Thursday, February 15, 2024

Godspeed my friend, David Johnston, with some mid-1970s mountaineering notes

    

 

 

 My friend David Johnston passed away a couple weeks ago, alone in a small apartment on the 26th floor of a Chicago high rise. A few more details are known, but like most of the rest of his life, these are not my stories to tell.

 

David was the brother/brother-in-law of my life-long close friends Margaret and Michael Schonhofen.  In 1975 the four of us left our suburban Midwestern homes and drove to Seattle to start new lives.  Shortly after arriving David became ill and drove straight back to the Midwest, where he mostly stayed.

 

David almost certainly could have lived longer had he taken better care of himself, but for whom among us is this not true?  He declined medical attention in his last days. I believe he expected to muddle through, independently, as he always did. But not this time.

 

I was remembering with Margaret and Michael a photograph I took of David and Mike after a day of skiing at Crystal Mountain in Washington.  I couldn’t remember exactly when I had taken it.  The day had been a spectacular and we had skied right up until the chairlifts stopped spinning. David held his skis in the air in a day-ending moment of exhilaration.

 

I decided I would look for that photograph in my archives.  This turned into a fairly deep dive.

 

My photographic slides are only somewhat organized. They have been kept dark and dry. I confined my search to three boxes, labeled: 

 

            • Mt. Rainier 1975–‘78

            • Pacific Northwest  1977–‘78

            • Dearborn pre–1975; Outtakes: Mike/Roy/John

 

While I searched through these boxes I would keep an eye out for two other photos from the era, both missing for decades: a photo of John McInerney traversing across a knife-edged section of the north ridge of Mt Stuart (summer 1975), and a photo of Denny Cliff dwarfed by an enormous serac on the north side of Mt. Rainier in winter (early 1977).

 

After poring through these boxes I had some general thoughts:

 

1.      On every single wilderness outing with Mike we were entirely alone and very very far from the cars.

 

2.     The photographs from the first winter attempt on Liberty Ridge (Mt Rainier) look forensic, as if trying to piece together how exactly disaster had struck: blurry, snowy, little-to-no visibility, crevasses everywhere.  Disaster was averted, but you’d never really guess that from the photographic evidence.

 

3.     There’s a random photograph of me climbing a dark wet slab in mountain boots, a double rope trailing down, not a piece of protection in sight. No label. No memory of it.  Just sheer dumbness captured on film.

 

4.      Up to a certain point I was wearing cotton knickers. I shudder now to think of this.

 

5.     There were a number of photos of a winter climb Rainer Burgdorfer, Denny Cliff, and I attempted above the town of Darrington.  I remember this chiefly because the three of us were packed into Rainer’s VW beetle and we left Seattle in the pre-dawn darkness and Rainier kept sticking his head out the window to stay awake, shouting “I was made for this!” into the void. We never really were sure we were even on the right mountain.  I remember the climb as being an abject failure.  But I was astonished by the photographs: they showed we had gained much altitude, the river valley far far below us.  The landscape in the photographs is stark and foreboding.  In those days we were summit-driven and saw anything less as a kind of failure.  I look at the photos now and see wild untraveled country and an amazing experience.  I see our youth. 

 

6.     Despite that during this era my friend Roy was my most frequent climbing partner, there are very few photographs of our days together. Not sure why this is so. We were so into the actual climbing that documenting it was somehow beneath us?

 

I found a couple other photographs I had thought misplaced.  One is of Mike and me on the summit of Mt. Shuksan.  There are also three or four “rejected” summit photographs, as well.  These were self-timed, the camera balanced on a rock.  A lot of time was taken to make these.  It occurs to me now that these dallying moments contributed to our eventual descending in the dark, off trail in the Fisher Chimneys, rappelling from marginal gear and a prayer.

