The Measure of a Mountain, page 3
We sidestep weather in cities, scuttling from building to car to porch. “The approaching storm” is a hollow phrase in the city, where it’s impossible to see much of anything approach, let alone witness a storm ride a five-mile sky. Skyscrapers shrink our view to a series of slots. We live in trenches. On the mountain, weather can’t be ignored or outrun; it is the dominant fact of life and can sometimes seem the manifestation of a cruel god.
The rain is here because of the mountain. Warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean flows over Western Washington and bumps into the Cascade Range. The air cools and condenses into clouds; it rains. From on high it looks as if a barn of cotton blew in and snagged on the jagged ridges of the Cascades. Given the right conditions, the mountain can whip up its own self-contained storm. Rainier’s glacial ice often cools atmospheric moisture into a lenticular cloud that hovers over the peak like a dinner plate; summit storms with one-hundred-mile-anhour winds can rage within a cloudcap on an otherwise clear day.
The Pacific Northwest boasts a long and honorable tradition of rain-soaked misery. One of its earliest and perhaps best descriptions was recorded nearly two centuries ago by the great American explorer and abysmal speller William Clark. Clark spent a winter on the Oregon-Washington coast, which is to rain what the Antarctic is to snow. “Rained all the after part of last night, rain continues this morning,” he wrote in late 1805. “We are all wet cold and disagreeable.” During their coastal wintering, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery enjoyed a total of twelve days without rain. At one point it poured for eleven days straight “without a longer intermition than 2 hours at a time.”
In his journal Clark repeats the word disagreeable as if it were a mantra. It’s a curiously evocative description. Miserable would be the natural choice, but Clark’s adjective captures a quality of the Northwestern damp that, as Ken Kesey once wrote, you have to go through a winter to understand. The stuff puts you on edge. It feels as if nobody’s showered or shaved in three days. The civility that Northwesterners wear like hand lotion washes away; some snap at one another, some just snap. About the ninth or tenth day, everybody looks at each other and says, “Goddamn it’s been raining.” That is what William Clark felt, I think. On November 15, 1805, he wrote: “The rainney weather continued . . . from the 5th in the morng. untill the 16th is eleven days rain, and the most disagreeable time I have experienced . . . ” Cold, wet, cooped up, and hungry, I imagine Clark waking to the sound of skyspatter on the morning of the 16th and thinking: I can’t believe this shit.
I imagine it because that is what I thought when I awoke on the mountain. To more rain.
Day three, still wet. During the night I dreamed I was an ultramarathon runner who had set out to break the speed record for circumnavigation of the mountain, which is something like twenty-nine hours. Everything went fine for the first few hours, but then obstacles began cropping up. First it was normal stuff like downed trees, but after a while the trail led into a bizarro land where rivers flowed above me and the trail melted like Dalí’s clock down cliffs. I took it in stride. At one point I passed my pack-heavy self chuffing along the trail and thought, What a Barney. I woke at dawn, disconsolate at finding myself trapped in the pathetic musculature of the Barney.
Two hours later, having traded a warm sleeping bag for a clammy shirt and spongy socks, I began walking and found that my legs, toughened by two days of ridge climbing, turned like pistons. At the top of the first ridge, I broke for lunch and decided to press on to Golden Lakes, eight miles north and two thousand feet of ridge above me. Nothing but melted trail could stop me.
Two hours later my body broke down. It’s a downhill skip from Klapatche Ridge to the Puyallup River, then a long slog up to Golden Lakes. My pace slowed. I took three stops an hour instead of two, then four. The Renegade grew unruly. Each time the pack came off I risked shoulder dislocations and muscle tears in returning it to its sixfour perch, and each time it seemed to gain weight from contact with the ground. Like der Waterschuhe, The Renegade earned its nom de guerre: The Wrencher. My mind was tempted by the thought of caving in here. Right on the trail. Throw off The Wrencher, shuck der Waterschuhe. Pitch the tent, to hell with the other hikers. They wouldn’t be along anyway. In September the trails were so deserted, I was lucky to pass two hikers all day.
With my will draining away, I became my own coach.
“Come on. The ridge is just up ahead.”
Trying. Huff. Must rest. Huff.
“You pussy. Grandmothers do this trail.”
