Eric knew Bradley, of course, if not well, since his father Mark and mother Lori had never made it up to Michigan during his growing up years as often as Bob and Ann. It had been two years since the two had last been together, sometime after Jeff’s stoke, but Eric couldn’t pin it down better than that. “It’s been a long time, Brad,” Eric said as he shook his hand.

“It has, Uncle Eric,” Bradley replied. “How are you getting along?”

“I hate to admit that I’m getting older, but I am. How about you?”

“Going to be glad to have college over with. How is Grandma doing?”

“She’s doing fine. You’ll be seeing her after we get to Blue Lake. Brad, you probably don’t know Donna Jameson,” he said by way of introduction. “She was one of your grandfather and grandmother’s oldest friends. The four of us all went to school together back in the day. Donna this is Brad Harrington, Mark and Lori’s oldest.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Donna smiled. “I’ve heard your grandparents and Eric talking about you, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

It didn’t take long to get Donna and Bradley’s luggage; neither had packed very much anyway. Soon the three of them were back in the minivan, heading for Blue Lake.

It was hard to get a conversation going. While Eric had thought about Donna a lot in the past couple days as he and Eunice had been doing their reminiscing, almost all of those memories were from fifty years or more before, back when each of them had been in and out of the other’s lives. All that was long ago. Really, they didn’t have all that much to talk about anyway, since he or Eunice phoned her from time to time. Donna had her friends and a little volunteer work at a nearby library to help her pass the time, and Donna knew what Eric had been doing for the last two years. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to add, even if Eric and Donna should happen to have a more private discussion in the next few days.

So the conversation in the minivan focused on Bradley. “I know you’re a senior, Brad,” Eric said from behind the wheel, loud enough that Donna could hear it. “But I forget what you’re studying.”

“Financial services and systems,” he replied. “It’s kind of like computer science as applied to banking.”

“I suppose that’s as good as anything in this day and age,” Eric replied. “I take that to mean you’re planning on working around the banking business.”

“Well, probably, or at least somewhere around the edges of it. The field is in a lot of flux right now and things keep changing.”

“I suppose that’s true of everything,” Eric agreed. “Is there any money in that field?”

“Oh, yeah,” he grinned. “It’s kind of like when someone asked Willie Sutton why he stuck up banks, he said, ‘because that’s where the money is.’”

“Never heard the name.”

“He was a bank robber, back in the twenties and thirties, mostly.”

“Brad,” Eric shook his head. “While I may be getting older than I want to be, that one is a little before my time. In fact, back when Donna and I were in college, I don’t think either of us had ever seen a computer, or knew anyone who had seen one.”

“I can’t think of any, now that you mention it,” Donna said. “Brad, computers were these big, mysterious things you occasionally saw on television, with flashing lights and spinning reel-to-reel tape drives that didn’t make any sense to me. Now, I’d find it very difficult to get along without my laptop. None of us at Meriwether College saw that coming back in those days. None of us!”

“Change comes from the damnedest places,” Eric agreed. “Brad, I can’t tell you what the next fifty years are going to bring, but when you’re Donna’s and my age you’re going to think back to these days and wonder how we managed to get along as primitive as we do today. Anyway, I believe I heard your grandmother say you’ve gotten engaged.”

“Well, yes,” the young man replied. “Claudia is a Marine Biology major. She’s a year behind me, so that’s why we haven’t set a date yet. We’ve worked out we want to be pretty well established in our jobs before we make things permanent, although we’ve been living with each other for a year. I thought about bringing her along to this but she wouldn’t know anyone, not that I know much of the family very well myself.”

“I guess kids do it that way a lot these days,” Donna sighed. “Boy, that was something that just wasn’t done when we were in college, was it Eric?”

“Jeff and I caught enough hell for just wanting to live off campus our last year in school,” he agreed. He smiled at Donna and added, “But it turned out to be worth it. We had some good times there, didn’t we, Donna?”

“Not too bad,” she replied noncommittally. “But that was a long, long time ago. It seems like it must have been a different life.”

