Imaginary peaks, p.13
Imaginary Peaks, page 13
One day, Harvey ventured into a part of Hidden Lake he called the “White Space on my map,” floundering through nets of tree branches and thorns as he pursued daydreams of long-vanished ice age glaciers. “I had a fantasy of stumbling into a secret basin, a miniature Deception Basin,” he wrote. “That was scientifically impossible. . . . But struggling and sweating through the White Space I could imagine . . . that I was at the foot of peaks I couldn’t quite see.” For hours, he thrashed up and down brush-choked hills and gullies. Somehow, he thought, the small woodlands must have expanded again into a vast, archaic wild. Then he stumbled back onto a broad trail. He recognized where he was—only about a dozen paces from where he’d started his hike. Disoriented by the dense vegetation, he’d been turning around in circles and loops. His bewilderment and imagination had worked like magic to scramble time and space.
During his senior year in high school, Harvey came across the term mystical experience. He knew right away what it meant to him: Marmot Pass. At Hidden Lake, where the trees were just as big as those along the Quilcene Trail, he tried to re-create a similar sensation: “I’d lie on my back in the breezes of a waterfall and soak up the coolness of the forest floor, breathe smells of trees and bushes, listen to birds near and far, and fix my gaze straight up through the trees to the sky. I sent the simplest message possible. Put in words it would have been: ‘I am here. Are You?’ ”
CHAPTER 9
The Ticking of Doomsday Clocks
BY 1942, WHEN HARVEY HAD recovered enough from the pain in his hip and legs to return to the mountains, the United States had entered World War II. There were blackouts and air-raid drills, along with the rumble of military trucks on the roads and antiaircraft guns in city parks. The carefully built worlds of Harvey’s boyhood dreams seemed about to shatter. He and Arild cut school on weekdays to hike and worked on weekends to buy gas for road trips in Harvey’s rattly 1930 Model A. As they wallowed around the snow-drifted shores of an alpine lake, they saw that avalanche debris had crushed some of the bushes. Invisible slides fell through a white fog of snow and clouds, roaring like the sounds of distant bombs. “We burst out laughing,” Manning recalled. While their friends were still stuck in a classroom, he and Arild were “here, cool and calm and sane, in a void loud with death.”
Arild soon left to serve in the navy. Since Harvey was too young for the draft, he enrolled at the University of Washington, where he again fell ill. This time, a doctor told him, the problem lay in his heart. Although Harvey was thus officially disqualified from military service, he thought he could die at any moment. He stumbled out of the health center to the circular pond at the heart of campus. From there, on clear days, Mount Rainier shines in the distance, but on that evening it was hidden behind clouds. Drops of rain beat the surface of the water like the noise of a broken pendulum, striking back and forth erratically. For the rest of his life, Harvey would be haunted by the sound of clocks, echoed in the rhythm of his boots on a mountainside and the pulse of his heart. He was “always waiting for the ‘tick’ with no answering ‘tock.’ ”
He tried to distract himself from his fear by writing, dreaming, drinking, and hiking. One morning, in a university library in Parrington Hall, Harvey was obsessively rereading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy, “Adonais,” about the death of John Keats at twenty-five. Light and shadow blinked through the windows above the bookshelves. Outside, the gusts of a departing storm blew scraps of white clouds through green trees. Glimpses of blue dazzled. Verses streamed through Harvey’s mind: “He is made one with Nature: there is heard / His voice in all her music.” The wind seemed to lift him through the fading library walls, past the rustling leaves, and into the clouds. “I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; / Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, / The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.” Harvey put the book down and walked across campus. The lawns stretched on and on, extending like a vast alpine meadow toward a vanishing point in the sky. Once more, the sky seemed tinged with the afterglow of the dusk above Marmot Pass. A sense of uncertain promise seemed to linger in the air: the possibility of some transformative power in the heights.
