The storm that brought this snow had also visited the Uinta Mountains in Utah, where I camped high in an aspen grove off a gravel road, and awoke to a winter wonderland that was something less than conducive to motorcycle travel. Later I crossed into Wyoming on I-80 along the only lane that was plowed, and spent the night in Kemmerer, the home of the original JC Penney store, and then rode on the next morning with the thermometer hovering around the 14 degree mark in order to get to the Tetons that day. The things I did for fun….
The motorcycle was a divorce present to myself, one of those self-indulgent things you do to help rebuild your self-esteem in the wake of certain un-pleasantries. I camped alone beside Jenny Lake, in the campground that was closed and nearly deserted for the season, and I squatted to take clear cold water from the lake for meals and drinking, with the mountains looming overhead. I didn’t think about climbing the Grand on this trip, because the last journey to this place had kinda soured me on that plan. And I knew the climbing school and guide service was closed for the season. Did I mention that this was a long story?
Dad and I had talked of climbing the Grand from the very beginning, when we first saw it in the mid 60’s. Mom gave us the look, you know the look, the one that silently suggested we take up some other nonsense and forget this one. So the notion sat on the shelf, to be talked about only in the abstract. And when his doctor told him that no way was Dad getting his permission to climb a mountain at his age, his dream seemed dead.
I still thought about doing the climb. Two years before the motorcycle trip I had driven to the Tetons in September, alone. That marriage was terminally ill already, but the truth hadn’t been revealed to me yet, although she would have known. I drove the new car, the one that I took off the dealer’s lot on 7/7/77, which I had figured was a sign of good luck, and it wasn’t. Approaching from the Idaho side, I had a brief look at the Grand from near Victor, and it felt just a bit weird. And after transiting Teton Pass, where you can turn left just past Wilson and take the back road to Moose, and the Grand fills the sky in front of you, I got this terrible feeling in my gut looking up at the peak, and since I harbored the notion that I would seek out the climbing school and actually try to climb the Grand on this trip, I asked the mountain if it was going to kill me. And the mountain laughed. At me.
That was an annoyance. I was trying to create something positive in my life, cause things were clearly spiraling out of control about then. The Grand Tetons had always grounded me and given me meaning in my life, and here they were taunting me, and I didn’t get it.
That trip was cut short, just like the one before we got married, when she called me, and I drove home at her request. She only did it to see if she could tug the string and I would snap back, and then of course when I got home, I got the who-are-you-and-what-do-you-want look upon arrival and that was a disappointment. Both times. And I knew why the mountain laughed at me. I wasn’t ready for the mountain.
The motorcycle trip felt better cause I felt better, and I think the mountain knew it. I was still looking up at the Grand and thinking about climbing it. So I mentioned it to Dad and he still wanted to climb it, too. He found another doctor, the one who told him he should go, and he somehow got the idea past Mom, and then at age 59 he began beating himself into shape. And that’s how the other photograph came to be.
Our climbing guide used my camera to take the other photo, because Dad’s had kinda got ruint during that little dunking we took when we paddled our kayak into deep trouble in the spring runoff on the Snake River. But that’s another story. In this photo, the coil of rope lay in the foreground, and the line led to its tie off on Dad’s waist. He wore one glove cause the other had floated away, and I stood at his shoulder. Behind us stretched snow covered mountains and then the haze over the distance of Idaho. Everything else was rock, the top rock on that big piece of rock, the Grand Teton (el 13770 feet). We were on the summit. And we be smilin’.
So I was talking with some clients in the exam room, and we looked up at the photo on the wall, and I showed them the Grand, and then I mentioned that we had climbed it on June 25, 1980, and it just happened to be June 25 as we talked. Thirty one years later. And they asked, “Why?”
“Because it was there.”
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. My sister had a shirt made up with that photo on the front and gave it to Dad when he turned 90. I’m thinking he just might have been wearing that shirt while I talked to that client last Saturday. And that would be OK.
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