Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
In the Summer of 1972, my father decided that we would climb the top five peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Every year he would take a week-long vacation and the two of us would embark on some sort of outdoor adventure; canoeing the Delaware River, rafting the Susquehanna, hiking the Appalachian Trail. We’d pour over topographic maps, assemble our camping gear, plan our itinerary and try to nail down every detail of our trip before we began our annual adventure.
At the time my father was employed at a small company in NYC and a co-worker had convinced him that the undertaking was a simple one. He was from France and had spent his youth hiking the Alps before coming to the US and what he considered an easy week was quite different from what we’d done in the past. I can still remember our trip out to the sporting goods store on Route 1 where we picked out new back-packs with aluminum frames and padded shoulder straps. We stocked up on dehydrated meals, little cans of Sterno to cook with, and an assortment of camp goods that would make our trip a good one. Each night in the weeks leading up to that vacation I would lay out my own share of what we’d carry on the floor of my bedroom; the camp axe, a battered tin cup, my spoon, fork, and knife linked together with two lugs in a brown plastic sheath.
There was a poncho and a sleeping bag, a ground tarp and two canteens, bug dope and waterproof matches. There was an equal share of the freeze-dried meals and snacks, mostly dried fruit and nuts, but some candy bars as well, and powdered cocoa and tea bags, a small shaker of salt and pepper, my mess kit, a wash cloth and a small towel. There were changes of clothes and rolled up socks all compressed in a waterproof bag as well as candles and a flint and steel to start our fires at night.
My father’s share was larger, of course. He carried all of his own gear as well as the two-man mountain tent and poles, the lion’s share of our food and a a hard-back copy of the short stories of Mark Twain. As the day for our departure neared, I grew excited at the prospect of spending another full week with my father out in the wild. I had been wearing in my hiking boots, also new from the sporting goods store and they were both stiff and heavy, but better suited for our trip than the sneakers I’d worn on our earlier trips.
My father’s friend came with us and I remember a kind of vague resentment that someone else would be tagging along but I decided to give him a chance and so we embarked on that adventure in early July filled with an eager anticipation only a twelve-year-old can muster. We had, at that time, a Volkswagen square back the color of a ripe apple. It had a roof rack and plenty of room in the back for our packs and an AM/FM radio with tinny speakers that we listened to on our drive into the mountains.
We listened to WABC, the popular NYC radio station that played the current hits mixed with breaks for news, sports and weather. That year the songs they played most often were Brandy, A Horse With No Name and that cool song about cheating with someone’s wife, Me and Mrs. Jones. There was an endless cycle of advertisements for General Tires, Fun Park and Coney Island, mixed in with the exaggerated inflections of Cousin Brucie, the D.J. Behind the microphone, I listened to all of it from my perch in the back seat while my father and his friend talked up front. As we drove further from the Tri-State Metroplex into the cool mountains, the signal faded and slowly lost touch with the feed and spent the final hour or two in a comfortable silence except for the wind coming through the windows.
I have no idea what the trails to those mountains are like today, if they’ve been improved over time or not, but in those days the only clear paths were near the trailhead where the signs, routed into slabs of pines gave the names of the various routes and the mileage to each destination. Looking back I am fairly certain that these were not the five tallest mountains, though Mt Marcy was and for now remains the tallest, but the tallest cluster of peaks.
We started with Gothic, the easternmost of the group and unloaded our gear in the small dirt lot. It was a very different America in those days and my father thought nothing of leaving the keys in the glove box to insure we wouldn’t lose them on the trail. We tightened up our loads, filled our canteens with water from the handpump and began the first leg of our trek, heading up across the boulder covered flank of the mountain. I can still remember the infinite green of it all, the mountain laurels that grew in profusion along the edges of the path, the gurgling brooks that crisscrossed our entire ascent, the sound of the birds.
