Guy Waterman
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Guy Waterman | |
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| Born | May 1, 1932 New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | February 6, 2000 (aged 67) Mt. Lafayette, New Hampshire, U.S. |
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| Notable awards | David R. Brower Conservation Award 2012 Outstanding Service in Mountain Conservation |
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| Children | 3 |
Guy Waterman (1932–2000) was an American writer, mountaineer, conservationist, musician, and homesteader. He was primarily known for his writing about the outdoors. Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics,[2] written collaboratively with his wife, Laura Waterman, helped define the clean camping and hiking movements of the 1970s, and are credited with helping spawn the Leave No Trace[1][2] program. Waterman also authored, with Laura, two definitive mountain histories; Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains,[3] and Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States.[4] Their final book, a collection of fiction and essays: A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True,[5] was published in 2000, a few months after Guy's death.
Early life
Guy Waterman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 1 May 1932, the youngest of the five children of Alan T. Waterman and his wife Mary. The family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Guy attended the Shady Hill School. There he developed a lifelong interest in baseball, attending most home games of the Boston Braves. Waterman went on to write for baseball magazines and was a longtime member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
In 1946 the family moved again and he enrolled in the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. At Taft he discovered jazz, and began playing jazz piano seriously under the tutelage of upperclassman Bob LaGuardia. He finished high school at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington.
In 1953 Guy Waterman graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics from George Washington University in 1953. During his college years, Guy had married his Sidwell schoolmate Emily Morrison, and they had two sons (William Antonio, born 24 April, 1951, and John Mallon, born 17 September, 1952). At this time, Waterman was also the pianist for Scotty Lawrence’s Riverboat Trio, playing at Washington's Jazzland and at the Charles hotel. In addition to playing ragtime in nightclubs, he wrote about this musical form for The Record Changer magazine. But in late 1953, the Riverboat Trio reorganized, and Waterman left the group and began drinking heavily, threatening his marriage. A third son, James Reed Waterman, was born on 11 July, 1955.
Career
Pursuing a more stable career, Waterman worked as an economist for the Washington Chamber of Commerce from 1955 to 1958, then was hired as legislative aide and speechwriter for the US Senate Minority Policy Committee. He moved to Capitol Hill on 1 January 1959, where he served as a staffer and congressional speechwriter for - among others - future US president Gerald Ford. In June 1960 Waterman was hired by the Republican National Committee as a writer of party platforms and speeches for Richard Nixon, who would go on to become their nominee for president.
When Nixon lost the 1960 Presidential Election, Guy received an offer to write speeches for the president of General Electric in New York city. He felt this would give him more time for his family which he hoped would improve his marriage. The political environment of the time made connections between corporate and political work somewhat fluid, and he was called in to write a first draft of a speech for Dwight D. Eisenhower when the ex-President headed up Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company. This allowed Guy to quip that he had written for three U.S. Presidents — Nixon, Ford, and Eisenhower.
Climbing
Waterman began climbing in the fall of 1963, prompted by a series of articles in Sports Illustrated by Jack Olsen on efforts to climb the North Wall of the Eiger that were later published as The Climb Up to Hell. Waterman signed up for rock climbing instruction offered by the Appalachian Mountain Club at the cliffs 90 miles north of Times Square called the Shawangunks. “I was absolutely transported at the excitement of climbing vertical rock,” Waterman wrote in his unpublished memoir,[7] adding that the Shawangunks were “destined to become my spiritual home.” His determination to meet the physical demands of climbing helped him to address his drinking, and by 1965 he was sober. “Mountains and climbing dawned on my drunken, shamed, lonely life like a beacon of hope,” Waterman wrote. “Here was a whole new world of aspiration and effort, contrasting with the nightmare my life had become. . . . I turned toward it as a drowning man toward a distant beach.” He had discovered the White Mountains in New Hampshire as well and often took his two older sons along on multi-day trips.
In 1965 Waterman began winter climbing, in both the White Mountains and New York’s Adirondacks, including ice climbing. He was one of the first to ascend the 46 Adirondack peaks over 4000 feet in winter. With son John he began exploring local ice routes, first in Connecticut and then in the famously steep-sided gullies of Huntington Ravine on New Hampshire's Mt. Washington.