“It was, Donna. It really was.” He didn’t want to get into that area with her just now, and regretted the teasing comment about the times he’d spent with her in the apartment their senior years. To get away from it, he changed the subject. “It’s early enough that we’re going to go straight to the house,” he told them. “I don’t think everything has been worked out yet, but there’s just not enough room for everyone to stay there, so Eunice and I reserved some rooms at the Lamplighter in Wychbold. It’s an older family-owned motel, but from what I hear it’s not too bad. I don’t know who is going to stay there or what. The only thing we’ve figured out for sure is that we’re going to have Justin and Lauren and their kids in the guest cottage.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Donna agreed. “It’ll give them a chance for their folks to get the kids away from the crowd a little.”

“Yeah, at four and six, the kids, well, they can be kids. But we’ll get the rest of it worked out after a few more people have shown up.”

Conversation lagged in the minivan after that; there just wasn’t that much to talk about. Fortunately, it was only about an hour before Eric pulled the minivan into the garage, noticing that there was another car sitting there. “I don’t know who’s here,” Eric said. “But I didn’t expect the people driving in to get here until later today.”

It turned out that Eric was wrong on that. The new arrivals were Justin and Lauren Newsome, Bob and Ann’s oldest grandson and his wife, so there was some family reunion going on in that angle, too. Justin worked as an administrator at Iowa State University, and Lauren was a secretary in a social services agency. The couple had brought along their two kids, who were the oldest of the great-grandchildren, except for Allison’s kids, if she had any at all – no one knew for sure. Their son Cameron was six, and their daughter Alexis was a preschooler. Eunice and Jeff had probably seen more of Justin and Lauren than any of their other grandchildren as the others lived so far away. Since the kids could be rambunctious at that age, they’d started late and driven most of the night, so the kids could make the trip asleep.

To Jeff’s eye both Justin and Lauren didn’t exactly look fully awake; they’d had a long night of it, and both looked like they needed a nap. The kids, however, were under full power, not exactly being mischievous, just being kids. While nothing could be done about it now, it was clear that putting the family in the guest cottage would make the kids a little less nerve-wracking from time to time, and would probably be easier on them, too. For now, the kids were excited enough to see grandma and grandpa that their attention was on Ann and Bob.

Justin and Lauren weren’t exactly strangers to Blue Lake; they had visited briefly once since Jeff had his stroke, and had been there a couple other times. Eric didn’t know either of them very well, although he hoped to get a little more familiar with them on this visit.

They were just getting past the “how have you been?” and “how was the trip” stages when there was another arrival, Brian and Elaine Ross, Jeff and Eunice’s third child, along with their two teenagers, Dustin and Shanna. Though they lived a little farther away – Reno, Nevada, where Brian was an operations supervisor at a resort hotel. They actually made it to Michigan a little more often than Justin and Lauren, since there were good low-rate air connections between Reno and Chicago, where they’d picked up a rental car to make the rest of the trip.

It was good to see them again, especially Elaine; Eric had known her well when she was about as old as her kids were now. When she’d been about Shanna’s age of fifteen, she and her older brother Mark had gone on a canoe trip in Canada with Eric and Gary. It hadn’t been an extremely difficult trip, just a gentle float down an easy river with the idea of giving the kids a taste of what wilderness travel was like. Elaine had especially liked the trip, and had often referred to it with fond memories, but as far as Eric knew – and he would have known if anyone would – she’d never considered doing anything like it again.

With that many people there the house was already full, and Eric knew there were more to come. “Eric,” Eunice suggested when she got a moment, “why don’t we open up the front porch and turn the heat on? It’ll take it a while to warm up, but will give a little extra room for everyone.”

“It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he agreed. “We probably ought to think about doing something for lunch, though.”

“Why don’t you put something together,” she suggested, “just catch as catch can?”

“We’re still on Pacific time,” Elaine said. “We did a drive-through breakfast on the way from the airport, so we’re good for a while.”

“I’m not that hungry,” Lauren said. “Mostly I want to get a nap.”

“Why don’t you go out to the guest cottage and lie down?” Eunice suggested.

“It sounds like a good idea,” Justin agreed. “Honey, go take a nap while I watch the kids, and you can relieve me after a while.”

“You don’t have to talk me into it,” she said. “I’m out of here.”

Very soon there was some serious reminiscing going on. Elaine suggested that Shanna take the young kids out on the porch and play with them, just to get them out of everyone’s hair for a while, and she agreed. Eric was glad to go out to the kitchen and make some lunch for everyone else.

