Wilderness Silences a Troubled Soul

They could picture him if they closed their eyes, sitting at the keyboard, familiar white beard and crinkled smile, favorite tam perched crookedly on his head.

“Maple Leaf Rag.”

“Tennessee Waltz.”

They could picture his vigorous, lithe body hiking up the mountain and into the clouds, deliberate, calm. They could see the snow-swept ridge where he dug in his ice ax and sat down to let himself freeze.

“Daisy Bell.”

“Goodnight Irene.”

The music poured from a cassette, brilliant, ghostly. Packed into the tiny church, the audience didn’t know whether to applaud or weep. Below the altar, the piano player’s cap lay on a bed of fir boughs. His melodies floated across the room, drifting over their tears and their prayers, making their feet tap in spite of themselves.

“After the Ball Is Over.”

Musician, mountaineer, philosopher, friend. Tortured soul.

Guy Waterman had inspired the world with his physical and intellectual agility, his whimsy, his quest for an enlightened life.

Snowshoeing, politics, ice climbing, jazz. He chose his passions carefully, cultivated them completely, mastered them all. At 67, he was indulging in one of his favorites, treating his friends to the performance of a lifetime.

His own funeral.

*

When the man she loved laced up his boots and walked out of their tiny wooden cabin 11 days earlier, Laura Waterman wept uncontrollably. For the first time, she understood the meaning of the words “reeling with grief.”

For almost two years, they had talked about that day. They planned it meticulously, knowing it would be the darkest of their lives.

So, on that frigid winter morning, Laura stuck to their plan, thankful to have one. She baked bread at the wood-fired stove. Then she read his letter and the last chapter of his memoirs.

“Though I’ve grown a protective covering of smiles and talk,” he wrote, “I too am alienated from my fellow humanity and dwell in a private world of storm and darkness.”

Even as she read, even as she pictured him hiking up Franconia Ridge, crampons digging into the ice, Laura wondered: Could Guy really pull it off? Could he master his death the way he had mastered so much in life?

Deep down, she knew. Guy always walked away when he was on top.

*

Guy Waterman chose his place in the world carefully. A green-stained wooden cabin nestled in the woods surrounded by hills, a mile from the nearest dirt road. Barra. Named for an ancestral island in the Scottish Hebrides, the Watermans’ 27-acre homestead was as much their spiritual haven as their physical one.

In their tiny book-filled cabin they created a life that seemed idyllic to friends, who envied its richness even as they teased the couple about living in the 14th century. Barra has no plumbing or electricity, no phone. Water is hauled daily from a nearby stream. Vegetables are stored in a root cellar under the floor. In winter, visitors have to trudge to the cabin on snowshoes.

There was an endless stream of them, lugging backpacks and children and pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream--Guy’s one decadence. In spring they came to help with sugaring, in summer to pick fruit, in fall to cut firewood, and in winter to sit around the piano and listen to the master play.

“I’m Just Wild about Harry.”

“Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.”

Barra, where trees were named for literary figures--King Lear, Macbeth, Voltaire--and woodsheds for baseball greats: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby; where a sheaf of wheat from Walter Johnson’s Kansas birthplace is pinned above Guy’s desk.

Guests never knew where they would find him--maybe down in the sugar grove awarding a “Tree of the Year” plaque to the maple that had produced the most sap, or carefully counting and recording his blueberries (45,000 in their best season) or rattling off arcane statistics from a 1943 Boston Braves game, bounding up in mid-sentence to play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

In summer he might be tending the trail on the Franconia Ridge, building small stone cairns as markers for hikers, teaching them about plants and rocks and the history of climbing.

Winter, he might be clawing up some icy ravine, discovering a new waterfall, exploring a new ridge.

“There was just such delight in coming to see Guy,” said climbing friend Mike Young. “You didn’t know what you would find, but you always found something that would make you reinterpret the world.”

*

Guy Waterman spent his life reinterpreting his world. Molding it. Mastering it. Walking away.

As a student, he dazzled the nightclub crowd at the Charles Hotel in Washington, playing Joplin’s great rags with the Riverboat Trio. He was considered a jazz prodigy.

But he chucked it after three years and moved to politics, where he discovered another way to push himself, another way to dazzle, as speech writer with the Senate Minority Policy Committee. Fast. Brilliant. Dashing. He left words on the lips of past and future presidents--Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford--that made people wonder if he would one day run for the highest office himself.

He walked away from that world too, after getting roaring drunk on election night in 1960.

In his unpublished memoirs, Waterman agonized over whether his life might have been more fruitful had he stuck with music, or stayed in Washington, instead of always retreating when he was at his best.

“Considerations like these have left me with a sense of dissatisfaction about what I’ve accomplished,” he wrote. Even his books, he noted, had never been widely read, and their message about the wilderness seemed to be sinking into oblivion.

Friends shake their heads.

How could he have doubted his influence on the world, this man who had achieved so much--in his music, his friendships, his writings, his life at Barra? And especially in his fierce dedication to the mountains he loved.

