|
As their last decade together wore on, the Watermans seemed to retreat ever further from the outside world. There's a telling passage in "Saving the Wilderness—From Whom?" an article they published in Appalachiain 1995. For 12 years, Guy and Laura wrote, they and a group of ten or so friends had gathered for an annual
midwinter reunion deep in the Pemigewasset Wilderness, east of Mount Lafayette. But over time, this tradition began to seem a hypocritical violation of the very ethic the Watermans had helped create. "The values of solitude, stillness, remoteness and respect for other parties' experiences spread," they wrote. "One tenet of the new ethic was limiting group
size.... People were offended by the inappropriate imposition of cocktail-party values of raucous sociability on the tone of the backcountry and on the experience of every other party there." So a dozen old friends stopped coming together in the woods—as if laughter could only be sanctioned in some destitute bar in the far-off, fallen city.
Meanwhile, the Watermans were also backing away from their once-prominent role in the AMC. In 1995 and '96, Guy worked as winter caretaker of a rough-hewn Randolph Mountain Club hut on Mount Adams, where the atmosphere was more quiet and contemplative than at the AMC huts, and where the use of the hated cell phone was forbidden. By then, Laura's knees
had worn out. Though she could still climb, and even ice climb, hiking became an ordeal. Guy, for his part, quit climbing. "He said his rock shoes were worn out, but I think it alluded to other things," says Dunn. "He saw rock climbing becoming more of a technical, gymnastic thing and less of a wilderness experience. All the modern gear and the bright
colors were part of it."
Waterman began to spend more time at Barra, explaining in one interview that he "would rather have Laura without mountains than mountains without Laura." He began writing again, but about baseball, a sport whose statistical intricacies appealed to him. Through the daughter of a friend, he developed a fan's enthusiasm for Dartmouth women's ice hockey, so
much so that he attended every home game and became something of a team mascot. He sat in the stands with his index cards, making little checks next to a skater's name when she made a good play.
But he seemed to have difficulty summoning the passion that he'd once felt for wilderness advocacy. "Guy always tended to do things intensely, then move on abruptly," Dunn says. "I think he lost a little fire each time. The things he did later on just didn't give him the same satisfaction as climbing. He didn't have the big issue."
In her Valley News article, Laura quoted a passage from the last few pages of Guy's memoir, the same pages he had handed her on the morning of February 6. "The transition away from deep involvement in the mountains and in the issues of preserving wildness in the northeastern backcountry has been painful, associated with a
sense that we were retreating, defeated, from the field," he wrote. "A few people have said some very nice things about our books, but on the whole they and our ideas about Eastern wildness seem to be sinking into oblivion unnoticed. All this is accompanied by a feeling that I could have done better."
|
