Following Atticus

by Tom Ryan

  Following Atticus

  Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

  Tom Ryan

  Dedication

  For R.R.—always in my heart

  Epigraph

  “There’s no sense in going further—it’s the edge of cultivation,”

  So they said, and I believed it . . .

  Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes

  On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated—so:

  “Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—

  Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE EXPLORER”

  We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Innocence Lost, Innocence Found

  1

  A Door Opens

  2

  “Carry Him Everywhere You Go”

  3

  Big Changes

  4

  A Gift

  5

  “People Die Up There in the Winter”

  6

  For the Kids

  7

  The Greatest Quest

  8

  The Little Giant

  9

  Stars to Light the Way

  10

  The M. Is Important

  11

  “Our Faith Comes in Moments . . .”

  12

  Atticus in Disguise

  13

  The Spell of Agiocochook

  14

  Five Astounding Days

  15

  “Thank You, Friend”

  Part II

  Light over Dark

  16

  A Heartrending Turn of Events

  17

  “I’m Not Leaving Him Alone”

  18

  The Friends of Atticus

  19

  Soul Work

  20

  Bread Crumbs

  21

  Dinner with Frank Capra

  22

  The Promise

  Part III

  Full Circle

  23

  A New Quest

  24

  The Witch

  25

  Magic Is Where You Find It

  26

  Death on Franconia Ridge

  27

  My Last Letter Home

  28

  Those Eyes, Those Beautiful Eyes

  29

  Mount Washington

  30

  Good-bye

  31

  Heartache

  32

  The Great Art of Sauntering

  33

  Paige

  34

  Home

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  October 8, 2006

  Dear Dad,

  I have a new favorite photo. I took it on Saturday while walking down the Polecat Ski Trail on Wildcat Mountain.

  Off in the distance—stately, proud, and jagged—stands the gigantic duo of Mount Adams and Mount Madison. Sloping down from their craggy summits and from the low shoulder of Mount Washington spreads an infinite army of trees stationed by rank. Highest are the evergreens, those hardy trees that never change throughout the seasons. They extend up to tree line, just below the summits, and slope downward until they mingle with the deciduous trees in their October war paint. An infantry of red, orange, and yellow that rolls forward like a great wave from an ocean swell. By the colors and the undulating hills at the foot of the mountains, you can almost see the trees pulsing, like an army ready to charge into battle.

  This army flows ever onward toward the camera until it forms a battle line both tense and even, ready for the order from high above to advance.

  In front of the trees there is a field—a mixture of faded yellow and green, flattened through the years, as if many battles have taken place there. In the foreground, separated from the front lines by yards of grass, sitting with his back to the camera, is a small, solitary figure looking at the legions of trees as they stretch on mile after mile.

  The lone figure sits erect, ready for the wave to break, ready for whatever the world is about to unleash upon him. He is serene (or perhaps resigned to the coming test), humble and undaunted because he has faith that he will find a way.

  He is Frodo Baggins; he is Don Quixote; he is Huck Finn. He is every unlikely hero who ever took a step out the door and found himself swept up in adventure.

  Looking at the photo, I think of what the poet William Irwin Thompson wrote: “When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.”

  For there he sits, alone in that field, facing an edge, facing a frontier, facing a wilderness that dwarfs him. And yet he sits. Facing it. Not turning away. Not running away.

  The little fellow in the photograph is my hiking partner, Atticus M. Finch, named for yet another humble and unlikely literary hero.

  Since May 21 of last year, he has been kind enough to put up with me as I’ve flung the two of us into our mountain adventures. Up until then we weren’t all that active. We mostly sat around Newburyport. We took little walks in the woods or on the beach, but never too far because I was too heavy and out of shape. Then, last year, after being introduced to the four-thousand-footers, we immediately fell head over heels for them and hiked all forty-eight peaks in eleven weeks. We so rushed through them all that I decided to do them again throughout this spring, summer, and fall—and this time we took our time to enjoy them more.

  Watching Atticus gazing upon those trees was when I started to celebrate this round of the forty-eight, but more than that I celebrated this curious little dog. How lucky I am to have him as a hiking partner. Come wind, sun, snow, or rain he has been with me every step of the way. Most of the time it’s just the two of us, and our tight bond has grown even stronger.