On 19 June 1969, son Bill, on a western adventure that involved hopping freight trains, lost his leg in a railroad yard in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Bill’s accident precipitated further difficulties with Waterman's marriage and he and Emily separated, divorcing finally in 1972. Waterman and then his high school aged third son Jim lived in the Hudson Valley town of Marlboro, a two-hour commute from the G.E. building and a half-hour drive from the Shawangunks where they were weekend regulars.
Waterman met Laura Johnson, a newcomer to the Shawangunks climbing scene, in the spring of 1970. The daughter of the noted Emily Dickinson scholar, Thomas H. Johnson, Laura had been working as a book editor in New York since college graduation in 1962. The two quickly became inseparable, climbing every weekend, with long drives to the ice and snow in the Adirondacks and the ravines on Mt. Washington during the winter.
The early 1970s marked a time of change in climbing areas across the country. Climbers saw that the pitons that they hammered into cracks in the rocks for protection were widening the cracks. In the spirit of the environmental movement spearheaded by the first Earth Day, climbers adopted the use of nuts or chock stones that could be inserted and taken out of cracks by hand. The movement was called “clean climbing” and it swept climbing areas across the country. Waterman was asked to join the board of the Mohonk Preserve, the land managers of the Shawangunks, to represent the climbers. This brought the couple into a friendship with the Smiley family, particularly Dan Smiley, a naturalist who strongly influenced their thinking on environmental matters.
Waterman and Laura were married on 26 August 1972. Both wanted to detach themselves from their city lives and devote more time to climbing and the outdoors. The couple found inspiration through reading Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. They bought land in rural Vermont, moving to their homestead on 9 June 1973.
Homestead: Writing and Climbing
The Watermans sought to combine a life of simple living close to nature, as self-sufficiently as they could, while maximizing time in the mountains and climbing. They built a small cabin, heated it from their woodlot, lit it with kerosene and candles, fetched water from their stream, filled their root cellar with crops from their garden, fruit trees, and berry bushes, and used their own maple syrup for sweetening.[9] They owned a car, but parked it far away, ensuring a walk into their homestead year round. They made room for Waterman's Steinway grand piano and their combined library of over a thousand books. Reading aloud was an evening pastime.
They lived on a tight budget, with income from writing for Backpacker and Appalachia, and a monthly column on camping and hiking for New England Outdoors. Their first book grew out of those columns, and was published by Stone Wall Press in 1979. Backwoods Ethics[1] was received by environmentalists and wilderness managers as a prophetic call to reevaluate the impact of recreation on the wilderness. It was revised and reissued with a foreword by Bill McKibben in 1993 by Countryman Press, and was joined by its companion volume Wilderness Ethics[2] that same year. That book looked beyond the ecology or the physical components of the backcountry, to the factors that make it “wild,” and the importance of safeguarding what the Watermans called the “spirit of wildness.” Wilderness Ethics was reissued in 2014, with a foreword by Ben Lawhon. Backwoods Ethics, under the new title of The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping, with a new foreword by Bill McKibben, was published in 2016.[10]
As active climbers and hikers Waterman and Laura became interested in the history of their northeastern mountains. In 1989 AMC Books published their Forest and Crag,[3] a definitive social history of mountain discovery, recreation, and trail-building, and in 1993, Stackpole Books released Yankee Rock & Ice.[4] Hailed as a classic by climbers, this book chronicles first ascents and the colorful personalities who made history on the Northeast’s cliffs and icefalls.
In 1981 when the Appalachian Mountain Club launched its trail-adopter program, Waterman and Laura signed up for Franconia Ridge, one of the most popular alpine trails in the Northeast. What they discovered in their fifteen years of looking for the balance between the pedestrian traffic and maintaining a sense of wildness, shaped their writing and their lives. Like the Shawangunks, Franconia Ridge became their spiritual home, with the meticulous work they did there matching in detail and careful thought the attention they gave to their homestead.