It was actually kind of a breather for Eric. In one sense he was a member of the family, but in another sense he was an outsider, and one who didn’t do crowds very well, anyway. Given a choice, he’d rather have been alone, or with a few close friends, like he had been that summer when Luke, Chip and he had gone up to Alaska the first time. Those were fun times to recall, and they were in his head as he got going on grilled cheese sandwiches and a pot of soup.

Eric and Chip had met Luke Hayward the summer before at Yosemite, where they’d been doing some serious big wall climbing, but all three of them had some experience with Alpine climbing, which, among other things, involved getting to the top of the mountain, not just getting a tough route in. For some reason the three of them hit it off well, and when they’d gotten tired of the Yosemite scene they’d decided to do some more well-rounded mountaineering, as it turned out mostly in the North Cascades.

There the three of them had learned to work well together, especially with each other’s little idiosyncrasies. By the time the summer had turned to fall they were spending much time figuring out what could be done in another year. Luke, as it turned out, had a pretty good idea: “Let’s go to Alaska,” he said.

“North to Alaska,” Chip sang, mimicking Johnny Horton in the John Wayne film. “Don’t you know the rush is on.” He quit trying to be funny and went on, “That’s a great idea. I don’t know much about the conditions there, but I do know there’s stuff up there that’s never been climbed yet.”

“There is,” Luke agreed. “And some of it can be pretty technical. I mean, high altitude, cold conditions, and not a lot less difficult rock climbing than Yosemite. I don’t really know all that much about it myself, but I figure I’ve got all winter to research it. We don’t have to take on the toughest stuff right off. We can feel our way into it, and work up to the hard stuff.”

It didn’t take them long to get down to specifics. “One of the problems I see,” Eric said, “is just getting up there, and getting around once we’re there. I know it’s pretty damn expensive in Alaska. Hell, a guy was telling me a while back that gas runs as high as fifty cents a gallon. I should be working all winter and making a fair amount of money, but we can blow through it pretty fast at that rate.”

“We could drive up there,” Luke suggested. “I mean, we’ve driven all over the place in your little VW, so we ought to be able to make it to Alaska. We can take some food with us and camp out along the way.

Eric wasn’t quite so sure how well the car would be able to do on the rough roads, especially loaded with three guys and a lot of gear, but the enthusiasm of the moment overcame him. “We’ll just have to try to keep it as light as possible,” he said. “If the old bug breaks down on us in the middle of nowhere, we could be in a world of shit.”

Thus it was that Eric met Luke and Chip at a train station in Chicago only a few days after he’d finished delivering oil for the winter. Over the winter, he’d had Eunice’s father go through the car thoroughly, and install a roof rack. He also put new tires on the car, and loaded a couple extra spares on the roof rack – he knew the Alaska Highway wasn’t paved end to end at the time, and it had a reputation for being hard on tires.

They managed to find a place for everything in the VW, but it was close. It was a long haul up the Alaska Highway, and it took them a week and a cracked windshield; Eric spent at least a little of the trip wondering what he’d gotten into, but the VW did its job with only minor problems. It was a tough little car and it took the beating, although it took its time getting there. Eric and Chip both told Luke it could have been a lot worse; it could have been a Citroën 2CV, after all; they knew what that was like.

Although the days were getting long by the time they got to Alaska in early May, it was still pretty cold, so that made a good reason to not get very involved with the higher-elevation stuff; besides, as they’d agreed, they wanted to feel their way into things.

One of the problems they soon ran into was simply the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get to the mountains they wanted to climb. Alaska has few roads, and those it did have were built for a purpose, which didn’t include serving climbers who wanted to get out into the hills on the cheap. Sometimes just getting to the mountain took several days’ worth of hiking in, sometimes in places where there weren’t even trails to get there. Several times they had to leave the VW parked in a place for two or three weeks and hike in with packs loaded to the point of breaking their backs. On several occasions they had to take a week struggling to a promising area, spend a week or so climbing one or several mountains, then take several more days getting back to the car. The packs weren’t anywhere near as heavy on those trips back – sometimes they were on starvation rations getting back to the Volkswagen, and they could have been in real trouble if it hadn’t started. But, after a couple days rest, a shower, and a visit or two to a local bar and a trip to a grocery store, they were ready to go again.

