The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  In July, Andrews went to Whatcom County District Court, where she had asked for a renewal of the protection order. Adam appeared as she waited. Violating the no-contact order in the courtroom, he knelt beside her, sighing, trying to speak to her. “Adam, what are you doing?” Andrews said.

  “I don’t care,” he replied. When a five-year renewal was granted, Adam cried out. He was removed from the courtroom in handcuffs.

  The week before Mother’s Day that year, Adam and Judy went to an appointment with a psychiatric health professional near his parents’ home. “You’ve got to control your behaviors,” the therapist told Adam.

  “I am trying,” he insisted.

  “No, you’re not trying enough,” she said, then left the room to make his next appointment. Adam grabbed a snow globe and threw it through a framed picture. He swept a computer off a desk. Three policemen arrived. Adam resisted. An officer pressed a Taser to his rib cage and fired, then fired again. Adam fell at his mother’s feet. He was booked into the Lewis County Jail.

  * * *

  Another blow had come a few months earlier. In February of 2016, Adam was helping prepare Mount Baker Ski Area for the Legendary Banked Slalom, the mountain’s marquee event and the longest-running snowboarding race in the world.

  The North Cascades typically show off on race weekend by dumping snow, and that year the weather didn’t disappoint—more than a foot of powder fell, landing on a slick, precarious surface. Adam dodged his duties and was cruising around the resort with Corey Warren, a friend and photographer. Adam was feeling antsy.

  “We gotta get out to the Arm, it’s looking pretty good,” he said, referring to the Shuksan Arm, a long ridgeline that connects the west flank of Mount Shuksan to the uppermost reaches of the ski area. The Arm is a dramatic sight, striped with steep lines that show up regularly in ski magazines.

  Warren got swept up in Adam’s excitement. They made their way to a gate that leads to the backcountry and outpaced two dozen other skiers to get fresh tracks near a ski line that locals call the Beast, which has a steep entry. Adam made a quick turn for the camera and stopped. Behind him, a small slide raced downhill. He smiled.

  As Warren skied down to set up the second shot, another avalanche cut loose. It grabbed Warren and carried him at least 50 yards downhill, burying him waist-deep and leaving him rattled. He composed himself and the two continued on. They set up for a final shot.

  “This is gonna rip,” Adam said. “I’m gonna arc to the right, make two turns, then I’m gonna arc out.”

  The Shuksan Arm is such a prominent feature above Mount Baker that a crowd of racers, spectators, and staff saw what happened next. Adam pushed off. The snow cracked open above him. “He could not outrun it,” Warren says. “He didn’t even get his one turn. It was like ball bearings. It just funneled him.”

  When the snow settled, Adam wasn’t visible. The slide had carried him over a rockfall. Warren hurried to the edge. Adam—stripped of poles and goggles—was walking uphill, a nervous smile on his face.

  “Dude, are you okay?”

  “That wasn’t what I expected. I rallied my back on that cliff.”

  Warren skied away to find help. At a spot where backcountry skiers reenter the ski area, a patroller was waiting for him.

  “Hey, is that Adam Roberts up there?” the patroller asked.

  “Yeah, it is,” Warren said. “We just skied off a slide. He’s fine, but he hurt his back and lost his skis. Can you send up a sled?”

  “We’re not calling anyone for Adam,” the patroller replied, according to Warren. “He’s on his own.”

  If Adam had been severely injured, ski patrol would’ve likely sent aid, even though he was out-of-bounds, but there wasn’t much interest in giving him a lift after this near-miss. Adam had annoyed patrollers by ducking ropes and launching off big cliffs without regard to the consequences for people below him. He’d gotten warnings and had his pass pulled for the day. This slide was just the latest personal foul.

  When Adam reached the lodge, he was met by a Whatcom County sheriff’s deputy and by Duncan Howat, Mount Baker’s general manager. The deputy issued a no-trespass order that forbade Adam from coming back for the rest of the season. Adam adored Mount Baker, and he deeply respected the Howat family, who had run the place for half a century. The ban devastated him.

