The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  “Fred was blackballed by the climbing community,” says Bertulis. “There had been a tragedy while he was climbing in the Himalayas. Beckey’s tentmate got edema and couldn’t move.… In the same period, a man died climbing with Beckey in the Cascades. They were descending at night, and the man went the wrong way through the brush off Mount Baring and fell off a cliff. The climbing establishment never forgave Beckey. There was a stigma attached to him, perhaps it was envy. He had a reputation for being reckless, an undeserved reputation in my mind. But he was the most qualified mountaineer in America for that 1963 Everest trip.”

  Later, some members from the 1963 party conceded that Beckey was in a league of his own, a climber of extraordinary talent. But they said his personality—blunt, smart-ass, independent—was ill suited to a three-month expedition where teamwork and an even temperament were paramount concerns. Beckey himself had too much pride to ask for a spot, and he was never good at self-promotion, a virtual requirement for world-class athletes.

  Beckey increased his pace in the 1960s, a time when rock-climbing developed as the new athletic frontier. More and more, younger climbers who’d heard about his spider qualities on rock and his ribald tales at night, sought him out. Among a circle of outdoor athletes, he obtained celebrity status, with one big difference: Beckey was always broke. But his sea-level charms could work wonders, often making up for what he lacked in money. Bertulis remembers numerous times when he and Beckey would descend into alpine towns, exhausted, and Beckey would want to go out. A few hours later he would return, arm in arm with the best-looking woman in the valley. He never married.

  “Fred married the mountains,” says Bertulis. “So, consequently, he looks at these peaks as his children. That’s his life. That’s all he’s got. He’s been very pure in that regard. He never compromised himself. Never endorsed Camel cigarettes or something like that. Never commercialized himself. As a result, he’s always had to live hand to mouth.”

  Though Beckey has not slowed down, Bertulis has noticed one significant change in his friend. “For the first time in his life, he’s thinking about his own mortality. He realizes his legs will not carry him forever.”

  In the Lost World Plateau, an attic of Beckey’s past, I’m searching for clues to the young man. One look at Nixon’s Nose, a protrusion of sloping granite high on Prusik Peak, tells me more about Beckey than anything he’s written. To be intimate with that rock is to be divorced from the laws of physics. The dozens of lakes settled in the granite bowls above seven thousand feet here are known as the Enchantments; in mythological spirit, the landmarks were given such names as Excalibur Rock, Valhalla Cirque, Grail Tarn, Lake Viviane, Rune Tarn, Talisman, Valkyrie. Larch trees, a conifer which loses its needles after a show of gold, surround the lakes. The recipe that produced this beauty is unduplicated in the Cascades. I had to wait several weeks to get my permit from the Forest Service to enter this realm, now protected as the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area. In this waistband of mountain country, thirty miles north to south, are 692 lakes. In Beckey’s heyday, he could run naked for a week in midsummer and bump into more goats than people. Now, the Enchantments have more company than they can accommodate and still live up to their name. As Winthrop urged in the last century, the captive of the city has discovered the freedom of the high country. And while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect. Since the mid-1960s, the government has concentrated on road building for timber companies, largely ignoring the trail system built by Depression-era city workers.

  Beckey first came to the Enchantments in 1948, intending to climb and name the unknown high points on the map above the apple orchards of the Wenatchee Valley. Like a sybarite stumbling into a convent, Beckey found himself surrounded by challenge. Traveling light as usual, he arranged for a crop-duster airplane to drop several weeks’ worth of supplies to his camp. Flying low over the high rock, the plane crashed into boulders, but the pilot lived, and the supplies were salvaged.

  I envy Beckey now, camped at Gnome Tarn under Prusik Peak. With the completion of the polar expeditions, discovery of the unknown corners of the planet became so much harder. Deep sea and outer space were considered the only places left, and to get Out There or Underwater required considerable technological help. Beckey, pushing the limits of a creature without hoofs or wings or sealed transport, found new land in his own backyard. When he reached the Lost World Plateau and set up camp in the Enchantments, he looked at a ridge where only eagles and hawks had perched, named it the Nightmare Needles, then climbed most of the serrated rock. He crawled up Nixon’s Nose, up to the top of Prusik Peak, walked to the edge of Little Annapurna to see the sun set behind Mount Stuart, and scurried for handholds on The Temple.

