Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  It started to rain, not much, but enough so that we both put on our rain gear. We climbed and rested and talked our way to Christ’s Saddle, and then on up to the great iron cross on the summit. It was busy at the top, hill walkers everywhere talking and eating and laughing. Scott asked the fellow next to us if he would take our picture together near the cross. As it had been for me on Snowdon, we couldn’t see a thing through the clouds. We found a rock shelter safe from the wind and spread out our lunch: cheese and hard salami, bread, fruit, and canned oysters. Aristotle is no friend of mine, but I do know that in his Nicomachean Ethics he devotes a number of pages to friendship, stating that “friends are the only refuge” and that “without friends no one would choose to live.” I certainly felt that now, as here on Carrantuohil I wasn’t anticipating the revelation of the universal mystery but rather the long, slow hike down engaged in conversation with my old friend, and, later, gorging on meat and Guinness at a Killarney pub. A much better option than epiphany. I reached for the oysters then, and a ray of sunlight broke over my hand. Blue sky cracked the mountain peak as the clouds parted and rolled down into the valley. The bustle at the summit went still, and everyone everywhere stood up. There was Ireland! The Slieve Mish Mountains on the Dingle Peninsula. The Galty Mountains to the east in Tipperary. Kenmare Bay to the southwest, and Inch and Rossbeigh Strand to the northwest. Cameras buzzed and snapped, but Scott and I just stood there looking out. This is a scene for poets, I thought, and to be shared among friends.

  Later, showered and happy and empty, Scott and I asked the slender beauty at the desk of the Neptune’s Hostel where we might find a good meal and a good beer.

  “The Laurels,” she said. “That’s the place you want.”

  “How do we get there?” Scott asked.

  “All right, then,” she said. “You go out onto the front street there, that’s New Street. Take a left. Then right on High Street. You can’t miss it.” Then she paused as if channeling the muse. “It will just hit you,” she said, “like fate.”

  Ben Nevis, Scotland (1,344 meters / 4,409 feet)

  In Fort William, over wild boar burgers and Guinness at the Grog & Gruel, I couldn’t think of anything else to complain about, so I complained about my good fortune.

  “I don’t know. Is this research?” I said. “I mean, how can I spend this grant money on climbing these mountains?”

  “Dude,” Scott said. “This is what you do. Would you rather be in a library somewhere reading some archive?”

  “No way.”

  “See, you gotta let that go. You’re collecting data. It’s just that your data is experience.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. “But will the university president buy that? I mean, I’m enjoying this. I can’t imagine doing anything else right now. Administrations don’t cotton to fun.”

  “Christ,” Scott said. “This is the best money the state of Texas has ever spent. Look at it this way—you’re supposed to be learning, right? Gaining knowledge and using that knowledge to write and teach?”

  “Right.”

  “So, experience as data—at least in my view—leaps over the whole tedious stage called ‘research’ and directly to knowledge. You don’t have to research anything. Experience is knowledge. That’s the difference between research in the humanities and research in the sciences. Your school is getting good value for its money, much better value than a scientist who goes on and on spending money for decades, data set after data set only to conclude that people have sex because they’re attracted to each other.”

  “Right, but—”

  “No buts, man,” Scott said. “You could write a whole fuckin’ paper on this difference, don’t you think? But who would want to? It’d be called something like”—and with that, he worked out a proper title to appease my overindulgent guilt—“‘Differential Data Gathering Methodologies between the Sciences and the Humanities, or How to Use Your Research Funding to Vacation in Europe.’”

  “That’s genius,” I said. “That ought to do it.”

  “Right. Plus you went to that conference, read your work, made contacts, and gave your school a good name.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then you’ll use these experiences to write your shepherd book.”

  “True.”

  “And you’ll share this journey with your students, not to mention your colleagues, who always benefit when their teachers actually live a life, rather than sit at home and watch reality TV.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And other pieces will come out of it too. I mean, maybe you’ll write about this.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So give it a rest,” he said. “Plus, look at it this way: the grant won’t even pay for beer, right? So here you are again spending your own damn money to bring all this knowledge back to your school. I find that almost criminal.”

  Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Scotland, and in all of the UK and Ireland, was just out our door from the Calluna Hostel. After a night of reading melodramatic poetry about the mountain—

  Oh! for a sight of Ben Nevis!

  Methinks I see him now,

  As the morning sunlight crimsons

  The snow-wreath on his brow . . .

  —followed by a little Burns and Sir Walter Scott, then a three-hour commitment to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (we were bent on Scottish immersion, after all), we walked the several kilometers to the trailhead and started up toward the Red Burn. We’d come to learn that a popular challenge in the UK was to climb Snowdon, Ben Nevis, and England’s Scafell Pike all within twenty-four hours. I boasted that I would climb all of them too, plus Carrantuohil, in twenty-four days.

  We came up out of the alder and Scots pine, the violets, heathers, and primrose at the bottom of the glen, and into deer grass, bog asphodel, butterworts, and sundews at Halfway Lochan. The mountain, as usual, was shrouded in mist. Likely all we would see at the summit were other people, hundreds of people streaming up the mountain track. (About a hundred thousand people reach the summit each year.) And sheep, which were everywhere on the green hillsides. I stopped often to snap photographs.

