The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (59 page)

 

The crazy Frenchman loved Alaska. He loved its overflowing wildness, its bear-filled forests, its fat halibut that sulked deep in its lightless ice water, waiting to be suckered topside by a flashy jig to a hot grill and a cold lemon wedge. After high school Michael LeMaitre could have gone to Syracuse University to run track. But eventually the tall, blue-eyed New Yorker made it to the far north and enrolled at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There he met Peggy, his wife.

Alaska in the early '70s was filled with young people eager to explore a state that was even younger than they were. Michael and Peggy took their growing family everywhere: Camping. Hiking. Fishing in Seward. Many summer Fridays after work they trooped their three young kids into the RV and pointed it toward Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula, where they'd fish all day, pull up their crab pots, and, in the dusky Alaskan midnight, light a bonfire on shore and gorge on the world's best king crab and shrimp. “We had no idea how good we had it,” said Peggy, today a tough, blond grandmother of three.

It was two months after Michael's disappearance. Peggy stood and left the dining room of her Anchorage home where we were seated. She'd been describing a man who was always in motion, and now she returned with the evidence: a stack of frames bearing his PhD in business administration; a dozen training certificates; his accreditation as a grief counselor. (Frequently helping others, he volunteered at a hospice program and counseled children orphaned by the 9/11 attacks.) For the last 18 years he had worked at the local Air Force base, most recently writing résumés for colonels and privates alike as they transitioned out of the service. At home Michael, fit and younger-looking than his 65 years, was the grandfather you always wanted—a big kid who was the first into, and the last out of, Big Lake's icy waters, or the only one to take granddaughter Abby on the Apollo, the scariest ride at the Alaska State Fair.

That enthusiasm reached beyond the LeMaitre family room and into the outdoors. And here a pattern continued: Michael never let the details complicate what he wanted to do. In the '80s when he wanted to learn to cross-country ski, he didn't take lessons but signed up for the Iditaski (now the Iditarod Trail Invitational), a 210-mile wilderness race in which entrants drag their own supplies on sledges. Twice he won the “red lantern” award that's given to the last-place finisher (the second time because he stopped to help a fellow skier). As LeMaitre saw it, grit and determination—let's call it stubbornness—could see a man through a lot, and he had buckets of both.

Another time LeMaitre and his best friend, Rich Ansley, installed an overpowering motor onto LeMaitre's dory in Anchorage and sailed toward Homer, more than 120 nautical miles away. The boat's fiberglass bottom literally began peeling apart in the middle of the treacherous Kenai Narrows. They siphoned water out of the leaking boat, stopped to make some temporary repairs, and puttered on to Homer. The next morning, they took the boat fishing on Kachemak Bay.

“We've had a lot of outings,” Ansley recalled, “where we said the only reason we're alive is that we entertained God.”

LeMaitre more or less subscribed to “the duct-tape answer to life,” his eldest daughter, MaryAnne, told me from her Utah home. “He wanted to have fun.” For her father the journey was the adventure—and if you map every moment, “you're taking away the spontaneity, the come-what-may feeling.”

Back in Peggy's dining room, her son-in-law, Curtis Lynn, looked at me across the dining table and asked, “Are you familiar with the military term FIDO?” I gave him a blank look. “Fuck It. Drive On,” Lynn explained. That was Michael.

And the thing is, he always made it work. There were a score of dodged bullets—the dead engines, the hunting trips that went sideways. But those just became good stories. That's why, when the CB radio craze hit in the mid-'70s, Peggy's handle became Lucky Swede, MaryAnne was TwinkleToes. And Michael? He became the Crazy Frenchman.

It wasn't out of character, then, when LeMaitre last winter applied for—and won—one of 60 men's lottery spots in the Mount Marathon Race. Soon the rookie letter arrived, with its bald admonition: “Do NOT make the July 4th race your first trip up Mount Marathon!” Peggy and youngest child Michelle, a nurse, tried to talk him out of it. He waved them off.

The night before the race, the LeMaitres and hundreds of fellow racers gathered at Seward Middle School. Outside, it was already raining—had been for days. After the annual raffle and auctions, the doors of the gymnasium were ceremonially closed for the mandatory rookie safety meeting. The gym was so packed that Michael and Peggy sat on the floor.