 

The other photo I hadn’t seen in a long time is a shot of me sitting on the summit block of Mt. Stuart.  I’m wearing my white Peter Storm sweater, the kind that smelled like lanolin, that I wore for years, until it became riddled with holes, shrunken and misshapen.  The way this photo later took on meaning was that my aunt had it displayed prominently in her house.  After she died her possessions went into an enormous estate sale.  I instructed my son, who attended as our representative, to find that photo.  But the estate sale was nightmarish and everything in the house had been removed from their places in the home and laid out for sale to strangers. He could never find it. I didn’t expect to ever see the image again.

 

I found the shot of John McInerney on the knife edged traverse section on the north ridge of Stuart.  The slide is damaged.  He is wearing his gold and navy striped cotton rugby shirt.  We spent an extra unplanned night out just below the summit, out of water, a small tin of mandarin oranges our only food.

 

I did not find the shot of Denny Cliff below the huge serac.  But I well remember the speed (and terror) with which we moved through that maze of ice.

 

Finally, I found the photo of David and Mike at Crystal.  It was in the most unlikely of the boxes, “Dearborn pre–1975; Outtakes: Mike/Roy/John,” the most grab-bag-like of the group. The shot was a bit of a letdown, the memory far grander than the photographic record. It’s late afternoon and the scene is deeply enshadowed.  We are in a parking lot.  It’s Mike, not David, who is raising his skis in triumph, unrecognizable behind his ski goggles.  David on his right, smiling contentedly. I’m very glad to have found it.  Slides in those days had the processing date stamped on them: February 1979.  This day at Crystal Mountain, then, was just days before I left Washington state for southern California where I would stay for the next seven years. In other words, a momentous occasion in a young life.

 

If I could hold fast to another single moment of my times with David it would be from when we were driving west, caravanning.  David in his Pinto station wagon, me in my rusted-out Javelin, passenger door coat-hangar-wired together.  We didn’t worry whether these were road-worthy: David could fix anything with an engine. Late in one of the days, Montana, let’s say, David ahead of me, pulls over to the shoulder, flashers blinking.  I ease in behind him and he runs over and tells me to dial up a certain radio station. “They’re playing,” he said, “Rosemary, Lilly, and the Jack of Hearts.”  We drove off toward the setting sun, while Bob Dylan told us a story as we unspooled down the empty highway into the rest of our lives. 



 

The last time I saw David was back in Dearborn (Michigan) in 2012, the occasion, my father’s funeral.  I had left the funeral home to get some air and David appeared unexpectedly, freshly shaven in a razor-nicked face, a gift bottle of single malt in his hand. I had the feeling he had been waiting in his car in the parking lot for me to appear.

 

It’s a different bottle now, David, but I am raising this glass to you.

 

 

 

`

Thursday, January 4, 2024

An Origin Story: the Detroit Institute of Arts

 

I was born in Detroit.  

 

Although I left there almost fifty years ago and the house I was raised in has been out of the family for decades, I still think of the place as home.  As Neil Young said, of “a town in north Ontario:” “All my changes were there.”  In my case, not all, but many, the typical changes one might experience by the age of twenty-two.  When I go back to Detroit, at least once a year, it’s to see the people. But two places, sacri loci, my sacred places, call me back: Sacred Heart on the corner of Military and Michigan Avenue where I went to school and mass and the Detroit Institute of Arts where I experienced the wonder of art for the first time.  On this recent trip COVID dashed most of my plans, but I did make it to the DIA. 



Though I had tested negative for days I was tired and spent more than a few minutes sitting on a bench in the Great Hall, an enormous room, mostly empty, that leads to another great hall that houses Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals.
  I’ve never seen the DIA overly crowded the way the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago always are.  This despite that admission is free for residents of three counties.  As I sat there I watched the families taking advantage of this great gift.

From my seat at the bench I see a young girl, six years old maybe, a waif who has escaped her parents and sister.  She is attired in a faded print dress over colorful, albeit dingy, tights.  She is skipping down the center of the hall.  Suddenly she stops and stares at the art high on the wall. She is literally transfixed, awestruck, the thing on the wall has stopped her in her tracks. 

