High Places, Sacrifices, Mysteries

                                   

                                                      Since then, at an uncertain hour,
                                                      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? 

                                                           ∞∞∞