by Tom Ryan
“I’ve decided to call him Aragorn,” I said.
“Aragorn?”
“A Tolkien character from The Lord of the Rings. In the beginning, he’s a common man who feels at home in nature. Over time you learn he’s the heir to the throne.”
“I think that yearling has a lot to live up to,” and she laughed.
“I see something different in him, different like I can’t put my finger on it. In a way, he reminds me of a young Atticus.”
Will’s fairy tale began with an unwanted and fateful twist; then came a journey to a faraway land next to an enchanted forest, where he’d meet others who would help him; and now even a bear was involved. Not a talking bear, mind you, as you might expect in a fairy tale, but a bear nonetheless.
Our lives were chaotic in those first months, and I often felt lost. But I came to think that we had fallen into that indefinable place Kentucky poet Wendell Berry wrote of: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our journey.”
4
Be Gentle
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
—RACHEL CARSON
I raised Atticus to be gentle and kind with other animals. I’ve always been this way, believing animals deserve kindness whenever it’s possible, which is nearly always, and at least a measure of respect when it is not.
While one of my brothers spent his younger summers sticking fireworks inside frogs at the local pond and tossing them in the air to watch them explode, or pulling wings off of flies during boring sermons at church, I would sit in the same uncomfortable wooden pew playing with the flies who landed on my hands.
I remember crying as a six-year-old when my family went to Montreal for the World’s Fair, Expo ’67. The A-frame chalet we stayed in was visited by the friendliest rabbit, who let us pet him. I didn’t want to leave him behind, not even for all the wonders we were about to witness. I cried and cried as my father made me get into the car.
All these years later, I am comfortable sharing one of the upper corners of our bathroom with a daddy longlegs each winter. In November one appears there. None of them have ever seemed to move, and I let them be. When the warmth of spring returns, they disappear.
There’s a cliché spun again and again by many who love dogs. “They have so much to teach us.” I agree with that, for I have learned much from the animals I’ve known. But I also believe we have much to teach them. For as long as people and dogs have been pairing up—about ten thousand years—it has been a symbiotic relationship. We teach each other. We take the lead in the civilized world while they often take the lead in the natural world. Together we have evolved into two species with a unique and universal friendship.
Some of it comes naturally; at other times there are lessons to learn and be reinforced.
One frozen November day during our second year of hiking, Atticus and I left Newburyport at six A.M. and drove the two and a half hours north to Crawford Notch. Soon after we arrived, I felt a little strange. Over the prior few weeks, my body had been feeling drunk and sluggish with a heaviness brought about by some unknown virus or bug. There were good days and some bad. It was an unpredictable cycle.
It came on during the first five minutes on the trail. My arms, legs, face, and lips felt numb—the same lethargy had visited me a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of a hike up Mount Chocorua. But after walking through the vibrant October woods and up the steep but short pitch to some open ledges, I left it behind. I felt fine the rest of the day.
I was hoping for a similar outcome on a ten-mile hike along the Willey Range covering three four-thousand-foot peaks—Field, Willey, and Tom. It’s a trek we’d taken three times before, and one of my favorites. However, the farther along we walked, the worse I felt.
I tried to ignore it and concentrate on the crisp air, the snow on the side of the trail, the solitude of a weekday hike. Like Robert Frost, I took note of the trees and realized that somewhere through the years “I learned to know the love of bare November days . . .”
Even on flat sections of trail, I moved slowly. I thought about turning back but figured I could always do so later if things didn’t improve.
I used extra caution crossing streams, and when we took the left fork toward Mount Avalon, I chugged slowly along, stopping frequently. The higher we climbed, the more snow there was. A lone set of footprints frozen in place from the day before led the way over the white rocks. Each of our rest stops lasted a little longer. Atticus, just ahead and above, watched me closely.
The prospect of turning back was becoming more realistic, but I hated the idea of driving five hours in a day and not hiking. I bargained with the weakness within. It wanted a complete stop; I wanted something out of the day. Back and forth the debate went until a settlement was reached. If I could make it, I’d stop at Avalon and call it a day.
Avalon’s along the way to Mount Field, but because it is smaller, even though it reportedly had a stunning view, Atticus and I had never stopped there. We always pushed on for the higher peaks. The mysterious illness made each step more difficult than the last.
Atticus was patient. He always was when we were on the trail, taking his ground methodically, then standing and waiting for me. The only time he would return to me was if I took off my pack and sat down.
On a steep stretch, I stretched out my arms and stabbed my trekking poles into the snow. I hung my swimming head between my arms and fought off the dizziness.
When I looked up, Atticus was above me with something dangling from his mouth. It looked like a small gray mitten. But upon a closer look, the mitten was moving while my hiking partner sat above me with an ordinary look, as if he had nothing hanging from his mouth whatsoever.
When I caught up to him, I noticed it was a vole.
“That’s not cool. That’s someone’s life you have hanging from your mouth. Remember to be gentle, please.” He looked at me and then let the rodent fall to the snow.
