In a way, the Watermans themselves had helped stoke this indignation. "One has to be sympathetic with public anger about the enormous costs expended in efforts to save people who often have acted foolishly," they'd written in Wilderness Ethics. "That such people should pay the costs of rescue efforts seems to us an unarguable point. If you get yourself in trouble, you get yourself out, or you pay."A recently adopted ordinance now allows New Hampshire Fish and Game to charge "reckless" hikers for search and rescue efforts initiated on their behalf, but it seems highly unlikely the service will pursue the matter with a figure as sympathetic as Laura Waterman.

"I have strong reservations about what Guy did," says Fish and Game's Gralenski. "I hate to see him martyred. Basically what happens when you die like that, from hypothermia, is you become like a drunk. It's fortunate this didn't cause him to wander too far. It could have blown up into a major search. We don't wish to spend money recovering people like this. We're small, with a limited number of officers. We're already taxed dealing with people who unintentionally hurt themselves."

A more painful problem for a lot of people, including many of the Watermans' close friends, is what Laura has had, and will continue to have, to endure. No matter how bad Guy was feeling, they wondered, how could he leave her like that?

Laura herself handles these concerns with impressive equanimity. "I don't feel abandoned or betrayed or even particularly left," she wrote me. "Guy was nothing if not conscientious and he took care
to leave me with a full woodpile.... I wouldn't have wanted to have held him back, nor could I have. Loving him meant letting him go."

The other thing Laura had to contend with was the flood of media attention. There is irony in this, too, as Guy would surely have resented having his past dredged up again. And yet, by choosing such a public way to die, he invited it.

Like a dozen other journalists, I puzzled over Guy's "reasons." It was hard not to speculate about those final hours on Mount Lafayette or to second-guess his plan. Why not just crawl off into the less frequented emptiness of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, where no one would have found him and the ravens could have picked him clean? "Guy was very pragmatic and thoughtful," Doug Mayer says. "It tortured him not knowing where his sons' bodies were, and he didn't want Laura to deal with the same thing." And, Mayer points out, "Estates can't be settled easily without a body, and Guy didn't want Laura to have any complications with his will."

Nearly 200 people attended Guy Waterman's memorial service, many more than could fit inside the little Congregational church in East Corinth. A small cassette deck on the altar played the medley of waltzes, Haydn, and Joplin that Mayer and Oreskes had recorded Waterman playing last fall. There were poems ("Song on a May Morning," "The Road Not Taken," "Down to the Puritan Marrow of My Bones") and hymns and tearful reminiscences, and only one moment of laughter, when someone made a joke about Guy's Republican politics and Democrat friends. Afterward, his body was cremated; his ashes were to be scattered at Barra in a ceremony in the spring, after the snow melted. Guy had asked that his boots be buried under the same cairn where Johnny's are, on the spur below Mount Lincoln.

Whatever their feelings about his suicide, virtually all of Guy's friends dismiss the notion that his passing was a death knell for the cause of Eastern wilderness, an acknowledgement that the fight was over and lost.

"I didn't feel that what Guy did in any way was a repudiation of our life's work," Laura wrote me. "Perhaps it was an affirmation of it. Nor do I feel that he was making the statement that the good fight was no longer worth fighting. Again, perhaps he was saying—by his action—just the opposite."

Perhaps. One would like to think that his was the last act of a man who believed in the wilderness even when he stopped believing in anything else. Yet all we can know for sure is that on a bitter winter afternoon he climbed up into its heartless heart and felt the full blast of its power in a way that no one can who would come back alive.   

Correspondent Rob Buchanan profiled surfer Jeff Hakman in the April issue.