  When I saw him sitting, facing that wilderness, I thought of all those unlikely heroes in literature who have faced unimagined challenges and come out seasoned and strangely different. In the end they became more than they’d ever been, and you just knew that through sadness and joy, through good days and bad, no matter what happened next, after the story ended and they walked off into the sunset, they could handle all the trials and tribulations that life had in store for them. But while knowing that, I also knew the sadness that comes with the closing of a book, in saying good-bye to my favorite characters. I often mourn the end of an adventure for that very reason. I have come to judge a good story as one that makes me feel as if I’m losing a friend when I read the final page, close the book, and put it down for the last time.

  Luckily for me, this is not the end of a book but merely a chapter. Atticus and I have many adventures to go before our days are done. As a matter
of fact, the next one starts in just a couple of months, and that will be a story unto itself, I’m sure.

  While walking farther down the ski slope through the shaded green grass and between sun-soaked golden trees, I took note of everything I was feeling, absorbed the beauty like a sponge, and looked upon Atticus with the same wonder I have for these mountains and for the trees and for the wind that knows them both. In watching him bounce down the slope in his carefree style, I smiled. How could I not?

  Looking at this little dog, who weighs twenty pounds after a good meal, I find myself loving him as much as I do because, like all those unlikely literary heroes, there’s more to him than meets the eye. And I am lucky enough to count him not only as a hiking partner but also a friend.

  There are some days that are perfect, not so much for what is accomplished as for what is felt and will always be remembered. Yesterday was one of those perfect days, when two friends finished one chapter and went off in search of another.

  Love,

  Tom

  Part I

  Innocence Lost, Innocence Found

  May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

  —EDWARD ABBEY

  1

  A Door Opens

  I led a most unusual life. Some would even say it was exciting. I was the editor, publisher, and lone employee of my own newspaper. In it I chronicled the life and times of Newburyport, a small city on the North Shore of Massachusetts. I was poor but influential, happy but stressed, fulfilled in my work but not in my life. I was making a difference, but at the same time I felt like there was something missing.

  Most of my nights were spent covering meetings at city hall, and after those meetings I’d get the stories behind the stories when I’d chat with city officials for hours on end. I filled my days conversing with characters from all walks of life and listening as they told me the secrets of Newburyport. In a city of seventeen thousand, everyone had a story to tell—and typically several more about their neighbors. Every two weeks my paper hit the streets filled with those stories, and nearly every issue sold out. It was a must-read, for as the typical Newburyporter saw it, the world revolved around our little city where the Merrimack River meets the Atlantic Ocean.

  I stayed up late at night and got up early each morning. There was no need for an alarm clock, however. I lived alone on the third floor of the old Grand Army Building in the heart of the downtown, and I slept on a couch. The sun rose out of the Atlantic, and daybreak spread across Plum Island, raced along the Merrimack, touched down on Joppa Flats, cast its early-morning shadows through the tightly knit historic neighborhoods of the South End, and when it reached the redbrick buildings in the downtown, it set them ablaze. The blinding orange glow reflected off that canyon of brick into my large, west-facing windows and told me it was time to get up.

  But Tuesdays were different, especially in winter, when the days were shorter and the early mornings darker. I’d bolt upright, awakened by the cacophony of the trash truck making its way up State Street. The whine of the gears, the squeal of the breaks, the crash of garbage dumped into the truck, the compressor’s heavy metallic thud. I’d rush out of bed, grab my trash, hurtle down two flights of stairs, and hope to beat the truck to the curb outside my back door on Charter Street. For five years I raced that trash truck, sometimes winning, sometimes not.

  I never put my garbage out on Monday night the way my neighbors did. I was warned not to. This was Newburyport, after all, a city with long-held secrets. For as postcard-pretty as it was, it had a charmingly sinister side. Since I dealt in secrets, and those who shared them, I could not be too careful. But after five years I was tired of being paranoid and tired of racing the trash truck. One Monday night I put out four bags of trash. As fate would have it, it was the night my trash disappeared. It was the night my greatest adventure would begin.

  My paper was called the Undertoad. The title came from John Irving’s The World According to Garp: a reminder that there’s always something lurking, beneath even the smoothest surface. It wasn’t a typical name for a newspaper, but Newburyport was not your typical city. It was Norman Rockwell meets Alfred Hitchcock. It was townies and newcomers, straights and gays. It was old Yankees and the Irish and the Greeks. It was a city divided many times over.