Atticus was never much of a hunter. Well, let me rephrase that. He was never much of a catcher. He loved chasing squirrels but had little luck in catching them. He did get hold of a youngster once, but when I said, “Please, leave it be,” he let his quarry go. It scampered away while he looked on in what I imagined was disbelief, first at the freed squirrel, then at me. On another occasion, while we were walking in Newburyport’s South End, a small bird had evidently fallen from its nest and was hopping along the sidewalk. He scooped it up into his mouth, and it disappeared. When I folded my arms and lifted an eyebrow, he opened his mouth and the young bird hopped out. It was unharmed. After a quick shake, the bird was on its way again, hopping down the sidewalk.
The vole was lying in the snow, struggling for its life. It writhed slowly on its back, its mouth open, its legs spread out and slowly kicking.
Sadness came over me. As I watched this tiny creature struggling, I forgot how poorly I felt.
I pulled on a heavy winter Gore-Tex mitt and held the vole in my palm. It was dying. I sat down in the snow and Atticus sat next to me looking on. He pressed his body next to mine to get even closer. There we sat, me holding the dying vole, him looking on and listening to me talk about reverence.
Find a quiet trail and you think about all kinds of things. And since it was almost always just Atticus and me on a trail together, my mind often wandered, memories floated back, internal dialogue sometimes became external. There’s a lot of good therapy to be found on a mountainside. Probably the best kind.
I was thinking of the woebegone nursing home, and one particular troubled resident, a wretched man. His name was Fred Welch.
He was wheelchair bound by a stroke and decades of drinking. Long ago, his wife and children grew tired of his alcoholism. She told him it was either them or the bottle. Fred chose the bottle.
His family hadn’t se
en him in years and didn’t want to know anything about him other than to be notified when he died.
Fred didn’t have a friend in the world. His only enjoyment came in making other people miserable. He did this by swearing at anyone who came near him. The women on the staff were regular targets whenever they tried to help him.
One day I made inroads with Fred by telling him a lie. I walked into his room as if he wasn’t there and cussed repeatedly. I turned to him and told him my wife and kids were nothing but trouble. I threw a towel, kicked the trash can, and raged against the injustice of my wife telling me she would leave and take the kids if I didn’t stop drinking. He watched rigidly from his wheelchair while I ranted. “Screw her! Screw all of them! Damn kids! I’m going to keep drinking and they can leave if they want to!”
With great effort, he shifted in his chair and mumbled something. I ignored him. He mumbled it again. When I stopped and asked him what he said, he repeated himself, haltingly. “Don’t do it. Biggest mistake of my life.”
From that point on I had a new friend, and lonely Fred changed. He was more patient with the other residents and kinder to the staff. He’d wait outside his room for me to come down the hall. We talked daily, and each day he talked more. As he opened up, I asked him about his life. I’d ask him all kinds of things.
“Fred, tell me three of your favorite things in the world. List them for me.”
He chewed his lip. Then he said, “Watching Ted Williams play baseball. Sophia Loren. Blow jobs.”
He smiled.
A week later I asked him, “Fred, tell me something. What are you most afraid of?”
He didn’t think long, which meant it was something he thought about. He worked the words up his throat and into his mouth. “Dying alone.”
On the day Fred took a turn for the worse and it was clear he was going to die, he was sent to Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport. They called it “care and comfort” at the nursing home. A way to make someone’s last hours more peaceful, I suppose.
His family was called. They said to call back when he was dead.
I stopped at home on the way to the hospital and picked up a change of clothes and a copy of John Updike’s essay on Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park.
When I arrived, he was already in a private room. Although he was weak, we talked. Mostly, though, I read to him or just sat with him.
The hours ticked slowly by. I held up water with a straw for him to sip from. I wiped his brow with a cool, damp washcloth. When he could no longer sip, I wet his lips with another washcloth soaked in ice water.
After ten hours, he was very close to the end. Neither of us had said anything for a long while, but I wanted him to know he was not dying alone. I sat next to him on the bed and held him and spoke just loud enough for him to hear, “Fred, do you know what heaven is like?”
He lay silent.
I put my mouth to his ear, “Heaven, Fred, is sitting at Fenway Park, watching Ted Williams at bat while Sophia Loren gives you a blow job.”
He smiled one last time.
Over the next hour, I watched his breathing slow. I could hear the death rattle. He inhaled less and less. I felt his body release into my arms when life left him.
I showed up so that Fred wouldn’t have to die alone. Throughout the night I comforted him, read to him, held him. When he passed from this world to wherever he was headed, he seemed at peace. Yet somehow, after all of that, I feel I was the one who received the gift.
I learned something that night: if childbirth is a miracle, so is death.
That’s what I was thinking of while watching the little vole dying in my hand.
I was distressed that Atticus had taken the life from this little creature, and felt the least I could do was to make sure it didn’t have to die alone in the snow. So I held it until I felt the life leave its body.
Just off the trail I scooped a handful of snow and made a dish. I took an extra sock from of my pack and made a bed for the tiny creature by wrapping him softly in the cloth. I laid him down in the indentation.
I did this just in case I had misread it and he was just in shock. Perhaps he would be fine, although I doubted it.
