stratagems. He was ambitious in the extreme, and like Walt McCandless, his aspirations extended to his progeny.
Before I’d even enrolled in kindergarten, he began preparing me for a shining career in medicine-or, failing that, law as a poor consolation. For Christmas and birthdays I received such gifts as a microscope, a chemistry set, and the
My father’s faith in this blueprint was unshakable. It was, after all, the path he had followed to prosperity. But I was not a clone of my father. During my teens, as I came to this realization, I veered gradually from the plotted course, and then sharply. My insurrection prompted a great deal of yelling. The windows of our home rattled with the thunder of ultimatums. By the time I left Corvallis, Oregon, to enroll in a distant college where no ivy grew, I was speaking to my father with a clenched jaw or not at all. When I graduated four years later and did not enter Harvard or any other medical school but became a carpenter and climbing bum instead, the unbridgeable gulf between us widened.
I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt oppressed by the old man’s expectations. It was drilled into me that anything less than winning was failure. In the impressionable way of sons, I did not consider this rhetorically; I took him at his word. And that’s why later, when long-held family secrets came to light, when I noticed that this deity who asked only for perfection was himself less than perfect, that he was in fact not a deity at all-well, I wasn’t able to shrug it off. I was consumed instead by a blinding rage. The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive.
Two decades after the fact I discovered that my rage was gone, and had been for years. It had been supplanted by a rueful sympathy and something not unlike affection. I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me. I saw that I had been selfish and unbending and a giant pain in the ass. He’d built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage.
But this epiphany occurred only after the intervention of time and misfortune, when my fathers self-satisfied existence had begun to crumble beneath him. It began with the betrayal of his flesh: Thirty years after a bout with polio, the symptoms mysteriously flared anew. Crippled muscles withered further, synapses wouldn’t fire, wasted legs refused to ambulate. From medical journals he deduced that he was suffering from a newly identified ailment known as post-polio syndrome. Pain, excruciating at times, filled his days like a shrill and constant noise.
In an ill-advised attempt to halt the decline, he started medicating himself. He never went anywhere without a faux leather valise stuffed with dozens of orange plastic pill bottles. Every hour or two he would fumble through the drug bag, squinting at the labels, and shake out tablets of Dexedrine and Prozac and deprenyl. He gulped pills by the fistful, grimacing, without water. Used syringes and empty ampoules appeared on the bathroom sink. To a greater and greater degree his life revolved around a self-administered pharmacopoeia of steroids, amphetamines, mood elevators, and painkillers, and the drugs addled his once-formidable mind.
As his behavior became more and more irrational, more and more delusional, the last of his friends were driven away. My long-suffering mother finally had no choice but to move out. My father crossed the line into madness and then very nearly succeeded in taking his own life-an act at which he made sure I was present.
After the suicide attempt he was placed in a psychiatric hospital near Portland. When I visited him there, his arms and legs were strapped to the rails of his bed. He was ranting incoherently and had soiled himself. His eyes were wild. Flashing in defiance one moment, in uncomprehending terror the next, they rolled far back in their sockets, giving a clear and chilling view into the state of his tortured mind. When the nurses tried to change his linens, he thrashed against his restraints and cursed them, cursed me, cursed the fates. That his foolproof life plan had in the end transported him here, to this nightmarish station, was an irony that brought me no pleasure and escaped his notice altogether.
There was another irony he failed to appreciate: His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.
I suppose it was this inherited, off-kilter ambition that kept me from admitting defeat on the Stikine Ice Cap after my initial attempt to climb the Thumb had failed, even after nearly burning the tent down. Three days after retreating from my first try, I went up on the north face again. This time I climbed only 120 feet above the
Instead of descending to my base camp on the ice cap, though, I decided to spend the night on the steep flank of the mountain, just below my high point. This proved to be a mistake. By late afternoon the squall had metastasized into another major storm. Snow fell from the clouds at the rate of an inch an hour. As I crouched inside my bivouac sack under the lip of the
It took about twenty minutes for the spindrift to inundate my bivvy sack-a thin nylon envelope shaped exactly like a Baggies sandwich bag, only bigger-to the level of the breathing slit. Four times this happened, and four times I dug myself out. After the fifth burial, I’d had enough. I threw all my gear into my pack and made a break for the base camp.
The descent was terrifying. Because of the clouds, the ground blizzard, and the flat, fading light, I couldn’t tell slope from sky. I worried, with ample reason, that I might step blindly off the top of a serac and end up at the bottom of the Witches Cauldron, a vertical half mile below. When I finally arrived on the frozen plain of the ice cap, I found that my tracks had long since drifted over.
I didn’t have a clue as to how to locate the tent on the featureless glacial plateau. Hoping I’d get lucky and stumble across my camp, I skied in circles for an hour-until I put a foot into a small crevasse and realized that I was acting like an idiot-that I should hunker down right where I was and wait out the storm.
I dug a shallow hole, wrapped myself in the bivvy bag, and sat on my pack in the swirling snow. Drifts piled up around me. My feet became numb. A damp chill crept down my chest from the base of my neck, where spindrift had gotten inside my parka and soaked my shirt. If only I had a cigarette, I thought, a single cigarette, I could summon the strength of character to put a good face on this fucked-up situation, on the whole fucked-up trip. I pulled the bivvy sack tighter around my shoulders. The wind ripped at my back. Beyond shame, I cradled my head in my arms and embarked on an orgy of self-pity.
I knew that people sometimes died climbing mountains. But at the age of twenty-three, personal mortality-the idea of my own death-was still largely outside my conceptual grasp. When I decamped from Boulder for Alaska, my head swimming with visions of glory and redemption on the Devils Thumb, it didn’t occur to me that I might be bound by the same cause-and-effect relationships that governed the actions of others. Because I wanted to climb the mountain so badly, because I had thought about the Thumb so intensely for so long, it seemed beyond the realm of possibility that some minor obstacle like the weather or crevasses or rime-covered rock might ultimately thwart my will.
At sunset the wind died, and the ceiling lifted 150 feet off the glacier, enabling me to locate my base camp. I made it back to the tent intact, but it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that the Thumb had made hash of my plans. I was forced to acknowledge that volition alone, however powerful, was not going to get me up the north wall. I saw, finally, that nothing was.
There still existed an opportunity for salvaging the expedition, however. A week earlier I’d skied over to the southeast side of the mountain to take a look at the route by which I’d intended to descend the peak after climbing the north wall, a route that Fred Beckey, the legendary alpinist, had followed in 1946 in making the first ascent of the Thumb. During my reconnaissance, I’d noticed an obvious unclimbed line to the left of the Beckey route- a patchy network of ice angling across the southeast face-that struck me as a relatively easy way to achieve the summit. At the time, I’d considered this route unworthy of my attentions. Now, on the rebound from my calamitous entanglement with the
On the afternoon of May 15, when the blizzard finally abated, I returned to the southeast face and climbed to
