End of Immortality, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mason, David

The clouds drove in above them, obscuring the peak. My brothers huddled in their tent that night while a thunderstorm raged over the mountain and rain poured down. The climb would have to be scrubbed.

But when they awoke to a world remade next morning and looked up at the sunlit peak, their spirits rose. Doug tested his bandaged foot. he felt fine. They decided to go.

Carrying packs, gear, ice axes and a climbing rope, my brothers passed the stunted, mossy firs at timberline and ascended the damp trail to the glacier. They crossed on snow and ice to Fisher's Chimneys. I always liked chimney climbing, wedging my body, arms and legs inside narrow walls and inching upward. It felt more secure than face climbing, and I suppose my vertigo was less apt to kick in. So I imagine that portion of the climb being a pleasure for both of them, though these particular chimneys were more an alpine route over steep boulders than a shimmy inside walls. Doug at twenty-eight was getting slowly back into shape. It must have felt good to use his body and skill in this way. Perhaps he was able to forget the City Council campaign he managed. Maybe even the doubts he must have felt about his marriage vanished for a time. And Don, at twenty-one, must have been in heaven, getting his second taste of real climbing with his older brother-they had previously done the Coleman Glacier route up Mount Baker. This was the great older brother who had been a hero to us, who once owned a red sports car, then a Jeep, who had lived and worked in Africa and traveled through Asia, sending letters home for two years from places we couldn't even pronounce, who held the attention of elders when he talked politics, whose girlfriends were gorgeous and who seemed so on top of things now, married and doing important work.

Both brothers photographed the climb. We have Don's photos, not Doug's, since his pack was never recovered. So I have shots of Doug from behind as he started up the chimney, which looks at first like a dark gray boulder field. Then what must have been the snowfield above the chimney, and one shot looking across pitted snow to a sunburst, the lead rope barely visible as it runs up toward the light. Maybe the sequence of shots is wrong, because I then have an earlier shot of the mountain with the two ice shelves of Curtis Glacier they had to cross. Then shots from the summit -snow and ice sweeping away in the brilliant summer air, Mount Baker in one direction, the Picket Range in another. One shot of Doug at the summit in short sleeves and sunglasses, his sandy hair disheveled by wind, his face in shadow as he turns toward the camera while a jagged sunlit snow ridge cuts the air behind him.

The view is so brilliant that I hardly notice clouds on the horizon. They look white and harmless in the photograph.

What joy my brothers must have felt. To have done the climb and done it together as brothers! Not the highest peak in the neighborhood, but the most beautiful, perhaps the most often-photographed mountain in all of North America, an image familiar even to climbers who have never heard its name. A constant presence in our childhood, it stands behind us in family portraits as well, all five of us together. My handsome father and beautiful mother with three tow-headed boys, ages two, four and eight or nine. In one particular photograph, Doug stands slightly apart from the rest of us on a rock that raises him almost to our mother's height, the perfect tip of Shuksan rising over his right shoulder, a universe of rock and ice below it.