Books

What went on at Camp Clay as winter turned to spring can never be entirely known. That cannibalism took place is undisputed, but when it started and how it was carried out is probably unknowable. The men did not record it, not Lieutenant Greely, not Private Henry, not Sergeant Brainard, who kept up his diary entries daily to just hours before their rescue. In an attempt to understand how the men of Camp Clay reached this point, I turned inward to an imagining based on fact. I wanted to break through to an essence of our natures that could emerge only under the extremity of physical and mental distress. Who took responsibility for executing Private Henry remains unanswered, as does the debated question of whether Sergeant Brainard knew of Private Henry’s criminal past, but a kind of truth can be reached indeed by telling the story of these twenty-five men through the novel form.

In part, I have used the medium of letters (Lieutenant Greely and Dr. Pavy) and journal entries (Sergeant Brainard and Private Henry) to give expression to individual points of view. Both Brainard and Henry kept journals and Greely wrote letters to his wife. Dr. Pavy’s letters are entirely fiction, but his character and how he was perceived by the men come from the writings of Greely, Brainard, and the few others whose diary entries we have. The letters and diary entries I created mix fiction with fact, since I have retained certain original phrases where they served the narrative. Especially useful to me was hearing each man’s individual voice as it came through in his writing. Private Henry made few diary entries — or few have come down to us — but his distinctive voice conveys character and personality of the type I’ve given him here. Sergeant Brainard used his diary entries to report weather and to comment on daily life. His reporting is factual but he could be frank about the men, his commanding officer, and his own feelings. Lieutenant Greely used his letters to Henrietta to express his frustrations, to review his thinking, and to justify his actions. Lieutenant Lockwood’s obsession with food at Camp Clay comes from his diary entries.

I have kept very close to the facts with the Greely Expedition. However, when I read Lieutenant Lockwood’s diary entries, I came away with the impression that he had, in nineteenth-century terms, a “close attachment” to Mary Murray. I learned later that Mary Murray was his sister, but since it fit my purposes for Lieutenant Lockwood to have a sweetheart, I let it stand.

Greely’s Three Years of Arctic Service was useful here, as was his Report of the Proceedings of the United States Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay, Grinnell Land. Lockwood’s diary and Brainard’s are found in Greely’s Report of the Proceedings. Henry’s diaries are located in the U.S. National Archives, and Brainard’s diaries were published in Outpost of the Lost and Six Came Back, both edited by Bessie Rowland James. I can only admire the force of mind it took for these men to keep up their diaries, in particular David Brainard, who at Camp Clay made entries daily despite freezing fingers and the uncertain shadowy light of the blubber lamp. In the early stages of working on this book, I started off my day by reading one or two entries of Brainard’s diary and making a transcription of it. This is now available at the website of the Dartmouth College Library.

Alden Todd’s Abandoned: The Story of the Greely Arctic Expedition: 1881–1884, Leonard Guttridge’s The Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition, and Theodore Powell’s The Long Rescue were essential tools, as was Jim Lotz’s Canada’s Forgotten Arctic Hero: George Rice. Michael Robinson’s The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture clarified for me America’s role in nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. I relied on Winfield S. Schley’s Report of Winfield S. Schley, Commanding Greely Relief Expedition of 1884 and his Rescue of Greely for a firsthand account of Greely’s rescue. These were chief among the numerous books and articles I happily read for this project, though since the age of twelve, when I read Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8000-Metre Peak, I’ve been an avid reader of expedition books and stories of travel, adventure, and hardship anywhere. This project allowed me to indulge this desultory habit.

My own experience with cold is as a winter climber in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where on frigid days above treeline, when the wind blows hard enough to knock you down, you can feel, despite the layers of fleece and wind gear, that you have nothing on at all, and even a short stop for water and a quick snack numbs your fingers in seconds. I drew on all my knowledge of cold, of wind-driven ice and snow, of the breathtaking, often frightening beauty to be found there to make the experience of these twenty-five men become real for me. Though, in truth, their story is impossible to duplicate.

From Starvation Shore by Laura Waterman. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
All rights reserved.

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Of course, I couldn’t be happier!

This Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Forest and Crag is a celebratory event, a milestone that has me looking back upon the ebb and flow in the life of the book itself.

The story begins with the Appalachian Mountain Club’s publishing arm, as Guy and I wrote in the Preface to the First Edition, giving us the opportunity to write a history of our Northeastern mountains and the place of people in them. It gives me great pleasure now to turn in memory to the countless hours spent in AMC’s library — stacks reaching toward the ceiling, mountain photographs on the walls — at 5 Joy Street in Boston. Fran Belcher, who served the club for a lifetime, acted as librarian then and made sure we didn’t miss a single useful source. That first edition was published in 1989.

Under Beth Kruzi’s careful guidance, the Appalachian Mountain Club released a second edition in 2003, but by 2007, they had to let the book go out of print due to low sales relative to the cost of reprinting. Dark days for any author.

