week later Guy’s pack was returned to me. In it I found a small plastic bag containing his eyeglasses, three pencils, two pens, and a copy of the map of Barra he had spent years making. He had colored it in greens and yellows, the stream a blue line, the paths that led into the heart of our woodlot traced in brown. He had penned in the names: Chipmunk Hill behind the house, the Forest of Arden with the maples named for characters in Shakespeare. In the northeast corner was our cabin with woodshed attached, Twin Firs Camp, the garden, the orchard, and the circle of sixteen highbush blueberries. This map had more in common with the map Tolkien had sketched for his world in The Lord of the Rings than a surveyor’s land map. Guy had always carried a copy of it in his pocket, along with his three-by-five cards, and now, as I stood in the kitchen, holding it in my hands, I saw how creased it was at the folds, how soiled the edges were. I remembered how he had pulled it out for visitors. Guy had placed the map in the plastic bag so I would be sure to see what he had written on the back. “For who would lose . . .” I began to read, and my mind jumped ahead to the following lines. I could have recited them myself. They were from Paradise Lost, a last message from Guy:
For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
His handwriting was jerky and stiff, the words running together, and I was aware of the enormous effort it had taken, with freezing fingers in the hammering wind, to keep his pen moving across the paper. Was Guy questioning his own action:“For who would lose . . . ?”
It seemed to me Guy was saying he’d taken the hard work of living as far as he could. Like Ahab, like Milton’s Satan, Guy had been led to this final isolated spot on a cold mountain by who he was. He felt the sadness and felt as well the inevitability of his own death.
There was much of the Romantic in Guy. There is much in me. This was Guy on the brink, sending back a message at the last possible moment. This was the postcard we had talked about on that last morning. It was as close as he could come to telling me how it all came out. I saw that there was no redemption here for Guy. No apotheosis. Instead, he was losing everything. “Swallow’d up and lost/In the wide womb of uncreated night, / Devoid of sense and motion.”
As I stood in Barra’s kitchen and read these lines I was overwhelmed by the continuing marriage of my mind to Guy’s. Right then I was living in the spirit of accepting. I had not yet begun to ask the questions. But perhaps it began then as I stared at Guy’s familiar handwriting, now so changed by cold. I knew I had to find out what had happened to me. If redemption lay anywhere, it was there. And because my mind could not resist the literary turn, I knew that, like Ishmael, I was the one left to tell the tale.