The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  On my second morning in Utah, I met McLean in the Little Cottonwood parking lot. He had his pickup truck, on which he had rearranged the lettering of “Toyota” to read “Otto,” in honor of his late Bernese mountain dog. He was accompanied by Dylan Freed. McLean had considered taking Freed on the Alaska trip to climb Mount Foraker, but Freed’s uncle, Mark Twight, one of the world’s top mountaineers, told McLean, “If anything happens to him and you survive, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.” (“This kind of raises the question as to why people would get their kids into skiing and the mountains in the first place if they really wanted them to be safe,” McLean told me. “Darts might be a better activity.”)

  On the way up the canyon, we picked up another friend, Lorne Glick, an accomplished ski mountaineer. Glick lives in a sparsely furnished room (ice axes, topographical maps, banjo) inside a small hydroelectric plant just off the Little Cottonwood road. The generators outside the room roar day and night. For money, Glick occasionally drives a Sno-Cat at Alta or works as a guide, and recently, at the age of forty-one, he got a license to be a helicopter pilot.

  Our plan was to hike up Mount Superior, a peak rising three thousand feet above Little Cottonwood Canyon, and ski down the south face, which, viewed from Alta and Snowbird, seemed to be a sheer white wall, studded with cliffs. On earlier trips, I had occasionally seen tracks etched on it and been half glad that they weren’t mine. “With slides that cover the road 10–20’ deep, Superior should be treated with the utmost respect,” McLean writes in The Chuting Gallery. “Because of the road below, keep in mind that you are endangering others by attempting to ski it in less than ideal conditions.” On this particular day, conditions were close to ideal—four inches or so of fresh snow atop a firm, older layer. I decided not to worry about endangering others.

  The trail began at Alta, behind the Our Lady of the Snows chapel, an avalanche-proof box of reinforced concrete and plate glass that was built in 1993, ten years after the original chapel, made of wood, was destroyed by a slide. McLean handed me a pair of Whippet Self-Arrest poles, which he designed. They are regular ski poles with a steel ice-axe blade fixed to each handle. You appear to be skiing with two stubby handsaws. In the event of a fall on a steep slope, you jab the blades into the snow to stop yourself from sliding. The climb was gradual at first, but it took just three minutes for me to fall well behind. The track was slick. My technique was poor. The air was thin. I huffed my way uphill, doing my best to look around and remind myself that there was no place I’d rather be. The panorama was dazzling in the morning light, like the inside of a diamond; unbroken fields of snow stretched in all directions.

  After an hour or so, I rejoined the others at Cardiff Pass, and we started up Superior. Here the skinning got more technical: A winding trail through the trees requiring awkward maneuvers. Again, I lagged; after a while, McLean skied back down to check on me—humbling enough, though he seemed glad for the exercise. After another hour, it was time to remove the skis, strap them to our packs, and start climbing up a narrow ridge leading to the summit. The trail was variable; stretches of thigh-deep drifted snow gave way to wind-cleared rock. Occasionally, there was climbing to do, on all fours; the Whippet blades helped me gain purchase. On my left, there were cliffs, and, on the right, snow-loaded chutes. In places, it was clear that a fall to either side would be highly problematic. The wind had kicked up, and through breaks in a cloud that seemed to have come out of nowhere I got vertiginous glimpses of the valley floor.

  McLean, by this point, was waiting for me at the top of each pitch, to make sure that I was all right and to take some delight in the extent to which I wasn’t. “You’re still smiling,” he’d say, to my grimace. After one stretch, when I crawled up onto a narrow shelf and collapsed at his feet, he said, “Nick, does your wife know you’re doing this?”

  And then we were on top, the slope below us dropping off into a foggy void. Freed and Glick were long gone. They had decided to ski the north side, which looked bright, powdery, and benign. We bundled up, drank water, ate chocolate, and prepared for the ski down. “There’s more snow up here than I thought,” McLean said. “I think we’ll do the chute on the left. Wait up here until I call up to you.” He dropped in, traversing back and forth a few times to test the snow—ski cutting, it’s called—and then making a series of blocky turns, his wide stance and cautious pace indicating to me that this was no place to make a mistake. And then he disappeared.