  “The most challenging and heartbreaking part of working with Adam was that there was never anything malicious, or intent to do any harm,” says Gwyn Howat, Mount Baker’s executive vice president and operations manager. Yet his pursuit of whatever he needed “straight-up jeopardized people’s lives. The paradox of that was very difficult to navigate.”

  Friends noticed that Adam’s decision-making was getting worse—and as more experienced skiers second-guessed skiing with him, there were fewer people around to check his riskier impulses. Rylan Schoen had gotten engaged to Amy recently, and they both decided he shouldn’t ski with Adam anymore. Jeff Rich begged off when Adam called to ski; privately, he told friends he didn’t want to be there when the inevitable happened.

  After the incident at Mount Baker, Cunningham cornered his friend. “Are you doing this on purpose?”

  “Kind of,” Adam told him. “I’m kind of out of control of myself. I keep making bad decisions. I know they’re bad decisions. But I just don’t care about my life anymore, because I’m so fucking depressed every single day.”

  He filled Cunningham’s voice mail. “I don’t want to die,” he said in one, “but I don’t have a future.”

  The writer David Foster Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, wrote a passage in Infinite Jest that captures the agony experienced by someone who’s in enough despair to consider suicide. Wallace said that no one leaps to his death from a burning building by choice. The person jumps because the flames are worse, “a terror way beyond falling.”

  * * *

  The house that Steve and Judy Roberts built, and where they raised their sons, is snug, made of timber, south-facing to welcome the afternoon sun. The living-room window frames the white bulk of Mount Adams as it noses above a rumple of green peaks. Behind the living room sits a bedroom. On the bed there’s a box made from local maple and yellow cedar, its lid inlaid with an image of the mountain. Steve made it. Now 68, he has a ragged woodsman’s beard and the vise handshake of a lifelong carpenter. The handshake comes later, though, because when you show up to talk about Adam, Steve will meet you at the car door with wet eyes and a bear hug, even if you’re a stranger. Inside the box are the ashes of his son.

  Judy, 69, places a plate of homemade cookies on the kitchen table, not far from a book, Healing After Loss. She’s observant, kind, yet direct. “The most incredibly sad thing to me is that he had it all,” she says. “He had the perfect girlfriend. He had a ski career that was developing nicely. But he torpedoed it. He torpedoed it all.”

  For five hours one spring day we talk about Adam. Judy says her son was one of the strongest people she’s ever met. A therapist once told her that if she took as much medicine as Adam was taking, she wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.

  Talking to Judy and Steve, you realize how large the blast zone of mental illness can be. Years ago, Judy says, when Adam was wracked by his eating disorder, “almost every day he’d call and say, ‘I want to kill myself.’” Do you have any idea, she says, what it’s like for a mother to write the memorial service for her son—not once, or twice, but many times? Later, Adam routinely sent her as many as 400 texts per day. One time he sent 753. The messages were often brutal, self-hating. “You can’t read stuff like that all day long and have it not affect you horribly,” Judy says. “Mostly I would just delete everything as fast as I could, and he knew that. Still it came in.”

  Near the end, Judy wondered if she should fear her own son. One night in Randle, she and Adam stood at a window together at home. “Oh, it’s such a beautiful sunset,” she said. Adam punched the wall next to the glass and fell to the ground, holding
his hand. “I can’t feel anything,” he moaned. “I can’t feel anything.”

  Judy is strong, but when she speaks of these things she dabs her eyes. She doesn’t share them because she wants your pity. She wants you to understand, all of it.

  They tried everything. When Judy retired and Adam fell off her insurance, they paid out of pocket for mental health treatment. They got Adam on federal disability and also secured state help. “It was really hard to explain to someone why this person is on disability when he goes out and skis these things, but we were out of resources,” she says. “We put out so much money for this kid.”

