Pecked to death by ducks (32 page)

Our team of about ten men studied the maps: Yellowstone rangers were combing the Amphitheater area by helicopter. We would work Granite Peak, and our headquarters would be a Ranger station called Colter Camp, just outside Cooke City.

I had never participated in a search before and was becoming impatient. I wanted to get out into the mountains, start walking, get to it right away, but cooler heads prevailed. Where was I going to go? Which trail? The entire greater Yellowstone system of National Park and wilderness areas encompasses literally millions of acres.

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No, the first order of business was not to run off in all directions at once. What we needed was a better fix on McGee's hiking plans.

Early that afternoon, the reports began filtering in from investigating rangers and sheriff's deputies. McGee had hitchhiked through the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone Park, which meant that he had passed by the Amphitheater area. He had last been seen in Cooke City, buying a small amount of food for his trek. The shop owner couldn't recall what McGee had purchased. A motorist said he thought he'd seen someone answering McGee's description walking east, out of Cooke City, away from the park.

We knew now that he was wearing a blue-and-red plaid shirt, green wool pants, and was carrying a sky-blue pack. His only shelter was a light blue tarp. The Park Service had contacted "Mike," who said that he and McGee had purchased identical pairs of boots. There was a very distinctive nine-lug pattern on the heel of the boot. If we knew which trail he had taken, McGee would be easy to track.

According to people who knew McGee, the young man admired mountaineers in general and rock climbers in particular. It seemed, from what little we knew, that McGee, an "aggressive" hiker, might have tried for Granite Peak precisely because, at 12,351 feet, it is the highest point in Montana.

There are three likely trails out of Cooke City that would take a trekker to the base of the mountain. Granite Peak is pretty much of a walk up if approached from the north. McGee, however, would be coming at it from the south: a treacherous route, without much in the way of a trail. The southern face of the mountain is mostly flaky rock, prone to come away in the hand.

Late that afternoon, three search teams waited at the three likely trail heads. Dozens of people were walking out of the Beartooths after a summer weekend in the mountains, but no one had seen anyone fitting McGee's description. (In another search, later in the year, a lost hiker was located by this very simple procedure.)

The first night of the search, we bedded down on the ground, outside Colter Camp, with the stars swirling above. Peter McGee

was the sole subject of conversation. Dumb kid. Out there alone. Didn't tell anyone where he was going. There was a long and, I think, finally embarrassed silence.

McGee had made some mistakes, but they weren't worth his life. We had been trying to think like the missing man for over a dozen hours—where would I go, what would I do if I were hurt —and that exercise in understanding had drawn out a measure of compassion.

There was a time when each of us could have been described as "aggressive but not knowledgeable." Most of us had ten, even twenty years on Peter McGee, and if we were smarter in the wilderness, it was a matter of experience. The wilderness had blessed us with blind luck.

Everyone on the team, without exception, had done something stupid, something life-threatening, in the wilderness at one time. One man had miscalculated the time his trip would take, had tried to walk out of the mountains in the dark without a light and fallen off the side of a two-hundred-foot cliff. Fortunately, he had landed on a ledge ten feet below.

I have made more than my share of blunders, one of which—I was twenty-four at the time—involved climbing bad rock, alone, at Pyramid Lake outside of Sparks, Nevada. No one knew where I was. Couple this with a broken handhold and an hour frozen on the cliff face, and you learn something. You make some promises to yourself. You hope your luck holds.

"Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure," the poet A. E. Housman wrote, "I'd face it as a wise man would, / And train for ill and not for good." It's not a line I would have savored at twenty-two, but one that made sense post-Pyramid Lake.

The next morning I was sent up one of the three likely trails in company with another volunteer searcher, a local rancher named Larry Lovely. Incident commander for the search Park County sheriff's deputy Brad Wilson had given me a roll of yellow duct tape. If the man was found, and he was dead, I was to tape off the area and touch nothing. What Wilson didn't say, but what every search-and-rescue volunteer knows, is that sometimes hik-

ers are found injured and in a state of shock. Often they are irrational, and sometimes violent. Occasionally, a hypothermic hiker has to be subdued, and duct tape works almost as well as handcuffs.