Jean-Paul, the experienced hiker my father worked with took the lead and rapidly disappeared from view above us. I’m not sure why my father ever imagined that a 75 pound 12-year-old humping a 40-pound backpack would be able to keep pace with an experienced alpinist with serious gear, but we tried. Every so often we would round a corner and find him relaxing on a massive outcrop of bedrock, chewing on a handful of gorp, waiting for us to catch up. This was repeated fairly often as we tried to adjust to our loads and the new packs. We made camp early that first night and I quickly did my part by collecting tinder, kindling and dry firewood from the surrounding tree line while they set up camp.
My father and I shared the low, orange two-man mountain tent and Jean Paul set up a hammock between two trees and a poncho strung tightly above to shed any rain that might blow in over the night. The forecast for the week was one of clear skies and mild temperatures, but it was mid-Summer and thunderstorms could always form at these elevations so he’d prepared for it. I started the fire in a small circle of stones that had been used for years, fire cracked rock lined the pit and the edges were blackened by a thousand previous campfires. We heated the water, rehydrated our Mountain House Chicken Tetrazzini and made a pot of tea to drink as nightfall engulfed us.
The following morning, or perhaps it was the second day I woke late, the inside of the tent already hot from the sun on it and discovered that my father’s friend had decided to move on without us. The glacial pace of a tween and a slightly out of shape thirty-something co-worker was not what someone who only last year had scampered up Mt Blanc was willing to tolerate. He’d agreed with my father that he’d continue on and perhaps add a few additional peaks to his route and promised to meet us back at the car on the final day of our planned trip so we could return together.
In 1972 my father was working on Wall Street, not as a financier, but as one of the early computer coders trying to integrate a US military language called COBOL into a system used by Chase Manhattan Bank. He’d been at it since the mid 60’s, when virtually everything was punch cards and yellow tape and I remember how he’d sit at our dining room table in the evenings with pads of graph paper and green plastic templates with all kinds of shapes cut out to try and set up some sort of flow chart for their developing system. To me it was both artistic and impenetrable. My father rarely talked about his job, not that we would have understood it, but he allowed me to use his mechanical pencils and pads of paper to draw on while he worked, sitting beside one another at the dining room table.
While I relished the time my father put aside for our trips together every summer, I had also come to that stage of life when I was finding my own voice and I remember making sure I was heard on that particular trip. I was tired, this was too hard, my shoulders ached, I was being eaten alive by tiny noseeums, tiny biting midges that plagued us whenever the breeze dropped off. I am pretty sure I complained far more than I commented on the scenery. Each day was a kind of walking torture towards our camp for the night. I kept the light of the campfire I’d build as a kind of beacon to make it through the day and with each step I’d plot about discarding items we didn’t need, like the camp ax or the grill in its greasy, blackened sleeve, tucked up against the pack frame and rubbing my back raw with every step.
My father carried a topographical map in a plastic tube and every couple of hours he’d pull it out while we paused to look over an ancient landscape of forest rolling out before and below us. I had to find another map to trace what I imagined was the route we took that week in July so many years ago and I can almost recall the terrain by looking at the tightly packed lines; Saddleback, Basin, Haystack, and Little Marcy. We drank water from the streams, impossibly cold in the middle of summer and refreshing with every sip. We’d soak our bandanas and tie them around our necks to keep cool on our ascent, my father’s red, mine blue.
On the second to last day of our journey we had only the space to cross from Haystack to Marcy reaching the summit just over a mile high for the views of the lakes below us and a seemingly infinite horizon, each set of ridges dwindling in the pale, hazy air. I was nearly spent, my feet were blistered, my shoulders raw and my skin, wherever it was exposed was covered in a rash of tiny bug bites. I was always hungry, and my whole body ached, but I was alone in the mountains of a place I’d never been before with my father. I was already dreaming of sleeping in my own bed again instead of on the rocky ground or in the leaf litter of the shelters if we were lucky enough to set camp in one.
We smelled of sweat and smoke and our hands and necks were thick with grease and grit, and somehow, probably because we’d eaten our way through most of our provisions, the pack seemed lighter. I remember thinking that if we could just get to the top of that rock covered summit it would all be downhill from there. As we made that last push to the top across the polished expanse of granite, you could see the distant clouds in the west piling up on each other. Magnificent fields of cumulous and above them the towering nimbostratus that looked like something from a dream. It was late afternoon and you could feel the temperature begin to change, the wind picking up and cool twinge to the air around us.
