by Tom Ryan
With sunshine came warmth. Off went my hat, my gloves, and my heavier layer. I started sweating as if it were summer. Near the last brook crossing, the snow turned into a distasteful mashed-potato consistency and glommed onto the bottoms of my snowshoes. It made for slow and frustrating going, and I repeatedly used my trekking poles to whack the sticky stuff loose. It was a tedious exercise, and it went on for more than a mile until just below the entrance to the alpine zone. There the snow became more consolidated.
I was concerned about the ledge that led above tree line. It can be a challenge for Atticus in certain conditions because it is difficult to scale, but that day the snowpack turned it into a staircase for him, and he climbed up easily. When I emerged above tree line, Atticus was already taking in the astounding views, sitting peacefully on a flat rock. Even though we had many miles to go, I stopped and sat next to him. Together we looked all around us at mountains rising from north, south, east, and west.
On Bondcliff the perspective is different from anyplace else I know. Instead of miles and miles, I could see for mountains and mountains. In contrast I also saw the lingering scars left behind by the logging industry a hundred years before. In the winter when the trees are bare, you can see where primitive roads and railroad tracks once ran for loggers who raped the land without concern for anything but the almighty dollar. It is particularly noticeable on North and South Hancock. That great mass of mountain has so many old roads spiraling up and around it that it looks like faded graffiti or ancient hieroglyphics. For fifty years the mountains had been used and not appreciated.
In spite of those scars, I realized that with all mankind and progress has taken from the natural world, there on the Bonds you can also look around and see where man got it right.
White Mountain painters like Benjamin Champney and Thomas Cole painted the peaks as if they were a link between man and God, often equating mountains to cathedrals and valleys to Eden. Writers such as Hawthorne and Thoreau wrote short stories and essays that brought the legends and the land to life. Poets Lucy Larcom and John Greenleaf Whittier wrote lovingly of what the Creator had brought to New Hampshire.
It was the romantic translations of the landscape from these and other artists that helped fuel the efforts of environmentalists who were disgusted by what lumber barons were doing to a once-beautiful area. In the early 1900s, the Weeks Act was passed, reversing a fifty-year trend of selling off public land in the Whites to individuals for logging, and the land was returned to the public. The results of clear-cutting and fires were reversed and trees began to grow again. And paradise returned.
Sitting with Atticus on Bondcliff, I could see no sign of civilization except for a partial view of the ski slopes on Loon Mountain far off to the south. I got greedy and wished that I didn’t even have to look upon those either. Without them the place would be untouched by the contemporary hand of man, save for the trails we traveled.
The other thing I noticed was how still the air was. There was no wind, no birdsong, no jets dully roaring above. I’d never been to a place so quiet in all my life. It wasn’t eerie, it was serene. It was the calm before yet another coming storm.
On top of Bond, we felt the only breeze we’d get all day. But soon we were warmed by the trip to West Bond. The snow had drifted in places to the point where if I hadn’t known better I would have thought no one had been out there for quite some time. That single mile took us an hour.
On West Bond the wind was gone again, and Atticus and I sat on a flat rock on the summit and took our time drinking in the views. It was one in the afternoon, and we were in no hurry to leave the best viewing point in the Whites. From there, Bondcliff looked even more dramatic than it does when you’re on top of it. People who don’t hike will see the pictures and see the backdrop of the cliffs and the sublime harshness and think it’s not real. Sometimes, when looking on the cliffs from West Bond, I feel the same way.
We wouldn’t see another person on the trails that day, and Atticus and I had the entire Pemi to ourselves. What a gift! And how I wanted to share it with one particular man.
It was so inspiring that I didn’t want to leave the summit of West Bond. I took off my pack, pulled out paper and pen, and placed the backpack on the ground for Atticus to sit on. I started a letter to my father there and then. I wanted him to see what I saw, to understand where the dreams that he’d instilled when he brought us to the mountains during childhood had taken me.
I thought of my father and his ever-present yellow pad of paper forty years before, when he sat in our campground on the shore of the Pemigewasset River back in Lincoln. We played and he wrote. Now his youngest son sat alone with a little dog, miles from the closest person, high atop a mountain few will ever see, encircled by wilderness, and wrote him a letter.
Dear Dad,
You would love it here, for it is a rare and most isolated place. Atticus and I are sitting on West Bond, surrounded by layers of mountains.
In your younger days I know you enjoyed the poetry of the romantics, including Wordsworth. If you were here, I’m sure you would think of his poem “Upon Westminster Bridge”:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
That’s what it is like in the middle of the Pemigewasset Wilderness. Only the “ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples” were all nature-made and, thankfully, man-protected and preserved. I’m a blessed man to be on this adventure with Atticus, and when we sit high atop a peak I often find myself remembering the stories you used to read to us in bed. Now, so many years later, Atticus and I have become the very characters I loved as a child. We are Huck and Jim, Frodo and Sam—on a great quest. It’s as if we’ve walked out of the pages of one of those books you read to us.
