The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (14 page)

While many of his early climbing partners anchored themselves to
desks at sea level, Beckey continued to take odd jobs, sleeping on friends’ floors and cadging rides to and from the mountains. Lloyd Anderson, his partner on Mount Despair, founded Recreational Equipment Inc., an outdoor co-op set up as a way to get good European hardware at reasonable prices. After the war, with the surge in leisure-time activities and the surfeit of Army camping gear, the backyard operation took off. By the 1950s, Anderson’s creation, known by the initials REI, had grown to be the largest consumer co-op in the nation. More than two million members have registered since Anderson’s days with Beckey in the late 1930s, and there are now eighteen REI stores in ten states. REI is one of the largest sporting-goods retailers in the world. But the outdoors brought no riches to Beckey. The Man with No Permanent Address made few plans beyond the next outing.

He is supposed to be up there somewhere today, a sixty-five-year-old man who can’t sit still. Beckey’s apparent target, the Nooksack Tower, is a black hulk six times as high as the World Trade Center, coated in ice. Beckey was the first human to touch the summit, on July 5, 1946.

As the rose-tinted light bleeds out of the sky to the west, I leave the German and set up my own campsite below the walls of the tower. A moist wind invades the cirque, a harbinger of the next frontal system. Perhaps Beckey is bivouacked somewhere up high, and I’ll catch him in the early morning. Then again, maybe he’s gone. Now the light has disappeared, and the peaks are black and white, the shades of a killer whale just beneath the surface. At night, with a cannonade of avalanches all around, I have trouble sleeping. The sound comes first as a crack, and then
whooomppfff
. Mount Shuksan, joined to the Nooksack Tower by the shoulder ridge above me, means “roaring mountain” in the native tongue. Everything that any mountain could have—flower meadows, alpine firs, small lakes, glaciers, serrated rock walls, colors found only above timberline at a certain time of day, and a summit that defies easy ascent–is on Shuksan. But at night, all it does is roar. In the morning there is no Beckey, and the German is gone. I scan the tower, its peak bathed in the bronze of dawn, and see a speck of a man moving upward—the German—no doubt muttering directions from the Beckey book in his backpack.

At sea level, I look up Beckey’s closest friend, a Lithuanian émigré named Alex Bertulis, who has an architecture practice in Seattle. I’ve put out the word that I’m looking for Beckey, and Bertulis has a message for me from the man himself: Beckey has gone to the Coast Range for the month. The Coast Range is a largely roadless spine of low-elevation wilderness rising from the fjords of British Columbia and stretching hundreds of miles north into the panhandle of Alaska. Most of the peaks are unnamed and unclimbed and heavily glaciated by year-round storms. The Coast Range, at his age? And then I remember a saying of Beckey’s. Loveliness, he said, is paid for “in the currency of suffering.”

Bertulis shrugs. Don’t worry, he says. He’ll be back.

“It’s just something he has to do.”

Bertulis has climbed with Beckey for three decades; he provides a couch for his sleeping bag whenever he’s in Seattle. Beckey, he says, “goes through climbing partners like a gypsy goes through horses.” Beckey may spend ten days on rock and ice, and within a few minutes of arriving back in Seattle he’s on the phone, trying to find somebody to go with him back to the mountains. Usually his partners are half his age. While in town, he’s constantly on edge until he’s secured a mate for the next trip.

I ask Bertulis about the 1950s, when the Northwest was coming into its own as the climbing center of North America. The Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, created as a ski unit to fight the Nazis in the Alps, was put together with climbers from Mount Rainier. After the war, many of them stayed together and started to pursue mountaineering as something more than a weekend hobby. Beckey was too young for the division; he enlisted near the end of the war and missed most of the action. By the late 1950s, an effort to put the first American atop Mount Everest was underway in the Northwest, led by Jim Whittaker, a West Seattle neighbor of Beckey’s and an early manager of REI.