Grandmothers. Huff. Better shape than . . . Huff . . . me.
“Keep moving, Barcott!”
Bipedal motion has never come easy to me. I’ve always been slow. At eight years I was the slowest boy on the soccer team, and at eighteen I was the slowest athlete in any sport, including chess. My baseball teammates once named me “Piano” because when I rounded third base, I ran as if I carried one. One particular exercise tormented my youth—on soccer fields, hockey rinks, basketball courts, and baseball diamonds. The team lines up on the near end line and sprints to the near free throw line, then back to the end line, then to the half court line, back to the end line, to the far free throw line, and so on in a reversal of Zeno’s arrow. Coaches traveled to the far reaches of their vocabularies to find idiosyncratic names for this torment: Liners, Crushers, Killers. With each completed section the gap between the swift and the slow widened, until the moment when the rest of the boys finished their final lap a full court-length ahead, leaving me to complete my assignment on a court empty except for the shreds of dignity trailing behind me.
One mile later the coach had lost his effectiveness. He could wordwhip me all he wanted. He could kick me off the team. I didn’t care. I turned to my physical therapist.
“We’re walking here. That’s all we’re doing.”
Right. Huff. Walking.
“That’s it. Step. One, two. Right, left.”
Left. Huff. Right. Huff. Left. Rest. Left. Rest.
“No no no! Step with me now. Forward.”
The spoken words goaded me and gave me something to wrap my mind around. I sang songs. “I am the raaaiiin king!” By late afternoon my mind had dulled so much that I sang “Rocky Raccoon” continuously. Mile after mile I filled the forest with the tale of Rocky’s met match and in my lucid moments made up prologues and epilogues. Rocky’s refrain became such torture that once I shouted, “Oh for the love of Christ! Not Gideon’s fucking Bible again!”
These are the early warning signs for hypothermia: exhaustion, shivering, stumbling, mild confusion. Late that afternoon, near the top of Sunset Park, I found myself batting four for four. My mind was aware enough to know it was slipping into nature’s cold narcosis. The trail weaved when I walked, but straightened each time I stopped. My fingers glowed with piggish translucence.
I collapsed next to a hemlock stump. Eyes closed, I lay in the rapture of darkness.
Survival alarms rang in my head. Sleep was not the optimal response to a cooling body. I needed warmth, dryness, and fuel. Everything I owned was soaked, the tinder around Sunset Park had been marinating in clouds for the past three days, but I did have food. I tore open a blueberry breakfast bar and forced myself to chew. Gagging as the first bar went down, I found a second and a third and ate them, too. As I sat chewing granola and fruit paste, I ran my trembling hands through the soil. It was the color of toast crumbs, which made me think of a beach on Kauai where the grains were similarly golden and the water was warm and if you lay back and closed your eyes you could almost—
Get up or you’ll die here, I told myself. I rose and I walked and I sang, only now the songs weren’t even bad pop tunes. I’d regressed into the corner of the mind where jingles are stored.
“Flint-stones, meet the Flintstones, they’re a modern stone age famuh-lee,” I sang, loudly.
“Oh those Golden Grahams, crispy Golden Grahams, chunks of honey, just a touch, and grahams of golden wheat.” I argued with myself: Chunks of honey doesn’t make sense. Hmm-hm-hm-hm, just a touch. Ah—golden honey, just a touch, on grahams of golden wheat. Yes.
“Flint-stones, meet the Flintstones . . . ”
Most people expect their waning thoughts to be of family, friends, and loved ones. My head filled with lowbrow pleasures, petty joys that have brought me happiness. The soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. Sipping champagne in a warm bath on a cold winter’s night. Eating Cherry Garcia ice cream in front of an air conditioner on an August afternoon in New York City. Christmas lights.
I rounded a corner and, in mid-Flintstones flourish, nearly ran over two hikers brooding over a map.
“Need some company?” is what I imagined myself saying.
“OH THANK GOD! PEOPLE! I LOVE YOU!” is what came out of my mouth.
I often felt at sea in the mountain’s thick cloudbanks and at times regretted that I wasn’t actually at sea, as the sea at least afforded the cheerful camaraderie of sailors who’d call out a greeting and perhaps hove to for an hour to exchange tidings. In ordinary circumstance, the hiker’s code seemed to require silence or a cursory phrase of passing acknowledgment.