  I waited awhile in the wind but couldn’t hear a thing. Bits of cloud blew past. Rock, cornice, cloud. Probability, complacency, luck. I decided not to wait any longer. I hopped into the wind-whipped snow on the upper face, then chopped my way into a steep, icy trough, intermittently jump-turning and side-slipping, chunks of snow and ice clattering around me like broken glass. When I found McLean, he was hiding behind a rock, a big grin on his face. “Isn’t this great?” he said. It was. The pitch eased, and we were making turn after turn in powder. After a while, McLean stopped and pointed up at a steep east-facing shaft. “That’s Suicide,” he said. He wondered whether I had enough left for one more. The answer, that morning, was no.

  Dawn patrol: I met McLean and Brad Barlage in the parking lot at 5 A.M. the following day. We drove up to the White Pine trailhead, donned headlamps, and started skinning up through the woods, a damp malevolent wind howling in the aspen trees. McLean had mercifully assented to a compromise: Instead of going all the way up to White Pine, we’d climb for an hour to Pink Pine. The name suggested achievability. We reached the top before first light. Snow had started to fall, spinning in the beams of our headlamps. We skied a run in the trees in darkness—a curious experience. Not feeling right, I continued down alone, while they went up for more.

  That evening, I had dinner with McLean and Samuels. They live at the top of a rise in a modest development outside Park City, on the east slope of the Wasatch, giving them a view through fir trees of the Uinta Mountains. The house is compact but spacious—three stories. McLean poured two glasses of Scotch and showed me around. The ground floor is dominated by his workshop. It contains twenty-three pairs of skis, as well as climbing skins, boots, bicycles, unicycles, and various heavy mechanical saws and drills. In a closet, neatly arranged, were twenty ice axes and an assortment of helmets and backpacks. Shovels, carabiners, headlamps. Next to the workshop is a sewing room, where he assembles his giant kites. Upstairs, he has an office full of maps and adventure books. He reads a lot; on expeditions, when the weather goes bad, he said, “you end up tearing paperbacks into chapters and passing them around to be read out of order.”

  When Samuels returned home from work, I remarked upon the neatness of the place. “Did you expect him to be living in some cave?” she asked. She and McLean met in the Little Cottonwood parking lot, when he made a comment about a bumper sticker on her car for a ski-mountaineering mecca in France called La Grave. She loves skiing and understands that he does, too, and so she tolerates the long absences, as well as the risks, though when he talks about them—when, for example, he enumerated some of the obstacles on Mount Foraker—she laid a hand on his leg, as if to keep him near.

  For dinner, McLean made cheese fondue. As he cooked, he talked about some of his avalanche encounters over the years. He told the one about being out on avalanche patrol for the Forest Service, early in the season, and getting caught in a slow slide on a seemingly harmless pitch that buried him head down, so that he couldn’t move or breathe. There were incidents in which he was buried up to the waist or thrown up against a tree. “I’m having second thoughts about skiing, suddenly,” McLean said, laying the fondue pot on the table.

  “I’ve never heard these stories,” Samuels said.

  “You haven’t?”

  “I guess I never asked.”

  The more you learn about snow, the clearer it becomes that skiing—in the backcountry, on glaciers, in deep snow, on extreme steeps—is more dangerous than most people who regularly do it acknowledge. The capriciousness of th
e snow is hard to figure. And, whether it’s because of hubris or probability, the victims tend to be those who know their way around the mountains, or believe they do.

  “Many people think that the way they do it is safe but that the way others do it isn’t,” McLean told me. “The only truly safe way of doing it is to stop doing it, which I don’t want to do.” McLean is not superstitious; he doesn’t believe that this frank assessment inoculates him against trouble. But it does enable him to evaluate the risks more soberly. For all his seeming recklessness, he is a compulsive planner and a meticulous performer—a mountain scientist. He admits to having “nighttime fears” and “trip anxiety,” but in the end such sensations manifest themselves in preparation and a fixation on gear. (Carabiners “are all about semi-intangible subtleties.”) And, where acumen comes up short, he resorts, as most mountain men do, to a kind of fatalism. “I often torment myself with a theoretical question,” he said. “What if you knew how and when you were going to die? If it was an avalanche or falling to your death, then you’d have to keep skiing, as you’ve already seen the end. If it was in your sleep at a ripe old age, then you’d have to keep skiing as well, since you’d know you were safe. The end result is the same: Keep making turns.” He does have his limits: A few years ago, he took up parapenting—jumping off mountains with a parachute—and decided it was too dangerous.