Like Beckey, Whittaker learned about the outdoors through the Boy Scouts, scrambling up the peaks of the Cascades and Olympics. Beckey, in the 1950s, had made three daring first ascents on comparatively unknown Alaskan peaks. He had done them all alpine style, a method of mountaineering later popularized by Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb each of the world’s eight-thousand-meter peaks, fourteen in all. Rather than rely on an army of supplies and porters, the alpine idea is to travel light and fast without bottled oxygen or cumbersome support camps. Beckey, given his superhuman reputation, seemed a natural
for the 1963 Everest trip. But he was not chosen. Four Americans made the high point of the planet. While Beckey was scrounging for gas money, Jim Whittaker became a national hero, joining John Glenn in the Kennedy circle of Camelot demigods, his picture on the covers of
Life
magazine and
National Geographic
. Whittaker went on to market a line of outdoor clothing under the label Because It’s There.

“Fred was blackballed by the climbing community,” says Bertulis. “There had been a tragedy while he was climbing in the Himalayas. Beckey’s tentmate got edema and couldn’t move.… In the same period, a man died climbing with Beckey in the Cascades. They were descending at night, and the man went the wrong way through the brush off Mount Baring and fell off a cliff. The climbing establishment never forgave Beckey. There was a stigma attached to him, perhaps it was envy. He had a reputation for being reckless, an undeserved reputation in my mind. But he was the most qualified mountaineer in America for that 1963 Everest trip.”

Later, some members from the 1963 party conceded that Beckey was in a league of his own, a climber of extraordinary talent. But they said his personality—blunt, smart-ass, independent—was ill suited to a three-month expedition where teamwork and an even temperament were paramount concerns. Beckey himself had too much pride to ask for a spot, and he was never good at self-promotion, a virtual requirement for world-class athletes.

Beckey increased his pace in the 1960s, a time when rock-climbing developed as the new athletic frontier. More and more, younger climbers who’d heard about his spider qualities on rock and his ribald tales at night, sought him out. Among a circle of outdoor athletes, he obtained celebrity status, with one big difference: Beckey was always broke. But his sea-level charms could work wonders, often making up for what he lacked in money. Bertulis remembers numerous times when he and Beckey would descend into alpine towns, exhausted, and Beckey would want to go out. A few hours later he would return, arm in arm with the best-looking woman in the valley. He never married.

“Fred married the mountains,” says Bertulis. “So, consequently, he looks at these peaks as his children. That’s his life. That’s all he’s got. He’s been very pure in that regard. He never compromised himself. Never endorsed Camel cigarettes or something like that. Never commercialized himself. As a result, he’s always had to live hand to mouth.”

Though Beckey has not slowed down, Bertulis has noticed one significant
change in his friend. “For the first time in his life, he’s thinking about his own mortality. He realizes his legs will not carry him forever.”

In the Lost World Plateau, an attic of Beckey’s past, I’m searching for clues to the young man. One look at Nixon’s Nose, a protrusion of sloping granite high on Prusik Peak, tells me more about Beckey than anything he’s written. To be intimate with that rock is to be divorced from the laws of physics. The dozens of lakes settled in the granite bowls above seven thousand feet here are known as the Enchantments; in mythological spirit, the landmarks were given such names as Excalibur Rock, Valhalla Cirque, Grail Tarn, Lake Viviane, Rune Tarn, Talisman, Valkyrie. Larch trees, a conifer which loses its needles after a show of gold, surround the lakes. The recipe that produced this beauty is unduplicated in the Cascades. I had to wait several weeks to get my permit from the Forest Service to enter this realm, now protected as the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area. In this waistband of mountain country, thirty miles north to south, are 692 lakes. In Beckey’s heyday, he could run naked for a week in midsummer and bump into more goats than people. Now, the Enchantments have more company than they can accommodate and still live up to their name. As Winthrop urged in the last century, the captive of the city has discovered the freedom of the high country. And while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect. Since the mid-1960s, the government has concentrated on road building for timber companies, largely ignoring the trail system built by Depression-era city workers.

Beckey first came to the Enchantments in 1948, intending to climb and name the unknown high points on the map above the apple orchards of the Wenatchee Valley. Like a sybarite stumbling into a convent, Beckey found himself surrounded by challenge. Traveling light as usual, he arranged for a crop-duster airplane to drop several weeks’ worth of supplies to his camp. Flying low over the high rock, the plane crashed into boulders, but the pilot lived, and the supplies were salvaged.

