Chapter 19
We are each inevitably and terribly and forever personally responsible for everything we do.
Guy Waterman,
from a speech written for the president of the General Electric Company
February 17, the day of the service for Guy at the church, was cold and clear, a picture-book winter day in our Vermont hill town. The river behind the buildings clustered on the bank cut a channel between upturned blocks of ice. The snow was heaved along the sides of the road by the plow. The white church, whose sign out front pronounced it Congregational, kept cheek-by-jowl company with the general store on its uphill side. The library, a red brick building, overlooked the store and the church from its knoll across the road. Up the street, in a white cape with a bank of sunroom windows facing east, was the Valley Health Center, its name in raised black letters above the entrance on the porch.
A worn double yellow line snaked down the center of the road. The village had no sidewalks, except for a short concrete strip that spoke more to whimsy than to purpose in front of the gray shingled house that faced the Health Center. Next came the post office, a government construction with a low-angled roof and in need of a coat of paint. But its dowdy looks were no indication of the post office’s importance as the pulse of village life. Here neighbor greeted neighbor, passing up and down its four wooden steps. Inside, conversations moved through the seasons, from sugaring to late frosts to woodpiles.
I had gone to the post office sixteen days earlier, when it was time to get word out about Guy. I knew that by asking Nancy to mention that Guy Waterman had died, the village would learn this news as effectively as if the town crier had galloped through on horseback. Friends and neighbors would hear well before the first headlines. “Writer, Outdoorsman Guy Waterman Dies on Mountain,” proclaimed New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader on Saturday, February 12, the day after Guy’s body was carried by his friends down out of the winds of the Franconia Ridge. “Nature Writer Dies on Mountain” ran the Denver Post, and a similar headline, also picked up on the AP wire, appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times obituary appeared on February 20. That reporter got through to me by calling Holly. As had the reporter from the Boston Globe. There were reporters at the service. One from the Associated Press waited at the tail end of the line to speak to me. I gave her a hug, thinking she was a friend I was drawing a blank on.
A few nights before he left Guy said,“I doubt I’ll have an obituary.”
“Probably the Journal Opinion will run something,” I said. This was our local weekly. “Or the Littleton Courier. They cover accidents in the mountains.”
Several years before Guy had written his own obituary. He saw this as an exercise in assessing his accomplishments as well as a reminder to fill in the blanks while there was still time. As Guy put it, “Do the words after the comma fit with how you want to see yourself?” The words he put after “Guy Waterman, . . .” were “. . . conservationist-homesteader, author, musician, and authority on baseball history.”
He had compiled a folder of suggested readings—poems, excerpts from our own books, in particular Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics—that could be read at his service. Then, about a month before he left, Guy threw this out. “Too pretentious,” he’d mumbled.
“Leave something in there, Guy,” I said. “It will make it easier.”
When I came to pull that file off the shelf it contained only a few poems—Emily Dickinson’s “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close,” Elinor Wylie’s “Wild Peaches,” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”
Guy had also been clear about Bible readings. He wanted the passage from Ecclesiastes—King James version only—that begins:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
 
What profit hath a man of all his labour
Which he taketh under the sun.
 
One generation passeth away, and another
Cometh: but the earth abideth forever; . . .
 
For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
I wondered if these words would reveal that hidden side of Guy when read aloud by Holly in the church. Reading them to myself less than a week after he died—letting them sink in—raised the shade on Guy’s despair in a way I had not seen.
As for music, he’d jotted down names of a few hymns: “A Mighty Fortress,” “Abide with Me,” “Once to Every Man and Nation,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
But Guy wanted more than just hymns. On February 14, 1998, Doug Mayer and Rebecca Oreskes had come to Barra to record Guy playing music for his own service. I had asked then if, while he was at it, he could play music for my service as well. Guy’s mention of my request only added to the general nervous joking of this occasion. No one, me included, knew what Guy had in his mind. But Doug and Rebecca weren’t too surprised. Everyone knew how well organized Guy was, how he planned ahead. As Doug recorded, Guy played four pieces: the slow movement from Haydn’s Quartet Opus 54 in G Major, which he had played as a young violinist at Greenwood, a music camp in the Berkshires; Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”;“Lament for the McLean of Ardgour,” a Scottish song that was played at his father’s memorial service and had great meaning for the family; and the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” which he knew I liked and which he played with the compelling beat of a jazz piece. When we listened to the tinny playback I had my doubts as to how this would come off in the church. It seemed somewhat controlling, if not borderline gruesome. Guy pulling the strings, insisting that people sit and listen to his music. He was aware of his self-absorption and therefore bent over backward not to inflict his piano on anyone. He almost always had to be asked to play. This often led people to see him as selfless. Since these thoughts felt disloyal, I kept them to myself.
(After the service our friend Lou Cornell wrote to me: “I was deeply moved by Guy’s service. A high point was, to my surprise, the scratchy recordings of G’s music—I thought, when Linda and John told me what he planned, that it was a bad idea, but in a haunting way G’s voice came through and lingered on after the music ended.”)
