Over the course of the afternoon Mark and Lori pulled in, bringing Bradley’s sister Shelby with them. It was a long drive, made necessary by Lori’s fear of flying, but they arrived earlier than expected mostly because they’d gone late the night before and made their night stop in Louisville, rather than Nashville where they usually stayed. All three of them seemed glad to be out of the car for a while.

A little later, Bob and Ann’s oldest daughter, Ashley Miller, pulled in after a long solo drive from Rochester, New York; she’d started well before dawn to get there, but had the advantage of having four-lane highway most of the way.

Eric kept his thoughts to himself, but Ashley was the only one of the grandkids he didn’t care if he saw or not. Although he’d seen as little of her as he’d seen of the rest of Bob and Ann’s kids over the years, she hadn’t been that bad as a little girl or a teenager – but when she met Kevin Miller, things changed. Kevin took his religion seriously, with no chaser, and it was one of the more esoteric and hard-nosed of the Pentecostal varieties. The contact with Kevin had turned her just about as intolerable as he was, and she was just as quick to get snippy over some religious slight. There was a possibility she might get through the weekend without pulling out a Bible and preaching at someone, but he really doubted it. In any case, Eric decided to try and avoid her as much as possible.

Actually, Eric suspected that Elaine and some of the others, including possibly her parents, felt much the same way. In any case, a room had been earmarked for her at the Lamplighter Motel, which meant there was a good chance of the people at the house getting through the nights without being the subject of some religious rant. Since no one was very sure when Megan, the youngest of the Newsome kids was going to make it in with her husband Chad and daughter Makayla – they were on standby – it was decided that the one remaining empty room at the house would be reserved for them. Mark’s family and Brian’s family would all stay at the Lamplighter as well, along with Donna.

Eric and Eunice had decided the day before to not try to cook a major meal for that crowd this evening, or the next night, but just order pizzas. Unfortunately, there was no pizza place that delivered as far as Blue Lake, at least in the winter, so the only real option was for Eric to order pizzas in Wychbold, then get in the minivan and go get them. He took some extra blankets to try to keep the food as warm as possible on the trip back.

At the last minute, Dustin, at eighteen, Brian and Elaine’s oldest son, asked if he could ride along. “Sure,” Eric told him. “I could use the company.”

In a few minutes the two were in the minivan, heading for Wychbold. Dustin was one of the kids Eric didn’t know very well, since the Rosses didn’t make it to Blue Lake that often. “Thanks for bringing me along,” Dustin said. “I, uh, I was getting a little tired of all the talk about people I never met and barely recognize their names. I guess I needed a breather.”

“Understandable,” Eric told him. “I know most of those people better than you do, and I’ve tried to stay out of the middle of it myself, at least partly because I’m not actually a relative. I’m just a long-time friend, even though everybody calls me ‘Uncle Eric.’ But really, you should try to listen to some of those stories, because it’s the only way you may ever get to know about some of those people. I don’t know much about my family, mostly because I never listened when I could. The end result is that there’s a lot I’d like to know about my family that I’ll never hear, now.”

“Why’s that? You just didn’t want to pay attention?”

“More or less, although I have something of an excuse. I was only six when my father died and I don’t remember him very well, much less any of the stories he told about where he came from. My mother was institutionalized a few years after that, and she never talked much about him, or about anyone else in her family, either. After she was gone, I wound up with my brother, who was a lot older than me and didn’t much give a shit about anything to do with mom or dad, or anything else but his job or his bottle. I didn’t see him after the early sixties at all, ever again. I’m told he got drunk one night and wrapped his car around a bridge piling, but I was in the Himalayas at the time and I didn’t get home until months afterward.”

“The Himalayas?” Dustin perked up. “Mom said you used to do a bit of climbing. Did you actually do any there?”

“Three trips,” Eric smiled. “I have a number of first ascents of very much-lesser-known peaks. They may be the only ascents for all I know; they’re not the peaks anyone who considered themselves a climber would really bother with. I did get up to about twenty-four five on Nuptse once, though.”

“Nuptse? That’s near Everest, right?”

“Yes, it’s pretty close to Everest, southwest of it in the same complex. We climbed it from the south side, so I never got to some of the famous places in the southern route to Everest. You sound like you know something about it.”

“I read a lot about it,” he said. “I’ve done some climbing, nothing very difficult though.”

“Well, in Reno you’re not far from good mountains, so there’s opportunity for you,” Eric said. “I don’t know how much you know about me, but for years I delivered oil and propane around here in the winter, and then took off to climbing or doing other stuff in the summer. I can’t honestly say if I’ve climbed anything real close to Reno, but I may have and I’ve just forgotten about it with all the other climbing I did back in those days.”