There was no sign of McGee up at Lady of the Lake, or at Lower Aero Lake or along the Broadwater River trail.

Over the next few days, fifty searchers combed the trails east of Cooke City. A helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft joined the search. Pictures of McGee were posted at trailheads.

One of the aircraft spotted McGee's backpack and sleeping bag about five miles west of the area I had searched, at the north end of Goose Lake. There the land rises to rocky slopes and plateaus, all above the timberline. The trail, however, was a week old, cold, and the dogs couldn't find McGee's scent.

I suspect the man tried for Granite Peak. He left his pack and bag—another mistake—expecting to make a high-speed run up the bad south face of the mountain. He was alone, climbing on bad rock, in the wilderness, where something as simple as a badly sprained ankle is deadly. On Thursday, August 4, the search was suspended. A light snow was falling at eleven thousand feet, and the nighttime temperature at that altitude was expected to drop below freezing.

Some of Peter McGee's friends like to think that he is still out there, that his luck held. Some think that, for totally inexplicable reasons, he decided to disappear into the mountains. He had left his bag and pack to confuse the issue. It's a comforting fiction, especially today, when the temperature is well below freezing and the snow is falling.

Author's Note:

"Peter McGee's" body was found a year later, near the summit of Fox Peak, a mountain he may have mistaken for Granite Peak. It appears as if a rock ledge collapsed under him and that he suffered massive head injuries.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 280

seeming to accelerate in my direction—I was on the verge of one of these character-shaping disasters.

It had started innocently enough. I was pedaling my old coaster-brake Schwinn bike around Waukesha, Wisconsin, when I met up with a gaggle of unimaginably sophisticated older boys, thirteen-year-olds so "cool," some of them called their parents by their first names. We stopped for a chat at the top of the steepest hill in town: a paved one-block-long clifflike drop-off on Hartwell Street. Kids called the run "steep Hartwell," as in, "Wouldn't it be neat to roll a tire down steep Hartwell?"

In point of fact, I had seen this done. The tire worked up incredible speed. At the bottom of the run, where the land flattened out into swamp, there was a wooden guardrail, four feet high, consisting of three stout boards. The tire hit the curb, bounced up, and went through the boards like a mule through October cornstalks. It sailed through the air, trailing bits of broken two-by-fours, and hit the swamp water in a huge, viscous explosion of green algae.

So I had some idea of the velocity an unbraked rolling missile could achieve on steep Hartwell. Still, the cool thirteen-year-olds insisted that a brave individual who knew how to handle a bike could hurtle down the plunge without ever once using his brakes and still make the ninety-degree righthand turn at the bottom. I argued that reason, history, and experience would suggest that such an experiment was doomed to punishing failure. Or words to that effect. I had little faith.

My ineffably cool pals, however, demonstrated that the deed could be done. One by one they set off down steep Hartwell. I watched, but none of them used their brakes. No one pedaled backward at all. Indeed, they all seemed to be pedaling forward, fast, in a manner movie cowboys might describe as "hell-bent for leather." The faster they pedaled, the slower their bikes seemed to go. I imagined there might be some sort of gyroscopic aberration in the works, a quirky law of relativity that might be expressed: The faster cool persons can get a bicycle to move, the slower it will go.

Convinced by the evidence of my own eyes and seduced by my

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own theory, I pushed off the pavement—"Here goes nothing!"— and began pedaling hell-bent for leather, lickety-split, down steep Hartwell. Soon enough, the iron laws of physics informed me that my theory was completely defective. I stopped pedaling because the bike had begun to buffet. I had seen a movie about the first guy to break the sound barrier. His plane had buffeted like my bike. It was all I could do to hold on, to keep the old Schwinn upright.

My choices at this point were limited to varying degrees of disaster. The bike was shuttering in such a way that braking would upset my equilibrium. I saw myself sliding one hundred feet or more along the pavement, contemplated the nature of the subsequent road rash, and discarded that option. I could try to make the righthand turn, but inertia, in the form of acceleration times velocity, said, "No way." In the end I opted to do nothing. Fear, my copilot, made that decision for me.