The roof of Parrington Hall turned out to be a good place for a solitary aspiring mountaineer to practice. Harvey relied on the friction generated by the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands to scramble up the steeply sloped shingles. From the top of a ventilator shaft, he watched the sunrise light up Mount Rainier. Along the horizons to the west and east, the peaks of the Olympics and the Cascades were still in shadows, waiting, trembling on the verge of the miraculous. In a few hours, whenever he could escape from school, his car would take him away from the city to mountainsides where mists drifted through ancient trees and dewdrops glittered like diamonds. Alone in the hills after dark, he felt his worst nightmares dissolve: “The fears proper to the place were the old ones, the natural ones.”
His alpine idylls were interrupted by reminders of the ongoing war. Mountain warfare troops marched by him in the hills. A pair of skywatchers peered out the windows of a Cascades lookout cabin, poised to warn of potential enemy planes. Japanese American classmates were sent to internment camps. In the summer of 1945, Harvey read “the breath-stopping August headline announcing man had created hell on Earth,” the news that American forces had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It seemed to Harvey that the remnants of his country’s idealism began to perish in the mushroom clouds.
During the aftermath of World War II, as Cold War tensions heightened between the US and the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race took off, defense industries in the Seattle area boomed. In 1943, the government had evicted residents of Hanford in the eastern half of the state to create a plutonium production center, which grew to include nine reactors. Modern society appeared to be ticking closer to apocalypse. He’d have to search for signs of inspiration elsewhere, Harvey decided, in the visions he experienced in the mountains and in the worlds he created in his mind.
After he finished his BA in English in 1945, Harvey thought of getting a PhD, but he decided to take time off first. While working at a lumber mill, he learned that the old-growth forest at Hidden Lake had been logged, its sanctuary turned into a ruddy gash of stumps and mud—a “home” to which he could never return. With the war’s end, however, Arild came back to Washington, ready for more alpine misadventures. During one ill-conceived glissade that turned into a headlong fall, Harvey somersaulted through clouds of snow. After hundreds of feet, he stopped sensing movement or sound, apart from the musical notes of unseen water. Just as he pictured himself merging into the universe, he came to a halt. “Life—abundant, exuberant, transcendent—that’s what Marmot Pass was all about, and Deception Basin, and even at the worst of the blow, Lost Ridge,” he declared.
Harvey also explored the backstreets of Seattle, encountering pockets of lost wild time amid the walls of old shanties and ruined mills. He met aged men and women in the Northlake neighborhood who told stories of nineteenth-century quests for gold, deep within the Alaska Range and the Washington Cascades. In 1889, the prospector Joseph Pearsall had scrambled to a ridge crest on Hubbart Peak, where he caught sight of a strange, luminous mountain beyond the high walls of a canyon. Sparkles of reddish gold and silvery gray coated the flanks of the peak, hinting at veins of precious minerals. “Boys, the world is ours!” one of Pearsall’s friends later exclaimed when he viewed the same gleaming mountainsides. But the difficulties of extracting silver, gold, and lead from this isolated region proved greater than any of its riches. After years of fighting mudslides, floods, and heavy winter snows, the miners gave up and followed other gold-rush dreams to the Far North. Only a ghost town remained of the mines of Monte Cristo, its legend rusting alongside its old buildings. “There’d been wilderness then,” Harvey realized, “a vast wilderness of which I’d known a tiny remnant at Hidden Lake. . . . If I lived to their age, what memories would I have of 1946? Looking back from the 21st century, what transformations would I see in the city? And in the wilderness, now pushed far up mountain valleys?”
One day, as he headed down University Way to meet his friend Bob at a tavern, Harvey bumped into Betty Lorraine Williams, a fellow English major. “Or better say,” Harvey wrote, “she ran into (literally) me.” Betty had taken time off school to recover from eye surgery, and she was still having problems with her depth perception. Harvey invited her to join them for a drink. At the tavern, Betty tried to smoke a cigarette, but she set her eyebrow alight instead. To Harvey, she seemed reassuringly unthreatening, “an amusing kid sister.” But when he and Bob started talking about epics in the mountains, Betty contributed her own tale about getting benighted with a friend in a rain-swept forest, shivering over a meal of raw potatoes after their fire wouldn’t start.
