"My first reaction to Guy?" Laura wrote to me in a letter. "Easy. Love at first sight. We met at the Shawangunks and immediately we began talking about climbing and Moby-Dick and Dickens and Alice in Wonderland. And of course we began climbing together."

A year later, in 1970, after Laura took an editing job at a new magazine called Backpacker, she and Guy began to think about a different sort of life, one away from the pressures of society. On a climbing trip to the White Mountains, a friend recommended a book that changed the course of their lives. Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life, first published in 1954, chronicled the self-sufficient farm the couple had established in Vermont a generation earlier. "They had organized their lives in such a way that they had plenty of time for music and writing, and to do the creative things they liked to do as well as the homesteading," Guy recalled in an interview. In 1971, after an abortive attempt on a difficult route on Alaska's Mount Hunter—the couple's first and last serious climbing foray outside the Northeast—Guy and Laura purchased their Vermont homestead, which they named Barra, after the Waterman family's ancestral homeland in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. They married in 1972, moved into a lean-to on the property, and began building a simple one-room cabin, complete with a disconnected toilet (to satisfy the letter of the building code) and Guy's cherished Steinway, which friends drove to Barra in a pickup truck.

Thus began a grueling but joyous cycle of seasons that continued for 27 years. The winter months were for ice climbing and tramping in the mountains. March was for sugaring. The vegetable garden occupied them from the end of April to the first part of June. There was time for more climbing and hiking in the summer, and then came canning, the root vegetable harvest, and weeks of chopping firewood for the winter. By Thanksgiving it was time to go hiking again. At one point, Guy figured they were in the mountains 50 percent of the winter days and slept there one night out of three. Until Guy's Social Security payments began six years ago, the Watermans lived on a budget of $200 a month, paid for by savings and the earnings from their one "cash crop"—their writing.

Barra never became what the Nearings' homestead, Forest Farm, had been—a sort of open-ended commune where people were welcome to visit and pitch in for as long as they liked. The Watermans were too protective of their peace and quiet for that. When reporters came to do interviews, they were asked not to mention the homestead's location, for fear the place would become some sort of zoo, with Guy and Laura the prize specimens. Still, to the Watermans' inner circle, Barra was a light in the forest. "I always loved going there," Mike Young says. "There were just a few kerosene lamps, but somehow you always felt it was a brilliant place. There was Guy's gentle charisma, his music, a ring of friends. Going there was like going on a pilgrimage."

Yet no matter how perfect a life the Watermans created at Barra, Guy couldn't escape the tragedies that darkened their first decade in the woods. Before his divorce, Waterman had begun teaching his sons Bill and Johnny to rock climb in the Shawangunks. Both boys seemed destined to become fine climbers. But on June 19, 1969, 18-year-old Bill, who had just graduated from high school, grievously mangled his leg while attempting to hop a freight train in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on a Kerouac-like cross-country odyssey. Bill underwent a series of operations to try to save the limb, but a few years later it finally had to be amputated, and he was fitted with a prosthesis.

Johnny, about a year younger than Bill, continued to climb, and though it's tempting to suggest he threw himself into the sport as some kind of compensation for Bill's injury, he had already proved himself a prodigy. At the age of 15, stocky, explosive, and all of five-foot-three, he was leading many of the hardest pitches in the 'Gunks. A year later, he became the third-youngest person ever to summit Mount McKinley. "By 16 or 17," Guy once said, "Johnny was far too good to be held back by climbing with me." By 20, he was regarded as one of the boldest young alpinists in the country. But along the way he had suffered the loss, either by accident or suicide, of no fewer than eight of his climbing partners and mentors.

In 1971, after briefly attending Western Washington State University, in Bellingham, Johnny moved to Fairbanks, Alaska. Eventually he enrolled at the University of Alaska. Bill, who hoped to work with native tribes, would soon move to Alaska himself. (Jim, Guy's youngest son, was still in high school and living with his father in Stamford, Connecticut.) In 1973, four years after his accident, Bill sent Guy and other family members a short letter informing them that he was going off on a long trip; the destination wasn't specified. According to one rumor, Bill went north to live with an Inuit tribe. In any case, it was the last Guy, or anybody else, ever heard of him. He simply disappeared.

Johnny continued to live and climb in Alaska. In 1978, he stunned the climbing world with a solo ascent of the previously unclimbed southeast spur of 14,573-foot Mount Hunter, a feat that has since passed into Alaskan folklore. It took him 145 days of fixing lines, ferrying loads, and waiting out storms to get up and down the mountain. He came back a hero, but something seemed to have changed him.

"He became fixated on difficult climbs," says John Dunn, who met Guy and Laura at a mountaineering school at about the time Johnny climbed Hunter. Though Dunn never met Johnny, he had spoken with Guy often about his brilliant and troubled second son, and still has a few letters exchanged between the two of them. "If he survived," Dunn continues, "then the climb wasn't hard enough. In between climbs, it seemed like he was hanging on by a thread."

According to several written accounts, Johnny Waterman had always been something of a character in Fairbanks—a guy who ran around the university campus wearing a black cape and eyeglasses with a star glued between the lenses, maniacally serenading passersby on a beat-up guitar. In his 1994 book, In the Shadow of Denali, author Jonathan Waterman—no relation—devotes a chapter to Johnny and his strange fate. "The climb changed him irreparably," Waterman writes of Johnny's experience on Hunter, and he quotes a climbing friend of Johnny's who said that "after Hunter he was almost dangerously psychotic."

In 1981 Johnny, now 28, prepared for the ultimate challenge: a winter solo of Denali's unclimbed east face, some 6,000 feet higher than Hunter. He was last seen on April 1, heading up the Ruth Glacier, a vast minefield of hidden crevasses, carrying absurdly minimal gear and provisions. Jon Krakauer, who spends several pages telling Johnny's story in his book Into the Wild, quotes a climber who had seen Johnny at a lower elevation a few days earlier: "He was wearing a cheap one-piece snowmobile suit and wasn't even carrying a sleeping bag. All he had in the way of food was a bunch of flour, some sugar, and a big can of Crisco."

To many who knew Johnny, his death did not appear to be an accident. "When he wandered up there, he didn't expect to survive it," Dunn says. "Whether he jumped in a crevasse or just fell into one doesn't really matter. Basically what he did was akin to wandering numbly across a highway at rush hour." (Jim Waterman, Guy's only surviving son, an environmental engineer who lives outside Boulder, Colorado, declined to comment for this story.)

The National Park Service searched Waterman's route for a week by air before giving up. His body was never found. Guy got the news two weeks later. "Poor Johnny embodied those impulses in me which have been destructive, as they were so finally for Johnny," he wrote in his unpublished memoir. "He was always at war with the world, never knew calm, always teetered on the edge of being out of control." Every year, on the anniversary of Johnny's disappearance, Guy and Laura would climb to the cairn where Johnny's boots are buried and sing laments in his memory.