            The thing on the wall looks like an enormous piece of fabric, textile, a kind of Golden Fleece. But actually it is composed of aluminum bottle tops and copper wire. It’s called “Amemo (Mask of Humankind)” and was made by a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui.  Foe scale: if it were squared it would be about 25 feet by 25 feet.

            I am grateful to have observed this epiphanic moment.  Later I pointed the child out to my wife. Cute little ragamuffin, she said.

 

The first time I went to the DIA I was with John McInerney (with whom I would share a lifelong friendship.) I remember being stunned, my ragamuffin-in-awe moment, to see Frederic Church’s “Syria by the Sea,” an enormous painting of dramatic golden light and ruins. It’s still in the collection, but somewhat overwhelmed by another smaller, more famous, Church painting  “Cotopaxi,” which was added to the collection in 1976 five years after our first visit.  Cotopaxi is also full of light and fire, kind of portrait of the earth being born.  Aside: at some time in the last decade John made an attempt to climb Cotopaxi, turned back, as I recall, by altitude sickness.


 

A work I had never seen before was “Family Album (Blood Objects) Exhibit F: Shirt, 1993, Yoko Ono, American; bronze with blue and red patina, on hanger.” I should first state that I was never really a Beatles fan, and certainly not a Yoko Ono fan.   But inarguably Beatles’ music would be feature hugely in the soundtrack of my life. As with Kennedy’s assassination and the Challenger debacle, I remember clearly where I was when I heard the news that John Lennon had been murdered. 

This sculpture is a facsimile of the denim shirt Lennon was wearing when he was shot, complete with bullet holes and blood.  At first I thought it was the actual shirt, then I thought no, a kind of copy. I was stunned to realize it was made of bronze.  I would have sworn it was cloth.

Looking around for a potential witness and seeing none, I actually, furtively, touched it. Bronze.  It was like touching the hem of saint’s gown.  Incredible. 

 

Finally, I made my way to the Rivera room. If you’ve never seen this, I recommend a visit to Detroit for this sole purpose.  The murals, 27 of them, fill four walls of a large room, so that when you stand in the center it’s as if you have been absorbed into Rivera’s universe.  Rivera painted these in 1932–’33, financed controversially by Edsel Ford. It’s hard to summarize as its messages are many: a celebration of the worker, a critique of capitalism and the war machine, an alert to the poisoning of the environment. It contains multitudes, as Whitman would have had it.

A large part of my love for these murals has to do with the fact that I, like the factory workers Rivera portrayed, worked at “the Rouge,” or, more precisely, Ford’s Dearborn Stamping Plant, at the time the largest factory in the world. My job on the assembly line was similar to the one portrayed here:

 


I operated a spot-welding machine.  It was mind-numbingly repetitive and dangerous work. With every weld a stream of sparks, much like the ones Rivera painted, shot out from the weld points, once nearly blinding me and more than once lighting my hair afire. At the time I was not yet conscious of living inside the Riveraian universe, but when I look at the murals now they seem highly personal.  

With the money I made on the assembly line I travelled to Mexico City (the Rivera murals were not part of this decision-making process yet) where I gathered material for a book that I, for some unfounded reason, thought I would write and where I discovered Rivera in his homeland. I did not write that book. But decades later I would write a novel that was set in Mexico City in which the main character inspired by the Industry Murals is a student researcher studying Rivera’s works. The murals function as the occasion that launches the plot of the story.



 

On this visit I focus on the scene, high on the east wall, of an unborn infant in utero, being nourished by the earth. That’s me, I thought, I was born here.

 

 

 

 

Thursday, November 9, 2023

Notes on Accepting the Banff Mountain Book Award


 Thanks Amy Jane (Rab Athlete who presented the award) and thanks to Rab for their continuing support of mountain culture and for sponsoring this award.

