by Tom Ryan
But being different from them didn’t mean I wanted to be distant from them. To the contrary, I’d always hoped we would all be happy one day, that we could have the family we never had. That’s why I invited David and Eddie for the weekend. I knew they liked the mountains of New Hampshire, and I figured they’d enjoy the tranquillity of Vermont as well. I was actually surprised when they accepted my invitation.
It was important to me to try to take another stab at being close with them, but I also wanted to thank them for taking care of our father. Out of the nine of us, they were the only two who had stayed behind in Medway, and they looked in on my father every day as he aged.
David was the responsible one. He would mop the floor, clean the toilet, fix things that were broken, regrout the tile around the tub, and do minor plumbing. He did my father’s taxes and helped him with his checkbook. I found this wildly ironic, since while my father often looked at the whole lot of us as if we were thieves trying to cheat him out of something, he trusted David least of all. And yet when my father’s mind started to go and he couldn’t keep track of his finances, it was always David who straightened everything out.
During David’s visits the two of them had little to speak about. But then again, David had picked up my father’s stoic approach to all things family. After they offered each other a bit of fractured small talk, grunts, and nods of the head, David would go home to his wife for more of the same.
Eddie was not gifted like David when it came to fixing things, but he was there for my father in other ways. He made sure Dad was taking all his medicines and kept his numerous doctors’ appointments organized. He worked in special education, and while he felt uncomfortable interacting with other adults, he was extremely gifted with troubled children. Some colleagues referred to him with reverence as a “child whisperer.” I think that’s why he got along with my father better than any of the rest of us did. He had the patience of Job and treated my father with the same kindness he extended to the children he worked with.
I wasn’t sure what I expected when Eddie and David joined Atticus and me at the Vermont farmhouse. I suppose part of me was longing for the closeness I’d always hungered for, but the years had taught me better.
It turned out to be the right thing to do. We walked, talked, and laughed. Although when I say we talked, I mean we made small talk, but to me even that was a victory of sorts. There was no talk of relationships or love or of dreams achieved or deferred. It was mostly talking about what we always talked about—family. We retold many of the same old tales. I think our favorite time of each day was sitting out on the back deck in silence watching the sun drop behind the western hills. It was not the same uncomfortable silence we often shared as a family, but rather a silence blessed by nature, one that perhaps said, This is as good as it gets for us.
Although there were no groundbreaking conversations, I enjoyed that weekend more than any other time I’d spent with family. We went out to eat, explored the area, and drove the auto road up the highest mountain in Vermont—Mount Mansfield. When the road ended, the four of us got out and walked to the top.
It was a postcard-pretty day, and we lounged on the summit rocks and looked down at the pastoral countryside, and once again we were silent. But we were also content.
Something happened that day up there on the mountaintop. None of us mentioned it, but there was a newfound closeness, and we made plans to come back. When we did, there were even more of us. Seven of Jack and Isabel Ryan’s children gathered for a weekend in Stowe, following up our first family reunion in more than fifteen years back in Medway. It was a sight I thought I’d never see.
It was those two visits to Vermont and our trip up Mount Mansfield that led David to invite Eddie, Atticus, me, and our brother Jeff to join him on a hike up Mount Garfield in New Hampshire.
David had decided to climb all the White Mountains of New Hampshire that were over four thousand feet high. There are forty-eight of them, and he was doing two or three a year. Once he’d climbed them all, he would be eligible to become a member of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Four Thousand Footer Club and he’d receive a patch and a scroll. I’d never heard of the club but accepted the invitation in the spirit of sharing another weekend with my brothers.
By this time Atticus was two and a half years old, and I had lost seventy-five pounds. I was still big, but nowhere near as large as I’d been. We had never climbed a mountain, and I knew there was a big difference between driving up the auto road on Mount Mansfield, then walking the short distance to the summit, and doing a ten-mile hike up a four-thousand-footer. It wasn’t that I doubted whether or not Atticus or I could do it; I just wasn’t sure we’d be able to keep up with my three brothers, who had all hiked through the years.
In a way, that trip to New Hampshire was to be a homecoming for me. The White Mountains were part of my past, and we considered them to be our father’s mountains. He took us on many vacations, but we spent most of our time up in the Whites. He loved it there, and it is the only place I can remember him being happy and peaceful. They brought out the best in him, which made them special to us as well. We’d camped by the streams in the shadowy valleys at the foot of the great mountains so often that we came to know their lore and their history.
They were America’s first great peaks. Long before the Rockies were discovered by Europeans, Americans knew about the magnificence of the White Mountains. They were the home to the Abenaki Indians, who looked upon the region as a sacred place and believed that the mountaintops were the home of the great spirits, especially the mountain they called Agiocochook. When settlers came upon the Whites, they built roads and homesteads, which grew into villages, and they began climbing the peaks.
