Journeys Afoot in North America
Walkabout, did you? And slept under hotel pines? So many thousands of miles, you never heard of the philosopher who got his exercise acting as pallbearer for his friends who exercised? All right, we promise not to ask how many pairs of shoes, but how did it all begin?
On the Black Dump of Wylam in Birmingham where the family had moved after my father quit sharecropping, I first rambled. Seen years later its gray acres of eroded slag ridges amid scant vegetation reminded one of desert mountains. No single Matterhorn it had been a range for a boy to explore. Out of the service married visiting the crowded home in Wylam my wife and I, walked out in the moon-filled night. Soft now the line of ledges, the near city so far, see where I once fell, will you rest by me on, the Black Dump of Wylam?
While still in the Air Force I had tried my first big mountain, Tulik, on the island of Umnak in the Aleutian chain that reaches out from Alaska into the North Pacific. A regular mob set out with me from Fort Glenn, but streams to ford, steep slopes, and simple toil subtracted. Only a Vermonter and I got close, with the last few feet of ice beating us too. Then he skied down fast on his feet, and I was alone. (The troops straggling back past midnight so vexed our superiors that Mount Tulik was declared off limits.)
Later, in graduate school at the University of Washington, I climbed the snow giants, Rainier's kin, with the Seattle Mountaineers. On a descent of a smaller but rougher mountain, Whitehorse, Robert Blumenthal saved my life. We were glissading too fast down steep soft snow when I went through the snow into a waterfall, turned upside down on the rope, and lost consciousness. He got us stopped, the other rope team pulled me up, and I soon came to. But I used to dream of continuing that dark journey out to the sea.
While teaching mathematics at the University of Wisconsin I grew homesick for the mountains. My second wife and I, with a friend, made a Christmas attempt of Gray's Peak in Colorado. They repented first; I got to the top about sunset, but it cost me. Perhaps we'd come up too soon from sea level. Whatever the cause I had asthma and partial deafness for years after.
I learned to breathe again climbing the other fourteen-thousand-foot peaks of Colorado, after moving there to work as an applied mathematician for an oil company. Most of these ascents were solo because I was ashamed of my slowness. Little Bear I remember for its rotten rock. Columbia was by moonlight; I had a stony sleep at the top, and woke to the red, red sun.
Whether peaks are worth the toil was never asked; I believed of them what the scholar said of Greek: know some by heart, it'll do you good.
In the spring of 1964 I testified for a wilderness bill at Denver regional hearings. After delivering mathematical papers it was surprising to be nervous before Congressmen. Will the honorable gentleman give the honorable bears a break? Who knows when he himself might need a home? And by fall I was divorced.
Next year, I lost my job too but found a new one with the University of Chicago (where I'd been a graduate student before Washington). This job left summers free.
Count the climbs as short walks. Then June of '66 was my first long walk. I'd been car camping with friends in the Tetons; when they left for the West Coast, I took a notion to walk back to Denver. In street shoes, no hat, sleeping gear stuffed in a duffel bag slung over my forehead by its strap, I began.
Sky and pavement teach our foot. "Hey, buddy, put that load in the back and ride awhile!" The longest I walked without the Wyomingers offering a lift was a couple of hours up Togwatee Pass. As if to claim that a man without family has many families.
One of these goodhearted ones suggested a nearby wilderness to visit instead of the remoter Wind River, and took me to a rancher friend for supplies. On my three-day side trip into Teton Wilderness spring was breaking, the game winter-tame, the bluebirds friendly and curious.
It snowed on me in there but I made a snug camp under a bank, heard what the fire had to say, and watched snowflakes fall into the black waters of Buffalo River. Man used to live thus before he invented the hoe. Was it a return being sung then, in the coals and soft, swirling hexagons?
Later in summer I climbed the Maroon Bells near Aspen, going very slowly at first on the cliffs because of an asthma attack the night before. But I warmed to it and felt strong getting over places where others had driven pitons. On the steep snow that followed I wanted to catch up to a roped pair seen above, but a big falling rock that nearly pulled them off reduced the yearning.
On top of South I saw by the register that they were Outward Bound instructors. I went on to the North Bell and descended the long way because most of the lives taken by the Bells that year had been lost coming back the hard way. I made high meadows by dark. It was a good one; climbing still had its satisfaction, but I had become a walker. Up and down would henceforth be bound into a greater outward. (And the number of pairs of shoes would be not nearly as many as you might imagine.)