We had only five hundred feet or more in elevation to go, but the trail zig zagged across the exposed bedrock for at least a mile. My father picked up the pace and I began to lag behind. In the distance I could see the darkness beginning to form underneath the cloud layers and every once in a while, catch a distant flash of lightning, the dull report of thunder lagging far behind each one. The summer storm was moving towards the mountain form the west and we were going at it from the east and it seemed like it was going to be a race for the top. My father paused for a moment to consider the odds perhaps, then told me to get out my poncho while he dug through his pack for his own.
Mine was an old army style O.D green with thick strips of waterproofing peeling away at the seams and my father was flash orange like a traffic cone. Once we had them pulled over our heads he helped me adjust mine and we cached our packs next to a massive erratic sitting alone on a shelf of grey rock. We continued on as the space between the lightning and the thunder grew closer and closer. My father clutching his walking stick in his right hand, looking back over his shoulder at me every few steps to make sure I was still with him. I could feel both his excitement and his anxiety though he said nothing, fixated on making ot before the thunderstorm engulfed us in the open.
I don’t think I ever felt such a degree of fear and dread in my young life before that moment. I’d fallen out of trees, been hit by a car, bit by a dog, nearly drowned, but never did I experience such a certain knowledge in advance that danger was imminent. As my father accelerated his pace and the storm bore down on us, making everything to the west vanish in a blue-black darkness. The lightning increased in frequency and the thunderous bellows from each strike picked up, decibel by decibel until it sounded like I was inside of a drum, echoing across that wide valley between the peaks. I wish I could say I made it to the top, and it is one of the few regrets I have in this life that I didn’t.
Instead, I hunkered down beside a boulder in fear, calling out to my father not to go on, but he either didn’t hear me in the midst of it all, or he did and ignored me for reasons of his own, but he pushed on, racing those few dozen yards to the top, his poncho the only spot of color in the darkening air around him. I watched as he made it to the very top, holding his walking stick above his head in triumph I suppose, the poncho blowing up like a superhero’s cape, held only by the hood around his neck. I don’t know if I cried or not but I was in mortal fear for my father’s life when the storm and he met in that moment at the top of that mountain.
And then the rain began to fall. Cold, huge drops at first, stinging and intense, a deluge on that bald mountaintop with no place to hide from it. I cowered under my poncho, head down while the thunder roared and the lightning flashed all around us, and continued on past us and to the next one further east. I remember when my father came back down to me, soaked to the skin, his beard dripping wet, poncho balled up under his arm now and we retrieved our packs slightly further down the slope. We shrugged them on once more and descended along the trail slowly across slick rock and sodden debris in a steady, slow rain, quietly in some sort of post-apocalyptic awe.
We hiked in silence, sodden, exhausted and to our surprise and relief discovered a small alpine shelter where we could crawl in and build camp. We pulled off our soaking clothes and changed into something dry. It was far too wet to build a campfire so my father pulled out the Coleman lamp and lit it up and we heated a kettle of water over a tin of Sterno so we could rehydrate something to fill our empty bellies. After we’d eaten and washed our mess kits out I curled up into my sleeping bag while my father dug out the hardback Twain short stories and began to read to me in the lambent twilight of our shelter.
….Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s old ram…
I fell into the kind of slumber that can only come to someone who has earned it and it was deep. If I am very still, even now, I can hear those words in my father’s voice, mellifluous, confident, comforting.
The following morning we packed our things back into our rucks, hiked down the trail in silence and made it to the lot where we’d left the car a week earlier, my father’s friend napping on the ground beside it. We drove first to the city to drop of Jean Paul, then made our way down the turnpike to exit 8A, and home where my mother waited excitedly to hear our stories about the trip. Although we never said anything to each other about making summit in the middle of a thunderstorm, there was a silent agreement between us that we would never mention it to anyone else, my mother especially. It was our little secret, that foolhardy and extremely dangerous stunt propelled by inexperience and some sort of ingrained bravado that never manifested in the world back home, and I kept that to myself all those years.