  Ira Spring, a photographer who has spent his life taking pictures of the Cascades, went into the Enchantments with Beckey in the 1940s and came out amazed at what he had seen.

  “He exists on a different plane,” says Spring. “Some of those climbs in there were just out of this world. Fred had taken lots of abuse because no one could believe he had done all these summits as fast as he said. I was impressed beyond description. But after that, I was the only one still impressed. He was written off as too controversial.” Beckey refused to mend his ways with the Northwest climbing establishment. He would attend the rare slide show or annual meeting, but all the rock talk would eventually bore him.

  Spring, holding rope to belay Beckey up the rock of the Enchantment Basin, heard nonstop prattle about women. “Girls, girls, girls, that’s all he ever talked about. After a while I just shut up and listened to him. It made for interesting listening.”

  Now in his seventies, Ira Spring limits himself to hiking in place of the climbs of his youth. He can’t understand why Beckey is not similarly bound by the handicaps of age. “Where does he get the energy? He looks like he couldn’t walk across the street.”

  When it’s time to leave the Enchantments, I scramble up to the edge of the Nightmare Needles as far as my ability will take me, a thousand feet or so below the Beckey threshold. I find a porch of salt-and-pepper granite and settle in for lunch. It’s hot; the sun east of the Cascade Crest is not the same star that burns in the soggy west side. I slice a bagel open and layer it with cheese and salami. Leaning against the rock, the Wenatchee Valley to the east, I hear voices—two men and a woman, tied to each other in the upper reaches of the Nightmare Needles. They speak the same language I heard in the glacier bowl of the Nooksack Cirque: “Beckey says …”

  Beckey lives. There is a voice to the legend. Back from the Coast Range, he says he’s ready to meet me. I can barely hear him above an electric buzz on the phone line.

  “What’s that noise?” I ask him.

  “I’m shaving,” he says. “Don’t like to waste any time in the morning.”

  He explains that he’s chained to a desk in the Oregon Historical Society office, researching a book on the history of the Cascades. Can I meet him in Portland?

  Crossing the Columbia into Oregon, where the Cascades are smoother, smaller and more rounded than the whitecapped ice fangs of the north, I have my doubts whether Beckey will actually show up; his reputation is that of a phantom, and an unpredictable one at that. We’re supposed to meet at a diner on the shore of the Willamette River, Beckey’s kind of place—“gets pretty wild after a while.” I wait. No Beckey. After an hour, I’m ready to go, convinced I’ve been stood up. Then—Beckey.

  He seems nervous and jittery, as Bertulis has described him whenever he’s stuck at sea level, away from the familiar music of a storm and the living room under the sky. He walks in a stiff manner, back upright, about six feet tall. There is not an ounce of fat on him that I can see. Beckey’s sandy hair is thinning on top, and his face is deeply lined, more from the sun than worry. He has a sort of hound-dog, wounded look to him until he smiles, and the accordion of high-altitude-baked skin slides back. His voice is hardly that
of a sixty-five-year-old man; rather, it sounds like someone in his twenties. I think of all those young, glossy-faced ski bums and climbers I’ve met in the mountains, people who never have to go home on Monday morning. They’re not supposed to age. Beckey’s index finger on one hand is bent at a right angle, hanging like a useless appendage evolving its way out of the species. I ask him about the finger, and he looks at it as if for the first time.

  “I don’t know what the hell happened to that,” he says. “Guess I’ll have to get it looked at. That’ll cost me.”

  Beckey gives the impression that he never planned anything in his entire life, except perhaps the next climb. Adventure drew him to the outdoors, the call of the unknown, he explains in short, precise sentences similar to the dry prose of his alpine guidebooks. He rarely talks about beauty in the mountains. His concerns are crustal fragments, thrust faults, gneiss. I wonder if the man has gone cold inside from all those years outside.