 

It is very humbling to walk through the reading room and see all the books submitted to this year’s festival.  One also senses the enormous logistical task of the judging process.  Thanks to everyone who participated in that process, from the volunteer readers on the front lines to the members of the jury, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, Kate Harris (gestures toward Kate at the podium) and especially to Tony Whittome for his kind words about my work, which mean the world to me.[1]

 

Thanks to everyone who works so hard to make this festival happen, especially the people I’ve worked with personally: Karolina, Margaret, and Kenna, and of course Jo Croston who makes this whole world spin.

 

I’ve been going to the mountains for over fifty years and I realized that although I’ve roped up with dozens of people, I’ve done most of my climbing with just three partners, John McInerney, Jim Pinter-Lucke, and Charlie Sassara. Very grateful for their good judgment, friendship, and shared laughs.  Also grateful for my friend Ralph Baldwin, who I haven’t been out with a lot, but when it counted, his cool head definitely saved my life when things looked pretty bleak.

 

My wife has the double misfortune to be married to a climber and writer.  The climber lives in the mountains and the writer, this one anyway, spends a lot of time in his own head.  

 

I was born and raised in the American midwest, lots of brothers and sisters. They don’t quite get what I do in the mountains and are generally . . . disinterested about what I have to say in most of my writing.  There’s little evidence they read any of it.

 

One day my wife got a phone call from my adult niece. She said that she had just read my book of climbing essays, Warnings Against Myself.  “Oh my God,” she told my wife, “I had no idea.  I am so sorry.”  So perhaps I owe her an apology myself. I love you, Aisha.

 

There’s a line from the great writer Leonard Cohen that I’ve taken to heart ever since I first encountered it: “I always considered myself a minor writer.  My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.”

 

Of course, he is not a minor writer, just a modest one.  I, however, am a minor writer with a small province.  But I believe that if one pays close attention to the specific, works hard, loves language and loves one’s subject, with a little luck we may approach the universal.

 

Thank you~

 



 


[1] “This powerful, exact, and beautifully written article explores the relationship between photograph, subject, and observer in a series of images of climbers who have died in the mountains. Its spare prose and flattened affect at first recalls art criticism, or even the forensics of an autopsy, but this is not the whole story: it soon modulates into something questing, passionate and deeply personal which will remain in the mind of the reader.  In short compass this is an extraordinary literary achievement.”- Tony Whittome, 2023 Book Competition Jury

 

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Follow Your Nose: Some Notes on Audience



 I read from my work in a bookstore last week. First “in-person” event since pre-pandemic times.

 Eleven people in the audience.  Five really, once you subtract the bookstore clerk 

(who was wonderful!), the two friends who came with us, two little kids who were soon let loose, 

and my wife. So, five.

 

When I taught composition courses one of the guiding principles we were supposed to imprint on our students was the importance of audience. As in, knowing who your audience was so that you could convince them of whatever it was you were trying to convince them of.

 

I don’t think very much, not at all really, about who my audience is, who might be reading whatever it is I’m writing, or what I’m trying to convince them of, beyond continuing to read. I follow my nose.

 

The one novel I wrote took more years to write than can accurately be counted. Maybe twenty years between when I started and finished.  My son Macklin read it. For many years he was the only one who read it and I considered him my best, and only, reader. Possibly some of the editors sent I it to read some of it, but it was hard to tell. Ten years after I finished it, it was published. Not many people have read it.

 

One anecdote I always take comfort in comes from Terry Tempest Williams.  She told about the time she had a reading in New York City (if I am remembering this correctly) and not one single person showed up.  As she was walking out, down a grand staircase, a man appeared for the reading.  Possibly he was homeless. But he had come for the reading.  She sat down and read to him.

 

Once my climbing partner and I climbed Longs Peak in Colorado but were to descend by a different route, on the trail which we had never been up.  A guy we met near the top told us that there were little spots of paint that looked like fried eggs that marked the trail.  Or not, he said, just follow your nose.

 

Aside: when my wife read my novel, she asked, “Who wrote this?”  Which I took as a compliment.

 

Another aside: The difference between teaching composition and teaching creative writing is that no students want to be in a composition course. In a creative writing class all the students want to be there.