I hit the curb at the bottom of steep Hartwell and vaulted skyward while assuming a somewhat more horizontal position in regard to the ground. I didn't seem to be astride my bike any longer. "Woof" . . . through the top board of the fence with my chest and ribs. The collision had a kind of three-dimensional pin-ball effect, so that for a moment I was looking at the sky through my legs. Above and somewhat behind, I could see the Schwinn pinwheeling along a similar arc. All this seemed to be taking an incredibly long time to happen. Presently, I found myself oriented toward the green muck of the swamp, and it rushed up to meet me—face dive, face dive—with indifferent vehemence.

My forehead hit something sharp and rocky below the surface of the muck. Something else, a submerged and muddy hillock, loosened my teeth, cut my lips. The Schwinn landed on the back of my head. For the nonce life did not seem to be a bowl of cherries.

But, strangely, neither was it a bed of pain. I was dazed, certainly, but getting my head out of the water and mud seemed to be a wise move. I came up bleeding from the mouth, from a cut on the front of my head and one on the back. Both bled profusely, as even the most superficial head wounds are wont to do.

Long strands of mossy green algae hung from my face. I suppose I looked like an explosion in a spinach factory, something alien and terrifying and inexplicably undead. The thirteen-year-olds had gathered by the break in the fence, and I lurched toward them, green and bleeding.

"Let's get out of here," one of the boys shouted, and off they pedaled, bang-flash-zoom, with terror howling after them and nipping at their back wheels. Cool guys, indeed. Ho, ho, it was to laugh. I managed to limp five blocks home. Hours later, after a visit to the hospital and a number of stitches, just as the pain finally arrived, my father saw fit to explain that some people liked to play practical jokes and that some bikes were equipped with hand brakes.

One learns from errors in judgment, especially those that result in stitches and defunct bicycles. Even infants, who have not yet learned the nature of pain, know something of fear. In an elegant experiment conducted with children barely able to crawl, psychologists have shown that falling may be our first and most primal fear. The scientists constructed a glass surface about the size of a tabletop. Just under the glass, clearly visible, was a wooden surface, but halfway across the glass apparent solidity gave way to a yawning abyss of some four feet. Infants were placed on the glass and encouraged to crawl toward their mothers. None of them would venture out into the void.

So if children know fear, why is it that most are inveterate climbers? A few years ago I was having dinner with Yvon Chouinard and Rick Ridgeway, two of America's finest mountaineers. Rick's daughter, Carissa, a toddler, was scaling the heights of the coffee table. Bang splat. Tears. A bit of fatherly comfort. Soon enough, there she was, attempting to conquer the great looming arm of Chouinard's sofa.

We discussed Carissa's efforts and mountaineering altogether. One day she could climb Everest; either that or become a buyer for Bloomingdale's. The conversation that night centered around the question of why some of us abandon a universal early urge to pit our skills and knowledge against fear.

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I suppose one answer is that pain teaches lessons in the synapses and that different people seem to interpret the lesson differently. The Debacle of Steep Hartwell is a good example. Perfectly reasonable people might conclude that riding a bicycle down a very steep hill is stupid. This is the "never do that again" approach. ('Til teach you!") And yet ... as I examine the event, the light that shines through the core of it, for me, is this: Know the secret, and you can ride fear right up to the edge of pain and never fall. Never. Not if you are prepared, physically and mentally. Not if you understand how to apply the hand brakes.

So why do people put themselves at risk? Isn't the experience stressful and frightening? Some people don't understand. The urge annoys them beyond all tolerance.

I know. Over the past dozen years various publications have paid me to dive with sharks, jump out of airplanes, climb mountains in Africa and South America, trek through equatorial jungles, plumb the deepest caves in America, and generally scare myself silly.

I found it was always a good idea to find a mentor, some man or woman expert in the endeavor I had chosen. If you are going shark diving, for instance, you want a dive master possessed of a complete set of arms and legs. It is best to put the mentor's professional reputation on the line: "If I get hurt, you look bad." That way you tend to hear about the various hand brakes you need up front.