“How you doing?”
“How’s it going?”
Neither hiker pauses to answer the other, because it isn’t a question but rather a way of saying, “I’d rather you weren’t here blemishing my experience of nature but I see that you are, and to avoid seeming rude I’ll feign interest in your well-being.” Since for many the point of hiking is to escape the company of other people, the sight of another on the trail is only a reminder of how far short of that goal they have fallen. I was a bad hiker, not only talking to others but cluttering up the air with words spoken to myself. To me, every passing hiker was assurance that I would not die alone in a mountain cloud.
Twenty minutes after embarrassing myself with Flintstones opera, I found myself sitting on the porch of the Golden Lakes ranger’s cabin with three hikers who had water dripping off the ends of their noses. More people! I rocked against the cabin and beamed. Around us mist enveloped the lakes. A few words passed about who was continuing to the north and east sides of the mountain, who was bagging out at Mowich Lake, who had seen some animals. I tend to laugh when I’m extremely happy, which gets me into trouble in situations like this. Everything the three men said struck me as riotously funny, and I gritted my teeth to keep from bursting out laughing.
“Yep. I tell you, you want to see some bear, the east side’s the place to be.”
I pinched myself.
“Saw some mountain goats couple days ago up Emerald Ridge.”
I smothered my face with a wet glove.
“Uh-huh.”
Stop it.
“Tell you, this shit keeps up I’ma turn in at Mowich.”
Turning my head, I coughed. Tears welled.
The klatch disbanded before I could humiliate myself; we broke dispirited, resigned to another night of damp misery. I huddled in my sleeping bag and waited for darkness to come. I slept and dreamed of warm houses.
Civilization proceeds in a direction opposite from everything mountains represent: starvation, hardship, coldness, the constant scramble to survive. We assume we’ll live to age sixty-eight or seventy-five, and keep actuarial tables to prove it. Seat belts, air bags, meat inspectors, booster shots, exit signs, out-swinging doors, smoke alarms, inflatable vests, safety glass, bicycle helmets, electrical grounds—every day we encounter a thousand systems and products created to decrease the likelihood that we will die. People used to avoid mountains, but now we seek their company. We come for the pretty sights, but also to find a place still free from those life-saving constraints. We come to the mountain seeking beauty and terror.
Rainier provides both. The day before, on Emerald Ridge, I had watched the clouds drift away for a moment to reveal the full measure of the mountain. Above me ran the iron-orange Tahoma Glacier and the bony finger of Success Cleaver. Marmots chased each other across a grassy park and broadcast unnerving cries. The scene unsettled me. I’d been unsure about climbing Rainier from the moment my father broached the subject. Certainly I was curious about the summit—who wasn’t?—but something troubled me about attacking the mountain as if it were a quarterly sales goal. At that moment on Emerald Ridge, further doubt rushed in. I felt something like the awe that struck the eighteenth-century poets in the Alps. It seemed inappropriate, even affrontive, to swing an ice axe into Rainier’s flanks. Talk of “conquering” this or any mountain seemed absurd. At that moment I felt like sinking to my knees in worship.
Hindu mythology holds that the sun circumambulates Mount Meru, the center of the universe, as a gesture of respect. Looking up at the mountain that day on Emerald Ridge, watching a stain of clouds ride in and draw its appearance to a close, I thought: What if the point is not to climb? Why lessen its power by slinging rope up its face? “All my life,” wrote Mary Oliver, “and it has not come to any more than this: beauty and terror.” I wondered if going higher would intensify Rainier’s awful splendor, tip the balance of beauty and terror, or merely drain its mystery.
At Mowich Lake, four days into the journey, I quit the mountain. The inexorable moist had crept into the cells of my sleeping bag. I could have filled a bath with the water from my wrung-out socks. My boots were terminally damp. I no longer bothered to hang my wet underwear in the tent, because the cotton absorbed more dew than it shed. I shivered more than a healthy man should. Without dry gear my next encounter with hypothermia would likely be my last. I retired for the winter, beaten.