 

Once Macklin told to me not to worry, that after I died, he would take good care of my library of mountaineering books. Predeceased.  What a shitty word that is.

 

I suppose my ideal audience is someone who shares my interests, but is actually a little smarter than I am.  That way I can aim higher.  

 

But a triumph in writing is when you win over the reader with whom you have absolutely nothing in common with.  I don’t know anything about playing video games, much less designing them.  Yet, I absolutely loved Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  The bottom line is that it was about humans.

 

I have friend who was inviting “friends” on social media to ask, just ask, for a free copy of his recent book.  Which is a really, really fine book. Wonderless, by Shelby Raebeck.

 



One time I agreed to do a reading at The Eagle River Nature Center.  The day of the reading there was a heavy snow.  The center requires a twelve-mile drive down a two-lane that wouldn’t be plowed. I drove out there, a fool’s errand.  My friends Andrea and Ben and their infant child, Uly, showed up, and I read to them, and only them.  After the reading was over it was almost dark–afternoon in Alaska in the winter–and still snowing, but I skied out to the bench that commemorates Macklin and shared some quiet moments with him.

 

Steve Almond once wrote an essay, “Camoin Among the Savages,” about one of my mentors François Camoin, who was giving away his books out of a cardboard box in the trunk of his car.  

 

After he died I went to his apartment to retrieve some of his things.  I found three of my books there:  Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg, Cuchama and Sacred Mountains by Evans-Wentz, and Already Deadby Denis Johnson.  The Johnson book gnawed on by some dog or other.

 

One of the very best literary events I ever attended was a reading by Terry Tempest Williams at the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake City upon the publication of her masterpiece, Refuge: an Unnatural History of Family and Place.  The Theatre is elegant and historic and seats 1,800.  That night overflowing with adoring fans. There was feeling of shared exhilaration and celebration.  I was happy for her.  I was happy for art.

 

We lost my friend Ben this summer.  I have read three of his novels, all unpublished.  One was contracted to be published, but the publisher folded before it could happen; one was just too bleak.  The last one just too crazy, although may be his best.

 

Steve, we’re all among the savages.  Steve!  We are the savages.

 

Last week I read a great essay about returning to old work. The author had written a novel and he couldn’t get it published; eventually he salvaged a part of it as a short story.  The rest he abandoned and the essay was about living with this choice. I looked up the short story collection in which the salvaged story ended up. The collection was published in 2015.  It had exactly zero Amazon reviews/star ratings. I wanted to weep.  I ordered the book immediately.

 

Following your nose only works if you already pretty much know what you’re doing.  In mountaineering and writing.

 

So, I had a very close friend in grad school who I inexplicably lost track of.  Completely.  No one we might have known in common had any idea where he was. In the acknowledgments at the end of my first book, I thanked him and parenthetically pleaded, Where are you, man?  I was fairly sure he had given up both academia and writing.  Like me, he has generic whitebread name.  I googled him twice a year.  For thirty years.  He has zero on-line presence. Two weeks ago I got a snail mail letter from him. It may as well have come from outer space. We are reunited after thirty years.  

How did you find me? I asked. 

Instead of just entering your name, he said, I added the word “writer,” and there you were.  

I’m admitting to you now how happy this made me.

 

And those five people who came to my reading?  They were lovely.  I am so grateful for them.

 

Friday, August 25, 2023

My Old Man, a work in progress


 If there’s one thing you should know about my father, it’s that he left college when his father 

died, his mother was in the tuberculosis sanitarium and my dad had to support his younger sister 

and brother so they wouldn’t be put in foster care.

 

My father worked at Ford and he had a friend from work, Hal Erickson, who lived in our neighborhood. One time we were visiting their family and the oldest son, Craig, who was at least five years older than me, and who I really admired, showed me a snub-nosed revolver. I was never sure if it was an authentic-looking toy or if it were real. He also showed me a toy model car, a Ford of course, that you blew into through a long flexible tube and it floated on a little layer air. The future.