When my sister called on Saturday in the middle of the afternoon, I think I knew what it was she was going to say before she ever spoke. Her voice began to break as the first word came across the wires from hundreds of miles away- Dad, she said, is gone. I sat down on my bed and thankfully our children were at home that day and they sensed something and came into the room with me and stood in anticipation around me as I looked up at them.
I didn’t cry in that moment, they needed me more than I needed to let myself go and I comforted them all, as we gathered together in a familial embrace, our arms all around each other, the sound of their own cries comforting me. I spoke with my sister for a few more minutes and agreed to call back later to discuss the details and after a while each of us moved off to our own little space where we allowed our emotions to fully take over and digest the news.
I have been trying to put my thoughts in order, to see my father all over again from the first memories I have of him to the last conversation we ever had. I knew him for 66 years, every day of my life he was present whether we were under the same roof or in the same tent or thousands of miles apart. There is no part of my life that hasn’t been in some fashion shaped by his words and his actions. He taught me to read, he shared his love of music with me, he played chess with a child and never let me win until I did one day, legitimately and I will never forget how happy it made him to be defeated on that game board by his own son.
We ate more meals together than I can count, experienced joy and grief together, laughed at jokes, and sat in silence beside one another when the time called for it. We became in my adulthood close friends and shared so many common interests even though we disagreed on many more. There was never a time in my life that I didn’t enjoy whatever moment we spent together even if I hated what we were doing. He was my best man when I married, a wonderful grandfather to our children and as patient and understanding a man as you could ever hope to meet.
And as hard as it was to put this story into words, it was perhaps the single most important week of my life and I couldn’t let it go away without writing it down into words however poorly my efforts were to recapture those moments. Those few minutes on that mountaintop in New York State in the last century were not some forgotten memory of child on a summer vacation, they were the defining moments of a life well-spent and lived to its fullest. He gave me the insights and the skills, the courage and the tenacity to believe that whatever it was before me, I could do it and for that I will always, as long as I live, be in debt to that man, my father.
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[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
In the Summer of 1972, my father decided that we would climb the top five peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Every year he would take a week-long vacation and the two of us would embark on some sort of outdoor adventure; canoeing the Delaware River, rafting the Susquehanna, hiking the Appalachian Trail. We’d pour over topographic maps, assemble our camping gear, plan our itinerary and try to nail down every detail of our trip before we began our annual adventure.
At the time my father was employed at a small company in NYC and a co-worker had convinced him that the undertaking was a simple one. He was from France and had spent his youth hiking the Alps before coming to the US and what he considered an easy week was quite different from what we’d done in the past. I can still remember our trip out to the sporting goods store on Route 1 where we picked out new back-packs with aluminum frames and padded shoulder straps. We stocked up on dehydrated meals, little cans of Sterno to cook with, and an assortment of camp goods that would make our trip a good one. Each night in the weeks leading up to that vacation I would lay out my own share of what we’d carry on the floor of my bedroom; the camp axe, a battered tin cup, my spoon, fork, and knife linked together with two lugs in a brown plastic sheath.
There was a poncho and a sleeping bag, a ground tarp and two canteens, bug dope and waterproof matches. There was an equal share of the freeze-dried meals and snacks, mostly dried fruit and nuts, but some candy bars as well, and powdered cocoa and tea bags, a small shaker of salt and pepper, my mess kit, a wash cloth and a small towel. There were changes of clothes and rolled up socks all compressed in a waterproof bag as well as candles and a flint and steel to start our fires at night.
My father’s share was larger, of course. He carried all of his own gear as well as the two-man mountain tent and poles, the lion’s share of our food and a a hard-back copy of the short stories of Mark Twain. As the day for our departure neared, I grew excited at the prospect of spending another full week with my father out in the wild. I had been wearing in my hiking boots, also new from the sporting goods store and they were both stiff and heavy, but better suited for our trip than the sneakers I’d worn on our earlier trips.
