Laura Waterman - A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True

MOUNTAIN ADVENTURES TALL AND TRUE

LAURA & GUY
WATERMAN

2000 by Laura Waterman

All rights reserved

First printing, 2000.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distributed in the United Kingdom by Cordee, www.cordee.co.uk

Manufactured in the United States of America

Project Editor: Dottie Martin

Editor: Miriam Bulmer

Designer: Ani Rucki

Cover illustration: Mountain Climber (wood engraving), 1933, Rockwell Kent [18821974] Illustrations by Rockwell Kent: : Flame (wood engraving on maple), 1928

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waterman, Laura.

A fine kind of madness : mountaineering adventures, tall and true / Laura and Guy Waterman.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-89886-734-7 (pbk.)

1. Mountaineering. I. Waterman, Guy. II. Title.

GV200 .W28 2000

796.522dc21

00-009642

ISBN (paperback): 978-0-89886-734-3

ISBN (e-book): 978-1-59485-332-6

FOR CHLOE, ECHO AND TUCKERMAN, BRUTUS, KENSEY, BAILEY, AND JAMIE, AND IN MEMORY OF ELSA

Other books by Laura and Guy Waterman

Backwoods Ethics:

Environmental Concerns for Hikers and Campers (1979 edition)

Forest and Crag:

A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains

Yankee Rock & Ice:

A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States

Backwoods Ethics:

Environmental Issues for Hikers and Campers (1993 edition)

Wilderness Ethics:

Preserving the Spirit of Wildness

Mountains have always inspired storytelling. The classical Greek bards, brooding in the shadow of Mount Olympus, created those marvelous gods and goddesses, with all their superhuman strengths and all-too-human frailties. We havent the slightest doubt that the Incas in the Andes, and the ancient Tibetans, and Russian peasant storytellers at the foot of the Caucasus must have told wild tales, tall and true.

For us, with our lower mountains and less elevated storytelling powers, these two worlds have been part of our lives since our earliest memories. Its hard to say which came first for us, the mountains or the writing.

Laura grew up as the daughter of Emily Dickinsons Boswell, Thomas H. Johnson, and the house was redolent with scholarship and the erudite turn of phrase. But the family summered in the New Hampshire hills where, at her bedroom window, the last thing Laura saw each evening and the first thing she saw each morning was the beckoning profile of Mount Monadnock.

In junior high, Guy lived close enough to come home for lunch. His mother would have sandwiches and milk set out, and while Guy lunched she would read aloud from Shakespeares plays. But his earliest childhood was spent roaming a ten-acre woodlot in Connecticut, and his father took him up Mounts Chocorua and Washington at the earliest opportunity.

Years later, we met as rock climbers. We courted at the Shawangunk cliffs during the spring, summer, and fall, and at the ice gullies and snow-drenched summits of the Adirondacks in winter. We were married at the Gunks and spent our wedding night on a bivouac ledge two hundred feet above level ground. During the week Laura worked as an editor at New York publishing houses, winding up as associate editor of Backpacker magazine at its birth. Guy became a speechwriter for various moguls of the political and corporate worlds.

When we began homesteading in the wooded hills of Vermont, we divided our leisure time between climbing in New Hampshires White Mountains and writing about mountains. The twenty stories in this collection come from that rich time of our lives.

The unifying theme in these stories is an exploration of the basic impulse to climb, and its roots in the underlying drives of remarkable individual climbers.

The first section looks closely at certain characters who stamped their distinctive personalities on the climbing scene and on their fellow climbers.

The second batch confronts danger and death in the mountains, and climbers eyeing uneasily these shadows always on the edge of their world.

The third explores the enduring mystery of why people climb, its meaning in their lives, and what we see and what we cannot see in the mountains and in the people who are drawn irretrievably to them.

About half of these stories are true; the other half-fictional inventions are rooted in the reality of our or others climbing experiences. About one-third were written by Laura alone, one-third were written by Guy alone, and the others (most of the nonfiction) are collaborations. The nonfiction stories appeared first mainly in two of our books: Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States (Stackpole Books, 1993) and Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness (Countryman Press, 1993). The fiction has mostly appeared in a variety of journals, but three of the stories appear here for the first time. We are grateful to The Mountaineers Books for their professional skill in producing it. Most of all we appreciate the encouragement and guidance given by John Daniel, from the very conception of this idea to its realization. It is unquestionably true that this book would not have happened without him, and hes been such a pleasure to be involved with all along the way.

We also are thankful to have spent so many years in the community of climbers and the exalted company of mountains. These were the focus of our life for a quarter century. Weve had exciting times, sometimes terrifying, more often hilarious, but always interesting, absorbing.

Whether climbing is a sport or a grim challenge, be it ballet, gymnastics, a route to wilderness or to the inner self, a romp of the spirit or a way of life that beats workingit all comes down to a metaphor for something more important than the vertical rock or ice, which is all the nonclimber sees.

These stories strive to express the impulse to climb in a variety of moods and manifestations.

Laura and Guy Waterman
East Corinth, Vermont
January 2000

Serious historians frown on what they deride as the great man theory of history. Historical forces, they assure us, are such profound compulsions that individuals are merely actors tossed roles in the staging of great events, specks on the crests of waves churned by deep sea changes.

But what can they say about climbing? The men (mostly) and women who enact the breakthroughs in climbing standards are up there on the cutting edge, all by themselves, physically and psychologically. Theres no way to dismiss them as tools of blind fate. Their will, their courage, their decisive acts, each shines as a flash of individual creation.