 

After school there was four a o’clock movie that came on the television and featured classic horror films.  This is how I saw Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. But the movie that really scared me was called The Day the World Ended, which featured an atomic blast that killed almost everybody on earth except a group of people who survived in an isolated box canyon. Radiation poisoning and mutations ensued.  I was in about fifth grade and somehow I knew that radiation and mutations were actual things in the world. I became obsessed by this to the point of losing sleep.  I asked my dad, very adult-like I thought, if “we could please please please dig an underground fallout shelter in the backyard.” I laid out my argument, but to my great disappointment, was unable to convince my father of the imminent danger.  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said.  But I did.

 

Or, maybe the one thing you should know is that when he was child his father burned his mother’s heirloom furniture in the furnace to keep the family warm in the winter. You should know he was a true child of the depression and later he would be very careful, tight-fisted really, with his money.

 

My father was going to a funeral. Craig, the son of his friend Hal had killed himself. 

Why? I asked. 

Apparently, my father said, he was involved in some kind of cult.

How? I asked. 

Shot himself

What did you say to his dad?  

What could I say? My father asked me.

 

Neither of my parents spoke much of their fathers, both who died young, before I was born. Once, I asked my father what his father died from.  He was just, my father said, worn out.

 

The year I turned sixteen my father gave me two Christmas presents that surprised me: a stopwatch and a three volume, red-leatherbound set of Shakespeare.  Until then I hadn’t been aware he understood me so well.

 

One time I was visiting at Blue Lake where my parents had a cottage and where my mother now lives year round.  Early in the morning I took my coffee down to the dock and dangled my feet in the water as the mist rose off the surface.  My dad wandered down and sat next to me.  

What are we going to do today? I asked him. 

We’re doing it, he said.

 

Or maybe this, maybe, this is the one thing you should know.  At my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I asked my father, Could my earliest memory be right?  My earliest memory being the car spinning on ice, someone’s arms reach in to pull me out.  My mother under the car on her back, her face, looking up at me, smiling, Don’t worry dear.

Yeah, he says, I lifted the car up with one hand and slid her out with the other.  

Why haven’t I heard that story before? I wonder aloud.

I never told anyone. 

            

My father drank too much for a while, late in life.  Vodka, straight, so we thought it was water in the glass. Really cheap vodka, too.  When I turned fifty he bought me a bottle of Glenmorangie, a good single malt Scotch whiskey.  I figured this cost was about four times the amount he would ever spend on his own liquor.  That was exactly twenty years ago.  And he’s been gone eleven, now.

 

My father gave me a pair of very thin silk gloves. He had worn them as a pallbearer for a friend’s father’s funeral. Did he know the man well? I asked.  

Not at all.  

Then how did you end up carrying his casket? 

Most people, he said, don’t have six friends left when they die.

 

He thought the gloves might be useful for mountaineering. But no way, bad juju. The really important things he gave me weren’t things at all.  If it’s not too much a cliché to say so.

 

From the train window I could see my father walking up a stairway toward the platform exposed to the wind and snow.  He looked small and hunched-over, inarguably old.  On the short drive home, he said to me, When you got off the train I didn’t even recognize you.  You looked like a tiny shrunken, old man.

 

One Alaskan morning I was out shoveling the driveway at 5:30 a.m.  Quiet. The snow, which continued to fall, muffling all sound.  I was thinking about my father and what a comfort he had been to me when our son died.  Then I remembered, whoops, he wasn't there, he had already been dead for three years when our son died. And then, I thought, but yeah, he was a comfort to me then.

 

I still have the gloves.  And, everything else.

