He had almost done it once before. On July 3, 1998, Guy left Laura at Barra and went for a day of solo hiking in the Whites. When he returned that evening, he told her he had climbed to the top of Cannon Cliff with the intent of throwing himself off but had not been able to go through with it.

"I was stunned," Laura wrote about the incident, after Guy's death. "My first thought was, as I watched him pace as he was telling me: Am I married to a crazy man? But I knew I wasn't, and I realized how much I loved him, and that the most important thing was to go on loving him as hard as ever I could."

Rebecca Oreskes, who met the Watermans in the early 1980s and is now manager of dispersed recreation and wilderness for the White Mountain National Forest, remembers hiking with Guy last fall. "He kept talking about how he really dreaded the thought of aging," she says. "My husband and I tried to argue that older people can have good lives—do have good lives—but with him it was obviously 'case closed.'"

One reason he might have been so gloomy was that he had developed a chronic abdominal condition a couple of years earlier, something akin to colitis. "I believe at one point he thought he had something more serious," says John Dunn. "But he refused any invasive diagnostic procedures." Dunn, a physician, says he doubts Waterman had a life-threatening illness, "but, if anything, having a problem like that only reinforced his conviction."

Friends also said his mood swings had become more extreme. "I'm not sure you could call it clinical depression, but he clearly had episodic bouts where he appeared deeply depressed," Dunn says. "Every couple of months he would seem to get down. He'd be withdrawn, and when he did talk, it would often be about his black mood."

"Friends have asked me why did he not seek medical help?" wrote Laura in the Valley News. "I cannot easily answer that question either, except to say it was not Guy's way.... Medicate his demons? Guy Waterman had no wish to do so. Better to live with a full blast of his terrors than to soften those sharp edges."

At the back of his mind, perhaps, was the knowledge that he would not be able to handle the rigors of life at Barra indefinitely. To that end, he set about putting things in order. He started mapping his property. For Guy Waterman, that meant dividing all 27 acres into 50-foot squares, making little cairns on each corner, and then painstakingly diagramming each square, indicating all the natural features and vegetation—every tree and bush. "I think he was preparing a sort of owner's manual for the place," says Doug Mayer.

A year ago, Guy and Laura made plans to leave Barra to the Nearings' foundation, the Good Life Center, which will steward the land. They also began construction of a new log house down in the hamlet of East Corinth so that Laura could live closer to neighbors once he was gone.

"I think most of us knew it was coming," says Dan Allen, one of Waterman's oldest winter hiking chums. "He had shown me his memoir and said, 'It's all done except for the last page.' That's a pretty big signal." That no one ever challenged him or attempted some kind of intervention was understandable, if you knew Waterman. "It just wasn't a negotiable item," says Allen.

One day last fall, Guy had Mayer and Oreskes bring a cassette recorder to Barra to tape him playing several of his favorite waltzes and a few other favorites—a Haydn sonata, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag"—on his Steinway. "We knew it was for his memorial service," Oreskes says. "We were just hoping it wouldn't be so soon."

But Waterman was ready, and all that remained to do was to wait for the weather to change. "He wrote to me, 'If you hear that I'm off for the mountains on a cold windy day, don't be saddened,'" Mayer says. "He said he did not cherish the thought of getting old or enfeebled. He referred to what he called his 'considered preference.' He was deliberate in everything he did, right up to the end."