THE ONLY SENSIBLE AND SUITABLE NAME
Over winter the mountain remained cloaked behind cloud and mist, but I saw Rainier everywhere I went. Rainier Beer. Rainier Hardware. Rainier Investment. Rainier Legal Clinic. Rainier Family Dentistry. The name became one of those words whose meaning you discover and then see all over the place, as if somebody switched the signs. Rainier Nissan-Mazda. Rainier Air Systems. Rainier Case Management. Rainier House Movers. Rainier Steel. I entertained the notion of patronizing only businesses named Rainier. Rainier Catering. Rainier Charters. Rainier BBQ. Rainier Cellular Service. Rainier Helicopter Logging and Rainier Wood Recycling, the alpha and omega of forest harvestry. The word lost meaning in its repetition. Ray-neer. Rayner. Rain ear.
What did it mean? I thumbed James Phillips’s reliable Washington State Place Names: “Vancouver named it for the grandson of Huguenot refugees whose French name was anglicized in pronunciation to ‘Rainy-er’ and Americanized to ‘Ray-neer.’ Since British Adm. Peter Rainier gained fame for defeat of American colonists in the Revolutionary War, the name has been deemed inappropriate and subjected to agitation for change.” Phillips’s entry struck me as a touch diplomatic, the phrasing of a writer not entirely disinterested in the “agitation.” A few weeks later I had lunch with a friend who called the mountain “Tahoma.” She said it with hushed reverence, as if she were afraid the mountain might hear. Tahoma was what Native Americans called it, she told me, before Europeans stamped “Rainier” on the peak. It occurred to me that there were worse ways to know a mountain than by restoring its rightful name. I had no idea I was about to step into a nomenclatorial battle that stretched back more than one hundred years.
On the morning of May 8, a Tuesday in 1792, Captain George Vancouver rounded Marrowstone Point, just south of what is now Port Townsend, and caught sight of a round, snowy mountain he’d glimpsed the previous day. He christened the peak “Mount Rainier” in honor of a colleague of recent acquaintance, Captain Peter Rainier. Vancouver’s journal reveals nothing more about Rainier or the mountain; he likely was attending to more pressing matters: Earlier that morning he and his crew had sailed past two freshly severed heads on pikes.
“Mount Rainier” took hold thanks to Vancouver’s charts, which were so accurate that they remained the navigational standard for the next half-century. But in the mid-nineteenth century, “Tahoma” entered the vernacular of white traders and settlers, who adopted the word from local Indians. Confusion attended the name from the start. William Fraser Tolmie, a young Glaswegian doctor who came to the Northwest in the 1830s, noted in his private journal that the Indians called the mountain “Puskehouse.” A few months later, however, Tolmie hired Lachalet, a Nisqually man, and Nuckalkat, a Puyallup, to guide him to the mountain’s treeline and discovered that they had a different name for it: “Tuchoma.”
“Tacoma” didn’t receive widespread attention until 1862 when it appeared in The Canoe and the Saddle, the popular travelogue of Theodore Winthrop, a Boston Brahmin who had toured the region in the 1850s. “Of all the peaks from California to Fraser’s River,” Winthrop wrote, “the one before me was royalest. Mount Regnier Christians have dubbed it, in stupid nomenclature, perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the Siwashes call it Tacoma—a generic name also applied to all snow peaks.” In 1868 Winthrop’s best-seller inspired the founders of Commencement City, on the southern shore of Puget Sound, to rename their town Tacoma.
The earliest campaign to rename the mountain began, like so much in the Pacific Northwest, as a railroad marketing scheme. In the March 1883 edition of Northwest Magazine, a tout sheet published by the Northern Pacific Railroad to attract immigrants, the editor announced that the mountain standing over the railroad’s western terminus would henceforth be called Mount Tacoma in its guidebooks and publications. The change was ordered by Charles Wright, a Philadelphia land baron and Northern Pacific director who had steered the terminus to Tacoma and who, as president of the Tacoma Land Company, had no small interest in publicizing the city’s name. For a while it worked. In 1886 a correspondent for the Overland Monthly reported that “the name of Rainier is being gradually supplanted by the Indian appellation of Tacoma (pronounced Tachoma, with the German guttural sound to the ach), a name not only more appropriate on account of its antiquity, but to be preferred on account of its euphony.”