  Five months after Adam’s death, his parents found themselves still sorting through many emotions. There was grief, of course, and regret at not finding a way to help him. Judy is frustrated that the last few years had darkened the memory of Adam, her favorite hiking partner. She pauses, considering how to word something else that she and Steve have also felt: relief. When I visited, they had just returned from a vacation. For the first time in years, a ringing phone didn’t scare them. “The last ten years, we haven’t been able to do anything without having continual fear and worry about Adam,” Judy says.

  By the autumn of 2016, Adam seemed exhausted. Ahead lay possible criminal trials for stalking and for trashing the therapist’s office, which could result in prison time. Adam’s actions had stripped him even of the solace of skiing: during the summer of 2016, he was required to wear a GPS ankle bracelet, so he couldn’t wear a ski boot. Some friends, like Cunningham, exasperated, pulled back in hopes that Adam would finally help himself. It didn’t work. Friends tried to keep him cheered up, but the spark was gone.

  That fall, people told Judy about another therapy they might try for borderline personality disorder. Her son waved her off.

  A friend asked Adam if he could help.

  “Everyone has helped me,” Adam said.

  * * *

  In the Pacific Northwest, winter arrives with the subtlety of an overdue freight train. Storms gather in the North Pacific and spin south until they smash into the first solid thing they encounter, which is often the South Cascades. By Christmas of 2016, more than 10 feet of snow had fallen at White Pass.

  Thanks to the mountains’ low elevation and proximity to the sea, it’s not uncommon for storms to arrive accompanied by warm temperature spikes. On December 20, the day before the winter solstice, it rained in the mountains, then grew cold and sunny for days. Ice formed. Such rain crusts create a slick bed upon which newer layers of snow can easily slide.

  On the day after Christmas, photographer Jason Hummel and Adam skied together at White Pass, a snowy, uncrowded, and fun mountain for the expert who knows where to look. For some locals, this means heading out of bounds for a “road run.” Just beyond one of the resort’s boundaries, off a snowcat route called the Plank, lie ungroomed and unpatrolled tree-flecked trails. This is classic Northwest skiing, rarely tracked out by others. The runs end at Highway 12; from there it’s a short hitchhike back to the ski resort.

  That day the skiing was terrible. “While we were sidestepping ice, we talked about how bad the avalanche conditions were going to be when it snowed a foot,” Hummel told me.

  That night snow began to fall. By morning nearly a foot of new powder covered the ground at White Pass, but the wind collected it much deeper in sheltered places. In its daily bulletin, the Northwest Avalanche Center warned: “The safest plan is to avoid avalanche terrain of consequence.” Adam said good-bye to his mother and headed to the ski hill. On his bed he left three books. One was a popular manual for telemarkers. The second was Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain. The third was a self-help title called Love Is Letting Go of Fear.

  At the mountain, Adam flagged down Wesley Martin, an assistant supervisor at the ski school, and invited him along. Martin was excited. Adam was a celebrity at White Pass. His picture had been on the trail map.

  Martin, 26, was working that day, and the two set up a plan: when Martin could shake free, they would meet behind the ticket booth to spin a lap. Several times that day they met for a road run.

  “The day was midthigh deep, just blower pow,” Martin recalls. He couldn’t stop smiling, but Adam was struggling to enjoy himself. “Every time we got done, he’d say, ‘I wish the run was longer. I’ll bet it’s better at Baker.’” Even so, Adam ghosted through the trees so quickly that Martin, though a very good skier, had trouble keeping up. Martin tried to lift his spirits. He quoted song lyrics by the John Butler Trio, about someone chasing what they can’t obtain: And if you just look around man / You see you got magic.

  * * *

  At two o’clock, Martin got another window from work. He and Adam headed out for another road run, working a popular backcountry zone that locals call the Grand Couloir. Grand is a misnomer. While the walls of the steep, narrowing gully quickly rise to more than 100 feet on either side and the couloir is large enough to be rippled with a few ski lines, a snowball tossed from the top can nearly reach the bottom of the gully and the creek that drains it in winter. It’s a classic terrain trap—anything caught in a slide will be funneled into the creek and likely buried.

  On the descent, a large slough of snow caught Adam and ripped off one of his skis. It took 15 minutes to find it. Even so, the men decided to take one more run.

