Acquiring The Shining Mountain, Part I

Peter Boardman would have entered his 70th year tomorrow, had he not disappeared on Everest in 1982.

An antique store on the east side of 101, coast of Oregon, where the young man behind the counter announces his name, asks yours, and where’re you from?  Then, he says, pick a color, and a pin of the color you just named is placed on a map on the ceiling on the place you just claimed to be from.

A few books, the Moncrieff translation of Proust in three volumes, paperback, the first volume missing and the second apparently much read.  There are probably only a hundred books in the whole place, but one of them is an unread copy of Peter Boardman’s The Shining Mountain, first American edition with no price penciled in.

Context: Peter Boardman disappeared with his climbing partner, Joe Tasker, on the unclimbed northeast ridge of Everest in 1982.  They were uncommonly fine climbers, and writers.  A prestigious annual award for mountaineering literature was established in their name.

I don’t even ask the price because I know I have a copy somewhere back at home in Alaska, maybe, probably, even two copies, and I let it pass.

The guy behind the counter, he’s a little off, yes, insisted we each take a beach agate out of the basket on the counter, as we leave empty-handed.

Fighting through the rain I take note of the piles of rusting junk everywhere outside the place. Perhaps at one time the idea was to sell some of it, but now it’s more of a display: an old cigarette machine, a car body with a mannequin driving, a phone booth occupied by another mannequin, a pair of mannequins in a boat, one waving, the other a babushka tied around her head, various other mannequins planted among the shrubbery.  It’s like one of those abandoned nuclear test cities.

Was he a little off? My wife asks.

Oh yeah.

This place creeps me out, my wife says as we drive off.

Later that night, randomly on the internet I see someone make the claim that The Shining Mountain is the best mountaineering book ever written.  I take this as a sign that I should acquire this particular copy.

Back to the antique store.  My wife announces she will stay in the car.  It’s raining, she says.

The young guy is still behind the counter, but an older guy, his father perhaps, emerges and I find the book, ask him what he wants for it.  The internet is the ruiner of bargains.  He looks it up on and says the going price is eight to sixteen, he’ll take twelve.  Twelve is a lot more than I want to pay for a book I already own two copies of, but eight to sixteen is probably for a used paperback in questionable condition.  I hesitate, reach into my pocket.  Normally I never have cash, but I do today.

I have a five and four ones.  He sees this and says, I’ll take eight. My old man told me you never take a man’s last dollar.

Take another agate, the kid says. And one for your wife, he adds.

I fight my way back to the car.  It’s raining sideways now.  My wife sees the book under my jacket.  How much? she asks.

Five, I say.

The mannequin in the forever beached boat waves good-bye as we drive off.

The Third Thing: Early Winter Notes

When I walk into the room the device known as Alexa flashes its green light twice in acknowledgment of my presence, the way an old dog might thump its tail a couple times in recognition, perhaps opening a sleepy eye, to confirm. Each time this happens I feel like I’m living in an old Twilight Zone episode.  It occurs to me I have outlived my era.

My St. Bernard medal seems to be irritating my skin, so I take it off, though I am leery of going up into the mountains without it.  Bernard, patron saint of alpinists and skiers. That day, I slip on a thin invisible layer of black ice in our steep driveway and go down hard.

We just saw a Ram Dass movie, noting that the audience was almost universally people of our age who had probably once been enthralled with Be Here Now, as we, I anyway, once were.  I was more skeptical, or equally skeptical, considering him now. But some of his observations are clear and unquestionable: “We are all just walking each other home.”

“Drinking too much is not a thing,” advises my friend, Nick Dighiera.  He’s wrong, of course, but he says so out of kindness.

My bathtub drains so slowly that dirt (where did it come from?) coats its surface and I procrastinate and procrastinate about calling the plumber.  It’s like this for three weeks.  My wife looks at it for five minutes and says the drainplug is stuck. Now it drains perfectly.  I envision my future self a doddering old man with his house falling down around him because he doesn’t have the common sense of 12 year old.

I love these dark winter hikes when we set out, as we’ve done dozens and dozens of times, into the darkness with no need of headlamps because the way is so familiar to us.  Now the snow is fresh and soft and underfoot the rocks and gravel are unconsolidated, the footing more work than usual.  Pre-dawn cold. It never once occurs to me to wonder why I am doing this, only to be glad that I can. The summit is fiercely windblown and the sun still not risen and we walk right over it without pause, downward facing dogs in one fluid motion.

What to make of strange dreams?  The dream of falling off Carl’s roof, while Carl and Charlie discuss a renovation project.  Which segues to crawling across a grass and hard dirt field during which I discover a hidey-hole filled with drugs and cash and am convinced that because of this discovered knowledge drug dealers are chasing me and I crawl and crawl and make no progress though I can see my bicycle leaning against a brick wall in the distance.  When I awake, the word “perfidy” is prominent in consciousness with not a known connection to anything, not the preceding dream(s) not any conscious thought.  Too much television news and facebook.

The poet Donald Hall once wrote of his marriage to Jane Kenyon: “Most of the time our eyes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing.”

“Other people’s dreams are boring.” So declared a Robert Stone character in a famous short story.  As evidenced above.

When I was about 15 I had an intense friendship with Drago. We would talk for hours.  We lived almost a mile from each other, but I remember walking with him to his house, but we weren’t finished with our conversation, so we walked back to my house, and then back to his house, kind of a form of Zeno’s paradox, arrows never arriving at their destination.  I think of Drago often now as he confounds the doctor’s death sentence by remaining alive months after they predicted otherwise. I am hoping he is holding on until I can see him again.

Hall added: “Sometimes you lose a third thing.”

This morning I was out shoveling the driveway at 5:30 a.m.  Quiet. The snow, which continues to fall, muffling all sound.  I was thinking about my father and what a comfort he was 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.