By the middle of the summer, they decided they wanted to see what the big stuff was like, so loaded up and headed for Denali National Park and Mount McKinley. Being a national park there was a permit system involved, but they were able to get permits for some of the lower and nearer peaks – but always their eyes were drawn to the big one looming high over them. They didn’t stand a chance of doing that one; there was a waiting list for permits, and there was a minimum size for the party.

Then they got lucky. At the park headquarters, they happened to meet a group of guys from Oklahoma, of all places, who did have a permit – but an auto accident had deprived them of two of the people in their party, putting them under the size limit. They were desperately looking for some experienced climbers who could fill the party back up to the minimum size, and Luke, Chip, and Eric were available and more than filled the bill.

The Oklahoma group had even arranged a quick fly-in to a location near the peak, which saved the trouble of a long approach march. The route was the more or less standard route of the time, up the long spine of Karsten’s Ridge, which had the disadvantage of being longer than more-direct routes, and spending more time at altitude. The three friends were not exactly thrilled with the route the Oklahoma group planned, but they hadn’t been involved in the trail decision and plans were set, so they had to go along with it.

The Oklahoma group planned a long siege up Karsten’s Ridge, where camps and supply dumps were established along the route, and there was much relaying of loads upward. This approach was in the process of being discredited by more forward-thinking climbers of the era, who were in favor of fast climbing on more direct routes, which cut down the logistical hassles by a huge margin.

Another problem was that the Oklahoma group simply wasn’t ready for McKinley – not in terms of scale and experience, but more so in that they weren’t physically ready for it. Eric, Chip, and Luke had been climbing in Alaska all summer and each had several years’ experience in Alpine conditions, although admittedly somewhat less extreme than they faced here. A week of intense effort was needed to get the party close enough to even think of striking for the peak, and by then several of the Oklahoma guys were just plain worn out.

By that time Chip, Luke, and Eric weren’t exactly in the best shape they’d ever been in either, but they were still focused on going up. After a storm blew in and kept them trapped in camp for a couple days, the Oklahoma guys were ready to call it quits – but not Luke, Eric, and Chip. “We can make a quick strike for the top,” Luke told the leader of the Oklahomans. “There’s only a couple hours of true darkness each night, so if we get caught out there’s no need to make a camp, we’ll just sit it out and be on our way. With any kind of luck we ought to be on the way back down by dark.”

There was a considerable argument before it was settled, but as soon as it was light in the east the next morning the three were headed upwards, while the Oklahomans prepared to retreat slowly and stiffly down the mountainside. Though conditions were less than perfect they were tolerable; the three topped out on the mountain a little after noon, the highest people standing on the ground in North America. They snapped a few photos then started down, catching up with the Oklahomans at the camp below where they had been caught by the storm. Needless to say, the three were quite pleased with themselves but kept their cool around the defeated group from Oklahoma.

However, after they got back to the VW they were still pretty pleased with their accomplishment. “As fucked up as that was, we did it,” Luke said. “If we could do that well on McKinley, we ought to be up for climbing in the Himalayas.”

“I think we could handle the climbing,” Eric replied thoughtfully. “But the money, just to get there, the gear, and everything else, uh, I guess you’re going to have to count me out on that. Remember, I’m not made of money and I had to drive an oil delivery truck for six months to afford to get here this summer. And for all of that, I’m not sure I’m going to have money enough for gas to get home.”

“I’ll see that you have it,” Luke told them. “I have a couple sources I haven’t tapped yet. But I think I’m going to do some more thinking about this Himalayan stuff, and maybe work a couple contacts.”

Summer became fall, and soon what Alaskans call “termination dust” was flying in the air in anticipation of the oncoming winter. In addition, Eric knew he had to be getting back to Jeff and Eunice’s so he could spend the winter driving an oil truck. So finally they had to get back in the VW and point it south down the Alaska Highway. The car was a little lighter this time, since they didn’t have a load of food. They were all pretty beat from being on the road by the time they got near Chicago, so Eric took Chip and Luke right to Blue Lake, where the three of them spent a couple days resting up and meeting Jeff and Eunice. It was the only time they were to meet both of Jeff’s climbing friends.

After a couple days rest, and some good Eunice-cooked meals, Jeff took the two back to the interurban station in South Bend, where they could take the South Shore Line into Chicago and then catch trains for home – Los Angeles for Chip and Seattle for Luke. “Great summer, guys,” Luke told them as they waited for the train. “Let’s do something like this again next year. I think I can probably come up with something.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.