The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (15 page)

“I don’t know what the hell happened to that,” he says. “Guess I’ll have to get it looked at. That’ll cost me.”

Beckey gives the impression that he never planned anything in his entire life, except perhaps the next climb. Adventure drew him to the outdoors, the call of the unknown, he explains in short, precise sentences similar to the dry prose of his alpine guidebooks. He rarely talks about beauty in the mountains. His concerns are crustal fragments, thrust faults, gneiss. I wonder if the man has gone cold inside from all those years outside.

Talking about his youth, Beckey says he was always hyper. When he realized his limbs could carry him to sights unseen by other humans, he was hooked. It was all so easy, crawling up rock chimneys, dangling across faces with eight thousand feet of exposure, slogging through brush. What was hard was the sea-level stuff. Bringing a body back from
a weekend trip, knowing the deceased had stepped one way and fallen to his death, while Beckey had stepped the other and come home unscathed—how do you explain that? In the 1940s there had been an avalanche on Mount Waddington, in British Columbia, resulting in the death of a man from a Harvard team guided by Beckey. In the 1950s, a companion fell to his death while descending Mount Baring northeast of Seattle. And then there was the Himalayan accident, an episode still cloaked in mystery. Thinking about these lost companions, Beckey rubs his face. Like most mountaineers, he has a logical explanation for what happened; it’s the only way to keep climbing.

Beckey says he wanted to be a cartographer, but most of the jobs for mapmakers in the 1940s were with the federal government in Washington, D.C., crawling up the walls of the bureaucracy instead of the flanks of the North Cascades. “I decided that was no man’s land—too hot, too flat, full of ugly women.” He didn’t care that there was little glamour or career satisfaction in driving a delivery truck. “It was no-brain work. I liked that, because I spent all my mental time thinking about girls and mountains.”

He talks about Liberty Bell, perhaps the best-known climber’s peak in the North Cascades. Beckey named the true summit—it had been misplaced on a neighboring rock tower—and was the first to climb it, in 1946. Today, alpinists come from all over the world to retrace Beckey’s route up the pastel tower of Liberty Bell. It broke his heart to see the east-west highway carved through the mountains in 1972. He went back to Liberty Bell this summer, climbing familiar rock while tourists stared from a parking lot nearby, off the North Cascades Highway. He was like the aging Buffalo Bill performing the tricks of the Old West in a circus ring. Civilization, he feels, has crowded out the remaining wild country. A person has to go deep into Alaska, or the Yukon, to find a place to get lost. Off-road vehicles, which have been found by federal government studies to disfigure more land in the West than strip mining, are now allowed into many of Beckey’s sacred places. “At least the miners knew what they were doing,” Beckey scowls. “These idiots on dirt bikes and ORVs don’t have any sense of the outdoors or how to treat the land!”

Oddly, Beckey calls himself a city person, and in that sense he is a Northwest archetype: someone who can tread water in the overcrowded urban pool knowing an ocean of freedom is only an hour away. But he feels cornered.

“The frontier is gone,” says the last of the frontier explorers. “We’ve
hit the Pacific Ocean and we’re backed up. There isn’t enough rock for everybody who wants to climb.”

A few routes on a few high rocks in the deep shadows of the North Cascades have been omitted from his alpine guidebook trilogy, by design. Beckey wanted to leave some room, long after he’s gone, for discovery. He says the books have brought him more stress than success. He lives on a few thousand dollars a year in royalties, and worries about the new litigious breed of urban outdoor enthusiasts. Recently, a woman went for a hike in the Cascades, following the directions of a popular trail guide. After she fell off the trail and suffered serious injuries, she sued the author and publisher, claiming they were to blame for her accident. The case was settled out of court. Beckey shivers at such stories. His publisher is always asking him to respond to some missive from a climber who is miffed because the Beckey route up a mountain took much longer than he had indicated in the guidebook.