  Talking about his youth, Beckey says he was always hyper. When he realized his limbs could carry him to sights unseen by other humans, he was hooked. It was all so easy, crawling up rock chimneys, dangling across faces with eight thousand feet of exposure, slogging through brush. What was hard was the sea-level stuff. Bringing a body back from a weekend trip, knowing the deceased had stepped one way and fallen to his death, while Beckey had stepped the other and come home unscathed—how do you explain that? In the 1940s there had been an avalanche on Mount Waddington, in British Columbia, resulting in the death of a man from a Harvard team guided by Beckey. In the 1950s, a companion fell to his death while descending Mount Baring northeast of Seattle. And then there was the Himalayan accident, an episode still cloaked in mystery. Thinking about these lost companions, Beckey rubs his face. Like most mountaineers, he has a logical explanation for what happened; it’s the only way to keep climbing.

  Beckey says he wanted to be a cartographer, but most of the jobs for mapmakers in the 1940s were with the federal government in Washington, D.C., crawling up the walls of the bureaucracy instead of the flanks of the North Cascades. “I decided that was no man’s land—too hot, too flat, full of ugly women.” He didn’t care that there was little glamour or career satisfaction in driving a delivery truck. “It was no-brain work. I liked that, because I spent all my mental time thinking about girls and mountains.”

  He talks about Liberty Bell, perhaps the best-known climber’s peak in the North Cascades. Beckey named the true summit—it had been misplaced on a neighboring rock tower—and was the first to climb it, in 1946. Today, alpinists come from all over the world to retrace Beckey’s route up the pastel tower of Liberty Bell. It broke his heart to see the east-west highway carved through the mountains in 1972. He went back to Liberty Bell this summer, climbing familiar rock while tourists stared from a parking lot nearby, off the North Cascades Highway. He was like the aging Buffalo Bill performing the tricks of the Old West in a circus ring. Civilization, he feels, has crowded out the remaining wild country. A person has to go deep into Alaska, or the Yukon, to find a place to get lost. Off-road vehicles, which have been found by federal government studies to disfigure more land in the West than strip mining, are now allowed into many of Beckey’s sacred places. “At least the miners knew what they were doing,” Beckey scowls. “These idiots on dirt bikes and ORVs don’t have any sense of the outdoors or how to treat the land!”

  Oddly, Beckey calls himself a city person, and in that sense he is a Northwest archetype: someone who can tread water in the overcrowded urban pool knowing an ocean of freedom is only an hour away. But he feels cornered.

  “The frontier is gone,” says the last of the frontier explorers. “We’ve hit the Pacific Ocean and we’re backed up. There isn’t enough rock for everybody who wants to climb.”

  A few routes on a few high rocks in the deep shadows of the North Cascades have been omitted from his alpine guidebook trilogy, by design. Beckey wanted to leave some room, long after he’s gone, for discovery. He says the books have brought him more stress than success. He lives on a few thousand dollars a year in royalties, and worries about the new litigious breed of urban outdoor enthusiasts. Recently, a woman went for a hike in the Cascades, following the directions of a popular trail guide. After she fell off the trail and suffered serious injuries, she sued the author and publisher, claiming they were to blame for her accident. The case was settled out of court. Beckey shivers at such stories. His publisher is always asking him to respond to some missive from a climber who is miffed because the Beckey route up a mountain took much longer than he had indicated in the guidebook.

  Beckey seems little interested in recounting any of his expeditions, with one exception: the first trip to the bright-colored rock country near Liberty Bell, an area he compares to the Dolomites in northern Italy. At the time, Beckey was in love with a dark-haired, athletic woman of Greek background named Vasiliki. He met her while skiing at Stevens Pass and they hiked and played tennis and skied and partied together. She was one of the smartest women Beckey had ever met, fluent in several languages, but also outdoorsy and sure of herself.

  Lovestruck, Beckey went into the uncharted mountains near Liberty Bell in 1952. The beauty of the area, baked in east-crest sun, only heightened his feelings. All around was fine-cut granite tinged in pink and orange. While bivouacked on a frosty evening, he witnessed the loveliest sunset he had ever seen in the mountains; in a lifetime of glorious alpine curtain calls, it was one of the few that ever stood out. He thought of Vasiliki, and then he remembered a quotation from St. Augustine: “There is a morning and an evening in all mortal things.”

