“That didn’t work out quite like Luke planned,” Eric smiled, noticing that the three kids were still pretty interested in his story telling. “There were a number of reasons and they started cropping up immediately after he got back to Seattle, or at least that was what I learned later on. I’m sure I still don’t know everything but a lot of it came as the result of things he thought were going to be simple turning complicated on him, and it may be there was a girl involved, I don’t know. In any case, sometime right around the middle of the winter I got a letter from him saying that he wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere until later in the summer. And he said that if Chip and I wanted to go big wall climbing in Yosemite again until he was ready to go, it was all right with him. It was right around in there when I met Gary Dovecote and got interested in backcountry canoeing, and the next thing I knew I was committed to a big canoe trip in Ontario.”

Eric told the kids a brief version of the story he’d been thinking about the other night, explaining that Gary had still needed a fourth person to go on the trip with them. It took Eric longer than really should have been necessary to think of asking Chip, who didn’t know much about canoeing either but at least knew how to act in the backcountry. The trip itself had been good, if not terribly difficult, but it had been long. Toward the end of the trip Gary had been talking about longer trips in future years; he knew at the time he wasn’t going to be able to do one every year, but had a more ambitious canoe run planned for two or three years up the road.

“That was how I got involved in backcountry canoeing,” Eric explained. “And I stayed with it long after I’d given up serious climbing. In fact, Gary called me up here a while back to ask if I’d be interested in going on another one. We’re both getting on up there in age now, so it would be an easy one. I had to tell him no since I was helping Eunice with Jeff, but I don’t think it’s off the boards yet.”

“That would be so neat,” Shanna said. “Mom has talked for years about when you and Gary took Mark and her on some river in Canada. I’ve always wanted to do something like that sometime. If the two of you go, do you think you could take me with you?”

“I can’t really say at this point,” Eric replied, thinking that it would be a great trip to break someone into the idea of wilderness canoeing. The trip on the Abitibi where Mark and Elaine had gone with Gary and him had been an easy one, and the kids had a good time; it would be fun to do something like that again. “I’m not sure if Gary is still thinking about it, or what. At the time he was talking about taking his great-grandson with him, he’s about your age, so if it did turn out that you went with us you wouldn’t have to put up with old coots like Gary and me all the time. Your folks would have to sign off on it, though.”

“Could we ask them, please?”

“Let’s not do it just yet. I don’t know if he’s still thinking about it,” Eric fibbed to buy himself a little time to think about something he hadn’t expected showing up. “But I ought to be seeing him at the funeral tomorrow, and I might get to have a word with him. But you need to realize that if the trip comes off, it’s going to be real backcountry. There won’t be any cell phones or video games.”

“That would really kill it for me,” Shelby shook her head.

“It would probably kill it for a lot of kids your age these days,” Eric smiled. “To top it off, there would also probably be plenty of mosquitoes and black flies and long days in the seat of a canoe. But you also get to see real wilderness, places where the hand of man touches lightly, if at all, places that give you a more honest view of your place in the universe. That’s not easy to do in this day and age. There would be lots for you to learn, but you wouldn’t be the first Gary and I have taught it to.”

“It sounds like fun,” she said. “It would be really neat to be able to do something different, something that no one in my class at high school would ever dream of doing.”

“That’s as good a reason as any,” Eric smiled. “It’d make you appreciate what we do have. I think it may be part of the reason I spent so much time over the years doing wilderness trips of various types. Dustin, do you think you might like to do a trip like that?”

“I’d love to do it,” he said. “In fact, it’s just exactly the kind of thing I really would like to do. But I don’t know how the folks would go for both a canoe trip and a long hiking trip next summer.”

“Well, it’s all so much gas at this point anyway,” Eric said. “Believe me, I’ve sat around a good many times over the years and kicked around trips that had no chance of making it as far as the starting gate. Sometimes it takes a lot just to get a trip that far. I’ve met plenty of people over the years who have plans for some pretty neat trips, but have just never been able to get all the pieces together – the time, the money, the people to go with them, and that sort of thing. In fact, Gary was actually a little surprised that everything came together so we could actually do that trip on the Albany River, and it was touch and go right up until the last few days. But we did get to go, and we had a good time.”

Summer 1966 – Summer 1967

The trip had actually been something of an eye-opener – it had been a fun, rewarding, and not excessively taxing or dangerous trip in the backcountry without a mountain worthy of the name within hundreds of miles.

