Laura Waterman

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Laura Waterman
Born	Laura Johnson 10 October 1939 Trenton, New Jersey
Occupation	Nonfiction Writer Conservationist Climber
Education	List Princeton High School Hollins College
Subject	Outdoors Climbing Conservation
Notable awards	David R. Brower Conservation Award 2012 Outstanding Service in Mountain Conservation
Spouse	Guy Waterman (1972-2000)

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Laura Waterman (born 10 October 1939) is an American writer and climber, known for her writing about the outdoors. Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics, written collaboratively with her late husband, Guy Waterman (1932-2000), were front-runners in the clean camping and hiking movement of the 1970s, and partially credited with spawning the Leave No Trace practices. Waterman also authored, with Guy, 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. Her final book with Guy, a collection of fiction and essays: A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True, was published in 2000, a few months after Guy's death. Waterman most recently published a memoir: Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage and continues to work on writing in her mountain home in East Corinth, Vermont.

Early Life and Education

Waterman was born on October 10, 1939, in Trenton, New Jersey, to Catherine Rice Johnson and Thomas Herbert Johnson. She grew up on the campus of the Lawrenceville School, a private boarding school for boys in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Growing up, combined with her father’s career as an Emily Dickinson scholar, meant that Waterman grew up surrounded by intellectual life, with her father's colleagues often visiting to discuss their books.

In her memoir, Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage, Waterman wrote of tension at home in her early years. "Even though my parents seldom argued, the possibility left me feeling that it happened every night" (Page 46). Though the memoir outlines tension, Waterman speaks highly of her father’s abilities and dedication to his craft:

A brilliant man, a scholar and a gifted teacher. I was told he had the kind of clarity of mind that could illuminate textual analysis with the concentrated focus of a magnifying glass. ... his contribution to American letters as Emily Dickinson's editor was, some have said the most important piece of scholarship in the twentieth century. Among the things I learned from him was discipline. He rose at 4:00 a.m. every day of his adult life and wrote at his desk until my mother called the family for breakfast at 7:15.

Her family vacationed during summers in southwestern New Hampshire and Wilmington, Vermont, her father's home state, where her mother taught her to swim and she could explore the pond and woods, fostering a deep interest in the outdoors. The turning point for her interests was when she read Annapurna by Maurice Herzog "It made a huge impression on me," she said. "I wanted to do that thing that made them want to go over the summit. Whatever is inside of you is pushing you up there. Something inside yourself." But she also remembered reading another book—name not recalled—in which the party did not make the summit. "I remember thinking that I would have made the summit," she said. "It was before I came to grapple with what actually goes on out there."

She graduated from Princeton High School in 1958 before attending Hollins University in Virginia. In 1960, the spring of her sophomore year, she flew to France and began a yearlong study-abroad program. A few months into her stay, a French man took her to a movie that turned out to be an effort by an ideological movement called Moral Re-Armament, founded by an American, Frank Buchman. By the summer she was planning to visit Moral Re-Armament's headquarters in Switzerland, skipping her college's summer program. Her mother flew to Switzerland and with the help of a family friend convinced 19-year-old Laura to go home. This episode outlines the lengths Waterman was willing to go to prevent her father from drinking, a trait that would resurface during her marriage to Guy Waterman.

Career and Marriage

After the episode abroad, Waterman returned to Hollins, from which she graduated in 1962. She started her career in New York City, working for publishing houses as a junior editor.

She started rock-climbing in the Shawangunks in New York in 1969. She later wrote that she was so taken with the climbs she’d done and the planning for those she’d do that her work at Atheneum Books in New York suffered. Soon she took a job as an editor at William Kemsley's new magazine, Backpacker.

Also in the Shawangunks, she met speechwriter and musician Guy Waterman. The couple quickly fell in love and shared an interest in "doing things off the beaten track, out of the mainstream." They climbed all of the standard routes in the Shawangunks and went often to Chapel Pond, a big slab off the road near Keene Valley, New York, in the Adirondacks. But they also sought out places that were remote, requiring long treks to reach. In 1973, they married and moved to East Corinth, Vermont, where they built a small off-grid house. There they lived primitively, carrying all their water, growing and preserving much of their food. When farm work was under control, they headed back to the mountains. Besides rock- and ice-climbing, they became volunteer stewards of the trails on Franconia Ridge, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Laura Waterman co-authored with Guy Waterman six books about mountains: Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trailblazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains, Backwoods Ethics, Wilderness Ethics, Yankee Rock and Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States, and A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True.

After Guy's suicide on the top of Mount Lafayette in the White Mountains on February 6, 2000, Laura Waterman moved to a more modern log house nearer to town in East Corinth. She repaired her mountain-worn knees with double-knee replacement surgery and has continued to garden, walk, and climb mountains. She still grows and stores vegetables and is a devoted fan of opera. She has devoted the bulk of her days in recent years to writing. She published her memoir, Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage and has written several essays for Appalachia journal, the mountaineering and conservation journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club. She is working on a novel, Starvation Shore, based upon the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881–84, to the Arctic.

References

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