I envy Beckey now, camped at Gnome Tarn under Prusik Peak. With the completion of the polar expeditions, discovery of the unknown corners of the planet became so much harder. Deep sea and outer space were considered the only places left, and to get Out There or Underwater required considerable technological help. Beckey, pushing the limits of a creature without hoofs or wings or sealed transport, found new land in
his own backyard. When he reached the Lost World Plateau and set up camp in the Enchantments, he looked at a ridge where only eagles and hawks had perched, named it the Nightmare Needles, then climbed most of the serrated rock. He crawled up Nixon’s Nose, up to the top of Prusik Peak, walked to the edge of Little Annapurna to see the sun set behind Mount Stuart, and scurried for handholds on The Temple.

Ira Spring, a photographer who has spent his life taking pictures of the Cascades, went into the Enchantments with Beckey in the 1940s and came out amazed at what he had seen.

“He exists on a different plane,” says Spring. “Some of those climbs in there were just out of this world. Fred had taken lots of abuse because no one could believe he had done all these summits as fast as he said. I was impressed beyond description. But after that, I was the only one still impressed. He was written off as too controversial.” Beckey refused to mend his ways with the Northwest climbing establishment. He would attend the rare slide show or annual meeting, but all the rock talk would eventually bore him.

Spring, holding rope to belay Beckey up the rock of the Enchantment Basin, heard nonstop prattle about women. “Girls, girls, girls, that’s all he ever talked about. After a while I just shut up and listened to him. It made for interesting listening.”

Now in his seventies, Ira Spring limits himself to hiking in place of the climbs of his youth. He can’t understand why Beckey is not similarly bound by the handicaps of age. “Where does he get the energy? He looks like he couldn’t walk across the street.”

When it’s time to leave the Enchantments, I scramble up to the edge of the Nightmare Needles as far as my ability will take me, a thousand feet or so below the Beckey threshold. I find a porch of salt-and-pepper granite and settle in for lunch. It’s hot; the sun east of the Cascade Crest is not the same star that burns in the soggy west side. I slice a bagel open and layer it with cheese and salami. Leaning against the rock, the Wenatchee Valley to the east, I hear voices—two men and a woman, tied to each other in the upper reaches of the Nightmare Needles. They speak the same language I heard in the glacier bowl of the Nooksack Cirque: “Beckey says …”

Beckey lives. There is a voice to the legend. Back from the Coast Range, he says he’s ready to meet me. I can barely hear him above an electric buzz on the phone line.

“What’s that noise?” I ask him.

“I’m shaving,” he says. “Don’t like to waste any time in the morning.”

He explains that he’s chained to a desk in the Oregon Historical Society office, researching a book on the history of the Cascades. Can I meet him in Portland?

Crossing the Columbia into Oregon, where the Cascades are smoother, smaller and more rounded than the whitecapped ice fangs of the north, I have my doubts whether Beckey will actually show up; his reputation is that of a phantom, and an unpredictable one at that. We’re supposed to meet at a diner on the shore of the Willamette River, Beckey’s kind of place—“gets pretty wild after a while.” I wait. No Beckey. After an hour, I’m ready to go, convinced I’ve been stood up. Then—Beckey.

He seems nervous and jittery, as Bertulis has described him whenever he’s stuck at sea level, away from the familiar music of a storm and the living room under the sky. He walks in a stiff manner, back upright, about six feet tall. There is not an ounce of fat on him that I can see. Beckey’s sandy hair is thinning on top, and his face is deeply lined, more from the sun than worry. He has a sort of hound-dog, wounded look to him until he smiles, and the accordion of high-altitude-baked skin slides back. His voice is hardly that of a sixty-five-year-old man; rather, it sounds like someone in his twenties. I think of all those young, glossy-faced ski bums and climbers I’ve met in the mountains, people who never have to go home on Monday morning. They’re not supposed to age. Beckey’s index finger on one hand is bent at a right angle, hanging like a useless appendage evolving its way out of the species. I ask him about the finger, and he looks at it as if for the first time.