The only problem was that it hadn’t used up the whole summer. It was still over three months before heating season was expected to begin, and all the way back from Canada Eric and Chip kicked around ways they could fill the time. They did have one advantage going for them: they were in better shape financially than they’d been the year before, at least partly because Gary had picked up a lot of the overhead of the trip anyway. They weren’t exactly loaded with money from their winter jobs, but they weren’t broke, either.

Finally, they decided to risk the aged VW and head out to Seattle to see what Luke was up to. From the little bit they’d heard over the spring he was working on the boat idea, but it had proved to be a little bigger project than he’d expected. Maybe they could help out, they thought, or if not, there was still plenty of climbing to be had in Washington State and British Columbia.

The Volkswagen was really getting to be in sad shape by then – it was ten years old, and for a car in that day and age was old indeed, especially with the beating it had taken and all the salt thrown on roads in a Michigan winter. However, Eric and Eunice’s father thought it might be able to hold out a while longer, and besides Eric decided that if it died on them and they had to hitchhike the rest of the way they really weren’t out much of anything.

It took Eric and Chip several days to get to Seattle, mostly on Interstate 90 and US-20, but stopping to take their time and investigate a few things that seemed to be worth checking out, like the Black Hills. They were a while finding Luke, who was in a boatyard north of Seattle, busy at work on a wooden-hulled boat. “Boy,” he said when he saw them, “isn’t it just like you two to show up just about the time the work is done?”

“We couldn’t have gotten here much sooner,” Eric shrugged. “We were doing other things, you know, like attracting half the black fly population of western Ontario.”

“Right,” Chip agreed. “We have to go where the fun is, you know. So what’s the deal on this boat?”

“Long story, and the story is mostly how much better off I’d have been to realize that cheap isn’t always good,” Luke admitted. “This boat is a Herreshoff-designed H-28. A real good boat, I’m told, and from what I’ve found, not much dry rot. The problem was that it was owner-built sometime back after the war. I’m not sure if the guy who built it just couldn’t get better screws at the time or if he just tried to cheap out on them. Either way, when I got the thing up on the stands to paint it and do a few things on the hull, I found out real quick it was a miracle the thing was still afloat because the screws had pretty much gone to hell. It turned out that was why I’d gotten the boat so damn cheap in the first place. It was either a case of burn it to the ground and kiss my money goodbye, or fix it up so I might be able to get my money out of it someday. So I’ve spent the last six months working on this thing.”

“I thought you were going to look for a fishing boat or something,” Chip commented. “I mean, something you didn’t have to sail.”

“I don’t know,” Luke shrugged. “Sailing always struck me as pretty cool, not that I know a whole hell of a lot about it. I was hoping maybe you guys did.”

“I was sailing for about a month up the East Coast on a boat a little bigger than this,” Eric replied. “We had a pretty good time, mostly because the guy who was actually sailing the boat brought his girl friend, and she brought a friend, and you get the picture. But, despite the girls, I think I learned something about sailing on that trip.”

“Good,” Luke said. “That means you can teach some of it to me. I’ve learned a hell of a lot about boat maintenance the last few months, but I have yet to do any sailing on it.”

“Considering that it’s going to be a case of the blind leading the blind, I guess I’m up for it,” Eric replied. “But maybe we’d better not get too ambitious with it this fall. If you can get it going, it’d probably better if we just learn how to sail it, rather than try to go anywhere.”

That was how Eric wound up meeting the Hawksbill, which was the start of another branch of new adventures in his life. He and Chip spent most of the next three months alternatively working on the boat or sailing it with Luke; by the time that period was over with, the three of them had at least become advanced novice sailors, though they all realized there was a lot to learn. They at least broke free every now and then to go climb a mountain, but those were short trips of only two or three days.

But over the course of the fall they firmed up their plans to take the Hawksbill up the Inside Passage to Alaska the following summer, just to explore the place and climb any mountain that happened to catch their interest. In early October Eric had to be heading back to Michigan for his winter job, so one day he fired up the arthritic Volkswagen and hit the road, taking with him a stack of used books about sailing from various bookstores, and especially sailing in the Inside Passage. It would give him something useful to do over the winter.

The VW made it back, although there were times in the last several hundred miles when Eric had his doubts it would. It was clear that it couldn’t be trusted on a long trip like that again, but it still could be used for local running around, if needed. After all, he could ride to the job at Amherst with Jeff most of the time.

That was the winter Eunice was pregnant with Elaine, who would be their last child. Elaine was born in February, and this time Eric was around when it happened. By this time Jeff and Eunice had become pretty used to the process, so it wasn’t quite the big deal it had been when Ann had been born.