  What suits McLean may not suit others. “People get in trouble trying to be their hero,” Bruce Tremper, the director of the Forest Service’s avalanche center in Utah, told me. “People got hurt or killed trying to be Alex Lowe. Andrew McLean has taken over that mantle. A lot of people are trying to be Andrew McLean now, and they’re getting hurt or killed, because they don’t have his talent or experience. Life gives us cheap lessons sometimes.”

  McLean and Samuels’s wedding was held in February at Our Lady of the Snows and presided over by Lou Dawson, a pioneer of North American ski mountaineering and a longtime mentor to McLean. He had managed to get an ordination over the Internet for the occasion. (Dawson, it turns out, knew my aunt Meta, and he himself barely survived a big avalanche behind Aspen Highlands, in 1982.) Many congregants were wearing touring boots and ski clothes. One friend had skinned over from Big Cottonwood Canyon with a tuxedo rolled in his pack. The skiers, bright-eyed, shaggy, ruddy, and lean, stood out among the many guests who had come from New York. They made me think of my grandfather and his fellow-Skilehrers, surrounded by Ivy League boys and debutantes. Samuels was brought up in Manhattan; she went to Brearley and Penn; her father, a prominent tax attorney, served as an assistant treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and her mother is a residential real estate broker. Eager to partake of the mountain life, Samuels moved out to Salt Lake City in 2000 and insinuated herself into the area’s clique of elite outdoorsmen and women by undertaking feats of courage and endurance. (In a toast at the wedding, one of these women said, “We think you have earned the right to marry the icon of the Wasatch.”) Also present was Polly’s older brother, Colin, who has himself become an avid backcountry skier and climber. He lives in La Grave. Two years ago, his fiancée was killed when she fell down a slope in Norway into a frozen hole. “Polly’s parents don’t understand it,” McLean said. “Colin has moved to one of the centers of alpinism, and Polly is marrying an alpine geek. They’re probably not thrilled by it.”

  McLean and Samuels left the church under an arch of ski poles held aloft by their guests, then put on boots and skis so that they could ski a celebratory run in wedding attire. They took a chairlift, his morning coat and her wedding dress apparently triggering another exemption to the leg-power rule. Afterward, they joined the reception, at a big hotel at Snowbird. The mountain men were scattered about, stooping to stay clear of the potted palms. Bob Athey, the saltiest of them all, sat by the door in his ski gear. He had a rusty beard and a grand frizz of hair, and he smelled of tobacco and sweat. From the way people lined up to talk to him, it was clear that he had not been observed indoors in some time. (“Bob, I haven’t seen you since we scattered Alan’s ashes,” one woman said.) Athey told me, “I figure I got another twenty years of this, before I die in an avalanche.”

  McLean sidled up. The morning coat looked big on him, as though he were a boy in a man’s suit. He had a fixed smile that thinly disguised a groom’s simmering embarrassment. “So, Bob, how was the skiing today?”

  “It was great.”

  “Where did you go?”

  Athey mentioned some backcountry spots.

  “How was the snow?”

  Crusty.

  McLean nodded and looked thoughtful for a moment, before his father-in-law came by to suggest that he start herding the guests in to dinner. After dinner and a short slate of toasts (“And that’s how my brother ended up in the position he’s in now, with…no job!”), it was time for “Hava Nagila.” Samuels and McLean were hoisted up and borne onto the dance floor. This being Utah, a good portion of the people holding the bride and groom aloft did not have a great deal of experience with this particular number, and it was hard not to notice, as the tempo sped up and McLean, lurching to and fro, gripped the sides of his chair, that the expression on his face contained an unfamiliar ingredient that you might call worry.