The 1800s became known as the century of the White Mountain painters, when approximately four hundred renowned artists came to New Hampshire to capture the grandeur and share it with the world. At the same time, writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson visited and wrote about their experiences and furthered many of the existing legends. What people saw in the paintings and read in the books caused them to flock to the mountains from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Railroads were built to accommodate the travelers. So were grand hotels. The golden age of White Mountain tourism had begun, and it led P. T. Barnum to refer to the Whites as “the second-greatest show on earth.”
Toward the end of the 1800s, lumber barons saw the mountains as a way to make money, and they set about clear-cutting much of the land. They laid train tracks into every remote nook and cranny, and before long, sparks flew, fires started, and much of the once-pristine forest turned into a wasteland. But thanks in part to the love affair people had with the White Mountains, the Weeks Act was passed in Washington in the early 1900s. The trend of the government selling off forests was reversed in the name of the environment, and the land was returned to the people. Trees began to grow again, and the splendor of the mountains returned, but by this time the heyday had ended, because people were looking to the much higher Rocky Mountains for beautiful landscapes, and the advent of the automobile meant that tourists no longer had to go just where the trains took them. That put an end to all but a few of the grand hotels that had sprung up in the area.
By the time my father started taking us to the mountains, the glory days of the place had long passed, but not the brilliance. Whenever we were there, it felt as though the land had never been touched, and we could imagine what the first explorers must have felt like.
We returned often and got to know the three great notches that ran north to south. In the east was Pinkham, in the middle was Crawford, and in the west was Franconia. We stayed in Franconia Notch. We set up our trailer deep in the folds of the notch, often near a stream at one of the area’s campgrounds. By day we explored the woods, going on small hikes. As evening descended, we’d sit around the campfire, and the mountains seemed to spring
to life in the darkness. It was a magical time for us, made even more so by the transformation in my father. I don’t have many great memories of my early years, but those I do have bring me back to the White Mountains.
When my father and I went to war with each other, I left behind the mountains of my childhood, just as I left him behind. But my brothers didn’t. They still often came north, as they’d always done. And now I was being invited to return. It took all of one night in a small cabin along the Pemigewasset River at the southern end of Franconia Notch for me to remember the magic of long ago. As soon as the sun set and the moon appeared, I could feel the mountains come to life, just as they had when I was young. It was September, and the days were warm and the nights were cool, and we slept well. Early the next morning, David, Eddie, Jeff, Atticus, and I left the safety of our cars behind and marched single file into the thick, dark woods. The brisk, chilly morning gave way to a humid and hot day, and the air turned still and oppressive. For the next three hours, we stumbled, staggered, and swore our way up the back of the mountain. There were no views, but there were plenty of other things to keep us occupied: mosquitoes, hearts pounding like never before, back pain that felt as if someone was punching me in the kidneys, and the occasional leg cramp. Our clothes were soaked with sweat and stained with dried salt. From time to time, we’d hold on to a tree for balance or to catch our breath. We gulped water and Gatorade as if we were dying of thirst. We were a pitiful group, looking like four middle-aged and out-of-shape men who didn’t belong in the woods. And because we were four men who were not used to being together, there wasn’t much said.
Every now and then, someone would ask, “How much longer to the top?”
David, who had read the guidebook, would typically give the answer and reveal to us that we were barely halfway up the mountain, or two-thirds of the way, or that we still had a mile to go.
We stopped often and drank and stood breathless. Occasionally someone would joke about how sore he was, or about old age or the lack of views through the trees. And yet while the dearth of conversation might have seemed strange to another group of brothers, it was not unlike those sunsets on the deck back in Vermont: This is as good as it gets for us. I mean that not as a bad thing but as a good thing. For as the youngest and the one who saw his family disappear before his eyes and always longed to share something—anything—with them, those breathless gasps, occasional swears, and uncomfortable jokes were like gold to me. It didn’t matter that we all looked and felt like hell; we were together for a change.
Atticus, on the other hand, looked great. It was as if he were made for the mountains. Unlike other dogs, who run back and forth and do three times the mileage of their human companions or go crashing into the woods on either side of the trail in search of wildlife, Atticus walked purposefully, staying on the trail, and kept a slow but steady pace. He seemed part mountain goat as he hopped from rock to rock with ease. Occasionally we’d come to a steep section of trail and I’d ready myself to help him, but when I looked up, he’d somehow managed to do it himself.
Most noticeable was how he kept a constant eye on me. This was new territory for the two of us, but all was well with his world so long as we were together. From the very first day we met, he believed it was his job to look after me, and he took it seriously—whether we were in city hall or on top of a mountain.
When at last we reached a sign that said we only had two-tenths of a mile to go, we took a break and then sputtered up a steep, craggy chute. There was more sweating, swearing, and gasping for breath. During that torturous last pitch, I thought for sure I was going to die of a heart attack. The trail thankfully leveled out, and I staggered to an opening in the brush and put my hands on my knees to rest. When I caught my breath and was able to look up, I saw Atticus sitting with his back to me, staring off into the distance. I followed his gaze and was immediately rendered speechless by the stunning serrated edge of the mountains of Franconia Ridge. They looked so close that I felt I could reach right out and touch them. My aches and pains, thirst and exhaustion evaporated, and my life changed in an instant. I’d never realized that such places existed in this world, other than in movies, never mind just two hours away from the pretty redbrick downtown of Newburyport. When we came to the mountains as children, we were but windshield tourists. We went where the road took us, and to the various tourist attractions. We’d never seen anything as wild as the view we had off the edge of Garfield.