“Where all have you climbed?”

“All over the place,” Eric told him. “California a lot, especially Yosemite. Have you ever been there?”

“I’ve been there to visit the place, but I’ve never even thought about climbing some of those walls. The exposure is just too great for me. I like alpine climbing, though, but more just hiking in the mountains.”

“I spent parts of several summers in Yosemite, but in the end I guess I decided I liked mountains, not walls. I haven’t climbed there since, hell, sometime in the early seventies, I guess. Beyond that, lots of Pacific Northwest, lots of Colorado, lots of BC and Alaska including Denali. Some good times in Europe, the Bavarian, Swiss, and French Alps, even Greenland some in my later years. The three trips to the Himalayas I just mentioned, a couple months in the Karakorams, and here and there elsewhere, over a period of about twenty-five years. After that I started to slow down and backed out of it quite a bit. Up until your granddad had his stroke I used to enjoy getting out for a while in the summer in Colorado, just to be in the mountains and get up above timberline. I’d have to say those days are probably behind me, now.”

“That’s a lot of climbing.”

“It is,” Eric smiled, pleased at discovering that at least one of Jeff and Eunice’s descendents was following in his path, at least a little. “I had to devote a lot of time to it, but I rarely considered it time wasted. Do you plan on doing any more now that you’re almost out of high school?”

“I have a climbing buddy, and we’re talking about doing a long hiking trip that will probably include a few easier climbs. Nothing very extreme, though. Like I said, I like the getting out and hiking as much as I do the climbing.”

The two of them talked climbing and Dustin’s plans all the way to Wychbold and the pizza place. The stack of large pizzas made a pretty good pile in the back of the minivan, and Eric wrapped the blankets around them to keep them warm on the chilly, clear night.

Soon the two were headed back to Blue Lake. “So,” Eric asked as they got on the road, “what do you want to do with your life?”

“Hell if I know,” Dustin snorted. “Mom and Dad are all hot for me to go to college, and I guess there’s not going to be any getting out of it. I’m just not looking forward to getting stuck in some dull job, at least not yet.”

“I guess some things don’t change,” Eric said. “Of course, my mom and dad were long dead by the time I was ready for college. Like I said my brother didn’t give a shit, but there was a trust fund that had been left to me by a grandfather who I don’t ever recall meeting. That money was supposed to be used for me to go to college. So I went. That’s where I met your grandfather and grandmother, and Donna, the older lady there you may not know. We were all pretty good friends back in the day, and pretty much stayed good friends. But for all the time and effort and money that was spent on my education, most of the money I’ve earned in my life has come from driving oil and propane delivery trucks, so I guess I can’t call my college education a waste.”

“How could you manage to spend a life doing that? It sounds pretty incredible.”

“To tell you the truth, it just happened. I never set out to do it that way. I think back to those days and I guess I was just trying to have a little fun before I settled down and got a real life. It happened that way with a couple of my old climbing buddies. I guess somewhere along in there I got the reputation of being a good guy to have along in a group of people doing stuff, a good crewman when I got to doing sailing. Fortunately, I had a few friends through most of that time who were often looking for someone like me to take with them on some trip or other. There usually was something else to do, and I just went ahead and did it without much long-range planning on my part.”

“I don’t think I’d care to make a life of it, like you seem to have,” Dustin replied across the darkness of the minivan. “But I think I’d like to spend a few years having some good experiences before I settle down. I was talking with Bradley, and he sure doesn’t seem to be thinking that way. It’s like he wants to graduate one day and be working full-time the next, then marry that girl of his as soon as possible.”

“I sort of got that impression,” Eric agreed. “And, when you get right down to it, I guess there’s not that much wrong with that for a goal in life. After all, that’s pretty much what happened with your grandfather and grandmother, and no one can say that they haven’t had a pretty good life as a result. Maybe not a lot of adventure, but they weren’t looking for a lot of excitement. They’ve had every reason to be satisfied with the way things turned out for them. There are times I felt like I’ve missed out on some of those things, but when you get right down to it I’ve been pretty satisfied with the way things worked out for me, too. I guess I can’t complain.”

That generally was the way Eric actually felt, too. With the wisdom of being able to look back at the past, he felt he would have felt chafed at the restrictions of the normal kind of life Jeff and Eunice lived. It was not that he didn’t envy them for it, but it just wasn’t the life he’d really wanted to lead. So he had few regrets – well, maybe a few little ones on balance, but nothing overwhelming.