  “More pictures of sheep, huh?” Scott said. “That’ll show those bastards.”

  Few friendships weather the great, ordinary life transitions: youth to adulthood, single life to married life, student-idealist to pragmatic citizen. How ours did, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was the way Scott and I helped raise each other. We both had powerful, emotionally distant fathers who instructed primarily by way of pragmatism and criticism. My father’s style was to put me in an oar boat on a big river in the American West and push me off into the swirling current. “Don’t hit any rocks,” he’d call after me. “I paid good money for that boat.” That was one way, and a pretty good one too, but it didn’t cover all the ground. Scott had an older brother, but they weren’t so close in those days, and I had grown up with two sisters. There were those hallmarks of Western male society—athletics, the frat house, the military—but either they were insufficient, or we skipped them altogether. So there were holes in our journey to manhood, and we turned to each other to fill them.

  A boy becomes a man only “through ritual and effort—only through the ‘active intervention of older men,’” writes Robert Bly in Iron John. He cannot make the transition from being under the care and protection of women (his mother, primarily) to joining the society of men (his father, primarily) without help. And he requires the help of older men. “Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all,” asserts Bly. Back in the day, the men would enter the mother’s house with spears, snatch up the boy, and take him by force to the edge of the village. There the boy would be instructed by other initiated men, his father among them, and on returning home, he would indeed be a man, with a man’s responsibilities. Without this kind of ceremony and without such strong, emotionally open older men to show the way, a son will have what Bly calls “father hunger” all his life. I have felt this father hun
ger and felt it most deeply when Scott and I were rounding out our high school years. It’s not that our fathers did nothing or tried not at all, but that they didn’t go far enough. At the threshold of manhood, it was Scott who was there for me, just as I was there for him.

  When Scott and I were sixteen, my father suggested, in the way that he did, that we take the drift boat and run the upper John Day River to Clarno. Perhaps he knew what he was doing after all, kicking us out of the house to work off a little baby fat. Scott and I drove out to eastern Oregon with food and gear for three days, along with a little contraband: a gallon of cheap wine, a half case of beer, a fifth of Jack Daniels. That first night on the river, after having run several small class II rapids and enduring the cold fall winds and rain, we grilled elk burgers on the fire and topped our glasses with JD. The sky cleared for just that night, and standing there under the simple stars, the hunger in my belly near insatiable, we raised a toast to brotherhood. Though I recognize it only now, these many years later, it was that moment that stands as my initiation ceremony, and it was Scott who was there to share it with me.

  Ben Nevis stands a thousand feet higher than all other mountains in the UK and Ireland, and our climb up it didn’t want to end. We climbed up and up, crossing a snowfield near the summit. Soon we could see a series of humps on the arc of the mountain’s back, humps that were the many rock shelters at trail’s end. Once again, as if the landlord were looking out for us, the clouds broke and the sun shone through. We walked the final steps bathed in light, and as it was so, we had no old complaints, no new desires.

  Scafell Pike, England (978 meters / 3,209 feet)

  Wordsworth and Coleridge were like brothers for a time, and they famously lived in proximity in England’s Lake District composing their greatest poems with the other’s favor and guidance. Dorothy was there too, Wordsworth’s beloved sister, and the three walked miles and miles together through the hills and glens. The height of their friendship was also the height of their poetic industry. Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” and Wordsworth was already at work on the poem that became his epic, The Prelude. They published a volume together, Lyrical Ballads, which was largely a failure then but is a staple of Romantic poetry now. On a walk to Keswick, near England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, Coleridge exclaimed, in typical Romantic bombast: “O my God! and the Black Crags close under the snowy mountains, whose snows were pinkish with the setting sun and the reflections from the sandy rich Clouds that floated over some and rested upon others! It was to me a vision of fair Country.” I had never been to the Lake District, so I anticipated fair country as well, not to mention—O my God!—my deepest immersion yet in all things pastoral, all things Romantic, all things sheep. Well, not all things sheep.

  We spent a few nights in Edinburgh, where Scott and I explored the pastoral paintings in the National Gallery, toured the Writers’ Museum, and viewed the work of that intrepid walker, Richard Long at the National Gallery of Modern Art, and where we adventured with a drunk witch from Portland named Sabrina.

  Then we struck south for Wordsworth-land to climb Scafell Pike, the last mountain on the list. Scott was nearing the end of his journey, while I would travel on for several more weeks. My sense of security had become so dependent on my companion I could hardly imagine what I’d do after he left.

  It was raining, of course, when in Grasmere Scott and I boarded a bus for Keswick, then on to Seathwaite, which was not a town, but rather the end of the road. We passed through the gates of a sheep outfit, where the shepherds kicked their dogs and beat the ewes into a pen, to find unfolding before us a system of trails ascending the hoary crags. We walked easily and steadily in the light rain, up Grains Gill and along Seathwaite Fell. Soon we would make a turn up Ruddy Gill and then onto the Esk Hause trail to the summit. Though Scafell Pike was the lowest of the four mountains, the climb challenged us more, with trails running every direction through the wilds, and the rough going over misty boulder fields.