Yet there was a negative aspect to the Watermans’ full-on involvement. The couple was outspoken and could find themselves within a wide range of differing issues. Though supported by the White Mountain National Forest for their work, particularly on Franconia Ridge, the Watermans’ disagreement with the Appalachian Mountain Club – the dominant organization in the northeast, which, in the couple’s view, placed priority on improvements meant to draw more people into the backcountry – affected Waterman deeply in his championing what he believed was right for the beleaguered cause of wildness in the eastern mountains.
Their involvement with the land managers, as well as actively climbing, at the Shawangunks kept the Watermans in touch with issues important to climbers. But increasingly they turned to the White Mountains and their great love: winter climbing. Their homesteading life gave them plenty of time for multi-day backpacks and ice climbs. In the 1970s ice climbing underwent radical changes in techniques and tools, opening up the possibility of climbs once thought too difficult. Waterman and Laura made the sixth ascent of the Black Dike on Cannon Mountain, Laura becoming the first woman to successfully complete an ice route on Cannon Cliff.
Generally the Watermans sought climbs off the beaten track that required bushwhacks to reach. These routes were of moderate difficulty, but required several nights out as they searched for open slides often not visible from a road. In this way they came to know the White Mountains intimately, on and off trail, and in all weather conditions. Waterman relished introducing others to these hidden jewels, taking pleasure in their enjoyment. Above treeline in wild conditions he was at home and supremely confident. His joy in the mountains was contagious, making him fun to climb with.
Waterman ended up climbing all the 48 peaks over 4000 feet in winter six times. Reveling in forbidding terrain and ferocious weather, he climbed each of them by off-trail routes, each solo and each from all four compass points, all in snow and ice. Waterman was happiest with a focus for his adventures and his last 4000 footer from all compass points, made on 8 March 1987 with Laura and his friend Dan Allen, was followed by a profound sense of loss. He never again found a goal that combined such joy with the difficulty of achieving it. Guy and Johnny, it seemed, shared much in their approach to and need for mountains.
Guy’s son Johnny died on Denali in Alaska in 1981. He simply walked up the Ruth Glacier with a light pack and without a sleeping bag[11]. His tendency toward depression and anxiety, often eased by his mountain trips, had returned forcibly after his success on Mt. Hunter. Johnny’s death caused Waterman to question the whereabouts of his oldest son Bill. For a while Bill and Johnny had shared a cabin not far from Talkeetna, Alaska. Guy’s last letter from Bill carried a 1973 postmark. Since then there were rumors that Bill had gone off to live with the native population, or had wandered into the bush. Guy did not go to look for Bill, and Bill’s death remains unconfirmed.
The Watermans wrote one last book together, A Fine Kind of Madness, a collection of fiction and essays on mountain and climbing subjects, which was published a few months after Waterman's death in 2000.
Waterman took his own life, dying by exposure near the summit of Mt. Lafayette on his beloved Franconia Ridge on 6 February 2000.
Legacy
After Waterman's death his wife Laura and some friends founded the Waterman Fund, a non-profit that fosters the spirit of wildness and conserves alpine areas of northeastern North America through education, trail rehabilitation, and research. The Guy Waterman Alpine Steward Award is given out annually to a recipient who has demonstrated a commitment to protecting the physical and spiritual qualities of the mountain wilderness in the Northeast.
The American Alpine Club, in 2012, awarded Guy Waterman, posthumously, along with Laura Waterman and John Stannard, their David R. Brower Conservation Award for Outstanding Service in Mountain Conservation.
Publications
Coauthored books
- Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (co-author with Laura Waterman), Excelsior Editions, 1989, ISBN 978-1438475301
- Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness, (co-author with Laura Waterman, Countryman Press, 1992 ISBN 978-0881502565
- Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States (co-author with Laura Waterman), Stackpole Books, 1993, ISBN 978-0811737685
- A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True (co-author with Laura Waterman), Mountaineers Books. 2000, ISBN 978-0898867343
- The Green Guide to Low Impact Hiking and Camping (previously Backwoods Ethics), (co-author with Laura Waterman), Countryman Press, 2016, ISBN 978-0881502572