that I have been careless about dating the entries. Also, in the past I have not even
bothered to read my notebooks after I fill all the pages. I simply archive them. Not sure
why. They are personal without much meaning to anyone other than myself.
This notebook is filled with dreams (none of which are transcribed here), passages from things I read (sometimes inexplicable in retrospect), lists of books, travel notes. Mostly just notes as a much needed aid to memory. The ones I have transcribed here are somewhat thematically related. I’ve played a little with the chronological order.
Seven a.m. the phone rings. It’s Sweeney. “Old climbers,’” he says, “it’s like being dead.”
Sweeney and I are rockclimbing near Donner Pass. We flail a little on an easy two pitch route, so the next day we do an even easier two-pitch route. The summit is broadly domed with spectacular views of Donner Lake and an easy walk-off. I have cell reception so I return a call to my kidney doctor [in the notebook I wrote kidney but I surely meant thyroid] and text the roofing guy who never picks up my calls.
“I hate Anchorage,” Sweeney announces apropos of nothing, adding, “But Anchorage is my favorite city.”
After climbing with Sweeney in the Sierra I drive north on Highway 99 toward home in Oregon. It’s the first week of June and already the temperatures have risen to the triple digits, the hills sunburnt brown and yellow, people wondering where the state will combust this summer, how many lives forever changed? Listening to Nany Griffith’s Other Rooms, Other Voices. Wil I ever hear her version of “Turn Around” without being reduced to tears?
Charlie and I are driving around the country road close to Smith Rock looking for dispersed camping spots–places where camping is allowed but without any amenities. It’s mostly high desert scrublands around here and the first place we scope out, though empty, is overridden with tire tracks and trash. And old mattress, an abandoned sofa, plastic garbage bags of trash open to wind, even the naked ribcage of a cow that wandered off its range. A place for high school drinking and Satanic rituals. I keep thinking this is distressed, not dispersed.
We do manage to find a good spot, however in the hills above us spotty fires flare up in the wind. It’s a prescribed burn, which we wouldn’t have known if I a temporary sign hadn’t declared it so. Most of the smoke is rising well above us, but it’s still a little eerie. We manage to set up the tents in the dark and sit in camp chairs around a lantern watching the embers glow and dim, and spark up again at the whim of the wind. No one is camped anywhere near us and the coyotes sing all through the night.
When we return to our campsite after our first day of climbing the prescribed burn sign has been removed and all the fires have burned out.
Reading David Smart’s biography Among the Pale Spires: the Life and Verse of Antonia Pozzi, Mountain Poet. He observes “the history of climbing is laced with names penciled in summit books, spoken between climbers like prayer.”
We were talking about what we would remember about our visit to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. For me it was the Richard Misrach photograph of a burned-out neighborhood after the Oakland Firestorm of 1991 (over 3,000 homes lost and 25 lives). I have admired Misrach’s work–the enormous scale of his photographs–ever since seeing his portfolio of the sky in a San Francisco gallery decades ago. I remember thinking that these were just made by pointing the camera at the sky and pressing the shutter. And yet, somehow, I was appreciating the grandeur and infinitude of the sky, a scene I could wonder at every day of my life, but didn’t.
The fire photograph was particularly brutal because we were travelling with our friends whose elegant craftsman-era house in Altadena just barely survived the Eaton Fire of 2025 (9,000 buildings lost, 19 human lives). We had been hearing from them the awful details of that fire for months.
Sweeney, living now in Chico, experienced California wildfire within arm’s reach. During the Camp Fire of 2018 (19,000 structures lost, 85 humans) Sweeney volunteered long days taking care of lost and injured animals. The work was messy and exhausting.
But the Oakland fire has stuck in my mind because of the 25 lives lost, one was a climber of some note, Leigh Ortenburger, a man I admired. Ortenburger wrote the first climbers’ guidebook to the Teton Range and was well known for his elegant black and white photographs of the Cordillera Blanca in Peru where he climbed as a member of ten expeditions. He had been working on a book about the Blanca at the time of his death. He was sixty-one years old when the fire caught him as he was running to escape it.
Once in rural Illinois we were hiking at a local nature reserve and came across a cornfield that had been burnt to stubble. In it we found the skeleton of a young deer that had been caught in the blaze and all I could think of was Leigh Ortenburger.
I was much saddened to hear of the death of the Canadian climber, Will Stanhope. From a fall in Squamish, on a route almost certainly well within his comfort range. Wet, runout, no helmet, a sixty-five foot fall. I met Will a few times in Banff and found him humble and charming. And, boyish. I met him around the time of his short film Boys in the Bugs when he would have been around thirty years old. But he looked like a teen. Talking to a crowded room he raised both arms and flexed his biceps. He kissed one and said “Lightning,” then the other and said “Thunder.” The funny thing was that he was very slightly built, spindly. Now, after his death I am learning he had a dark side. I would rather remember him only as he was that night in Banff. But humans are complex. [This is actually the last entry in the notebook.]
This quote from Jim Harrison, which is kind of weird because although I read Todd Goddard’s biography: Devouring Time: Jim Harrison’s A Writer’s Life, this is the only Harrsion quote I have recorded into the notebook and I’m not sure if it’s from the biography or elsewhere. “The word love becomes mortally imprecise when the objects of love are torn from us and love whirls off into the void on their own individual track.”
Sweeney calls. “Stevenson,” he says, “You know the dead talk to me, don’t you?”
Finally, near the end of the journal I find another unattributed quote: “The rules were these: they couldn’t talk about their ailments, even the new ones that had manifested themselves since their last meeting. And, they couldn’t talk about the dead, not the friends they had lost climbing, not their lost classmates of whom there were an uncommon disproportionate number. Then, they amended the rules: they could, after all, talk about the dead but not about their deadness.”
I was surprised that I copied a passage without attribution to its author. Then I remembered, oh yeah, I wrote that, I was the author.
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