My father’s friend came with us and I remember a kind of vague resentment that someone else would be tagging along but I decided to give him a chance and so we embarked on that adventure in early July filled with an eager anticipation only a twelve-year-old can muster. We had, at that time, a Volkswagen square back the color of a ripe apple. It had a roof rack and plenty of room in the back for our packs and an AM/FM radio with tinny speakers that we listened to on our drive into the mountains.
We listened to WABC, the popular NYC radio station that played the current hits mixed with breaks for news, sports and weather. That year the songs they played most often were Brandy, A Horse With No Name and that cool song about cheating with someone’s wife, Me and Mrs. Jones. There was an endless cycle of advertisements for General Tires, Fun Park and Coney Island, mixed in with the exaggerated inflections of Cousin Brucie, the D.J. Behind the microphone, I listened to all of it from my perch in the back seat while my father and his friend talked up front. As we drove further from the Tri-State Metroplex into the cool mountains, the signal faded and slowly lost touch with the feed and spent the final hour or two in a comfortable silence except for the wind coming through the windows.
I have no idea what the trails to those mountains are like today, if they’ve been improved over time or not, but in those days the only clear paths were near the trailhead where the signs, routed into slabs of pines gave the names of the various routes and the mileage to each destination. Looking back I am fairly certain that these were not the five tallest mountains, though Mt Marcy was and for now remains the tallest, but the tallest cluster of peaks.
We started with Gothic, the easternmost of the group and unloaded our gear in the small dirt lot. It was a very different America in those days and my father thought nothing of leaving the keys in the glove box to insure we wouldn’t lose them on the trail. We tightened up our loads, filled our canteens with water from the handpump and began the first leg of our trek, heading up across the boulder covered flank of the mountain. I can still remember the infinite green of it all, the mountain laurels that grew in profusion along the edges of the path, the gurgling brooks that crisscrossed our entire ascent, the sound of the birds.
Jean-Paul, the experienced hiker my father worked with took the lead and rapidly disappeared from view above us. I’m not sure why my father ever imagined that a 75 pound 12-year-old humping a 40-pound backpack would be able to keep pace with an experienced alpinist with serious gear, but we tried. Every so often we would round a corner and find him relaxing on a massive outcrop of bedrock, chewing on a handful of gorp, waiting for us to catch up. This was repeated fairly often as we tried to adjust to our loads and the new packs. We made camp early that first night and I quickly did my part by collecting tinder, kindling and dry firewood from the surrounding tree line while they set up camp.
My father and I shared the low, orange two-man mountain tent and Jean Paul set up a hammock between two trees and a poncho strung tightly above to shed any rain that might blow in over the night. The forecast for the week was one of clear skies and mild temperatures, but it was mid-Summer and thunderstorms could always form at these elevations so he’d prepared for it. I started the fire in a small circle of stones that had been used for years, fire cracked rock lined the pit and the edges were blackened by a thousand previous campfires. We heated the water, rehydrated our Mountain House Chicken Tetrazzini and made a pot of tea to drink as nightfall engulfed us.
The following morning, or perhaps it was the second day I woke late, the inside of the tent already hot from the sun on it and discovered that my father’s friend had decided to move on without us. The glacial pace of a tween and a slightly out of shape thirty-something co-worker was not what someone who only last year had scampered up Mt Blanc was willing to tolerate. He’d agreed with my father that he’d continue on and perhaps add a few additional peaks to his route and promised to meet us back at the car on the final day of our planned trip so we could return together.
In 1972 my father was working on Wall Street, not as a financier, but as one of the early computer coders trying to integrate a US military language called COBOL into a system used by Chase Manhattan Bank. He’d been at it since the mid 60’s, when virtually everything was punch cards and yellow tape and I remember how he’d sit at our dining room table in the evenings with pads of graph paper and green plastic templates with all kinds of shapes cut out to try and set up some sort of flow chart for their developing system. To me it was both artistic and impenetrable. My father rarely talked about his job, not that we would have understood it, but he allowed me to use his mechanical pencils and pads of paper to draw on while he worked, sitting beside one another at the dining room table.