“Was she as artless as she seemed?” Harvey wondered. Betty brought the friend from her alpine ordeal to a subsequent night of drinking. “Monie climbs mountains!” Betty said, and she laughed as the boys stared. Harvey had, up until then, more or less only hiked up mountains. And here was a twenty-something woman, Monie Long, a budding mathematician who had summited all the peaks he’d heard of in the Cascades, along with many more he hadn’t. “Worst of all,” he recalled, Monie “had climbed Rainier—often.”
When Bob asked Monie why she climbed mountains, she responded with an offhand rendition of Mallory’s famous words about Everest: “Because it is there.” Then she recited two lines of grandiose verse from a Swiss guide, Andreas Maurer. Perhaps, as Monie eyed her male listeners through her coke-bottle glasses, she infused Maurer’s words with an edge of sarcasm: “Men can go where the clouds can go / But they must be sturdy men!”
On the West Coast, local alpine clubs, such as the Sierra Club in California and The Mountaineers in Washington, promoted a relatively inclusive culture, and women participated in greater numbers than in many other parts of the country. Some of them, like Betty and Monie, found that climbing offered more scope for self-liberation than the rest of society. Betty had initially gone to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she’d rebelled against her conservative upbringing by briefly becoming a Communist (of the Trotskyite variety) and (even more “scandalous”) by swimming alone with male classmates. Despairing, Betty’s mother pulled her out of Reed. A year later, Betty transferred to the University of Washington, where she met Monie. “Somehow,” her son, Paul, later wrote, “she found the Mountaineers, a place where her mother would never find her, and the mountains became her symbol of freedom and happiness.” To improve their climbing skills, Betty and Monie anchored one end of a rope to the frame of a bed, and then took turns belaying each other outside the window and onto the walls of their shared Seattle apartment.
Intimidated at first, Harvey only agreed to join Monie and Betty on hiking trips. By autumn, however, he’d begun to trust Monie’s leadership and he realized he could follow her to “a rich lode of alpine lore.” That October, she promised something “a bit more interesting” for Harvey, Betty, and Bob. She’d take them up a climbing route on Cruiser Peak, a slender rock spire in the Olympics, with some “exposure,” she said.
“That’s the climbers’ euphemism for ‘one false step and you go screaming through space and splatter your brains on a rockside,’” Harvey thought. Robust nylon ropes were not yet commercially available. For Monie’s less resilient manila rope, the old adage of “The leader must not fall” remained terrifyingly true.
“A cheap thrill,” Monie assured Harvey. “Good for laughs.”
Icy gusts buffeted the four friends at the top of a col. Monie said they’d been moving too slowly to reach the true apex that day, so she’d guide them to a false summit instead. With the rope coiled and slung over her shoulder, she scurried up a narrow slab of stone until she vanished into the winds. Bob rushed after her. Behind them, Harvey felt as if he were crawling up a roof into the sky. “The knobby basalt was easier than the slick shingles of Parrington Hall. . . . But this roof was high, way high . . . and below me everywhere was air and I’d no gin in my blood. Wind wailed by ears, deafening, unsettling. I needed one hand to hang onto my hat, the other to hang onto my glasses. No hands for hanging onto Earth. The next gust would hurl me into the void.” Terrified, he turned back and huddled with Betty in a sheltered nook. Later, he realized that was the moment he and Betty fell in love.
That autumn, Betty started her senior year. Harvey tried to focus on graduate school classes at the university and on his work as a teaching assistant. But as he paged through the piles of bluebook exams he had to grade, he couldn’t stop daydreaming about mountains. He knew that, if he proved lucky enough to get a tenure-track position, he might have to leave the Cascades for some desolate flatland college town. After he and Betty spent a particularly idyllic day of scrambling around mossy boulders by a snowmelt creek, Harvey gave up on academia—and on trying to find a secure job at all.
But he still had to make a living. Surviving by shoplifting, he mused (with his typical sense of humor), could only go on for so long before he got caught. “What does an English major do if he doesn’t professorize?” he wondered. “What does he know? Words. Who in Seattle buys words?” No one wanted his, it seemed. After his applications to various media outlets were rejected, Harvey went to work at a warehouse. When he got in trouble for reading on the job, he found employment in the University of Washington chemistry stockroom. He and Betty rented an apartment in a ramshackle house near University Way—although Harvey couldn’t officially move in until he produced a marriage license to prove to the landlady that they weren’t living in sin.