Monday, June 19, 2023

Some Notes on Descent

 


The descent beckons, as the ascent beckoned~ William Carlos Williams

 

There are only three people I trust to set up rappel anchors, pauses, AND I’M ALL THREE OF THEM.~ Charlie Sassara

 

Descent seems to be very steep and dangerous.  The ascent is always laborious, yet it is on a well-trodden path.  But the downward path is new.  Many have gone down, but they have usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface. One finds wrecked cars, trousers, shoes, and skeletons, perhaps of people gone to smash on that path.  This is the path of danger.~C.G. Jung

 

Outside the hut, clouds roll by at speeds that appear induced by time-lapsed photography with plenty of blue sky between them.  Typically, the day you tag a summit in the Alps is a long one, mostly because it starts so early.  We had spent our first night sleeping (not) under a dining room table in the Tête Rousse hut.  And that was with reservations.  Now, without reservations on the return, we have no choice but to descend all the way to Chamonix.

            We plod downward past the spot where we had met the lightning-struck Brits–“So I says, ‘Wot’s that smell?’ And then I realize it’s me hair!”  Soon we are at the bottom of the ridge where the death couloir must be crossed. On the ascent it had been frozen in the dark; now it is late and sloppy. Here a number of people are bottle-necked, gathering up the necessary courage to sprint across the shooting gallery.  They are clumped in sketchy silence like boys deciding who will be the first to jump off the bridge in the water.  The couloir itself appears like a runway down which large rocks tumble sporadically in huge slow-motioned leaps of space.  So far as we could see there were never two rocks falling at once and though they tumbled mostly in silence, a thrumming in the air usually announced their approach.

            The actual danger zone may be only forty feet across, though better measured probably by the number of seconds it will take to cross. But if it’s not really dangerous then why do so many people die here? They are slow, thrashed, inexperienced, we rationalize, creatures so very much unlike ourselves.  Unlucky.

            I watch a large flat rock arc downspinning, a stone thrown to skip on water, frozen and tilted. It builds speed as it descends, but it’s hard to believe you couldn’t dodge it, even in crampons on the slope. That’s what we tell ourselves.

            We sprint across and begin the long hike out to the train station, the caveat being that if we don’t catch the 5 o’clock we will have to spend another night out, this time without the arguable benefit of the hut’s dining table to lay under, as we had on the ascent. Without the train and the telecabine–newly-acquired decadent Eurohabits–the walk to Les Houches is unthinkable after the length of our day, now approaching fifteen hours.

            We make our train and not too long after that we’re seated at a sidewalk table at the Café de’ L’M where the placemats match the view of the Aiguilles–the needles–and as our exhaustion sets in, the alpenglow brightens, and fades, leaving the ridge to the Goûter hut, the Dome de Goûter and the distant summit silhouetted against the night sky.  Lucky indeed.


Photo: Charlie Sassara casts off for the glacier below Peak 11,300

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

In the Clouds with Charles: Random Climbing Notes from My Journals


 

i

“We live by accidents of terrain, you know.  And terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind.” Said Hemingway in Across the River and Into the Trees.

 

ii

Brian Hall (in High Risk: Climbing to Extinction) recalls: “Al [Rouse] would arrive at my doorstep wearing his mother’s disheveled fur coat and [Mike] Geddes in a threadbare army greatcoat.”

This is resonates with my memories of the 1970s.  When our mutual friend Drago Archer passed away during one of the pandemic summers, the poet Pat O’Neill recalled one time that Drago and I randomly arrived at their house at three or four in the morning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  I reminded him that the house was full of people, all of whom were awake and partying.  I really miss Drago being in the world.

 

iii

Hall also tells of his and Al Rouse’s attempt of a climb on the Gogarth sea cliffs in Wales. It was winter and they ended up in the water, had to abandon the rope and now had to climb out, wet, unroped, hypothermic, exhausted and about to become benighted.  They barely made it.  Hall recalls this conversation amid this epic:
           Wish I’d brought a torch, I said.

Did you tell anyone what we were doing?

No.

Did you leave a note on the car windscreen?

No.


This, to me, somehow epitomizes the state of climbing in the 1970s. I don’t think we thought we were immortal, or that we were particularly careless.  We were just naive, and sometimes fatally so.  Drago would call bullshit, claim I am playing word games.


iv

“Climbing and mountaineering have never been sports.  They are adventures with a level of danger and an uncertain outcome.”  So said Reinhold Messner, with which I agree.


v

Sometimes I make notes but don’t provide enough context to recall what the actual point of writing it down was.


