East Corinth (pronounced cuh-rinth) is quaint and small. There's a Congregational Church, a general store, and a post office. Across the street is the library where the Watermans had volunteered a few nights a week. I went in to look it over, intending to make a quick photocopy of my letter. Two women sat at a table by the door, deep in conversation. The older one, trim and sixtyish with short, graying hair, wore neat, no-nonsense clothes and L.L. Bean boots. She looked up and smiled, and then turned back to her conversation.

As I stood waiting for the copy machine, I heard the older woman's voice floating across the room. She and her husband had expected a few articles to appear in the local paper, she said plaintively, but nothing like the media invasion she'd had to face. The other woman, her voice lower, murmured some words of consolation to her friend.

It took me a moment to realize that the older woman was Laura Waterman. I briefly considered handing the letter to her directly, and introducing myself in the process. But there was something about the scene—the distressed tone in her voice, the sacrosanct hush of the library, the awareness that I was, however inadvertently, an eavesdropper—that stopped me. I walked across the street and mailed the letter at the post office.

When I got home from Vermont, Laura's reply was waiting for me in my mailbox. It was four pages long, banged out on a manual typewriter. The sentences were short and direct and, unsurprising in a letter to a stranger, largely matter-of-fact. The most poignant part of the letter was the handwritten postscript. "Sorry about misspellings and poor punctuation," it read. "Guy always caught my errors as we always read over each other's mail before it went out." Otherwise the tone was straightforward, with occasional flashes of anger at a culture that, as she put it, "sees only strangeness, imbalance, and sickness in suicide."

Laura seemed to relax in passages that dealt with details of her and Guy's life together. The longest paragraph in the letter dealt with their collaborative approach to writing, which began with a column called Woods Trails they wrote together for New England Outdoors in the late 1970s. "Guy would draw up an outline," she recalled. "We'd each take sections that appealed to us to write. We'd scribble furiously for about two-thirds of the morning. We'd read aloud what we'd written to each other. Guy would construct the bridging paragraphs. One of us would type it up. We'd mail it." Many of those essays became chapters in their books, and the column kicked off a happy era of impassioned advocacy on behalf of the region's wilderness.

Though far from a best-seller, their first book, Backwoods Ethics—a whimsical but fervent compendium of tips for hikers and campers seeking to lessen their impact on the environment (skip the fire, sleep in hammocks, "rock-hop" in areas with delicate ground-cover vegetation)—nevertheless had a tremendous impact within the wilderness community. "It reminds me of something they used to say about this one Velvet Underground album back in the sixties," Doug Mayer says. "It only sold a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought it started a band."

In 1979, the AMC approached the Watermans with an irresistible offer: a book contract for a comprehensive recreational history of the Northeastern mountains, from the trailblazing pioneers to the new wave of extremist ice climbers and ski mountaineers. The couple planned to spend three years on Forest and Crag, but in the end it took ten. The book, dedicated to Johnny Waterman, came in at a relatively svelte 884 pages only because the AMC, worried about the bottom line, insisted on removing all the material on technical climbing. (These sections were later published by Stackpole Press under the title Yankee Rock and Ice.)

In 1993 the Watermans' fourth book, Wilderness Ethics, was published. (A fifth and final work, Mountain Tales: Tall and True, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, will be issued this fall by The Mountaineers Books.) Among other issues, Wilderness Ethics wrestled with a concern that became the Watermans' paramount cause later in life: their conviction that the maintenance of the "illusion" of wildness was just as crucial as the wildness itself. The book casts a jaundiced eye on everything from helicopter rescues and large, boisterous groups to the use of cell phones, to which Guy had a particularly strong aversion. It ends on a hopeful note, but scattered throughout are signs of a deepening pessimism and Guy's growing sense that his work was not being taken seriously. "[T]he erosion is so creeping," one passage reads. "It is like the tide coming in, first a foot from your toes, then up to your knees, and in a short while over your head. You never saw it move, but you are drowning and there is no more wildness."