Guy Waterman knew the White Mountains of New Hampshire better than anyone, had explored every peak and crag, had reveled in their wildness, their beauty and solitude.

He scaled the Cannon Cliffs with his son, Johnny, pioneered treacherous ice climbs with Laura, led bushwhacking expeditions through undergrowth so thick that climbers 20 years younger had trouble keeping up.

“Backwoods Ethics,” “Wilderness Ethics,” “Forest and Crag,” “Yankee Rock and Ice.” The manuscripts that the Watermans tapped out on manual typewriters in their cabin set the tone for a debate about the wilderness that has lasted to this day.

“He changed the way we viewed the wilderness. He changed the way we viewed the world,” said Doug Mayer, one of a group of young climbers close to the Watermans. “He had a huge impact on everyone he met and a profound impact on the policies and things that mattered most to him.”

“The huge irony,” Mayer added sadly, “is that he thought he wasn’t good enough.”

*

Waterman’s passion for the mountains was a late-blooming one, stumbled upon in 1963 when he read an article about climbing the North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland.

“I was swept off my feet,” he wrote. “Mountains and climbing dawned on my drunken, shamed, lonely life like a beacon of hope.”

He was 30, married with three sons. But his marriage was disintegrating, and he felt stifled in his latest job, as speech writer at General Electric.

As a child growing up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Waterman enjoyed hiking with his father. But he had never done any serious climbing.

Once he discovered it, he hurled himself in, joining the Appalachian Mountain Club, mastering rock and wilderness skills. Soon he was spending every weekend at the Shawangunks cliffs in upstate New York, a popular climbing spot. His teenage sons, Bill and Johnny, often joined him.

Both were good, but Johnny was a genius. At 25 he completed a 145-day solo ascent of Mt. Hunter in Alaska, and was being written into history as one of the most daring young climbers ever.

“A lot of me went into Johnny,” Guy said in a 1991 interview. “And there’s a lot of Johnny in me now.”

At the Shawangunks, Guy met a vivacious climber 7 1/2 years younger than he. The attraction was instant. Guy and Laura Waterman spent their wedding night on a tiny ledge barely wide enough for their tent.

In his records, Guy marks Feb. 21, 1971, as the day the “idea of Barra” was born. It was just a matter of time before he and Laura abandoned their corporate careers in New York City (she worked as an editor at Backpacker magazine) and moved to the mountains.

Carefully, they chose what to keep from their old lives: their books, of course, and music. The walls of the cabin were built only after Guy’s baby grand was safely installed in a corner.

*

At Barra, the Watermans became a voice for the wilderness, writing passionately, and humorously, about the need to protect it. Cell phones, radios, helicopters, trails that look like well-maintained sidewalks. All came in for their derision.

“A wild place can be a difficult place, uncomfortable for humans,” they wrote. “And we should seek to keep it that way.”

They lived their message, working at winter mountaineering schools, volunteering on trails, lecturing at mountain clubs, adopting Franconia Ridge as their own.

The ridge, a popular hiking spot in the White Mountains that runs for nearly 10 miles over a series of peaks, was being trampled to death by hiker traffic. The Watermans invested two decades into restoring it, concentrating their efforts on its fragile summit, a “great spiny hogback” that rises into the clouds for about two miles above the tree line.

This was their special place. In 1967 Guy had gone on his first winter hike here with his son Bill. In 1968, in the nearby Presidential Range, he had barely survived a furious winter storm with his 16-year-old son Johnny. The father-and-son essay that Guy wrote about their escapade became the most widely read of his works.

The Watermans would spend days on the ridge, clearing the trails, talking to hikers, introducing them to the rare alpine flowers that peeked from the brush. Diapensia. Labrador tea. Breathlessly, Guy would explain how these tiny plants could withstand the howling winds that swept the ridge, yet be crushed in an instant by a misplaced boot.

“Hikers would leave with this sense of wonderment after meeting Guy,” said climber Jon Martinson.

And not just climbers. Back in East Corinth, the Watermans volunteered at the local library, attended local opera and meetings of the Society for American Baseball Research, and avidly supported Dartmouth College women’s ice hockey. They made friends wherever they went.

But they always headed back to Barra, to the elegant simplicity of their cabin in the woods. At night, Guy would read aloud to Laura by the light of a kerosene lamp. Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens.

“I could not help feeling robbed,” cried a friend at his funeral, “thinking, was this not good enough for you, Guy?”

*

“I will not be placed in any pigeonholes,” Guy wrote.

As though anyone could pigeonhole this “elfin giant of a mountain man,” as one friend described him, a man who stuffed teddy bears into his backpack on tough mountain hikes and played a baseball game in his head on solo ascents.

Guy confided to his friend Tom Simon that, using real teams and players, he had replayed all of baseball history from the 1880s to the 1930s.

Baseball, he wrote in his memoirs, was a sanctuary, a place in which to lose himself “with no hint of the disagreeable stresses of life.”