They soon made it back to the house, to discover that Megan and Chad had arrived, bringing their one-year-old daughter Makayla, who was fully into the toddler stage, but tired from a long day of traveling. It turned out that to make it to Chicago from Greensboro, North Carolina, they’d had to change planes twice, once in Atlanta and the other time Dallas-Ft. Worth, which seemed like a long way out of the way to everyone. Fortunately Eric and Dustin had been gone long enough that the worst of the “ooohs” and “aaaahs” were over, so their arrival with the pizza was warmly greeted. Eric spread the boxes out on the kitchen table with a stack of plates, and it was strictly self-serve. It didn’t take long for most of the pizza to be gone; in the end there were only a few slices left to go into the refrigerator for a snack or lunch sometime.

After the impromptu dinner, Eric somehow found himself on the front porch. There was a small fireplace there, and he decided to build a fire in it, more for the conviviality, rather than for any warmth it may have actually provided to the glassed-in enclosure. He had spent a good many evenings killing time around campfires over the years, and though the fire place was a poor substitute it still brought back a little of the flavor of those days. Dustin soon joined him there, still not wanting to be around the crowd, and Shanna wandered in within minutes; she was still a skinny little kid of fifteen with a mouthful of braces. Mark and Lori’s daughter Shelby soon joined them. She was more heavyset and seemed to be mostly interested in video games she couldn’t play right now, so it was more interesting to listen to Eric tell his tales than it was to have to sit in the living room and listen to the old folks talk about people she didn’t know.

It turned out that Dustin still wanted to hear about some of Eric’s adventures. “So how did you wind up going to the Himalayas in the first place?” he wanted to know.

“That’s kind of a long story,” Eric told him. “Remember I told you that I had a few friends who liked to do things and needed someone reliable to take with them? Essentially, that was what happened, and like a lot of things in my life it led places I never expected.”

Fall 1963 – Fall 1965

Of course, Jeff had Eric driving an oil delivery truck just about as soon as Luke and Chip had departed for the Pacific Coast. Eric stayed about as busy as ever while he wondered a little about what the three of them would be doing the next summer. There had been plenty of talk and big ideas on the long trip back down the Alcan Highway, but few firm plans made.

Then, in the middle of February, things changed radically. Jeff came out to the guest cottage one evening to tell Eric there was a long distance call for him, and the two of them hurried back into the house so Eric could take it.

The call proved to be from Luke. “I hope this isn’t going to screw anything up too badly,” he told Eric. “But I’m not going to be available next spring, up through about early summer.”

“Did something happen?”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “You remember the guys from Oklahoma we were on McKinley with?”

“They were pretty good guys, if not anything much as climbers,” Eric replied, remembering how they really hadn’t been ready for the conditions on Denali.

“True,” Luke said. “But I’ve been writing and calling back and forth with a couple of them. It turns out they want to go to Nepal in a couple months. It would mostly be trekking, but they probably want to try on a few smaller peaks just to say they did. I won’t go into the ins and outs of it, but it’s gotten worked out that I get to go along.”

“It might be fun,” Eric conceded. “But knowing those guys, I wouldn’t expect you’d get to do much.”

“I don’t think so either,” Luke agreed. “But I figure it would be a real good chance to check out the countryside and find out what hoops have to be jumped for future. You and Chip and I could go there later, maybe next year, and get some real climbing done.”

“Sounds like it might work,” Eric agreed. “Let me know how it comes out.”

“If everything goes all right, I should be back by July. Let’s the three of us get together along about then and do some planning.”

The more Eric thought about it, the more it seemed like a perfectly good plan to him. Within a couple days he received a letter from Chip. He was working two different jobs pumping gas in gas stations, and managing to put some money in the bank. Luke had made the same announcement to him, and Chip suggested that he and Eric meet up in Los Angeles in the spring and go up to Yosemite and do some big wall climbing and other messing around while they waited for Luke to get back. He also suggested they try to watch their pennies, since if the Himalayan deal came off the next spring it probably wasn’t going to be cheap.

That was what the two did the next spring. They climbed several big walls in the valley, the biggest one a lightweight fast assault on the North American Wall with two other Yosemite regulars. The climb came off very well, and it helped build their reputation as big wall climbers.

It was early in July before Eric and Chip caught up with Luke in Seattle. He reported that it had been a fun trip and he’d learned a lot, even though the Oklahomans and a couple other guys they’d recruited hadn’t tried to do anything ambitious. “I don’t see any reason we couldn’t try to do it next spring,” Luke told them. “I laid a few pieces of groundwork to get ready, but there are a lot of details to work out.”

“You’re the one who’s been there and it’s your idea,” Eric told him. “I guess the smart thing to do is to let you take the bull by the horns. Just let me know where and when.”