Then Guy got the idea that it might be nice for people to walk in to his music, and he asked Doug and Rebecca to pay a return visit. This time I knew Guy’s plans, but I allowed myself to feel only a nagging discomfort as we listened to Guy play and I watched Doug’s and Rebecca’s faces. I kept squashed down the question that fought to surface: How will they feel when they discover what Guy has in mind? This time there wasn’t any joking, nervous or otherwise.
Later Rebecca told me what Guy had said during a walk in the garden that November afternoon. “‘We’ve had some wonderful times here. I wish it could go on forever, but it can’t. Nothing can.’”
“He was telling me something for which there was no argument,” Rebecca said. “I knew his words were true, but there was something behind them I wasn’t ready for, so I stayed silent.”
I walked with Guy’s family, all from out of town, from the parsonage to the church. The sun was blinding as it struck the snowbanks, and the high sky behind the hills shaded to indigo.Already, a half-hour before the service, a long line of cars stretched on both sides of the road.
It seemed that everyone we had ever known was in the church. They were seated in the balcony and stood against the walls. Holly sat in her high-backed chair behind the altar. The readers sat in the choir stall to Holly’s right. Guy’s family occupied the front two rows. I sat next to Guy’s surviving son, Jim, who had come from Colorado.
Guy had told me he thought just his tam on the altar might be fitting. Nothing else. I wasn’t so sure. I thought the gesture was a little morbid, perhaps even showoffish. But Guy was inexorably connected with his tam. Does he take it off to sleep? friends often kidded. I had asked my friend Polly Stryker to do the flowers. “I’ll do boughs, Laura,” she said. I mentioned what Guy wanted with his tam. “Can you get it to me?” she asked.
Later Polly told me that items for the bough arrangement just appeared on the seat of her truck: deer antlers, several birds’ nests, one with eggs. The tam fit right in, and the church was permeated with the aroma of evergreens.
Danuta Jacob, the jazz vocalist Guy had worked with for the past six months, sang “Over the Rainbow,” a song Guy associated with his son Johnny.
Tom Simon, Guy’s baseball friend, read from an essay by Bart Giamatti, the Yale president who had become commissioner of baseball and died in office after only 154 days.“It breaks your heart,” Tom read.
It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
Guy’s niece, Laura Cooley, read Milton’s “Song on May Morning,” which, weighing in at ten lines, was a bit easier to take than Milton’s twelve-book epic.
Rebecca read a reflection she had written on Guy and his literary heroes: Milton’s Satan, Ahab from Moby-Dick, and Prometheus, stealer of fire. All three were consumed both by journeys of one kind or another and by fire in various forms, and each one was painfully human.
A few days later my friend Lou Cornell would write me:
Despite the affinity Guy felt for Ahab, Satan, and Prometheus, I can’t really identify him with any of them. He wasn’t cruel like Satan, or monomaniacal like Ahab, though he did want to help mankind like Prometheus, at great cost to himself. I thought instead of Hamlet. To me Hamlet has never been the wishy-washy intellectual that the Romantics wanted to make him: rather, a Renaissance prince, a formidable swordsman, a brilliant and witty mind addicted to word-play but afflicted with depression, a questing imagination haunted by self-doubt and tempted by the thought of death—by far the most interesting of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, the only one you could imagine talking to. I thought of his friends carrying Guy’s bier down the mountain, as Fortinbras’s soldiers carry Hamlet off the stage, and Horatio’s wonderful lines of farewell [“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, /And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”] kept running through my mind.
Sally and Tek Tomlinson read poems they had each written about Guy, neither knowing the other was doing this. As did Art Kirn, whose poem began,“Elfin giant of the mountain ways.”
Twelve-year-old violinist Hannah Meier and her cellist father, Larry, played a J. S. Bach piece that Guy had heard them play before. Ida and Nancy Nininger, my builder John’s daughters, played a four-hand piece that they’d performed on our Steinway at Barra a year earlier.
Near the end of the service Holly read a piece sent by village friends Sue and Bill Parmenter: “Guy Waterman was a ‘counter,’” they wrote. “He counted virtually everything that affected his life—the crops that he and Laura raised, the number of blueberries they picked, the amount of sap produced from each tree in their sugar bush, the many visitors who came to Barra to see how they lived, hockey and baseball statistics—and so much more that we never knew.”
Earlyn Dean, a friend from our rock climbing days, spoke:
I hiked and climbed with Guy and Laura in the Gunks. While I was on the Appalachian Mountain Club’s nominating committee, Ralph Waterman was proposed for membership. Ralph had completed all the major eastern peaks. He was well mannered, red-haired, and a good hiker. The committee had almost passed the application when one person said, “I thought Guy had only three sons: Bill, John, and Jim. Who is this fourth son, Ralph?” Guy’s dog was out of the bag, so to speak, and membership denied.