Beckey seems little interested in recounting any of his expeditions, with one exception: the first trip to the bright-colored rock country near Liberty Bell, an area he compares to the Dolomites in northern Italy. At the time, Beckey was in love with a dark-haired, athletic woman of Greek background named Vasiliki. He met her while skiing at Stevens Pass and they hiked and played tennis and skied and partied together. She was one of the smartest women Beckey had ever met, fluent in several languages, but also outdoorsy and sure of herself.

Lovestruck, Beckey went into the uncharted mountains near Liberty Bell in 1952. The beauty of the area, baked in east-crest sun, only heightened his feelings. All around was fine-cut granite tinged in pink and orange. While bivouacked on a frosty evening, he witnessed the loveliest sunset he had ever seen in the mountains; in a lifetime of glorious alpine curtain calls, it was one of the few that ever stood out. He thought of Vasiliki, and then he remembered a quotation from St. Augustine: “There is a morning and an evening in all mortal things.”

As the expedition continued, Beckey gave immortality to the woman he was stuck on. He named the sharp-edged, glacier-refined, pastel-colored rock of nearly eight thousand feet Vasiliki Tower, the only time he ever christened a peak for an individual woman. He named the surrounding summits for her favorite drinks—Chianti, Burgundy and Pernod spires—and two other high points, Aphrodite Tower and Bacchus Tower. Standing alone, any of those mountains would be far higher than any peak east of the Mississippi. In the North Cascades, they were ignored
until Beckey bestowed his names on them. “Imaginative names,” he wrote in a cryptic reference in his guidebook, “sometimes in abuse of such privilege, but adding character to the ridge.”

Vasiliki was the one woman Beckey wanted to marry. “She would have made a terrific wife,” says Beckey. “I wish I’d done something about it.” She fell in love with somebody else, and prospered in a life where culture and money and civility mattered more than the spontaneous thrills of the climbing bum. Beckey went back to his old ways, seldom mentioning Vasiliki, flirting with death on new rock walls, meeting new women, but he left behind one strong hint of the man’s soul.…

Near Vasiliki Tower, wildflowers grow from rock slits high above timberline. A hummingbird buzzes overhead, and I see goat prints on a patch of midsummer snow. I’m not wearing a wristwatch, so I can’t set my expectations of the day against the clock. As it has for many late-century citizens of the Information Age, computer time has cut my attention span and reduced my patience. I absorb change in milliseconds. To come up here, looking for the better part of Beckey, I must slow to glacier time. Below, near the edge of a snow lake fast melting to turquoise, are heather fields aflame with color and little bell-cupped flowers. On the other side of the summit is a tarn, newly sprung from the Ice Age. My topographical map, based on a geological survey in the 1950s, shows several small glaciers in the northern basins of these peaks. They are no longer here, victims, perhaps, of the gradual warming of the earth.

Moving along a summit ridge, I chase Vasiliki Tower. It pokes in and out of view, guarded by the wine spires, never in full profile until I reach a rock summit. And then, there it is, in all its vertical glory, a magnificent hulk of rock and strength. I’ve had conflicting views of Beckey throughout the first months of summer—an egotist, an adventurer, a free spirit, a freeloader, an iconoclast, an athlete without equal, a man full of life, a man full of sadness, doomed to living out his years in high-altitude loneliness on legs that must grow weaker. But in his way, he has fulfilled Winthrop’s prophecy, finding exalted life in the iced pinnacles. Yes, I know it now: feeling the breath of Vasiliki Tower at this range, I can think only one thought of Beckey: God, was he in love.