  Wordsworth had his Mount Snowdon, but it was Coleridge who scrambled up Scafell, not the mountain we were climbing, but the one next to it with nearly the same name. Some think of Scafell and Scafell Pike as the same mountain, but each has a distinct summit, the latter fourteen meters higher. At the top of Scafell, Coleridge, never without pen and ink, worked on a letter to his beloved Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s wife, Mary (not to be confused with Coleridge’s wife, also named Sara). That done, Coleridge thought he could see a route to the summit of Scafell Pike (which apparently he thought was Bowfell, farther to the east), the mountain local shepherds believed was the highest in the land. He had no map, no compass, no guide or guidebook. He relied only on his poetic sense. The going was hard, and he found the ridge between the two mountains too much for him. Abandoning Scafell Pike, he started back down, dropping over vertical ledges onto narrow shelves of rock. He passed the carcass of a sheep, “quite rotten,” which had fallen to its death. Not an altogether good sign. Soon he reached an impossible ledge, impossible for him anyway, and there he was, crag-fast—he could go neither up nor down. “My limbs were all a tremble—,” he wrote later to Sara Hutchinson: “I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom, to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight—” Somehow, perhaps with Providence on his side, he discovered a great crack (known today as Fat Man’s Agony), which he thought might just be the only way down. He moved his rucksack to his side, and down he went, stemming his way to the bottom. Clouds closed in around him, and the rain fell. He hustled down the mountain toward Eskdale, where he took shelter from the storm in a sheepfold. From the enthusiasm in his notebook and letters, one must conclude this treacherous climb was the highlight of his 1802 solo tour of the Lakes.

  Scott and I crossed over the murmuring brook of Grains Gill, where we paused on the footbridge for photos. I carried in my pack a few bars of the famed Kendal Mint Cake, the soft, sugary energy bar that Hillary and Norgay took to the summit of Everest. I broke one open and shared it out. From here we could see a good way in both directions—down the gill and up into where we were going. The rain came on, and we took the time to put on our rain gear. A little farther up the trail, we stopped again and took off our rain gear—this time for the last time. Though clouds hung heavy over the mountain peaks, it wouldn’t rain again for a couple days. Up we climbed into the clouds, where the moist air wetted our hair and clothes. Sun fell across the broad green backs of the hills in patches, and I wondered if I’d ever seen anything so beautiful. I thought probably I had.

  We crossed a great boulder field where the sheep would not go, skipping from stone to stone in our boots. At the top of Broad Crag we descended onto the tongue between them, the crag and mighty Scafell Pike. So here it was, our final ascent. We noticed a few other climbers in bright colors among the rocks winding slowly up the mountain, but compared to Ben Nevis and Carrantuohil, we had the place mostly to ourselves. I broke off a couple more pieces of mint cake, and with that cool, sweet courage, we climbed to the top. There wasn’t much to it, really, at least from this side, and we met with no dastardly threat to our health or heels. The mist and heavy clouds allowed us no grand view across the Lake District, so we found a proper seat among the boulders to spread our lunch.

  I wondered if, like Coleridge after listening to Wordsworth read from his great epic, I might not be overwhelmed at this juncture, at the completion of this journey with my old friend, by “thoughts all too deep for words!—,” and then might fall delicately into a reverie, part trance and part delight. But no—for thence erupted from my lips, without my consent, a string of hopeful words:

  “You gonna eat that?” I asked, indicating the last bit of hard salami.

  “Nope,” Scott said.

  And that was it; there was not
hing more, only the shorter, faster grind back down the mountain, a happy, sunny ride through the countryside on the second level of an open-air bus, and, in the evening, food and beer without end.

  In Ambleside, the morning of Scott’s departure, we walked together from the big hostel on the lake to the bus stop. We had hardly slept at all, as the hostel was overrun with a belligerent rugby team, shouting drunken obscenities and vomiting in the hallways. Scott would take the early bus to Windermere and then catch the train south to London. I felt a terrible anxiety welling within, and I didn’t think it was lack of sleep. Before Scott’s arrival, I had emboldened myself to travel alone (not the first time, certainly) and made my way through Wales and up Mount Snowdon. But something in me had shifted, and now I was flooded with questions. What in god’s name would I do with myself after Scott’s departure? When would we see each other again? Would we ever make another journey? What if one of us kicked off without warning and this was really, really the end? What does one say in a moment of such finality? I still had a couple weeks to travel before I went home, and now who would I talk to over good food and beer? Who would help me plan the route and take up the idle hours of the day? Who would hold my confidence, my hesitations, my deep expostulations, and return them with a generous reply? Who would watch my stuff on the train when I got up to take a piss? We had grown together across these mountaintops—I could feel it—and now this sudden separation knocked about my heart. I was struck by a sense of fear and emptiness. I wanted to express my brotherly love, to say something lasting and profound that we’d never forget. The bus pulled in, just like that, and in that hurried way that people take their leave when consumed with the details of schedules and connections, we shook hands and he was gone.