This one was written into a book that I was planning to discard and I transferred it into a notebook, hoping the reason for originally noting it would miraculously appear.


As recorded: “Charles [Sassara], shaking my hand, after telling me the story about using stuff sacks filled with snow as rappel anchors on University Peak in the Wrangell St Elias Range (an audacious ascent with Carlos Buhler, that probably has not seen a repeat).”


The shaking of my hand, underlined in the original note, was apparently the key, but whatever the meaning held for me has not miraculously reappeared, although placing your life in the staying power of a bag of snow?  You had to be there.


 

vi

In the 1980s I lived in Southern California and my regular climbing partner, was Jim Pinter-Lucke, ten years my senior. Many of my favorite climbs from the Sierra to the Cordillera Blanca were done with Jim. Although we usually switched leads, he was stronger and most likely the lead-switching was calculated so that he lead the hardest pitches. 


Recently I returned to Joshua Tree, where Jim and I had often climbed, after an absence of over thirty years.  I was mildly surprised to not be able to get off the ground on routes I knew I had easily climbed all those years ago.


Although Jim had recently suffered a stroke and had various other physical ailments, his wife drove him out to the desert to have lunch.  The sight of Jim, one of the strongest persons I’ve known, struggling to walk, was very sobering.


We sat in camp chairs in the desert sun and summoned our shared past to the surface–we both remembered the guy who fell forty feet to the ground and had to be helicoptered out. In my memory he had died; in Jim’s he survived. Not sure why I believe Jim’s memory was likely more right. In either case, the sight, more like the sounds, of the fallen climber rendered us disinterested in climbing for the rest of that afternoon and we wandered around the desert for a while and called it an early day. That part we agreed on. When Jim left I was worried I wouldn’t ever see him again.


 But, I am happy to report, I have seen him again. He’s holding on.


vii

“Hanging on for dear life to the side of a mountain so you feel alive deserves some questioning.”~Jeremy Jones, The Art of Shralpinism: Lessons from the Mountains.


 viii

Charles and I head up to McHugh Peak and reach the cloud ceiling rather quickly. From then on we are walking in the cloud and sensing that we are not going to rise above it.  We catch and pass a couple of old guys, old, you know, like about ten years younger than ourselves. Chat amiably before moving on.


There’s a high plateau before you reach the cockscomb summit crag of McHugh Peak. It’s a remarkable place, an enormous expanse of nearly flat land. At that point the trail basically ends. We pass a cairn, but after moving on a few steps we can’t even see it. We pull out our compasses, but with visibility at about six feet there are no landmarks to aim for. 


We decide to head down, passing the other two old guys who are soldiering onward, mostly due to the fact they had been shuttled to the trailhead and had a car stashed to which they had to complete the hike to arrive at.


“Read about us in the newspaper,” they laugh as they disappear into the void.


 We sit down to eat our peanut butter sandwiches. Another couple approach. They have enormous handguns strapped to their chests, but are without a compass. After talking with us, they turn around and head down.


 When we pass them on our way down, the couple has stopped and just opened a couple bottle of beer.


We make quick work of the descent, piercing the cloud ceiling only a couple hundred feet above the parking lot.


 

ix

Our last morning in Joshua Tree and Sweeney and I set out to climb The Blob. Here are the reasons we told ourselves as to why that did not happen:

 

1.     Super windy and cold;

2.     Can’t find the start;

3.     Scary down climb from summit that we do not know the location of; 

4.     My fucked-up fingertips;

5.     Sweeney’s anxiety about driving home and his need to get on the road.

 

x

Drago was the one of the smartest, sometimes I think the smartest person I have ever known. He rarely, almost never, left Michigan. He believed that mountain climbing was the stupidest activity humans had ever conceived. He missed very few opportunities to remind me of this.  We agreed to disagree. I really miss that dude.