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Outside Magazine 2003
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Last Time Around (cont.)

SEEING THE CAPE HORN BOOK ON THE FLOOR, I ducked back into my own room, quickly dressed, laced up my hiking boots, and rushed downstairs. I remembered one odd moment. When my father had taken the book from my hand a half-hour earlier, he'd simply stood there in the middle of my room, staring at the thick carpeting, while out the big window behind him the morning's first skiers were carving down Ajax. I assumed he was brooding again—about the ongoing decline of the stock market, the decline of his strength, the decline of his physique. Earlier, I'd heard him demonstrating to my mother how he could no longer do a proper push-up. At dinners, he'd been eating like a 15-year-old anorexic, picking at his pasta, worried he was gaining weight.

"Come on, move it!" I'd commanded him to get to work with tongue-in-cheek harshness, similar to the way he had ordered me as a balking teenager into, say, sweeping out the garage. In better days he would have instantly fired back with something defiant and goading, belittling and affectionate: "It's you we're all worried about, my friend." But in this state he only said, "OK, OK," before limping into his room with the book.

Maybe he'd gone for a walk. I asked at the front desk. They'd seen him go past about 20 minutes earlier wearing a coat; he'd gotten a lift somewhere. Just then the driver, a young man named Parker Lathrope, stepped from his van.

"Where did he want to go?" I asked.

"To the footbridge over Castle Creek," Parker told me. "He said he wanted to take pictures."

"Let's go," I said, jumping into the van. "Hurry!"




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