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Guy's Winter at Gray Knob In 1973 Guy and I left our high-paying jobs in New York City and moved to the countryside of Vermont with no possibility of further employment on the horizon. We had elected to live a simple, self-sustaining life. We built a cabin in a clearing, planted a large vegetable garden, an orchard, and set out 16 high bush blueberry bushes. We tapped our sugar maples, cut our own wood, and enjoyed a life unburdened with expenses and modern conveniences that left us with plenty of time for hiking and exploring the White Mountains. Little did either of us suspect that when Guy walked out of the General Electric offices on June 8, 1973, removed his tie and stated, “Gentlemen, I’m never coming back to Manhattan Island again” (he never did), that the next paycheck Guy would collect would come from the Randolph Mountain Club a full twenty years later when he was just past 60. Guy made an early December trip up to Gray Knob in 1991, and on his return told me that the caretaker, Craig Jolly, had been up there without a break since he had arrived. So Guy offered to pinch hit for Craig, and that’s how Gray Knob came into Guy’s life, and mine too, even though I was the one who stayed at home stoking the fires of our homestead - the place we called Barra. The next winter Guy covered for Craig again, but in the winter of 1993-94, Guy became an “official” Gray Knob caretaker, sharing the position with Paul Neubauer. Guy was 61. Paul was 23. That first week Guy noted as a high point, “Smooth working relationship developing between Paul and me.”
On Monday, November 1st, I wrote in my journal, “G left for Gray Knob very early [3:30 a.m.] and he must have had a very wet trip up. It snowed all day here, wet and melting, so it was hard to tell accumulation, but 2 to 3 inches is on the ground. Sloppy and slippery walking.” There was somewhat of a cliff-hanger with his getting off because Guy was suffering from a pulled back muscle that also affected his leg. We spent the weekend before at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Wheeler Pond Camp in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Part of a work crew, we tore down the old tool shed and built an extension on the existing woodshed, as well as scraped out waterbars on the nearby trails. Guy felt pretty handicapped by his back. Everyone there had expressed concern, especially when they found out he was due up at Gray Knob on Monday for his first day on the job! When Guy returned home to Barra after that weekend at Wheeler Pond, he began to break down what he had planned to carry up to Gray Knob from two loads into three weighing 43 pounds each, in deference to his back. It turned out this packing of lighter loads was a real revelation. Guy was famous for carrying 80 pounds on our ice climbing trips into Huntington Ravine. Now that he was forced to pack lighter, he was surprised to discover he actually liked carrying loads! I ended my journal entry for Sunday, October 31st, the night before he left, by saying: “I trimmed up some brussels sprouts for G to eat tomorrow night at Gray Knob. So begins a very different seven months for us.” And so it was! Guy was away for seven or eight days at a stretch, then home for a week. That in itself was an enormous change for a couple who had spent very little time apart in the last twenty years. But there were similarities too. We both had to walk to reach “home,” though Guy had a longer and steeper walk compared to the mile and a half into our cabin, and his ended up at a higher elevation. He got more total snow, and it was a bit breezier, I would venture to assume, at Gray Knob than it was at Barra. But that first November week, my temperatures were lower than Guy’s on several mornings due to an interesting inversion. On November 6th the thermometer at Gray Knob read a blistering 50 degrees while I recorded a more normal 35 degrees on that date. Our lives continued similarly in other ways as well. For instance, we were both using an outhouse, living without electricity, and hauling our water. But Guy got to talk to Bill Arnold every evening on the radio, whereas no phone ever rang at Barra. The differences, of course, were great. I can think of two in particular. The first was that Guy often had overnight guests. In fact during those seven months he logged in a grand total of 283 overnight human visitors. My overnight visitors during these months was zero. Guy kept track of dog guests as well, recording 13 in November, 3 in December, zero in January, 1 in February, 2 in March, and zero in April. I expect Doug Mayer’s dog, Barkley, accounted for many of the visits there. My overnight canine guests count was zero, except for our dog Elsa who was a permanent resident. The other major difference, and one I must say I was happy not to exchange with Guy, was that my living space was a whole lot warmer. As winter frequenters of Gray Knob are aware, the caretaker is requested not to start the stove until 5:00 p.m., and then only if the temperature is below 32 degrees inside the cabin. On December 27th it was 5 degrees in Gray Knob’s interior, as it was on January 6th and 19th. But most days the inside temperatures crested into double digits, with the most torrid reading occurring on November 15th with 49 degrees. No need to start the stove that night!