The winter was otherwise unworthy of note; Eric delivered a lot of fuel oil, but he was used to that by now. He spent his spare time studying sailing and seamanship, and accumulated a few bits of gear that would be wanted the following summer. Over the holidays, he also spent a few fun evenings with Donna.

One day in early April Jeff dropped him off at the interurban station in South Bend, and Eric rode the train into Chicago, then caught a bus for Seattle. It was cheaper than taking the Empire Builder, the train that connected the two cities, and though it was slower it was possibly a bit more comfortable. It took him several days to make the trip and he was glad to get off the bus in Seattle and give Luke a call to come pick him up.

Chip joined them a couple days later after hitchhiking up from Los Angeles and his job pumping gas. Soon the three of them had the boat loaded with climbing gear, food, and other essentials; they cast off the Hawksbill and headed for the Inside Passage.

In spite of good sailing directions, the trip was a little more challenging than they’d anticipated – not impossible by any means, though there were a few close shaves in some of the tide races up and down the passage. They made it across Dixon Entrance on a rare calm day, and after that took their time working their way northward, stopping to go climbing if they happened to find anything that seemed interesting. They found plenty that did; sometime all three of them would go on a climb, and sometimes just two of them would go, leaving the third behind on the boat.

One of the books Eric had taken to Michigan with him over the winter had been John Muir’s book about exploring the glaciers toward the north end of the Inside Passage, and that got him a little interested in them. When they were close to Juneau, they decided to go take a look at some of the glaciers in the area, particularly the big, interesting Taku Glacier.

By this time the three were familiar with snow, ice, and glaciers; they’d spent a bit of time on them in various places in the world, including the Himalayas. Taku was big, although the mountains didn’t seem like much of anything to them. But there was an exception: scanning through binoculars, Eric happened to notice a couple of spires that resembled cat’s ears to one side, partway up the glacier. Even the easy routes to the top would be difficult, and the direct routes up the faces looked even more challenging. Those spires, the three agreed, demanded more investigation.

The only obvious route to get to the spires was up the glacier itself, and even that looked to be hard going. Glaciers by their nature are filled with crevasses and other treacherous impediments, so it looked like something of an expedition to even get where they wanted to start climbing. They loaded up their packs with climbing gear and rations for a long stay, then got a ride back to the glacier and started up it, roped together for safety like the good mountaineers they were, in case one of them should happen to fall into a crevasse.

They didn’t, but partway to the spires they met someone who had. A group from the University of Michigan glaciological department had been doing some studies on the glacier, and some kid who wasn’t looking where he was going managed to fall into a wide-open one. It was a deep one and the kid was clearly hurt; a couple of other kids had started to get in touch with the professor who was leading the party some distance away, and the rest were standing around looking at each other, wondering what to do.

Naturally, Eric, Chip, and Luke stopped to help. They broke out climbing ropes and crampons; soon Eric was rappelling down to the kid, who had a couple broken bones and other obvious injuries. Eric did first aid on him down in the hole as best he could, and rigged a rope sling so the kid could be brought back to the surface. They had him patched up as well as they could by the time the professor arrived with a rescue party. It was, as far as they were concerned, a little mild excitement and a good deed well done; no more than that, but Eric was unaware at the time that it was the first step into something else that would be an occupation of his for several decades.

After the combined groups managed to get the injured kid back to the university’s base camp and on to the hospital in Juneau, Eric got talking with the professor, whose name proved to be Dr. Joel Heerman. “That’s something I really ought to think about,” he said. “I’ve had a number of close calls over the years on these trips, and this one was about the worst. I’m not bad at getting around on glaciers and climbing around on them, but some of these kids don’t know a thing about it. I’ve often thought maybe the thing to do would be to have someone else on these trips who could teach the kids something about ice and rope work, and to try to keep them safe while I try to teach them glaciology and field procedures.”

Eric allowed as how it might not be a bad idea, and the two exchanged addresses. He thought that was about the end of that, until several years later when he got a call one winter from Dr. Heerman, asking if he might be interested in the assistant trip leader position. It would typically be for only six weeks or two months every other summer, but now that Dr. Heerman had been able to arrange funding for the position, it paid pretty well. “Yeah,” Eric told him. I think I could be talked into that.”