Whether you know it or not, it’s all a result of seeds you planted in my childhood.
We have not always gotten along, but I wanted you to know there are things I dearly appreciate, and when Atti and I are up here, you’re often with us.
Well, it’s getting cold and late, and we should get going. To paraphrase Frost, we have “miles to go before we sleep.” About thirteen, to be specific.
Love,
Tom
I tucked the piece of paper into my backpack so that I could retype it when we returned to my apartment. Little did I know that it would be the last letter I ever wrote to him.
From West Bond the journey to Guyot is relatively short, but once again the drifting snow made for slow going, and it took us another hour. But Guyot, even on a cloudy day, was well worth it. On those bald mounds, there is a perspective that almost matches the Bonds themselves. In winter it’s like walking on the moon. The vast, gentle roundness of Guyot lends contrast to the jutting surrounding peaks of Franconia Ridge, Garfield, and South Twin.
On the back side of Guyot, the trail was packed down. I was thankful for the efforts of whoever had done it. But by that time I was tired. It took another hour to get to Zealand, and my energy was dwindling with the light of day. However, Atticus was as bouncy as if it were a five-mile hike. I fed him throughout the hike, giving him handfuls of food about fifteen times during the long day, and it kept him fresh.
From Zealand we cut across the Lend-a-Hand Trail and to Hale, and that last thirteen hundred feet of elevation gain took all my strength. Night had fallen, and I had nothing left when we made our way down to Zealand Road for the last 2.7 miles back to the car. I shuffled mindlessly along and appreciated why many hikers refer to marathon hikes as “death marches.”
It was the secon
d-longest hike we’d ever done, and my body felt it. However, as tired as I felt after five four-thousand-footers and twenty-five miles, it was a small price to pay for such a day. In spite of our impressive total during that fourteen-hour hike, we were dropping further behind in our totals for the winter, although at least we were starting to get some longer hikes in. Soon we’d have a run of better weather, but would it be enough to get us back on track?
28
Those Eyes, Those Beautiful Eyes
We were far behind the preceding year’s total of mountains hiked, and I cannot tell you how frustrated I was. There was either too much snow, too much wind, too much ice—or a combination of all three. Some trails were impassable, under more than ten feet of snow. The Wildcat Ridge Trail was one of them. The snow was so deep it touched the lowest branches of the trees. It was impossible to even crawl beneath them.
As much as I wanted to believe that we still had a chance to reach our goal, I knew we didn’t. And yet we weren’t quitting.
On the day we hiked both Whiteface and Passaconaway, the sun was so bright and the snow so white that I had to put on my sunglasses. I worried about Atticus’s eyes. They’d been sensitive to bright light since he had his surgery, but he seemed to be doing fine.
The slabs of rock along the Blueberry Ledge Trail were filled with snow, and I struggled mightily to get up each one. Atticus would stand just above, having been able to walk on top of most of it, and look down on me. He patiently stopped and waited, an expression of concern on his face as I turned red and sweat ran down my face. After I caught my breath, he’d take off, climb to the top of the next ledge, and wait once more. This went on for several steep but short climbs. However, on the next-to-last ledge he didn’t stop. I called out his name, and he didn’t come.
I called again, louder, but he was nowhere to be seen. I feared he’d been attacked by an animal or fallen off one of the ledges. I called out to him again.
Shit, what’s happened to him?
I was so tired I literally couldn’t stand and fell to my knees to regain my strength. I forced myself up to the last ledge, and he wasn’t there either. By this time I was panicky. My heart was racing, my head was spinning.
I looked straight ahead and then up at the little bump of rock in front of a cliff. Had he fallen off? I started frantically bellowing his name. I turned to take off my pack, and when I did, I finally saw him. He was on the highest rock, the one with the most unobstructed view. But he wasn’t looking down at me; he was sitting looking out toward the glistening lakes to the south.
Amazing. Only a view like that could keep him from me, I thought.
Watching him, I had to smile, my Little Buddha, with his precious eyes. He found such peace in these mountains. Bookstores are filled with stories about how animals help us to get where we need to go, but could it be, I wondered, that our roles were reversed? At times like this, I thought that perhaps I was the one bringing him where he most needed to be.
Instead of climbing up to join him, I sat where I was to take in the best view of all: Atticus.
We weren’t going to make our goal. We wouldn’t even be close, but watching Atticus like that made my winter complete.
Well, maybe not quite complete. The mountains weren’t done with me yet.
The weather wreaked havoc with our plans, and we were kept off the trails for more than a week. When the storms finally let up, the conditions couldn’t have been more different from those on Whiteface and Passaconaway. We set out for Crawford Notch before dawn, and I parked near the Gateway to the Notch where great rocks lay snug against the road on either side. It is so dramatic that Herman Melville once compared it to the entrance to Dante’s Inferno.