Another hiker once wrote something that sums up the experience of that day. But he was writing about poetry, not mountains. That hiker was Robert Frost, and he lived in and explored the White Mountains. He wrote, “Permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It has not to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight we never could forget it.”
I knew the moment I looked from Atticus to the surrounding mountains that I’d never forget that day. My life had changed.
Throughout the cold, dark months of the autumn and winter, I often returned to Mount Garfield. But it was always in a daydream or when I was sleeping. Two things stayed with me about that day. The first was how I saw Atticus sitting calmly casting his eyes out to take in the view. “He’s like a little Buddha,” said a woman who arrived on the summit just after we did. The second was how I knew we wouldn’t be going back to Vermont. We’d graduated to a new place.
During our next visit to see John Allison and DeeDee McCarty at John Farley Clothiers, I couldn’t wait to tell them about our hike up Garfield, and they were thrilled for Atticus and me. They were even more excited when I told them that when the snow melted in the spring he and I would return and begin climbing the four-thousand-footers. As fate would have it, DeeDee had already hiked eleven of the mountains and had a plan to finish the entire list within the next two years. She invited us to join her, and I happily accepted. A few weeks later, DeeDee introduced me to a book by Steve Smith and Mike Dickerman, The 4000-Footers of the White Mountains, a guidebook that covered the various routes up each of the forty-eight. Like Atticus, it would become my constant companion, and I found myself thumbing through its pages repeatedly.
I’d never heard of most of the mountains listed in the book, and thinking back to that September day on Garfield, I couldn’t help but wonder about the exotic places we’d see in the coming months. At night, when I was sitting in a meeting at city hall, instead of watching the evening unfold, I often had my nose buried in the Smith and Dickerman book. It became dog-eared, and my yellow highlighter stained its pages, and I wrote notes in the margins in blue ink. I wondered how the two of us would possibly make it up those mountains. There were those that reached high above tree line to the alpine zone and others that were located deep in the wilderness, requiring an eighteen-mile round-trip. There would be streams to cross, rock slides to scale, ledges to maneuver, and weather to contend with.
It would not be easy for a little dog who didn’t like getting wet and a man who so feared heights I got dizzy standing on a stepladder to change a lightbulb. However, none of that mattered to me. It was a curious thing. We were being called to the mountains, and I had no doubt we’d somehow find a way to climb them all.
When the snows finally melted in late May, we started our quest in earnest. DeeDee, Atticus, and I climbed Mount Hale, our first four-thousand-footer of the year. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Hale was a good peak to begin on. It was considered easy. The route to the top was just over two miles, and the elevation gain was two thousand feet. According to the Smith and Dickerman book and the Appalachian Mountain Club’s AMC White Mountain Guide, which was also edited by Steve Smith, an elevation gain of a thousand feet per mile is considered a steep climb, and we were climbing two thousand feet in two miles. By the time we’d made it up and down the mountain, my body felt it, but I was so enthralled at having climbed our first peak of the year that I couldn’t wait for the next one.
/> The following weekend was Memorial Day, and Atticus and I went north and hiked for three days, climbing peaks DeeDee had already done so that we could catch up to her. On the first day, we climbed Mount Tecumseh. Like Hale, it was considered one of the easier peaks. On the second day, we climbed Cannon Mountain, another short hike. Our final hike of the weekend took us to the summits of Osceola and East Osceola.
When I returned to Newburyport, I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm, nor could I wait to tell DeeDee what we’d done. The plan had always been for Atticus and me to catch up to DeeDee and then hike the rest of the forty-eight with her over the next two summers. But instead of just catch up, we passed right by and kept going. I just couldn’t help myself. (We did end up hiking with her a few more times and also with my brothers three more times as well. However, after those first three weeks, it was mostly just Atticus and me.)
Something was happening to the two of us in the mountains, and we were about to see the world in an entirely different way.
4
A Gift
We all have a bit of Adam and Eve in us. Sooner or later we come to a point in our youth when we lose our innocence and it feels like we’ve been kicked out of the Garden. Whether we admit it or not, all of us want to make our way back home to that time again. But innocence lost is difficult to find. Nevertheless, we look for it. We long for it, dream of it, and are haunted by it. Occasionally we glimpse it again, perhaps in the laughter of a child, the first snowfall of the holiday season, or when we hold a little puppy in our arms. And then in a flash it vanishes and we miss it all the more. But I’d like to think that if we can get our lives just right and become who we were always supposed to be—if we become the people we dreamed of being when we were young and pure and innocent, then and only then do we find our way home again. I don’t think many make it. There are just too many distractions and obstacles. Yet I’ve come to believe that the worst we can do is to give up looking for it.