  As the expedition continued, Beckey gave immortality to the woman he was stuck on. He named the sharp-edged, glacier-refined, pastel-colored rock of nearly eight thousand feet Vasiliki Tower, the only time he ever christened a peak for an individual woman. He named the surrounding summits for her favorite drinks—Chianti, Burgundy and Pernod spires—and two other high points, Aphrodite Tower and Bacchus Tower. Standing alone, any of those mountains would be far higher than any peak east of the Mississippi. In the North Cascades, they were ignored until Beckey bestowed his names on them. “Imaginative names,” he wrote in a cryptic reference in his guidebook, “sometimes in abuse of such privilege, but adding character to the ridge.”

  Vasiliki was the one woman Beckey wanted to marry. “She would have made a terrific wife,” says Beckey. “I wish I’d done something about it.” She fell in love with somebody else, and prospered in a life where culture and money and civility mattered more than the spontaneous thrills of the climbing bum. Beckey went back to his old ways, seldom mentioning Vasiliki, flirting with death on new rock walls, meeting new women, but he left behind one strong hint of the man’s soul.…

  Near Vasiliki Tower, wildflowers grow from rock slits high above timberline. A hummingbird buzzes overhead, and I see goat prints on a patch of midsummer snow. I’m not wearing a wristwatch, so I can’t set my expectations of the day against the clock. As it has for many late-century citizens of the Information Age, computer time has cut my attention span and reduced my patience. I absorb change in milliseconds. To come up here, looking for the better part of Beckey, I must slow to glacier time. Below, near the edge of a snow lake fast melting to turquoise, are heather fields aflame with color and little bell-cupped flowers. On the other side of the summit is a tarn, newly sprung from the Ice Age. My topographical map, based on a geological survey in the 1950s, shows several small glaciers in the northern basins of these peaks. They are no longer here, victims, perhaps, of the gradual warming of the earth.

  Moving along a summit ridge, I chase Vasiliki Tower. It pokes in and out of view, guarded by the wine spires, never in full profile until I reach a rock summit. And then, there it is, in all its vertical glory, a magnificent hulk of rock and strength. I’ve had conflicting views of Beckey throughout the first months of summer—an egotist, an adventurer, a free spirit, a freeloader, an iconoclast, an athlete without equal, a man full of lif
e, a man full of sadness, doomed to living out his years in high-altitude loneliness on legs that must grow weaker. But in his way, he has fulfilled Winthrop’s prophecy, finding exalted life in the iced pinnacles. Yes, I know it now: feeling the breath of Vasiliki Tower at this range, I can think only one thought of Beckey: God, was he in love.

  Chapter 5

  WITH PEOPLE

  Here we have a city: black and beige and boxy up front, the towers of Chicago or Tokyo planted in soil that once held a glacier and fed a forest. Such bulk, piled on land so rumpled, pinched by an enormous lake on one side and an inland sea on the other. It’s all very new, and all very tentative, for Seattle is a city that can’t decide what to wear. The city has changed its look three times in the last thirty years, and half a dozen times in the last century. The hills that once rose steeply from the central waterfront—they’ve been cut in half. The Black River, a salmon stream that flowed from Lake Washington to the Duwamish and into Puget Sound—it’s gone. And the tidelands which nurtured a bouillabaisse of sea life—buried. Still, the city is not finished; every wave of fresh tenants wants to remodel. So, the flat-topped hills of downtown, minus their natural summits, are sprouting new skyscrapers by the month, and the forested edge of the city is leveled for Weyerhaeuser’s newest product: the instant neighborhood. When humorist Fran Lebowitz recently visited Seattle, she was asked what she thought of the city. “It’s cute,” she replied. “Why are they tearing it down?”

  In the spirit of earlier inhabitants, I approach Seattle by kayak, entering Elliott Bay on a weekday morning; it’s like landing at O’Hare Airport on a kite. Overwhelmed by ship traffic, I hug the shoreline, trailed by sea birds looking for French fries. The wake of a passing container ship, four city blocks in length, gives my small craft a muscular nudge. Rainier floats atop the southern skyline, a hooded cone above the industrial congestion of the Duwamish Valley. There is the Kingdome, a cement cavern without sufficient daylight to adequately support a baseball team, plopped on fill-dirt that used to be tidelands. Farther south is Boeing Field, where the Duwamish River was straightened and its old bed leveled to provide a runway for newly hatched jumbo jets. Towering over downtown is the Columbia Center. A thousand feet high and black as a charred forest, it’s stuffed with enough lawyers to replace nearly half the attorneys in Japan.