Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
~
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge began
“Kubla Khan” with a preface, a disclaimer of sorts, so I’ll take license to
begin similarly with an apology. Yes, I
know much of my work tends to trickle down to the same inevitable conclusion.
I’ve become the Mariner compelled to repeat my story, to dwell on the loss that
has most shaped me. Believe me, if I had
a choice, I would choose otherwise.
∞∞
Cockloft: a small loft just below the
roof. From cock (rooster), from Old
English, cocc, + Old English loft (sky). Apparently roosters love to
roost up high and this is the highest place indoors, in the house.
∞
In Norse cosmology,
Aasgard is translation from the Old Norse meaning “an enclosure in the air,” a
place associated with the gods and located in the sky. Valhalla, from the Old
Norse meaning “hall of the slain,” is a majestic
enormous hall located within Aasgard, ruled over by the god Odin. The Valkyries were dispatched by Odin to the
battlefields to select from among the dead those who would live happily among
the gods in Valhalla.
∞
Our son found work
roofing with two brothers who went by the names Skeeter and Slim, who were not toothless
rednecks, but perhaps aspired to be.
They gave Macklin the name Rooster,
because of his reddish hair and complexion.
∞
Loteria is a Mexican card game somewhat like
bingo. The cards themselves are
beautiful, folky. Teachers would use the cards to play a game with their
students, asking questions from which the students guess to which card the
phrases refer. For example, the teacher
would say, “El quele cantó a san Pedro no
le volverá cantar.” And the students would answer, “El Gallo!”
∞
“He that sang to St. Peter will not return to
sing again.” The Rooster!
∞
The
Enclosure is a high point on
the north side of the Grand Teton, at 13,285 feet some 80 feet lower than the
main summit. So named because near its
top early climbers found a small horseshoe-shaped rock-walled enclosure,
conjectured to be a site the native peoples used for vision quest
ceremonies. A nearby couloir was later
named Vision quest Couloir. Getting to
the Enclosure would have been a formidable task for any climber.
∞
My sons and I took a
road trip from Illinois to Wyoming in the summer of 2006. We did some bouldering, rock climbing, and
even some alpine climbing. Probably the
most memorable climb for me was the ascent of the Diamond in the Snowy Range
accompanied by Macklin. His brother was on
a nearby route in a party of three. As
memorable as that climb was, there was another: high in the Tetons the three of
us roped up together. We got a few pitches up when the rain began, loud splats
on the helmets, and I decided we should bail.
Before we began the rappels we found shelter under a rocky roof, a cockloft of sorts, and ate our meager lunch. The boys, who were 12 and 14 at the time,
began to tell me outrageous jokes, forbidden (!), one after another, rapid-fire. Jokes they would never dare repeat aloud in
civilized society. We howled in laughter
as the rain fell around us. Finally we
stepped out from under the rock and began the rappelling. I can’t remember what
I used for rappel anchors, or even the name of the peak. I only remember the laughter.
∞
The Inca believed in
human sacrifice, child sacrifice: the famine may end, the emperor may be smiled
upon by the gods. In 1999 the mummified
bodies of three children were found in a hollowed out chamber just below the
summit of Volcán Llullaillaco, a 22,110 foot peak in the Andes. DNA samples
revealed the three had been plied with large amounts of coca and alcohol. It is believed that in this drugged state
they simply passed out and never awakened, succumbing to the rigor of the
journey, the thin air, and the freezing temperatures.
∞
In 1978 Johnny
Waterman disappeared into the crevasse field beneath Denali on a climbing trip
he was radically under-provisioned for.
He had previously climbed an unthinkable route on nearby Mt. Hunter,
solo, over 145 days. People naturally
said he had a “death wish.” Who is to
say?
∞
. . . the
rigor of the journey, the thin air, and the freezing temperatures. In his Evening
Sends essay taking stock of the last decade of climbing headlines, Andrew
Bisharat notes the passing of at least a dozen young climbers, a litany of the self-martyred, “icons who
pushed limits of alpine climbing, who are no longer with us.” To what god did they sacrifice themselves, to
what ideal?
∞
Likewise, five years
earlier, John Waterman’s brother William had disappeared in Alaska without a
trace.
∞
Guy Waterman, the
parent of two missing sons, chose to end his own life in winter on the summit
of Mt Lafayette in the White Mountains near his home. He planned the event carefully, took some
drugs, curled up on his side, went to sleep and surrendered, by design, to the
cold. He was sixty-seven years old, my
age as I write this.
∞
I happened to have
climbed Mt. Lafayette. In 1972 my friend
John and I hitchhiked up to New Hampshire from Boston where he was in
school. We attempted to climb Mt
Washington—this was early winter—but the first night we were so bitterly cold
we headed down in the morning. Nearing the road John slipped on some ice and
badly sprained his ankle. We ended up
camped below Mt. Lafayette and I hiked up it alone, mostly enshrouded in clouds
the whole day. I sometimes think of that
day in conjunction with Guy Waterman’s sad end even though eighteen years
separate the events.
∞
My father’s father
died a few years before I was born. He and my grandmother had been in and out
of tuberculosis sanitariums for much of their adult lives. My aunt called it “the san.” My dad didn’t talk about his father much and
I remember asking him what his father had actually died from. “He was just,” my father said, “worn out.”
∞
“Roosters
wear out if you look at them too much.” So
said Garcia-Marquez in “No One Writes to the Colonel.” Some times I think that about Macklin, our
Rooster. Was he just worn out? At 22? “Close to the western summit,” Hemingway
famously wrote of Mt Kilimanjaro, “there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard.
No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” Likewise, we can’t explain how Macklin found
himself alone, in Willow Creek, in early winter, and how he drowned there.
∞
When our loteria card is called, will we know
the answer? What visions were seen by
the novitiates in the Enclosure? Will
our sacrifices be received by the gods? Will
St. Peter greet us at the pearly gates? Who among us will live happily forever
among the gods in Valhalla?
∞∞∞