“If you have not been up that mountain before, you should consider going home right now, and you should not be in the race,” Tim Lebling, who gave the prerace safety talk, told the crowd. LeMaitre had always been in good shape—he lifted weights and ran at the gym regularly and had finished a 12-K a month earlier—but the weeks leading up to the race had been busy. He'd run few hills, and he'd never gone to Seward to scout the course. But now, if he heard the warning (Peggy doesn't remember it, though several others who were in attendance do), he didn't move.

“No one's gotten up, so I'm assuming everybody's done it,” Lebling continued. He then showed a short video and a slide show of the cavalcade of hazards—bears, falling rocks—and important landmarks, including the “turnaround rock.” Lebling talked about how slick the course was this year, and about the winter's record snowfall that had left crumbling snow bridges high above rumbling creeks. “Remember—you can't beat the mountain,” the safety video concluded, “but the mountain can beat you.” Yet even the video seemed to capture this race's schizophrenic relationship with danger: some of those images of injuries and flying bodies were set to an adrenal-squeezing speed-metal sound track.

 

The next day was a pluperfect small-town Independence Day. Local guys sang the national anthem. Sacred Heart Catholic Church hawked drumsticks at its annual chicken barbecue. A parade celebrating “100 Years of City Government” marched down Fourth Avenue with kids dressed as future city council members. And all day long, people in waves ran up and down Mount Marathon, to crazed cheers—first the shortened kids' race, then the women's race.

After the women ran, spectators at Fourth and Adams crowded in front of the bronze bust of eponymous William H. Seward, negotiator of the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, who cast his jowly gaze over the men's starting line. The mood was expectant, but the weather wasn't great—chilly, the pigeon-colored skies threatening rain.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Peggy asked her husband.

“I'm going to be fine,” he replied. “I'm going to take it slow.”

“Honey, you come back to me.”

He kissed her.

“I will. Don't worry. I'll be back.”

When the gun sounded for the second wave of the men's race at 3:10
P.M.
, LeMaitre and about 175 others charged through a tunnel of noise up Fourth Avenue. They ran past the fire hall, past the Chinese restaurant, past the other Chinese restaurant, past the United Methodist Church that advertised
WORSHIP AT MOOSE PASS, 9 A.M.
After two blocks the runners took a hard left on Jefferson Street and ran beneath the large mural of the Mount Marathon Race, painted on the side of the senior center and bearing a list of past winners in the way another small town might celebrate its prized graduates or war dead. They passed a low-slung building with a large red cross—the hospital. The road kept rising. In another block the asphalt turned to gravel. LeMaitre and the others ran past a warning sign at the foot of the mountain that read,
GOING DOWN IS EVEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN GOING UP
. Then the runners ran out of road entirely and faced the great green bulk of the mountain. They started to climb.

In Peggy's dining room stood a large photograph, the last ever taken of her husband, shot by a photographer on the course at about 4:30 that day. In it, Michael is just emerging from the thick brush midway up the mountain. Seward lies below, a toy landscape of streets and yards as neat as an ice tray. There is no one behind him. His knees are dirty, his gloves are soiled. He is completely soaked through by rain and sweat—shorts, shirt, headband. What you keep returning to, though, is his face. It isn't a face of misery, or complaint. The blue eyes are wide. The grin is gritted but large, even a little wild. Last place doesn't faze this face at all; it has been there before. You realize then that you know this grin: it is the grin of the Crazy Frenchman.

Fuck it, the grin says. Drive on.

 

Peggy shivered alone in the rain, honking her car's horn and screaming her husband's name at the base of the mountain to guide him home.

By eight o'clock when he had not appeared through the spruce—two hours after Tom Walsh had radioed to race officials that LeMaitre would soon be on his way down—the family notified authorities. Hasty searches turned up nothing. The temperature was dropping, the rain increasing. By two in the morning, an Alaska State Troopers helicopter equipped with infrared radar sensitive enough to see footprints left in snow arrived and scanned the mountain through the dusky night. Searchers landed and blew whistles—still nothing. Had anyone looked up from town in the late afternoon, he might have watched LeMaitre, seen exactly where he'd gone—he was that close. But the race was long over; everyone had turned his back on the mountain, toward cold beers, hot showers. The evening ahead. Now it was sleeting at Race Point. LeMaitre had been on the mountain for 12 hours dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts. Searchers feared that if he wasn't already injured, he was almost surely suffering from hypothermia.