Chapter 5
W
ITH
P
EOPLE

H
ere we have a city: black and beige and boxy up front, the towers of Chicago or Tokyo planted in soil that once held a glacier and fed a forest. Such bulk, piled on land so rumpled, pinched by an enormous lake on one side and an inland sea on the other. It’s all very new, and all very tentative, for Seattle is a city that can’t decide what to wear. The city has changed its look three times in the last thirty years, and half a dozen times in the last century. The hills that once rose steeply from the central waterfront—they’ve been cut in half. The Black River, a salmon stream that flowed from Lake Washington to the Duwamish and into Puget Sound—it’s gone. And the tidelands which nurtured a bouillabaisse of sea life—buried. Still, the city is not finished; every wave of fresh tenants wants to remodel. So, the flat-topped hills of downtown, minus their natural summits, are sprouting new skyscrapers by the
month, and the forested edge of the city is leveled for Weyerhaeuser’s newest product: the instant neighborhood. When humorist Fran Lebowitz recently visited Seattle, she was asked what she thought of the city. “It’s cute,” she replied. “Why are they tearing it down?”

In the spirit of earlier inhabitants, I approach Seattle by kayak, entering Elliott Bay on a weekday morning; it’s like landing at O’Hare Airport on a kite. Overwhelmed by ship traffic, I hug the shoreline, trailed by sea birds looking for French fries. The wake of a passing container ship, four city blocks in length, gives my small craft a muscular nudge. Rainier floats atop the southern skyline, a hooded cone above the industrial congestion of the Duwamish Valley. There is the Kingdome, a cement cavern without sufficient daylight to adequately support a baseball team, plopped on fill-dirt that used to be tidelands. Farther south is Boeing Field, where the Duwamish River was straightened and its old bed leveled to provide a runway for newly hatched jumbo jets. Towering over downtown is the Columbia Center. A thousand feet high and black as a charred forest, it’s stuffed with enough lawyers to replace nearly half the attorneys in Japan.

Looking around, I see a few hints of traditional life in the temperate zone: a rock crab scrambling over exposed pilings, some loose kelp, a cormorant riding a northern breeze. At the entrance, Elliott Bay is nearly as deep as the Space Needle is high, a depth of six hundred feet that hides a half-blind octopus of three hundred pounds which paralyzes its prey with a toxic squirt. In these waters live squid twenty-four feet long, century-old clams with necks of pornographic dimensions, starfish bigger than an extra-large pizza—in all, more than two thousand kinds of invertebrates. All of that is below me, out of sight. What I see when I paddle into Elliott Bay is the dominance of one species.

I try to imagine George Vancouver, who was the first to pencil Puget Sound onto a map that showed no such thing. For one month in the spring of 1792, at the age of thirty-four, he had the feeling of God during Creation Week. Traveling up the Pacific Coast, the
Discovery
and the
Chatham
took a right turn at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and proceeded east toward an immense volcano anchored in the North Cascades, which Vancouver promptly relieved of its native name, Koma Kulshan, and replaced with that of his cartographer, Joseph Baker, the “undistinguished biped” cursed by Winthrop. Then south, to an inland sea and an even bigger volcano at its southern end, which he named Rainier. He passed through Admiralty Inlet, the weather clear, the water calm, the mountains polished on either side of him. All around, the land rose up
in storm-sculpted detail, the islands carpeted by forests, streams leaping out of steep canyons. The air opened his sinuses and expanded his imagination. Vancouver, already ill with a mystery disease that would kill him before his fortieth birthday, was in the Northwest to map and chart a course for future commerce. A detail man, humorless, he would flog his men in front of other sailors to make his disciplinary point. But when he entered Puget Sound something happened, as if he’d tossed his old spirit overboard in a rush of spring euphoria. The first thing he did was give his men a holiday, their only day off since they’d passed Cape Horn at the toe of South America. From then on, his journals started to sing.

To Vancouver and other British explorers, wild land was evil land, bad until proven civilized. That attitude changed when he came upon the garden of Puget Sound. It was perfect as it was. Vancouver wrote: “As we had no reason to imagine this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.” Farther down the sound, he anchored off Bainbridge Island, just across the water from the future city of Seattle. Vancouver then penned what is perhaps his most famous passage: