Guy Waterman

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Guy Waterman
Born	1 May 1932 New Haven, Connecticut
Died	6 February 2000 Mt. Lafayette, New Hampshire
Occupation	Nonfiction Writer Conservationist Climber Musician
Education	Shady Hill High School Taft Sidwell Friends School George Washington University
Subject	Outdoors Climbing Conservation
Notable awards	David R. Brower Conservation Award 2012 Outstanding Service in Mountain Conservation
Spouse	Emily Morrison (1950-1972) Laura Waterman (1972-2000)
Children	William Waterman, John Waterman, James Waterman

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Guy Waterman (1932–2000) was an American writer, conservationist, climber, musician, and homesteader, primarily known for his writing about the outdoors. Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics, written collaboratively with his wife, Laura Waterman, were front-runners in the clean camping and hiking movement of the 1970s, and credited, along with David Saxe, Bruce Hampton, and David Cole, with spawning the Leave No Trace practices. Waterman also authored, with Laura, two definitive mountain histories; Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trailblazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains, and Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States. Their final book, a collection of fiction and essays: A Find Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True, was published in 2000, a few months after Guy's death.

Early Life

Guy Waterman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 1 May 1932, the youngest by six and a half years of the five children of Alan T. Waterman and Mary Waterman. His father, a physics professor at Yale University, was, in 1942, brought by Karl Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, into the group of scientists who were providing leadership between the military and the government during the Second World War. The family moved from their country farm in North Haven, Connecticut, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Guy attended the Shady Hill School. Here, in the Boston area, he developed his lifelong interest in baseball, attending 53 out of 77 home games of the Boston Braves in 1943. Waterman went on to write for baseball magazines and was a longtime member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

Guy Waterman (left) performing with the Scotty Lawrence Riverboat Trio.

In 1946, when Alan Waterman’s work took him to Washington, the family moved once again and Guy Waterman was enrolled at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. His unhappy years there were relieved by his discovery of jazz, and Waterman began playing jazz piano seriously under the tutelage of upperclassman Bob LaGuardia. He finished his high school years at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington.

In 1950 Alan Waterman was appointed by President Truman to head up the newly formed National Science Foundation. Guy Waterman graduated from George Washington University in 1953, Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, with a degree in Economics. By this time the twenty-one-year-old had married (an elopement) with Sidwell schoolmate Emily Morrison, and had two sons (William Antonio, born 24 April 1951, and John Mallon, born 17 September 1952). During his college years Waterman was the piano player for Scotty Lawrence’s Riverboat Trio, playing at Jazzland and at a black hotel called the Charles in the 1300 block of R Street, N.W. Through Roy Carew, friend of Jelly Roll Morton and collector of his sheet music, Waterman began playing ragtime, long neglected, in Washington nightclubs, and writing about this musical form for The Record Changer. These articles, classic sources for the basic understanding of ragtime, were later anthologized. By late 1953, when the Riverboat Trio reorganized, Waterman dropped out. Not a stranger to alcohol, he began drinking heavily and his marriage came close to blowing apart. A third son, James Reed Waterman, was born on 11 July 1955.

Career: Economist, Political Writer, Corporate Writer

Guy Waterman worked as a professional conservative economist for the Chamber of Commerce in Washington from 1955 to 1958, when he changed to political work and was hired as legislative aide and speechwriter for the Senate Minority Policy Committee. He moved to Capitol Hill on 1 January 1959, where he served as a staffer and speechwriter for the prominent congressmen of those years. One of the special projects he worked on, called the Ford Report, was a study of overall defense and foreign policy that brought Waterman into close contact with the future president, Gerald Ford, who chaired the committee. Then, in June 1960, as the country plunged into a presidential election campaign, Waterman was hired by the Republican National Committee as a crafter of party platforms and speeches for Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon (right) going over papers with Guy Waterman (second to the right).

While Guy called this time on the Hill, “the most eventful and exciting two years of my life,” he was aware of the irony of his transition from a professional economist who considered himself above party politics to a full-time political campaign worker.

Nixon lost in 1960, and Guy received a job offer to write speeches for the president of General Electric in New York. The salary was good and he had three sons to educate. He would have more time for his family which he hoped would improve his marriage.

But the very week he went to work in December 1960 news broke of the largest antitrust scandal in U.S. history, a massive conspiracy of price-fixing by the electrical equipment manufacturers, with G.E. heading the conspirators. From the top company in America, G.E. was seen as the top crook, effectively silencing the company’s political voice in Washington. Guy, hired by G.E. as one of Washington’s sharpest young writers, now had no outlet for any writing on public issues. However, occasional breaks came his way. In particular, he was called in to write a first draft of a speech for Dwight D. Eisenhower when the ex-President headed up Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company. While this allowed Guy to quip that he had written for three U.S. Presidents—Nixon, Ford, and Eisenhower— though none was president at the time, exciting times on the Senate floor were in the past and Guy found himself drinking more than ever.

Climbing

Waterman began climbing in the fall of 1963, prompted by reading a series of articles in Sports Illustrated by Jack Olsen on efforts to climb the North Wall of the Eiger that were later published as The Climb Up to Hell. Waterman signed up for rock climbing instruction offered by the Appalachian Mountain Club at the cliffs 90 miles north of Times Square called the Shawangunks. “I was absolutely transported at the excitement of climbing vertical rock,” Waterman wrote in his unpublished memoir, adding that the Shawangunks were “destined to become my spiritual home.” His determination to meet the physical demands of climbing helped him to expel the alcohol, and by 1965 he had achieved sobriety. “Mountains and climbing dawned on my drunken, shamed, lonely life like a beacon of hope,” Waterman wrote. “Here was a whole new world of aspiration and effort, contrasting with the nightmare my life had become. . . . I turned toward it as a drowning man toward a distant beach.” He had discovered the White Mountains in New Hampshire as well and often took his two older sons along on his multi-day trips. Later, as ties with his boys weakened, these trips with his sons in their early teens came to mean more and more to Waterman, a mix of joy and sadness.

To improve his physical condition Waterman began walking the 2.4 miles from his house in Stamford, Connecticut, to the railroad station. And to make use of that down time he undertook to memorize Paradise Lost. Later, by 1973, when his life had changed to preclude memorizing time, he had committed more than seven of Milton’s twelve books to memory and could recite for five hours uninterrupted.

In 1965 Waterman began climbing in winter, in both the White Mountains and New York’s Adirondacks, ice climbing as well as steep slides and tough bushwhacks leading to rocky ridgelines or summits. He was one of the first half dozen to ascend the 46 Adirondack peaks over 4000 feet in winter, with the added wrinkle in Waterman's case, that he had climbed none of them first in summer. With son John he began exploring local ice routes, first in Connecticut and then in the famously steep-sided gullies of Huntington Ravine on Mt. Washington. For Johnny, climbing had quickly become an obsession. At 15 in 1967 Johnny was leading top-ranked (5.10) climbs at the Shawangunks at a time when few teens even climbed. He went on to make first ascents in the Alaska Range, garnering near legendary fame in 1978 for his solo ascent of the unclimbed central buttress of Mt. Hunter’s south face on which he spent 145 days. Johnny’s climb was seen as both visionary and crazy. John himself was surprised to have survived, and wrote his father, revealing a twisted logic, that his living through the climb meant that Mt. Hunter wasn't the mountain he thought it was.

On 19 June 1969, son Bill, on a western adventure that involved hopping freight trains, lost his leg in a railroad yard in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Bill’s accident precipitated further difficulties with Waterman's marriage and he and Emily separated, divorcing finally in 1972. Bill returned to the west as a student at Western Washington State College, though soon dropped out. Johnny explored the mountain ranges in the Canadian Rockies and Alaska, while attending—off and on—the University of Alaska. Waterman and his high school aged son Jim lived in the Hudson Valley town of Marlboro, a two-hour commute from the G.E. building and a half-hour drive from the Shawangunks where they were weekend regulars.

Waterman met Laura Johnson, a newcomer to the Shawangunks climbing scene, in the spring of 1970. The daughter of the noted Emily Dickinson scholar, Thomas H. Johnson, Laura had been working as a book editor in New York since college graduation in 1962. The two quickly became inseparable, climbing every weekend, with long drives to the ice and snow in the Adirondacks and the ravines on Mt. Washington during the winter.

The early 1970s marked a time of change in climbing areas across the country. Climbers saw that the pitons that they hammered into cracks in the rocks for protection were widening the cracks. In the spirit of the environmental movement spearheaded by the first Earth Day, climbers adopted the use of nuts or chock stones that could be inserted and taken out of cracks by hand. The movement was called “clean climbing” and it swept climbing areas across the country. Waterman was asked to join the board of the Mohonk Preserve, the land managers of the Shawangunks, to represent the climbers. This brought the couple into a friendship with the Smiley family, particularly Dan Smiley, a naturalist who strongly influenced their thinking on environmental matters.

Waterman and Laura were married on 26 August 1972. Both wanted to detach themselves from their city lives and devote more time to climbing and the outdoors. The couple found inspiration through reading Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. They bought land in rural Vermont, moving to their homestead on 9 June 1973.

Homestead: Writing and Climbing

The Watermans sought to combine a life of simple living close to nature, and as self-sufficiently as they could, with maximizing mountains and climbing. They built a small cabin, heated it from their woodlot, lit it with kerosene and candles, fetched water from their stream, filled their root cellar with root crops and canned goods from their garden, fruit trees, and berry bushes, and used their own maple syrup for sweetening. They owned a car, but parked it a mile-and-a-half from their cabin in winter and on an edge of their land in summer, ensuring a walk into their homestead year round. They made room for Waterman's Steinway grand piano and their combined library of over a thousand books. Reading aloud was an evening pastime.

Guy Waterman climbing a cliff face.

They lived on a pared-down budget, writing for Backpacker, for Appalachia, and provided a monthly column on camping and hiking for New England Outdoors. Their first book grew out of those columns, and was published by Stone Wall Press in 1979. Backwoods Ethics was received by environmentalists and wilderness managers as a prophetic call to reevaluate the impact of recreation on the wilderness. It was revised and reissued with a foreword by Bill McKibben in 1993 by Countryman Press, and was joined by its companion volume Wilderness Ethics that same year. That book looked beyond the ecology or the physical components of the backcountry, to the factors that make it “wild,” and the importance of safeguarding what the Watermans called the “spirit of wildness.” Wilderness Ethics was reissued in 2014, with a foreword by Ben Lawhon. Backwoods Ethics, under the new title of The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping, with a new foreword by Bill McKibben, was published in 2016.

As active climbers and hikers Waterman and Laura became interested in the history of their northeastern mountains. In 1989 AMC Books published their Forest and Crag, the definitive social history of mountain discovery, recreation, and trail-building, and in 1993, Stackpole Books released Yankee Rock & Ice. Hailed as a classic by climbers, this book chronicles first ascents and the colorful personalities who made history on the Northeast’s cliffs and icefalls.

In 1981 when the Appalachian Mountain Club launched its trail-adopter program, Waterman and Laura signed up for Franconia Ridge, one of the most popular alpine trails in the Northeast. What they discovered in their fifteen years of looking for the balance between the pedestrian traffic and maintaining a sense of wildness, shaped their writing and their lives. Like the Shawangunks, Franconia Ridge became their spiritual home, with the meticulous work they did there matching in detail and careful thought the attention they gave to their homestead.

Yet there was a negative aspect to the Watermans’ full-on involvement. The couple was outspoken and could find themselves on the opposite side of a wide range of differing issues. Though supported by the White Mountain National Forest for their work, particularly on Franconia Ridge, the Watermans’ disagreement with the Appalachian Mountain Club – the dominant organization in the northeast, which, in the couple’s view, placed priority on improvements meant to draw more people into the backcountry – affected Waterman deeply in his championing what he believed was right for the beleaguered cause of wildness in the eastern mountains.

Their involvement with the land managers at the Shawangunks kept the Watermans in touch with issues important to climbers, as well as climbing actively at the Shawangunks. But increasingly they turned to the White Mountains and their great love: winter climbing. Their homesteading life gave them plenty of time for multi-day backpacks and ice climbs. In the 1970s ice climbing underwent radical changes in techniques and tools, opening up the possibility of climbs once thought too difficult. Waterman and Laura made the sixth ascent of the Black Dike on Cannon Mountain, Laura becoming the first woman to successfully complete an ice route on Cannon Cliff.

Generally the Watermans sought climbs off the beaten track that required bushwhacks to reach. These routes were of moderate difficulty, but required several nights out as they searched for open slides often not visible from a road. In this way they came to know the White Mountains intimately, on and off trail, and in all weather conditions. Waterman relished introducing others to these hidden jewels, taking pleasure in their enjoyment. Above treeline in wild conditions he was at home and supremely confident. His joy in the mountains was contagious, making him fun to climb with.

Waterman ended up climbing all the 48 peaks over 4000 feet in winter six times. Reveling in forbidding terrain and ferocious weather, he climbed each of them by off-trail routes, each solo and each from all four compass points, all in snow and ice. Waterman was happiest with a focus for his adventures and his last 4000 footer from all compass points, made on 8 March 1987 with Laura and his friend Dan Allen, was followed by a profound sense of loss. He never again found a goal that combined such joy with the difficulty of achieving it. Guy and Johnny, it seemed, shared much in their approach to and need for mountains.

Guy’s son Johnny died on Denali in Alaska in 1981. He simply walked up the Ruth Glacier with a light pack and without a sleeping bag. His tendency toward depression and anxiety, often eased by his mountain trips, had returned forcibly after his success on Mt. Hunter. Johnny’s death caused Waterman to question the whereabouts of his oldest son Bill. For a while Bill and Johnny had shared a cabin not far from Talkeetna, Alaska. Guy’s last letter from Bill carried a 1973 postmark. Since then there were rumors that Bill had gone off to live with the native population, or had wandered into the bush. Guy did not go to look for Bill, and Bill’s death remains unconfirmed.

The Watermans wrote one last book together, A Fine Kind of Madness, a collection of fiction and essays on mountain and climbing subjects, published by The Mountaineers Books a few months after Waterman's death in 2000.

Waterman took his own life, a death by exposure near the summit of Mt. Lafayette on his beloved Franconia Ridge on 6 February 2000.

Legacy

After Waterman's death his wife Laura and some friends who had been close to him founded the Waterman Fund, a non-profit that fosters the spirit of wildness and conserves alpine areas of northeastern North America through education, trail rehabilitation, and research. The Guy Waterman Alpine Steward Award is given out annually to a recipient who has demonstrated a commitment to protecting the physical and spiritual qualities of the mountain wilderness in the Northeast.

The American Alpine Club, in 2012, awarded Guy Waterman, posthumously, along with Laura Waterman and John Stannard, their David R. Brower Conservation Award for Outstanding Service in Mountain Conservation.

References

This article "Guy Waterman" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Guy Waterman. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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