The three of them spent the rest of the summer climbing around Washington State and in British Columbia, including a couple difficult climbs in the Canadian Rockies, refining their plans as they went along. One of the things Luke had worked out was that they needed a fourth partner to go with them, and he didn’t want to include any of the Oklahoma group. It was a long time before that got settled, but Eric’s old Shawangunks climbing companion Warren Hanneman proved to be available, interested, and able to afford it.

Eric got back to Blue Lake early that fall and was immediately driving a delivery truck again. There was no doubt it was going to be expensive, so he worked all the overtime he could manage, filling in for other drivers when they wanted to take time off, so he could afford the Nepal trip. That was the winter Eunice was pregnant with Mark, but Himalayan climbing is a spring and fall affair, so Eric was on his way before Mark was born.

This time Eric left the VW at Blue Lake; it was really getting elderly and beat up now, and he didn’t really want to trust it on another cross-country marathon. He wound up going to Los Angeles on the train, a day coach on the Santa Fe Super Chief with Warren. Luke and Chip met them there, and after a last minute search for a few items soon the four were aboard an airliner across the Pacific.

It took them several different flights to get to Kathmandu, Nepal. In those days there were no bush flights into the Khumbu region, where Everest and several other tall peaks are located; the alternative was a two-week trek along mountain trails to get there. It proved to be a pleasant walk, up and down around the edges of mountains, gradually working their way up to the high country. It was possible to hire porters cheaply, so they did, which meant they didn’t have to carry heavy packs themselves, just light daypacks. The loads were actually fairly heavy for the porters since they’d taken a lot of food with them, mostly items Luke had put together over the winter and had shipped to Kathmandu.

The Nepalese government had a permit system in place for climbing mountains in the region. Everest was relatively expensive, and there was a long waiting list, but permits for some of the smaller peaks in the region were very cheap, and Luke had taken out several of them. In spite of the relatively low elevation – though higher than they’d been atop Mt. McKinley a couple years previously – some of them were challenging and about all they really wanted to handle. Others were hardly more than a pleasant stroll, in spite of the altitude. They did some other exploring and traipsing around, including a visit to the base camp of the party currently attempting to get up Everest. The mountain looked pretty awesome from the base camp; it was something they all figured they wouldn’t mind trying sometime if things worked out for them.

Eventually the summer monsoons blew in, and it was time to get back to civilization. It was just as long a hike back to Kathmandu as it had been coming out, although they needed fewer porters and could go more quickly. They soon found a good bar and had a few drinks, pleased with their accomplishments. “It’s a shame it’s over with so soon,” Luke sighed. “Hell, summer is barely started. I’m not really looking to head back to the states just yet.”

“Well,” Chip suggested. “We could probably get to Europe a little more cheaply than getting back to the states. Eric and I had some great climbing there a few years ago. But, to spend the rest of the summer there, I have to say that money is a problem for me.”

“It is for me, too,” Eric agreed. “The thing is that my job won’t start up again until next fall. I wouldn’t mind a little more time in the Alps, but I’d really have to watch my pennies. Chip and I more or less learned how to do it on the cheap, staying in hostels and that kind of thing.”

“I have some left over from what I planned on spending,” Warren said. “I could help out with it a little.”

“I could, too,” Luke agreed. “Let’s do it.”

So they did. It proved to be about as carefree a summer as the one Chip and Eric had spent there three years before. They revisited a few of the places they’d climbed before and did some new ones. Warren had to head back in late August – he was working on a doctorate at NYU and had to get to classes – but the other three of them hung on until the leaves had begun to turn.

“I almost hate to bring it up,” Eric said one early fall evening while they were sitting around in a cheap pension near Chamonix, the main center of French climbing, not long before they had to head back. “But what are we going to do next summer? I mean, it’s going to be hard to top this one.”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “I’m thinking Alaska again. Not the Alaska Range or the Wrangells like we did two years ago. I’m thinking the coast range and the panhandle. There’s a lot in the region and some of it has never been climbed.”

“And most of it is pretty hard to get to, unless maybe you have a boat,” Chip pointed out.

“That is a problem,” Luke agreed. “But it’s not an unsolvable one. There are a lot of cheap boats to be had around Seattle, and some of them have been up and down the Inside Passage any number of times and practically know the way themselves. Maybe we could get an old fish boat or something so we could go damn well where we please.”

“It sounds like a good idea,” Eric agreed. “But I’m going to have to be real careful with my money. I mean, hell, I’m just about going to have to hitchhike home from wherever we can get an airliner to in the states as it is, and it’s going to take working hard all winter to get back to balance.”

“Right,” Chip agreed. “I’m going to have to pump a lot of gas myself this winter.”

“Let me work on it,” Luke smiled. “There might be a few strings I can pull.”

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