Thus it was that Eric wound up spending up to two months most every other summer on various glaciers throughout the world. The trips weren’t exactly research trips; they were mostly designed to give undergraduates a little exposure to field conditions, but Dr. Heerman also used them as excuses to visit glaciers in distant parts of the world to give his students experience on different glaciers with different conditions. Over the next thirty years Eric was to go with Dr. Heerman to glaciers in places like Canada, Norway, Iceland, and Greenland as well as Alaska. He mostly taught the kids basic mountaineering skills, looked after the base camp, and told the kids thrilling stories about some of the exotic places he’d been. Over the years he got pretty conversant with the glaciological skills Dr. Heerman was trying to teach, so became a useful assistant there, too. Occasionally one of the kids would call him “Dr. Snow,” just out of habit, and Eric had to remind them that he was just a heating oil truck driver on his off season. Though it was a relatively minor part of Eric’s life it became a most satisfying one, and he kept on doing the trips with Dr. Heerman’s replacement long after the good doctor had retired. The last one had only been a few years before; after that funding was cut, and there were no more exotic summer glaciological expeditions for the undergraduates.

But all of that was still in the future back there in the summer of 1967 when Eric, Luke and Chip left Dr. Heerman and the students and hiked on toward the spires that had caught their attention in the first place. They actually proved to be darn difficult. The initial inspection from up close revealed that there was no easy route to the top. They gave some consideration to trying to work their way up one of the ridges which looked like it might possibly be feasible. After some study they all admitted they knew what they were doing on big walls and the more difficult but more rewarding approach might be to go right up the face of one of the spires. It proved possible, but took them longer than they’d expected. The face of the other spire proved no less difficult, and they ran out of food before it was over with. They made it back down and started trudging back down the Taku with empty bellies but with a feeling of some accomplishment. On their way, they stopped off at the glaciological student camp, impressed the kids with their stories, and cadged dinner as a reward.

While they did a number of interesting climbs that summer, the three of them tended to look back on that one as their big success of the summer. When they finally got back to the Hawksbill, they sailed on up to Glacier Bay, the glaciers within it having receded a lot since John Muir’s time, did a little climbing, and started back down the Inside Passage for Seattle. They took their time, and got back in late September, about the time Eric had to be heading for Michigan and the fuel oil truck. Since his money was getting to be on the short side and the plan was generally to do the same thing the next year, Eric left most of his gear on the Hawksbill, took a page from Chip’s book and started hitchhiking for Michigan.

“We didn’t really do anything earth shattering that summer,” Eric told his young audience on the front porch of Jeff and Eunice’s house. “But in a way it was one of the more interesting summers I spent in those years. That was mostly because the scenery is spectacular, and I had a couple of good friends with me. We had some good times and I learned a lot, and that made it worthwhile. We more or less had plans to do the same thing all over again the next summer, but once again things changed over the winter.”

“Have you been filling the kids’ ears with some of your old stories?” Elaine asked. Eric hadn’t noticed her coming out on the porch. “I know I listened to a lot of them when I was younger, and I sure envied you your adventures.”

“Some of that was after I’d slowed down a bit,” Eric replied defensively. “But I suspect I told you a story or two.”

“More than one or two,” she shook her head. “You could go on for hours and hours. Some of the things you did still amaze me.”

“I might have stretched the blanket a time or two,” Eric grinned. “But most of what I told you was the truth.”

“Or at least loosely based on it,” she smiled. “I hate to break into your keeping the kids enthralled, but it’s getting late and we’ve all got to be heading back to the motel. You can pick up where you left off tomorrow.”

Eric glanced at the clock; it was getting late. “Yeah, I guess,” he told her. “You managed to hit me at a good stopping point anyway. Kids, I’m just going to sum tonight up by saying that I had a lot of fun in those years and somehow it worked out for me. The biggest reason I was able to do those things was because Jeff and Eunice gave me a stable place to spend my winters, where I could earn some money to do it all over again. I could never have done it without them, and that’s true about a lot of things in my life.”

The next few minutes were filled with the hustle and bustle of getting several people out the door and on their way to Wychbold. Mark and Lori left, taking their kids with them, and the Rosses were not far behind them; Ashley had apparently already left. With them gone, the house seemed relatively quiet again; a little snooping around made him suspect that Eunice was well on her way to bed, and that Bob and Ann were already there.

Eric knew that he ought to go to bed himself, but he also knew that he still had that eulogy to write. He hadn’t done a thing about it all day, but with the house now nearly empty and quiet he might not get a better chance to work on it. So be it, he thought; he went over to the computer and set it booting up, with no more idea of what he wanted to say than he’d had the night before.

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