The light brightened when, in 2009, Ben Rose, president of the Green Mountain Club, proposed bringing out Forest and Crag as an e-book, generously keeping the book alive. This allowed me to write a preface for the e-book edition that had me pondering the incongruity of a book that Guy and I had researched by sending numerous letters through the US mail, making countless trips to libraries to spend hours thumbing through card files, and typing on manual typewriters in an off-the-grid homesteader’s cabin with no road access. Then, the idea of someone reading Forest and Crag in a mountain shelter on their iPad, or some other digital device, was a decade ago, surprising or disturbing, exciting or anathema, depending on the kind of experience you wanted in the mountains.

In 2014, the Appalachian Mountain Club came back into the picture. They tried for the next two years to find a sustainable way to bring the book into print again, but the task of raising funds that fell to the author proved too daunting.

My agent Craig Kayser and I thought we’d try a university press and learned that the University of Washington had an admired imprint, the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series. We received a quick reply from Paul Sutter saying their interest and marketing strength was in the Northwest, but his familiarity with the book led him to encourage us to try university presses in the Northeast. We reached out to James Peltz at SUNY Press in Albany, New York, whose enthusiasm for the book made it clear that Forest and Crag had found a new and welcoming home.

Guy and I began our research in 1979, forty years before the publication of this edition (so in some ways this is as much a fortieth anniversary edition as it is a thirtieth). Much of that story we detailed in the Preface to the First Edition: how we began with the crazy misguided conception that while this book would be a good-sized project, surely it couldn’t take us longer than three years. It took us a decade. I’d like, now, to reflect back on the process of writing a big book. Or, to be more accurate, our experience of writing a book that turned out to be a whale of a project, one that was much bigger than we ever dreamed.

It got off to a great start, an exciting time for Guy and me, a true honeymoon of a research effort that — and this was what we were really happy about — literally sent us to the mountains. Our attack continued on two other fronts simultaneously.

We wrote letters to everyone we knew, as well as those we didn’t know but knew were in a position to give us information that bore on the history of their region: Katahdin, the Whites, the Greens, Adirondacks, Catskills, Massachusetts’s Berkshires, Connecticut’s blue-blaze trail system, trails north of New York City, and the Appalachian Trail that threads it all together. Each person we wrote to suggested more people who could give us more information. Of course, we eagerly followed up and got more helpful suggestions from hikers, staff at the hiking clubs, public agencies, and conservation organizations.

We began visiting libraries around the region, and after each research trip, we staggered back to our cabin with pack-fulls of notes, copies of magazine articles, notes from interviews, and sometimes gifts from our interviewees: books, early guide books, photographs, metal trail markers, wooden trail signs, and once two pairs of exquisitely made wooden snowshoes with gut webbing and leather bindings dating from the 1920s. We had opened the floodgates on an unstoppable river of primary data, secondary data, personal memories of those in their seventies, eighties, nineties — and one hearty senior of 106 — who had made the history by building trails, exploring the mountains in winter, or helping to found a hiking club.

This avalanche of material demanded we set up a system that allowed us easily to retrieve this information. Using folders, we based our filing system on the table of contents of a book that, as yet, had no title. Inevitably, this table of contents began to split and grow, expand and subdivide, as the research trips multiplied and the mail brought more letters and packages to our post office box in the village. Our cabin was small. It didn’t take long before this onslaught of paper swelled out of the neat wooden files we had built when we constructed our cabin and into cardboard boxes picked up at the supermarket. These ended up piled three-deep and encroached on our limited floor space, often serving as tables if we had a houseful of guests.

We had started writing nearly simultaneous to our earliest research forays and immediately ran into difficulties. We became so interested in tracing down every colonial ascent that we had written what could have become nearly a book in itself, or at least a lengthy article. Time to stop and reassess. If we exhausted every piece of early mountain exploration in this way, we saw we’d be working on this book for the rest of our lives. It would never get published because it was too blasted fat, and we’d never go hiking again because we’d be working on a book about hiking that was going to take forever. It was a bad moment. We never came up with a permanent or even good solution. But we never stopped hiking. One of our hardest tasks was attempting to justify reining in the material. It helped to say that perhaps others would take the book’s more lightly covered themes and explore them in greater depth, writing their own books or articles that would continue to add to the human story of the Northeast’s mountains.

We wrote on two manual typewriters on a small wooden table, facing each other. This was how we worked on all our writing projects, but writing history, this kind of collaboration, quickly revealed the incompatibility of our writing styles. Guy’s training was as a speech writer; he wrote fast and to tight deadlines. Mine was as an editor. As a writer, I was slow, the kind who labors over sentences with many cross-outs and much thinking through, requiring many drafts. Too many drafts. Too slow for Guy. It was not helpful for a smooth collaboration on a big book. The upshot was that Guy became the primary writer on Forest and Crag.

The book, however, needed both of us if it was ever going to get written. Guy continued to feel a daunting pressure from the sheer length. Having an end point that kept receding into the distance was unlike any of his previous writing experiences. He fought against the book taking over his life, which in this case meant preventing him from getting to the mountains on the regular basis he needed for his own mental health.