The next morning the 210th Rescue Squadron of the Alaska Air National Guard, which specializes in searching for downed pilots and missing hikers, arrived with its HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter for another infrared scan. The two choppers stalked the mountain all day. On the ground a team of 40 searchers, which soon ballooned to 60 or more, canvassed the mountain. They tried to think like the lost man: Did LeMaitre hike right past Race Point and continue up a goat path toward the true summit—only to slip down treacherous cliffs beside the path? Did he fall through a melting snow bridge created by the streams that run beneath the lingering snowfields on the racecourse and now lie, injured, out of sight? Desperate, did he beeline straight for Seward through the impossible jungle of alders and devil's club? In the following days they checked everything, to no avail—even tying strips of pink and orange surveyor's tape to branches to mark the places searched. Weeks later when I climbed it, the mountain remained tinseled with hundreds of poignant Day-Glo ribbons, each one a hope unfulfilled.

Days passed. Rescue quietly became recovery. The bar-stool sages jawed that LeMaitre had pulled a fast one on everybody. “He's in Cabo,” they said, “nursing a frosty margarita.” But for many Sewardites the hurt was personal. “This is our mountain,” Sam Young told me. “We can't have someone up there suffering.” He and others took days off to search the mountain—some with teams, some on their own.

But where did LeMaitre go? The high tundra and rock slopes were easily enough searched. Soon the snow tunnels also had melted out, revealing nothing. Only one general scenario seemed to fit: Something sudden and drastic happened to LeMaitre—a fall? A broken ankle in the scree? A heart attack? He managed to reach the worst of the brush, or else wandered into some of Mount Marathon's frightening, unseeable cliffs—dense and difficult areas where searchers might have missed him. Shock and hypothermia took hold. And he died there.

But the mountain, so much larger than it looks from town, was loath to return what it had taken. Its rocky slopes ripped spiked crampons from searchers' feet. Its muddy slopes twisted their ankles. And it kept raining. Four days after LeMaitre disappeared, the state troopers, who'd spearheaded the search, ended their effort. The Seward Volunteer Fire Department kept looking. A cadaver dog arrived from Oregon. Friends pored over high-resolution photographs. The LeMaitres' son, Jon, came to Seward from Anchorage to comfort Peggy during the search. Daughter MaryAnne flew up from Utah and stayed for six weeks, climbing the mountain's gullies with volunteers. Once, she steeled herself to poke through fresh bear scat on the trail, looking for a bone, a scrap of clothing, any grisly hint of her father's whereabouts. “If it would've been me on that mountain—I know my dad. He'd be doing the same thing,” she told me later as she fought back tears. “I know he wouldn't give up on me.”

Finally even Chief Squires reluctantly called off the fire department's effort, hoping that when autumn stripped the jungle, a clue would appear. But soon the autumn too would pass, and then the snow would fall, and still, nothing.

In mid-August, before MaryAnne returned home, she headed up the mountain one last time. She left at three o'clock, arriving at Race Point nearly exactly when her father did. She sat by the turnaround rock and wept. Then she pulled a Dremel tool from her knapsack and carved
I LOVE YOU DAD
into the rock. Having experienced the mountain and Seward for these weeks, she wrote friends afterward, “If this ends up being my dad's final resting place, he is happy here.”

 

Volunteers were still on the mountain when the soul-searching, and the questions, and the finger-pointing started. Should the race timekeepers have left LeMaitre? Shouldn't he have been stopped? Why didn't officials know who remained on the mountain? Who is responsible?

Two months before the race, former race director Chuck Echard had warned in the
Seward Phoenix Log
that race directors were asking for trouble by boosting the cap on adult racers by another five entrants last year. More bodies on the mountain meant more flying rocks, more unprepared racers. “Take care of the runners and the mountain,” Echard cautioned. “Not everyone can run the race.” Women's champ Holly Brooks caught the thoughts of several people I spoke with when she said, “I'm kind of surprised that something like this didn't happen sooner.”