Atticus and I left him and made our way through knee-deep snow on the spur path to Avalon’s summit. I had a difficult time in spots where the slippery rocks were hidden by snow and underlying ice. At the summit, I was stopped in my tracks by the magnificence of the Presidential Range covered in snow.
We sat in the warm sunshine, drank in the views, and ate an early lunch. I took photos and wrote a quick letter to my dad, as I did on many of our hikes.
On the way down, Atticus was the first to reach the spot where we’d left the vole. He sat next to the little bed and waited for me. It was dead.
In Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff wrote, “Reverence is the capacity of awe in the face of the transcendent.” He also wrote, “Death is one of the most awe-inspiring facts of our lives.”
Perhaps Woodruff’s words were one of the reasons I took the time on that day when I wasn’t feeling well to take branches and greens to make the dead vole a nest. When I left that nest under an evergreen tree, I paraphrased two lines from John Irving’s Cider House Rules, substituting “New Hampshire” for “Maine”: “Good night, you Princes of New Hampshire, you Kings of New England.”
A friend in Newburyport found this story silly.
“It was only a rodent,” he said.
To me it was about more than a rodent. It was about these astounding mountains. It was about remembering to say thank you, about showing respect for a place and the lives, no matter how small, that call it home. It was about reverence. I am continually learning about myself and nature, continually remembering what I have forgotten or what I have failed to keep significant in my life. In my journeys alone with Atticus, I’d always found myself being a better person than I’d taken the time to be before.
One day the following spring, on a climb up Mount Pemigewasset before the mountain had turned green, I nearly stepped on a tiny vole. In midstride I noticed him and stopped. Atticus and I sat down to watch him. I pulled a piece of cheese from my lunch and offered a morsel to the vole. He sat up on his hind legs, grabbed the corner with the tiniest front hands I had ever seen, and held on as he chewed.
We sat together for a while. When I shifted my weight, I moved too quickly and the vole ran away from me. He ran toward Atticus and sat between his front legs. Atti looked down at him, studying him calmly, and that’s how dog and vole sat until we left.
Our lessons never end. We teach ourselves, and we teach others, and the favor is returned as we become students.
I have no doubt that this enchanted forest and these mountains have made both Atticus and me gentler. Whenever the task of making Will gentle seemed impossible, I’d think about how the forest had helped me. I hoped the mystique would find a way into his tired spirit. As would kindness and respect, and attempting to apply the same golden rule I used with Atticus, by treating him as I would want to be treated if the roles were reversed.
Looking back on the years of hiking before Will came, perhaps I was making myself gentle. I was setting up a home for him when the day came that he arrived.
As our friend Ann Stampfer said, “The mountains, and these woods, are the perfect metaphor for everything else. They prepared me for whatever I would ever face, and allowed me to handle the most challenging things with perspective.”
5
Pine Mountain
Nature can show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds.
—ECKHART TOLLE
Long before the settlers arrived, the Abenaki Indians knew the mystique of this land. They considered it sacred, especially Agiocochook, home of the Great Spirit, which they are said to have avoided. Today Agiocochook is called Mount Washington, home of a weather station, a cog railway, an auto road, and a summit cafeteria where you can buy chili, pizza, hot dogs, and soda.
Most indications that this land was once the home of the Abenaki are gone, but a few names remain to remind us. Notable chiefs such as Passaconaway, Chocorua, Kancamagus, Wonalancet, and Paugus have mountains named after them. All are part of the Sandwich Range, which stretches across the southern border of the White Mountain National Forest, running east to west. It is a quieter range than most of the others in the national forest, and the mountains are not as tall as many of the more popular peaks. It’s one of the reasons I like the Sandwich Range and accompanying Sandwich Wilderness. The majority of the trails are not as busy. The area is less sexy for those looking for photo opportunities and Instagram posts. But the range’s subtlety is exactly what draws me in.
Of all the mountains we’ve climbed over the past ten years, I would guess we’ve stood on the summits of more in the Sandwich Range than any of the other ranges.
Another reason I like it, besides the solitude, is that with Abenaki names sprinkled across this area, I feel more connected with those who first knew the land and held it in the highest regard. I like to imagine that when Atticus and I hiked one of these peaks, we were back in a simpler, purer time when one these great leaders ruled their tribe.
I often bow my head when remembering their way of respecting this land. The deified hills, the sacrosanct rivers, the hallowed valleys. It’s land that’s good for the soul. It fills you up, brings you back to basics, reminds you who you are beneath the layers of ego. Deep in the quietest forests, you come face-to-face with yourself.
Of all those romantic Abenaki names, my favorite is Passaconaway. It translates to “Son of the Bear.” New Hampshire legend had it that when the influential Passaconaway, greatest of all the chiefs, died, a sled pulled by wolves flew him to the top of Agiocochook.
The reverence the Abenaki had for this grand enchanted forest touches me deeply and reminds me how privileged we are to live here and to hike through the forests they walked. And whenever I look up at Mount Washington, I can’t help but think of the late Passaconaway’s mythic flight.