Soon after the legal matters were taken care of and the landlady was appeased, the Mannings set off for their honeymoon—another climbing trip in the Cascades with Monie as their stalwart guide. The couple had chosen Monte Cristo, one of the false El Dorados that Harvey continued to find fascinating. Relics of rusted mining equipment appeared in the mists. Alders and firs were growing back, consuming the remnants of the lost town. From here, as mountaineering historian Lowell Skoog recounts, nineteenth-century prospectors had made nocturnal winter ascents, racing up mountainsides with alpenstocks, snowshoes, and hatchets, to stake their mining claims as soon as midnight struck, at the very beginning of a new year. Monie, Betty, and Harvey kicked steps up a nearby slope in a more leisurely fashion to the crest of Silvertip Peak. For a moment, while the sun flashed through dark clouds and lit the snows, Harvey imagined himself in “Mallory’s world.” Then he gazed down to Silver Creek: only gashes of clearcuts and piles of debris remained where he and Arild had once wandered past old-growth trees. Solely above tree line, it seemed, could a paradise be secure.
When Harvey’s Model A sputtered out, he purchased a used car with a V-8 engine, capable of bumping along at forty-two miles an hour instead of twenty-eight. Although he missed the rambling pace of his old vehicle, the new car enabled more frequent trips to the mountains. Climbing had become his escape hatch from the conventional life that was closing in on him and Betty. Monie sensed his restlessness and suggested they return to complete the ascent of Cruiser Peak before the first winter storms. At the base of the summit tower, past his previous high point, the stone turned as hard and glossy as congealed lava. Harvey couldn’t discern any edges or ripples where a climber could even pause to rest. There were no cracks to place a piton. If Monie slipped while leading, the sharp rocks below her might cut the rope that connected them. Harvey might watch her tumble to the valley, unable to stop her fall.
Monie told him not to worry. Soon, she disappeared around a corner, her progress indicated only by the slow movement of the fragile manila strands through his fingers. The rope stopped for fifteen minutes. Harvey lit a cigarette with one hand while he held on tightly with the other. “Bad spot . . . hang on,” Monie’s voice wobbled from somewhere above. The rope quivered and slid upward again. Harvey smelled something burning: he’d been so focused on grasping the rope that he’d singed himself with the cigarette. At last, Monie called out that she was safe at an anchor. Harvey felt dizzy at the sight of what she’d just climbed. The slant of rock shimmered like glass, reflecting the greenish tints of distant trees. As he wriggled upward, his legs trembled and his tennis shoes skittered off the volcanic stone. Finally, the surface became more corrugated, and he scampered to the top.
“The rope from above was my faith, my prayer, my church,” Harvey declared in rapture, but the experience convinced Monie that he needed to take more responsibility for his own safety. At the start of the next summer season, in 1948, she told the Mannings they had to sign up for a climbing course with The Mountaineers. Despite his dislike of large groups, Harvey conceded.
Their first trips weren’t too auspicious. During one course, other climbers knocked off a large rock that whizzed through the air, almost striking Harvey and Betty. On another outing, while Betty practiced glissading, students above her began tumbling uncontrollably in a mass of falling bodies, sharp metal gear, and sloughing snow. A flying ice axe struck Betty’s side. By the time Harvey and the others caught up to her, she was lying in a patch of blood, the only person injured. Evacuated to a Seattle hospital, Betty recovered, and though the near-disaster stirred forebodings in their minds, the couple remained drawn to the mountains. As his skills grew and he met more local climbers, Harvey realized how little published information about the North Cascades existed. Scattered across the maps, topographic names beckoned like signals from imaginary countries: Inspiration Glacier, Phantom, Deception, Mystery. Others, such as Azurite and Ruby, reflected fleeting dreams of riches. Near the top of 8,868-foot Eldorado, Harvey watched mysterious summits emerge through gaps in the mist like visions from storybooks. His trip leader didn’t know what to call some of the local mountains. “Neither did the map,” Harvey observed.