I, on the other hand, was less disturbed by long projects. I had the example of my father, who wrote books of prodigious length that took years and eventually got published. There was no reason why Forest and Crag wouldn’t see daylight — if we stuck to it. Here I was banking on Guy, who said to me more than once that a primary reason why he continued to work was that he didn’t want to let down all the people who had helped us. He just didn’t feel he could face that — their disappointment.

When the book came out and I held it in my hands, the heft of it felt right. All during the writing of Forest and Crag, I had in my mind Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. She had written a big book that exhausted the subject. I wanted Forest and Crag to carry the kind of weight that felt exhaustive. If Guy had a big book in mind it might have been Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, which we read together while we were working on Forest and Crag to have the experience of reading a truly great history. But if Guy had this thought, he never mentioned it, nor did I mention my Joy of Cooking vision to him. To me, at the time, it felt too risky to articulate.

In sum, in our case, writing a big book required only a certain basic ignorance of the extent of the project, an initial enthusiasm that got us in too deep to pull out easily, a punishing sense of obligation to the generosity of others, and an overriding and insane love for our Northeast mountains.

Where are we now, thirty years after Forest and Crag’s publication? In the Preface to the First Edition we wrote that “the idea of integrating the histories of all the mountains of the Northeast in one book offered opportunities for comparing and contrasting the pace of change. . . ,” particularly in “relation to social history and Americans’ evolving attitudes toward mountains and wilderness.” In the Preface to the Second Edition, which I wrote for AMC’s 2003 release, I concluded, “The age of exploration in the nineteenth century has re-ceded into the past, as has the age of trail building in the twentieth. The age of stewardship has dawned with the new millennium. . . .”

As I look back at the ensuing decade and a half, I can only conclude that the most important work that can happen in the mountains now is stewardship. That people are coming to the mountains in greater numbers than ever previously witnessed is evidenced in the spillover of cars from parking lots onto the shoulders of highways and interstates. The trails on the popular peaks see so much traffic that hikers are forced to step out of the treadway to allow others to pass. This is so common that damage to the vegetation has accelerated, and above treeline especially, where the plants recover slowly or not at all, they are, in some areas, in danger of obliteration altogether.

Our mountains need our care. We hikers are not the only threats. Our mountains contend with climate change as well as all the other ways we humans have impacted the world around us. But hikers will continue to reach for the summits. My hope for the future is that each one of us becomes a steward by learning how to minimize our impacts; that the story we will write ten or thirty or fifty or one hundred years from now will be one of health for our trails and alpine summits; that as we take in the far-off views, we will see a flourishing forest, and as we climb above the trees, we will experience an untrampled wild garden of alpine plants, remnants of the Ice Age, colonizers of this terrain for ten thousand years. Here is the alpine zone, home as well to birds, insects, and animals. It is this entire ecosystem that awes us and deserves our most heartfelt protection.

Laura Waterman
East Corinth, Vermont
September 2018

I’M VERY GLAD, of course, that Laura and Guy Waterman’s fine book has emerged in a new edition, one suitable for the new earth we inhabit.

It should be said up-front that we have failed — as a species, as a civilization — most of the ethical tests set for us in the larger, frontwoods world. Simply by continuing to pour carbon into the atmosphere, we have turned the oceans 30% more acidic, melted much of the planet’s ice, and made its weather far more extreme (do not camp beneath that large pine bough—the fact that it’s been there for half a century does not guarantee it will last the night, given that the storms on our new planet are manifestly nastier). Some have tried — a little and around the edges — to limit their impact on the earth, but taken as a whole we’ve shown very little conscientiousness.

You might take this as license to trash your campsite, or at least build a big, honking blaze: What, after all, is a bit more carbon? But think instead of the way in which you’ve been granted a microcosm of the planet for a night. Here you are, in a place more lightly touched by humans than most other places. For a night, you are its steward. See what it takes to nurture and protect it; see what sacrifices of immediate ease and comfort you’re willing to make.

The payoff for conscientiousness, as I wrote in the original edition of this book, will be connection. You’ll have an opportunity to actually fit in with a place, to feel its tempo, to sense what it’s like without your overwhelming presence. At this late date, along with the possibly hopeless job of slowing down the destruction, our work as humans involves bearing witness. Part of that task is simply bearing witness to the beauty of the earth (and how much easier to observe this if you haven’t built that bonfire). However, we must also bear witness to our own possibility of lightness and grace, to remind ourselves, if only for a few nights, that there is nothing inevitable about the ways we currently inhabit the earth.

If you come out of the woods convinced of that truth, then perhaps you will participate in the building movement to prevent more destruction. In which case, the ethics of the backwoods will have helped preserve not only the few square meters of your campsite, but also every cubic meter of the atmosphere on which we and all else depend. Change can come, but it must start somewhere, and deep in the wild is as good a place as any!