While I relished the time my father put aside for our trips together every summer, I had also come to that stage of life when I was finding my own voice and I remember making sure I was heard on that particular trip. I was tired, this was too hard, my shoulders ached, I was being eaten alive by tiny noseeums, tiny biting midges that plagued us whenever the breeze dropped off. I am pretty sure I complained far more than I commented on the scenery. Each day was a kind of walking torture towards our camp for the night. I kept the light of the campfire I’d build as a kind of beacon to make it through the day and with each step I’d plot about discarding items we didn’t need, like the camp ax or the grill in its greasy, blackened sleeve, tucked up against the pack frame and rubbing my back raw with every step.
My father carried a topographical map in a plastic tube and every couple of hours he’d pull it out while we paused to look over an ancient landscape of forest rolling out before and below us. I had to find another map to trace what I imagined was the route we took that week in July so many years ago and I can almost recall the terrain by looking at the tightly packed lines; Saddleback, Basin, Haystack, and Little Marcy. We drank water from the streams, impossibly cold in the middle of summer and refreshing with every sip. We’d soak our bandanas and tie them around our necks to keep cool on our ascent, my father’s red, mine blue.
On the second to last day of our journey we had only the space to cross from Haystack to Marcy reaching the summit just over a mile high for the views of the lakes below us and a seemingly infinite horizon, each set of ridges dwindling in the pale, hazy air. I was nearly spent, my feet were blistered, my shoulders raw and my skin, wherever it was exposed was covered in a rash of tiny bug bites. I was always hungry, and my whole body ached, but I was alone in the mountains of a place I’d never been before with my father. I was already dreaming of sleeping in my own bed again instead of on the rocky ground or in the leaf litter of the shelters if we were lucky enough to set camp in one.
We smelled of sweat and smoke and our hands and necks were thick with grease and grit, and somehow, probably because we’d eaten our way through most of our provisions, the pack seemed lighter. I remember thinking that if we could just get to the top of that rock covered summit it would all be downhill from there. As we made that last push to the top across the polished expanse of granite, you could see the distant clouds in the west piling up on each other. Magnificent fields of cumulous and above them the towering nimbostratus that looked like something from a dream. It was late afternoon and you could feel the temperature begin to change, the wind picking up and cool twinge to the air around us.
We had only five hundred feet or more in elevation to go, but the trail zig zagged across the exposed bedrock for at least a mile. My father picked up the pace and I began to lag behind. In the distance I could see the darkness beginning to form underneath the cloud layers and every once in a while, catch a distant flash of lightning, the dull report of thunder lagging far behind each one. The summer storm was moving towards the mountain form the west and we were going at it from the east and it seemed like it was going to be a race for the top. My father paused for a moment to consider the odds perhaps, then told me to get out my poncho while he dug through his pack for his own.
Mine was an old army style O.D green with thick strips of waterproofing peeling away at the seams and my father was flash orange like a traffic cone. Once we had them pulled over our heads he helped me adjust mine and we cached our packs next to a massive erratic sitting alone on a shelf of grey rock. We continued on as the space between the lightning and the thunder grew closer and closer. My father clutching his walking stick in his right hand, looking back over his shoulder at me every few steps to make sure I was still with him. I could feel both his excitement and his anxiety though he said nothing, fixated on making ot before the thunderstorm engulfed us in the open.
I don’t think I ever felt such a degree of fear and dread in my young life before that moment. I’d fallen out of trees, been hit by a car, bit by a dog, nearly drowned, but never did I experience such a certain knowledge in advance that danger was imminent. As my father accelerated his pace and the storm bore down on us, making everything to the west vanish in a blue-black darkness. The lightning increased in frequency and the thunderous bellows from each strike picked up, decibel by decibel until it sounded like I was inside of a drum, echoing across that wide valley between the peaks. I wish I could say I made it to the top, and it is one of the few regrets I have in this life that I didn’t.
Instead, I hunkered down beside a boulder in fear, calling out to my father not to go on, but he either didn’t hear me in the midst of it all, or he did and ignored me for reasons of his own, but he pushed on, racing those few dozen yards to the top, his poncho the only spot of color in the darkening air around him. I watched as he made it to the very top, holding his walking stick above his head in triumph I suppose, the poncho blowing up like a superhero’s cape, held only by the hood around his neck. I don’t know if I cried or not but I was in mortal fear for my father’s life when the storm and he met in that moment at the top of that mountain.
