End of Immortality, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mason, David

Doug kept climbing, though. When he returned from his travels around the world, having made it to high altitudes in the Himalayas, he was in his mid-twenties, interested in politics but hell bent on avoiding law school. he drifted for a few years, worked for a department store, then a paint company. Then he became a congressman's press officer and lived in Washington, D.C., and after that a very successful campaign manager in Seattle city politics, along with doing work for the Puget Sound Council of Governments. People said he had a promising career.

One summer when we were together at the family home on Lake Whatcom near Bellingham, Doug joked despairingly about getting fat and grabbed a roll of his own midriff to show me. He worked long hours. It was hard to get enough exercise.

When Jonna and I were married and out of college in 1978, I worked in Rochester as a gardener and caretaker. Doug began to climb more seriously again. He married a woman who loved the outdoors as he did, and who had an interest in the law. But something was wrong about the marriage. Or about his career. Or about approaching thirty. He felt remorse for the way we had always fought as boys, and tried to make it up to me. We went out for a few beers at a waterfront tavern once, on one of my visits to the West Coast, but found our conversation awkward, a few terse encouragements strung on a line of silence. There was real love between us, but also a residue of the wariness of brothers.

In the summer of 1979 I began my second year as a gardener on the estate in Irondequoit, next door to Jonna's parents. My younger brother, Don, was a photography student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, so he and I spent time together as allies, fellow Westerners in the foreign country of New York with its strange manners and extreme weather. I was healthy and in love with my wife and busy writing a novel about Alaska when I wasn't pruning or mowing, planting or weeding. Don, who had according to the Mason formula drifted for several years, had now discovered the talent that would lead to his career as a commercial photographer. He was also fascinated by adventure. He wanted to go climbing, and Doug had promised to take him on his first ascent of Mount Shuksan, a rugged, heavily glaciated peak near Bellingham.

They would be okay, I thought, though I had lost my own appetite for technical climbing. I remember going to a concert with Don in Rochester before he flew home, and talking about their plans. Then I don't remember anything else until a phone call in the middle of the night, August 29th, and how I stumbled into the living room of the little cottage I shared with Jonna, knocking over a lamp as I lunged for the phone.

It was my stepfather, Art, a man much loved for his jovial, loquacious ways. I was always glad to hear his voice, but tonight it sounded different. When I asked him how he was, he said, "Well. . . . I'm not sure."

I had completely forgotten about the climb.

On Saturday the 28th, Don and Doug hiked into Lake Ann, a tarn fed by glaciers on Shuksan. It was sunny, and as they set up camp and practiced climbing some nearby boulders they talked about their route the next day, across the glaciers and into the network of rock chimneys that would lead them to a high snowfield and on toward the knife-tip of the summit. It was just like Doug to get himself injured before the climb. he took off his boots to wade in a stream near camp and cut his foot on what must have been one of the few shards of broken glass for miles around. he was always more accident prone than the rest of us. I had broken a few bones, but Doug was always getting stitches, like the time he caught a ski pole in the back of the head-it was jokingly tossed by one of our racing buddies in dry-land training-and had to get himself sewed up before he went out that night on his first date. Now, when he and Don examined this new wound, they were sure he would not be able to climb on that foot.