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.
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