And then the rain began to fall. Cold, huge drops at first, stinging and intense, a deluge on that bald mountaintop with no place to hide from it. I cowered under my poncho, head down while the thunder roared and the lightning flashed all around us, and continued on past us and to the next one further east. I remember when my father came back down to me, soaked to the skin, his beard dripping wet, poncho balled up under his arm now and we retrieved our packs slightly further down the slope. We shrugged them on once more and descended along the trail slowly across slick rock and sodden debris in a steady, slow rain, quietly in some sort of post-apocalyptic awe.
We hiked in silence, sodden, exhausted and to our surprise and relief discovered a small alpine shelter where we could crawl in and build camp. We pulled off our soaking clothes and changed into something dry. It was far too wet to build a campfire so my father pulled out the Coleman lamp and lit it up and we heated a kettle of water over a tin of Sterno so we could rehydrate something to fill our empty bellies. After we’d eaten and washed our mess kits out I curled up into my sleeping bag while my father dug out the hardback Twain short stories and began to read to me in the lambent twilight of our shelter.
….Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s old ram…
I fell into the kind of slumber that can only come to someone who has earned it and it was deep. If I am very still, even now, I can hear those words in my father’s voice, mellifluous, confident, comforting.
The following morning we packed our things back into our rucks, hiked down the trail in silence and made it to the lot where we’d left the car a week earlier, my father’s friend napping on the ground beside it. We drove first to the city to drop of Jean Paul, then made our way down the turnpike to exit 8A, and home where my mother waited excitedly to hear our stories about the trip. Although we never said anything to each other about making summit in the middle of a thunderstorm, there was a silent agreement between us that we would never mention it to anyone else, my mother especially. It was our little secret, that foolhardy and extremely dangerous stunt propelled by inexperience and some sort of ingrained bravado that never manifested in the world back home, and I kept that to myself all those years.
When my sister called on Saturday in the middle of the afternoon, I think I knew what it was she was going to say before she ever spoke. Her voice began to break as the first word came across the wires from hundreds of miles away- Dad, she said, is gone. I sat down on my bed and thankfully our children were at home that day and they sensed something and came into the room with me and stood in anticipation around me as I looked up at them.
I didn’t cry in that moment, they needed me more than I needed to let myself go and I comforted them all, as we gathered together in a familial embrace, our arms all around each other, the sound of their own cries comforting me. I spoke with my sister for a few more minutes and agreed to call back later to discuss the details and after a while each of us moved off to our own little space where we allowed our emotions to fully take over and digest the news.
I have been trying to put my thoughts in order, to see my father all over again from the first memories I have of him to the last conversation we ever had. I knew him for 66 years, every day of my life he was present whether we were under the same roof or in the same tent or thousands of miles apart. There is no part of my life that hasn’t been in some fashion shaped by his words and his actions. He taught me to read, he shared his love of music with me, he played chess with a child and never let me win until I did one day, legitimately and I will never forget how happy it made him to be defeated on that game board by his own son.
We ate more meals together than I can count, experienced joy and grief together, laughed at jokes, and sat in silence beside one another when the time called for it. We became in my adulthood close friends and shared so many common interests even though we disagreed on many more. There was never a time in my life that I didn’t enjoy whatever moment we spent together even if I hated what we were doing. He was my best man when I married, a wonderful grandfather to our children and as patient and understanding a man as you could ever hope to meet.
And as hard as it was to put this story into words, it was perhaps the single most important week of my life and I couldn’t let it go away without writing it down into words however poorly my efforts were to recapture those moments. Those few minutes on that mountaintop in New York State in the last century were not some forgotten memory of child on a summer vacation, they were the defining moments of a life well-spent and lived to its fullest. He gave me the insights and the skills, the courage and the tenacity to believe that whatever it was before me, I could do it and for that I will always, as long as I live, be in debt to that man, my father.
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