  Twenty-four hours after the wedding, I talked to McLean on the phone. I was at Alta, he was at home. (The honeymoon, a trip with friends to a backcountry lodge in British Columbia, would come a few weeks later.) McLean invited me to accompany him and his new brother-in-law on an outing the next morning to the Y Couloir, a three-thousand-foot chute that you walk up in your boots, with crampons and an ice axe. (The Chuting Gallery: “You will be exposed to avalanche hazards 100 per cent of the time and getting caught in even a minor slide here could be fatal.”) I recalled that earlier in the winter McLean had told me that the only expeditions he has ever regretted were the ones he pulled out of: “Whenever I get invited on a trip, I remember a fortune cookie that said ‘Practice saying yes.’” To the Y Couloir invitation, however, I said something about not having the gear and having a plane to catch. McLean told me he had gear for me, and that we’d make it down by noon. “Come on, Nick. You’ll love it!” I hung up and talked it over with my wife, with whom I was supposed to ski the following day. The consensus was that the answer should be no. I called McLean back. I told him that it was snowing at Alta, and he remarked that, if more than four or five inches accumulated, the Y Couloir would be too dangerous to ski. Later that evening, I stepped outside and noted, with more than the usual elation, that six inches had fallen. And it was still dumping. I called McLean and gave him my report; the Y Couloir would have to wait.

  The next day was a powder day. At Alta, the Scrubbing Bubbles were out in force, devouring the new snow in less than an hour. Riding up the chairlift, I looked back hungrily across the canyon, at the vast untracked south face of Superior, and then followed the ridgeline east, until I saw a lone figure ascending a pristine snowfield. The skin track looked steep, the pace brisk. Ten minutes later, I saw the figure, a tiny speck, reach a peak called Flagstaff. My cellphone rang, and it was McLean, calling from the top to gloat. “Are you lonely?” I asked him.

  “It is really good, Nick,” he said. “And I have it all to myself.” After a moment, he dropped off the backside, out of sight.

  2005

  THE RUNNING NOVELIST

  HARUKI MURAKAMI

  Translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel.

  A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after leaving college—I’d been so busy with side jobs that I was actually a few credits short of graduating and was still officially a student—I had opened a little club near the south entrance of Kokubunji Station. The club had stayed there for about three years; then, when the building it was in closed for renovations, I moved it to a new location, closer t
o the center of Tokyo. The new venue wasn’t big—we had a grand piano and just barely enough space to squeeze in a quintet. During the day, it was a café; at night, it was a bar. We served decent food, too, and, on weekends, featured live performances. This kind of club was still quite rare in Tokyo back then, so we gained a steady clientele and the place did all right financially.

  Most of my friends had predicted that the club would fail. They figured that an establishment that was run as a kind of hobby couldn’t succeed, and that someone like me—I was pretty naïve and, they suspected, didn’t have the slightest aptitude for business—wouldn’t be able to make a go of it. Well, their predictions were totally off. To tell the truth, I didn’t think that I had much aptitude for business, either. I just figured that since failure was not an option, I had to give it everything I had. My strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can handle a lot physically. I’m more of a workhorse than a racehorse. I grew up in a white-collar household, so I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, but fortunately my wife’s family ran a business and her natural intuition was a great help.

  The work itself was hard. I was at the club from morning till night and I left there exhausted. I had all kinds of painful experiences and plenty of disappointments. But, after a while, I began to make enough of a profit to hire other people, and I was finally able to take a breather. To get started, I’d borrowed as much money as I could from every bank that would lend to me, and by now I’d paid a lot of it back. Things were settling down. Up to that point, it had been a question of sheer survival, and I hadn’t had time to think about anything else. Now I felt as though I’d reached the top of a steep staircase and emerged into an open space. I was confident that I’d be able to handle any new problems that might crop up. I took a deep breath, glanced back at the stairs I’d just climbed, then slowly gazed around me and began to contemplate the next stage of my life. I was about to turn thirty. I was reaching the age at which I wouldn’t be considered young anymore. And, pretty much out of the blue, it occurred to me to write a novel.