  Throughout the day, Adam had been sending Judy texts, the same litany of self-recrimination and regret that had become numbingly familiar.

  11:56 a.m.

  I was driven..ski at baker and then school..why

  Why did it kill me..I killed me

  12:57 p.m.

  White pass nothing

  2:45 p.m.

  But I coolant [sic] work..never been able to live on,own..never been able to work and live and make life..it’s so so sick..its so sad

  At 4:15 p.m., after riding the chairlift, Adam sent her a last round of texts. One read:

  I feel so so dead..skiing feels so sick..i, know nothing.. Why why am i here..why

  The skiers walked the Plank and headed out of bounds. It was still snowing; the oyster light of a December afternoon was failing. Somewhere, under the deep snow, lay the old sign: ROBERTS’ RUN. They stood at the Grand Couloir again, but this time Adam had led them higher, to an entry of the gully that was steeper than anything they’d skied together that day, perhaps 45 or 50 degrees.

  “This looks sketchy,” Adam said.

  “I don’t like this one,” Martin replied. His legs wobbled with exhaustion from chasing Adam all day.

  The Grand Couloir is not a single open funnel; it’s punctuated by small islands of trees that break up the terrain. Martin told Adam he would ski the adjacent line that the two had skied last time. He took a few steps uphill and looked back. Adam had already dropped in and was gone.

  Martin hiked about 40 yards and skied his short alley. At the bottom, Adam wasn’t waiting. Martin yelled. No response. Ascending the gully Adam had skied, above he saw a fracture line on the slope that signaled the crown of an avalanche. It was a large slide, more than 100 yards wide, reaching down to the rain crust. Martin was not as experienced as Adam in the backcountry and he carried no avalanche beacon or rescue gear. Though Adam routinely carried such equipment, that day he had carried only a beacon. He had not switched it on.

  Martin skied to the road and hitchhiked to the ski area for help. Ski patrollers located Adam at 5:53 p.m., a little more than halfway down the gully. He was in perfect position—upright, hand gripping a ski pole, the other pole inches from his outstretched hand. He looked as if he was about to make a slashing right-hand turn and pull off one last escape. His orange helmet, still on his head, was beneath four feet of snow.

  It’s hard not to wonder what Adam wanted when he stepped onto the slope for his last run. Did he hope to die? Perhaps he was trying to find a way to live, in the only way he knew. Or perhaps, in his exhaustion, he had ceased to choose. He would let the mountains decide for him.

  “It would be inaccurate to sa
y that Adam took his own life,” Cunningham says. “It would also be inaccurate to say that he didn’t.”

  Many of us head to the high peaks in search of something we hope to find there. “Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees,” John Muir wrote, urging others into the hills. Perhaps Adam’s story differs from yours and mine mainly by degree. All of us seek a quiet mind, a glimpse of sunshine through the trees. The difference is how far some of us will go in pursuit of it.

  * * *

  About two weeks later, a couple hundred people braved a snowy Saturday to come to Randle. In a church that Steve had designed, they laughed and cried and sang and told stories about Adam. They burned some of his journals, sending the words skyward. That night several of his friends stayed together, drinking and remembering. The next day they all went skiing.

  More than a year later, Cunningham still misses his friend terribly, but he sees the world differently these days. Heading into challenging backcountry is no longer like crossing into hostile terrain. It’s a homecoming. Adam taught him this. “Home is everywhere,” he says. “Home is in the mountains.”

  Adam’s many friends have rallied behind Judy and Steve. Judy posts videos and pictures on Adam’s Facebook page, including pictures of her own hikes. Everyone comments. The couple has dozens of children now.

  On a warm cloudless weekend last August, Judy and Steve removed some of the last of their son’s ashes from the wooden box. They headed to Mount Adams, accompanied by a few of his friends, just as former girlfriend Andrews, Hummel, and others had accompanied them to other peaks earlier in the summer. They hiked to a spot where the family had camped when Adam was a boy. There in the mountains, the parents put their son to rest where he had always felt most at ease.