We hit the trail to Jackson early enough for me to wear my headlamp and for Atticus to disappear beyond its beam of light into the blackness. Yet another storm was coming, and I wanted to make it down before it hit. My MICROspikes cut into the crisp trail, giving me all the traction I needed. There was a time when such a walk would unnerve me, but no longer. I welcomed being enveloped in the dark, feeling like a well-kept secret.
Once we were beyond the first jutting climb up out of Crawford Notch, my breath caught up with me, but I struggled with my breathing throughout the hike. In the previous two weeks, I had lost any semblance of a hiking rhythm. Before the last major band of weather came, we had hiked eight of the previous ten days, but that seemed like ages ago.
I was struggling. My breathing and my stride were off, and I stopped often. When I moved, I moved too quickly, no rhythm. I relied on my trekking poles more, because my legs were weak, and I pulled myself up the mountain with them.
Somewhere along the way, a gray morning broke and lazily filtered through the trees. Night was more tolerable. At least in the darkness, the light from the headlamp cut through the unknown and was definitive. But in the gray light, we were walking through a shroud. The higher we climbed, the icier the trees became. They were somber specters looking down upon us, eyeing us with suspicion.
We stopped just below the summit, where the two French Canadians had laughed at Atticus the previous winter. I gave Atticus some treats, shoved some more into my bib, took off my MICROspikes, and replaced them with crampons. I put on my heavier jacket, pulled on my hat and gloves, and left my pack behind as we started the last climb of the day.
I don’t enjoy crampons, because you have to take extra care when walking on them—more than a few people have stabbed themselves in the leg with their long spikes—and I didn’t miss using them, considering all the deep snow we had to contend with during the past few months, but they were a comfort on the steep and icy pitch to the summit.
Atticus first made for the trail sign and sat as he usually does, but when he didn’t see me take out my camera, he made for the summit cairn. How eerie to lurch about on high in the murk of a thick cloud, in still-but-comfortable air. At the cairn Atticus nudged my leg, so I offered him a treat, but he didn’t want it and nudged me again. This meant he wanted me to pick him up, and so I did, and together we looked off into the gray abyss toward where Washington would normally be.
We stood there for a while, in the middle of a cloud, and I realized we had the same view my father now had.
The preceding week my sister Nancy walked into his house and found him lying facedown on the carpet, furniture strewn about, the signs of a fall.
Heart attack.
The ambulance brought him to the hospital. He was in intensive care, then moved to pulmonary care, and during the weekend he was moved to a nursing home. He wouldn’t be returning to his own home.
Atticus and I visited him two days before we hiked Jackson. It was the first time I’d seen him in more than a year.
When we walked into the room, it was difficult to recognize him, that once-strong man, a giant—sometimes benign, angry more often than not. He had a leg and an arm flung over the side rail of his bed. He was confused, tormented; he looked at me with terror and pleading. He seemed to recognize my face but couldn’t place it. His voice was fragile and filled with fear.
“Get me out of here,” he said.
Atticus and I spent five hours with him. For all but maybe thirty minutes, he didn’t know who I was. My brothers and sisters and I weren’t surprised; this had been coming for a long time. He’d mostly given up trying a couple of years earlier, when he’d stopped taking his medication regularly, stopped eating right, and kept smoking.
I put him in a wheelchair, and Atticus and I took him down to the lounge, which was empty.
“Hello, Jack.”
He nodded suspiciously.
“How are you doing?”
“How do I look like I’m doing?” he said with an exasperated tone.
I asked him several questions, but he was addled. He wanted to know where his mother was. When I told him she was dead, he was clearly surprised. I asked him about his fami
ly. He was still confused. I asked who his favorite daughter was.
“Grace?”
“Grace is your sister, Jack.”
“I have a daughter?”
“You have three daughters and six sons.”
“I do?” He looked bewildered. “Do I have a wife?”
“You did. Her name was Isabel. But she died in 1968.”
He thought for a moment and looked sad.
I asked about each of his children, starting with the oldest and working down to me, the youngest.
I’d say, “What can you tell me about Joanne?” and he’d tell me bad things about Joanne and why he didn’t like her. I asked him about John. He did the same thing. The only one he spoke highly of was Eddie, who had been his caretaker before moving up to New Hampshire.
Then I came to me. “What can you tell me about Tommy?”
“He’s the biggest prick of them all.”
“I heard something similar,” I said. “But why do you say that about him?”
“He could care less about me.”
“I don’t think that’s true at all, Jack. He loves you very much, but sometimes he might not like some of the things you do.”
He shook his head. “I’ll never see him. He won’t come to see me.”
“Oh, I heard he was here to see you.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “He wouldn’t bother.”
“Maybe you were sleeping. What can you tell me about Tommy?”
He thought for a moment. “He’s married.”
I was surprised. “He is?”
“I told him not to marry her,” and he shook his head with disgust.
“Why did you tell him that?”
“I told him not to marry her because she’s black. That’s why he won’t talk to me.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“I can’t remember. He doesn’t bring her around me.”