Guy recorded the date darkness began overshadowing his life: April 21, 1981. The day he learned that Johnny was missing on Mt. McKinley, presumed dead. The troubled 28-year-old had headed up the Alaskan peak, woefully ill equipped. He is presumed to have fallen into a crevasse, although his body was never found.

Guy understood Johnny better than anyone, understood the demons that tortured his son’s soul. After all, he wrote, where did Johnny get them from?

“Poor Johnny embodied those impulses in me which have been destructive, as they were so finally for Johnny,” he wrote. “He was always at war with the world, never knew calm, always teetered on the verge of being out of control.”

Johnny’s death brought double tragedy, because it forced Guy to accept that he had lost his elder son too. Bill had disappeared 12 years earlier, after writing an enigmatic letter saying that he was going on a long trip. It was clear now that he would never return.

Guy buried Johnny’s boots in a secret cairn near Franconia Ridge. For years, he wore Johnny’s wind pants in the mountains in winter.

In his memoirs, Guy compared the warring factions in his head to the Ariel and Caliban characters in Shakespeare’s “Tempest.” He agonized over how Caliban, the dark side, always surfaced when things were at their best--in his music career, in politics, in life.

In the decade after Johnny’s death, he wrote, the darkness became more prominent. His memoirs close with this line: “After 67 years of struggling, I see that Caliban has won.”

He could still solo up the icy Pinnacle Gully in Mt. Washington’s Huntington Ravine. He could still bushwhack up the 4,000-foot peaks in the White Mountains, all 48 of them, from all points of the compass. He could still push himself further, take more risks than anyone he knew. He could still whistle in delight at the sight of a wren.

But his fearlessness began to fail him, and joy became elusive.

“I felt unspeakably impoverished,” he wrote, “by not being able to find once more the high-spirited adventure I had known in the mountains in winter for so long.”

Only Laura saw his growing despair. To the rest of the world, Guy was still the playful wit who dazzled them with his music and, on a whim, dug out old climbing gear to scale a 150-foot fir.

“We’re going to write it up for the AARP newsletter as a splendid Sunday outing for folks in their 60s,” he joked to a startled visitor who found him swaying from the treetop.

*

“Which way shall I fly, infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”

Everyone knew Guy Waterman could recite from memory eight books of “Paradise Lost,” but Satan’s lines were the ones he quoted most often to Laura.

When the time came, she knew there was nothing she could do. It couldn’t be any other way. He couldn’t wait until his body got too old, or his resolve too weak. He had to be strong enough to brave the treacherous conditions that would kill him.

Laura didn’t know the exact date, but she guessed it would be that winter. They had bought land and started building a modern log cabin in the village. Laura’s “retirement home,” Guy called it. Friends knew he wouldn’t be joining her there.

Still, no one thought it would be so soon.

On that icy Sunday morning when her husband of 28 years walked out the door, Laura thought of how he had so often compared himself to Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick,” his raging daily torment chasing some elusive goal.

“I identified with Ishmael,” she said, “left alone to tell the tale.”

On the fourth day, she strapped on snowshoes and hiked into town to tell the tale.

Friends found his body where he said it would be, just below the summit of Mt. Lafayette, slumped beside his ice ax, dusted with snow.

He left letters explaining his decision. Guy Waterman couldn’t bear to get old or sick. He had to leave when he was on top. His exit had to be as challenging as his life. He asked that his boots be buried next to Johnny’s.

In a piece published in the local newspaper three days after his funeral, Laura hushed all doubts about her husband’s choice.

“He stayed with us as long as he could,” she wrote.

*

Don’t be sad, Guy wrote to friends, if one cold wintry day I go into the mountains and don’t return. Sitting in the church, they struggled with their sorrow as his sweet piano music floated over their tears.

“After the Ball Is Over.”

If they closed their eyes they could picture him, high on a precipice, thrusting his face toward the storm. They could see him gleefully raising his right hand, solemnly bowing, pretending to pluck clouds, like notes, from the sky.

A wilderness symphony, and Guy Waterman was conducting.

As always, he was having the time of his life.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Waterman’s Wilderness is based on interviews with his friends, family, members of the mountaineering community in Vermont and New Hampshire, and residents of the town of East Corinth, Vt.

They include Waterman’s wife, Laura Waterman; climbers Doug Mayer, Jon Martinson, John Dunn and Mike Young, who retrieved Waterman’s body from Mt. Lafayette; Rebecca Oreskes of the White Mountain National Forest Service; Mike Pelchat of Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue; Brad Synder, former executive director of the Monhonk Preserve at the Shawangunk cliffs; Tom Simon of the Vermont Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research; Peter Crane of the Mt. Washington Observatory; Bill Arnold of the Randolph Mountain Club; former college classmate Warren Robinson; and Mike Dickerman, who has written about New England outdoors.

The story also drew on Waterman’s unpublished personal memoirs and private correspondence.