  Newburyport was the home of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who sharpened his pen locally before taking on slavery on the national stage with his paper the Liberator. It was the home of Andrew J. “Bossy” Gillis, the on-again, off-again bad-boy mayor from the wrong side of the tracks who was as colorful a political character as any this nation has ever seen. Bossy published his own paper to take on his political foes. He called it the Asbestos, because “it was too hot to handle.” Newburyport was the home of John P. Marquand, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who used the local gentry in many of his works. And for nearly a decade during the 1930s and ’40s, Newburyport, with its rigid, antiquated class structure, was also the home of William Lloyd Warner, a Chicago anthropologist and sociologist, and his team of thirty researchers. Their study of Newburyport, Yankee City, is perhaps the longest-running study ever done of an American city.

  I was compared to all of them, but most often I was considered a cross between Garrison and Gillis. As humbling as this was, I admitted to being more Gillis than Garrison. In the Newburyport I knew, you had to be a bit of a brawler if you were going to be writing about scoundrels. In my debut issue of the ’Toad, I wrote about my desire to “shine light in the dark places, weed the garden, and poison the poisoners.” But I was no mere muckraker; I was a romantic who regularly invoked the words of Emerson, Thoreau, and other existentialists. I uncovered the dirt, but I also had high hopes for where the city could go and what it could be.

  Once, when a new reporter came to work for the Newburyport Daily News, she sought me out, even though I was the competition, and asked, “So what’s it like here?”

  “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” I told her.

  She wasn’t impressed. “I hear the same thing about every town I go to.”

  A year later she left the paper to work for a Boston television station. I asked her, “So what was it like?”

  “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen!”

  The city was filled with characters and character. It had a history of fishing, then of shipbuilding and shipping, then of textile mills and shoe factories. In the fifties and sixties, after the mills and factories folded or moved elsewhere, Newburyport was left to rot. The most heavy-handed politician in town at the time led the charge to demolish the great Federal-style buildings of the downtown and replace them with strip malls and parking lots. A group of citizens came together, hired an architect to show what the downtown could look like if it were saved, and went to court to stop the demolition. They won, and Newburyport became the first city in the country to use HUD money to restore instead of demolish a blighted downtown. This brought about a great restoration, but to many of the locals it brought about an even greater bitterness. For once newcomers saw how beautiful a place it was, they started moving in, and gentrification washed away much of the old and the familiar. Locals no longer saw it as their city and bemoaned the loss of the stores they’d grown up with as one by one they were replaced by upscale boutiques.

  Through all its changes, the one constant in Newburyport was the rough-and-tumble political scene. Politics was king and, more often than not, dirty. Those who had power did whatever they had to do to hold on to it. It wasn’t just native against newcomer; it was also native against native. Some called the town “Cannibal City.” Others referred to the locals as crabs in a bucket—when one climbs up, the others try to pull him down. It was full of incest and infighting at their most vicious—and about the most wonderful place in the world for a new writer.

  I’d arrived on the scene during a
perfect political storm. Power had been wrested from the good-old-boy network by a mayor who had been in the city for only three years. To add insult to injury, it just so happened that this newcomer was also a woman and a lesbian. She was a breath of fresh air for a stuffy provincial city that took itself far too seriously. The mayor was coming to the end of her first two-year term, and the good old boys not only wanted to drive her from the corner office, they wanted her out of town.

  I had no thought of getting involved in politics or starting a newspaper. But I was so shocked by the way they bullied this young mayor, mostly with rumor and innuendo, that I couldn’t help myself, and I jumped into the fray. I wrote letters to the editor of the daily and weekly papers. Without realizing it, I was following in the footsteps of Garrison and Gillis by naming names, something not typically done in Newburyport. In a wild and raucous election, the incumbent won a close battle against a former mayor who had served five straight terms long before. Although I was new to town, my letters were credited with helping bring about the victory. A year later the Undertoad was born, and it wasn’t long before the Boston Globe referred to my paper as “the insider’s guide to the underside of Newburyport.”

  Depending on where you stood in town, whom you were related to or were friends with, I was either a muckraker or a reformer. I took on the good old boys, refused to worship the long-existing sacred cows that the Daily News protected, and was helped in part because I didn’t know the first thing about journalism. Instead I paid more attention to what ordinary people had to say and thought about what I didn’t like about newspapers and then did just the opposite. My headlines were sensational and colorful but factual. My reporting was intimate and included as many names in each issue as possible. I realized that people didn’t care too much about organizations or city boards because they couldn’t relate to them. But in a small city where everyone knew your name, they could relate to a city official they saw at the health club, who was the coach of their son’s Little League team, or who managed a local restaurant. Articles ran the gamut of emotions.