During the day, when I was working on short stories in the morning (Guy’s absences every other week gave me a concentrated period to work on fiction, something new for me) and sawing up wood in the afternoon, Guy, when he wasn’t packing up and down Lowe’s Path, was covering ground above treeline. Adams 4 was one of his favorite destinations, as was the summit of Adams itself as well as Sam Adams, and a lesser bump Guy dubbed Babe, the smallest member of the Adams family. The high point he noted for the week of December 21st was, “Morning of Christmas Eve – tour of the Adams’ summits with Tracy Rexford.” It had been 30 degrees below zero that morning. For the week of March 2nd the high point was, “Adams in dense whiteout on Sat, entire Adams family in splendor on Sun.” And for April 6th week, “Finding all 8 Adams summits in unseasonal wintry whiteout with Chuck Kukla.” I paid Guy one visit in his mountain home that winter, in early February. My knees weren’t up to much mountain walking anymore, and in fact that was one reason why Guy’s taking the Gray Knob job seemed like a good idea. We’d spent so many years, especially in winter, camped out and climbing only to return home to dry out, then back to the mountains again. At the beginning of each winter we made a list of what we wanted to explore, and though we managed to fit in three to four multi-night outings a month plus day trips, we never came close to exhausting the ideas we had for trips. That’s the great thing about the White Mountains! But it all took its toll on my knees. So it seemed that Gray Knob presented a splendid opportunity for Guy to be on the mountains in the winter in a way that challenged him, yet made him feel useful too. With encouragement of Guy and Doug Mayer, I made it up the Lowe’s Path and was able to see how well-swept and welcoming Guy and Paul kept Gray Knob. The next morning we awoke to 20 below outside and 10 above inside, so Guy broke the cardinal rule and started the stove, even though it was nowhere near 5:00 p.m. I was sure he never would have done this for any of his other guests. It made me feel a little wimpy, but I knew he wanted to make me comfortable. The wind was roaring as we ate our oatmeal, and it looked like climbing Mount Adams was out of the question. But an acquaintance, Sue Johnson, showed up and said it was perfectly lovely out, so we donned crampons and started up. I was very glad to reach the summit of Adams on such a day with a cobalt blue sky and the snow so deep even the rock pile of Adams’s summit was nearly filled in. The next day, I knew from my difficulty in packing down Lowe’s Path that the mountains had slipped away, and my eyes kept filling with tears as I thought about all our adventures – ferocious bushwhacks, iced-up slides climbed with ropes and axes and crampons, wild times above treeline – so often ending with a hot meal in our tent and the purring of the camp stove. Our best trips had been in winter. Though I knew my mountain days were over, I didn’t know Guy’s were as well. When he returned to Barra between stints he often said, “When I’m up above treeline in whiteout and wind I’m completely at home, utterly confident.” This made me feel happy for Guy. But then he added once, “I’ve felt confident about so little in my life,” and though I thought I understood what he meant, I really didn’t see at all. On June 1st, exactly one month after his birthday, Guy descended Lowe’s Path for the last time and walked into a party at Doug Mayer’s house on Randolph Hill Road. Surprise! Friends had gathered to celebrate Guy’s “retirement.” He had turned 62 and was going on Social Security. Everyone had chipped in to give him a present – a sundial – which, as Doug put it, was the equivalent of the gold watch he would have received if he’d stayed the course at General Electric. Afterward I saw the retirement party was double-edged for Guy. He must have known it marked the end of his active life in the mountains, but no one, especially not me, saw this when we were celebrating such a good time. Guy went to the mountains rarely after that and never again in winter. The cloud of demons that had long swarmed around his head clamped down. Though the spark that made Guy so much fun to be with never entirely vanished, he dwelt more in a dark land he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about. His struggle, and his inability to share his pain, led to his suicide six years later, in February 2000, when he trudged up to the summit of Mount Lafayette to lie out in the cold and die. I like to think back to how Guy enjoyed to the hilt his job at Gray Knob. As mountain host, he welcomed his carefully counted guests with floors swept, counters scrubbed, and wood neatly stacked. His romps through the alpine wilderness were a lifeline. Guy turned this time at Gray Knob into the high watermark and last hurrah. True to his nature, he was the only one who knew he was saying farewell. ———————————————— The late Guy Waterman was probably best known for the many outdoors books co-authored with his wife Laura. Among them are Forest and Crag, Yankee Rock and Ice, A Find Kind of Madness, and two ethics books-- Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics which, together, laid the groundwork for today’s Leave No Trace ethic of stewardship. A longtime member of the RMC, Guy had three unique connections to our club. His father, Allan, signed an ancient deerskin that served as the log book for the old Crag Camp. The date is particularly interesting: July 31, 1931-- nine months, to the day, before Guy was born. Writing in the RMC collection, Remembrances of Crag Camp, Guy wrote, “I hasten to observe that, of my five siblings, I’m said to most closely resemble my father!” Years later, Crag would be the last place Guy would be together in the mountains with his two oldest sons. As Guy wrote, “We little knew then... that that night would be the last together in the mountains. Both sons died in their twenties in Alaska, far from the edge of King Ravine where we watched the dawn together on September 2, 1968.” Finally, sixty three years after his father’s visit, Guy became RMC’s oldest caretaker, when he worked at Gray Knob during the winter of 1993-94. It was, as Laura Waterman wrote, Guy’s last hurrah. Guy intentionally ended his life atop of Mount Lafayette in February of 2000. A book about Guy’s life, Good Morning Midnight: A Life and Death in the Wild, was recently published by Chip Brown, writer. -- Editor
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Guy’s
stint at Gray Knob proved a wonderful time for him, but I see
it now as a poignant time as well.Guy knew his hold on the mountains
was weakening, not on account of his age, but because of an inner
turmoil that was leading him toward the close of his life. I
saw little of this at the time. Guy kept his deepest thoughts
to himself. But they came out at last, some six years later on
Mount Lafayette on a frigid day in February.
It
took Guy a bit of practice to get the hang of the stove. There
was plenty of wood, neatly stacked under the bench by the fall
caretaker, Kevin LaRue. However, the finest to be found was spruce
and fir, and it was as wet as a wash rag. (This was before the
days of the woodshed to dry wood at Gray Knob.) To get it burning
took a degree of patience and skill that Guy was unprepared for
after all the years of burning hardwood (sugar maple, red oak,
ash, hop hornbeam, and beech) seasoned until it could be lit
with one match. I wouldn’t have traded places with Guy for
anything when it came to starting the stove at Barra versus the
stories he brought back on a weekly basis of the amount of cursing,
gnashing of teeth, and singeing of fingers it took to get the
fire started at Gray Knob. Guy had to contend with the propane
as well (we operated with kerosene for our light at Barra), and
he noted as his low point for the week of December 8th, “Difficulty
with propane, necessitating valley trip in the rain, utterly
unnecessary in the end.”