Doug Teschner, who lived across the Connecticut River, had this to say:
It was always a fairy tale adventure to visit the Watermans. You walked deep into the woods and suddenly came into a clearing with a small house. If you were lucky and they weren’t out hiking or climbing, you would be warmly greeted by Laura and the elflike Guy in his ever-present tam-o’-shanter. Guy had a wonderful mischievous personality, and he loved kids. He told Ben and Luke about trolls in his root cellar. Once he gave them a little ceramic elephant, no doubt a leftover from his political days. And he often entertained us with ragtime on the piano. (“How did you get the piano up here?” the boys would ask.)
On the last page of the program I wrote: “All his life, Guy felt that Ariel and Caliban represented the two warring forces within himself.” Then ran the words with which Guy ended his memoir:
Closing Words—
In The Tempest Prospero calls Ariel:
. . . my industrious servant,
. . . my tricksy spirit
. . . my diligence.
He speaks thus of Caliban:
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers....
And in the play’s Epilogue, these are Prospero’s closing words:
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint . . .
. . . Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(Exit.)
That last evening, as we sit at supper, Guy says that soon the voices will be still. He puts his hands to his head. Stupidly, I just look at him. I don’t say: What voices, Guy? What are the voices saying? I think I know what he means —the “voices” telling him he let his sons down, that our Ethics books fell on deaf ears—but I see now that I have no idea what he means. He has never spoken to me of voices before.
The next morning, as we stand together at the table, Guy hands me the last three pages of his memoir.
“Please don’t read them until I’ve left,” he says.
This is what I read a half-hour later:
The transition away from deep involvement in the mountains and in the issues of preserving wildness in the northeastern backcountry has been painful, associated with a sense that we were retreating, defeated, from the field.A few people have said some very nice things about our books, but on the whole they and our ideas about eastern wildness seem to be sinking into oblivion unnoticed.All this is accompanied by a feeling that I could have done better.
To be retreating from that arena is to remind myself that I retreated from others at other times in my life. I left jazz piano playing without ever finding out whether or not I might have had something important to contribute there. I walked away from an amazingly promising start in Washington politics. In many ways, thinking of the public service aspects of my work in Washington, I think the most useful thing I could have done with my life would have been to remain in the center of staff work there.... There are people who would say that the example Laura and I have set in living as we have for 27 years is a shining beacon to others. But we are not cut out (as Helen and Scott Nearing were, for example) for a leadership role in this arena. For one thing, we really have shaped a life relevant only for the two of us, not a pattern for others to imitate. If you look closely at almost anything we have done, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as a model for others.
Considerations like these have left me with a sense of dissatisfaction about what I’ve accomplished all my life. When this feeling first became uppermost, as we pulled away from our mountain involvements, it was very depressing. The year or so before and after my 60th birthday [May 1992] was particularly depressing. The years since have not really been much better, only more numbed. I play the role of genial host and wit as best I can, so that few of even our closest friends are likely to be aware of how I feel. The opera Pagliacci seems to me particularly poignant as a result: that’s what I seem to be walking through these days, trying to provide sparkling company for everyone but ready to give up otherwise. Laura is the only one subjected to the blackest of my moods —an intolerable burden for her, which she bears with inexhaustible patience and sympathy.
I could add that the physical process of aging appalls me. I have been uncommonly lucky physically, all my life, have sailed through with no major broken bones, no serious illness, not even significant pain. But now I find all kinds of minor aches and pains and physical limitations I never knew before, harbingers of advancing age which are only bound to become much more evident, more limiting, more uncomfortable.As I look at people in their 70s and 80s, even those who are cheerful and uncomplaining, I see they put up with many things I hope I never have to. I’d not be cheerful and uncomplaining. So longevity has ceased to be an objective of mine.
I have used—probably to excess—the metaphor of Ariel and Caliban to describe the warring tendencies within me all my life, the constructive and positive versus the negative and destructive. I think of my father and my son Johnny as embodying these two impulses.
My father—Hawee, as all the family called him—stood for everything positive, a deep sense of public service, an “Olympian calm” (my sister Anne’s apt phrase), always in control, upright and strong, though always gentle and reserved. If this sounds like hero worship, let me add that he was never, for me, a warm father or able to be close to me, or to help me with my childhood, teenage, or young adult problems. I do not revere his memory. But I see in his dedication to public policy a side of me that has always struggled for expression.
Johnny, on the other hand, poor Johnny embodied those impulses in me which have been destructive, as they were so finally for Johnny. He was always at war with the world, never knew calm, always teetered on the verge of being out of control—and frequently was. As Hawee seemed to dwell in a world of sunshine, in the service of his fellow humanity, Johnny struggled always in a world of darkness and storm, alienated irretrievably from his fellows in this life.
Both in me. I know that the same high positive impulses of Hawee’s have been prominent in me at times—wonderful tendencies. But the same demons which drove Johnny to destruction have always intervened—where, after all, did Johnny get them from? And though I’ve grown a protective covering of smiles and talk, I, too, am alienated from my fellow humanity and dwell in a private world of storm and darkness.
Ariel versus Caliban. Prospero’s options—the world was all before him, where to choose his place of rest. As I look at where I have come to, after 67 years of struggling, I see that Caliban has won.