Laura and Guy Waterman were among the most important chroniclers of the great surge of American zeal for hiking, camping and mountain climbing during the 1960s and ’70s. During their three decades of marriage, the Watermans wrote scores of magazine articles and five books together, all still in print and classics of their field, including Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (1989) and Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness (1993). They lived in a spartan cabin in East Corinth, feeding themselves with a big garden and earning some money by maple sugaring and growing blueberries.
Writing was also a vital cash crop in their household economy. They worked and wrote collaboratively, sharing bylines and a first-person-plural “we.”
Since Guy’s death by suicide in 2000, Laura has made her own way as a writer. This year, at 84, she published Calling Wild Places Home: A Memoir in Essays, her third book as a soloist. Some of the essays in the collection previously appeared in publications such as Appalachia, the Concord Monitor, Alpinist, Northern Woodlands and Vermont Almanac.
In Laura’s previous books, she notes in the preface to this one, “I had not looked closely at my relationship with the twenty-first century … I was still too close to the world we had lived in, a world without central heating, electricity, plumbing, telephones, and road access. [F]or various reasons we had chosen to plant our feet in the nineteenth century.”
Calling Wild Places Home explores Laura’s changed circumstances and her present life, as well as revisits the past. Its first section reflects on childhood, family life, and the special communion of reading and writing with another person, as in her partnership with Guy; the second remembers the Watermans’ 30-year adventure in no-frills, self-reliant living; and the third describes Laura’s continuing encounters with forests and mountains, inevitably different at her age.
“I’ve found from writing memoir, if you’re completely honest, the reward is so great, because you will have no secrets from yourself.” Laura Waterman
A recurring fascination in these essays is the meaning of “the wild.” What are people seeking when they go into the woods? How do human beings place themselves in the natural world without damaging what they love and want to share? How does our experience of nature change when we’re older?
In 1972, Laura and Guy left corporate jobs in New York City — she as junior editor for publisher Atheneum Books, he as a speechwriter for General Electric executives — to build a homestead on 27 acres in East Corinth, which they named “Barra.” They’d been stirred by the writings of another husband-wife authorial duo, Helen and Scott Nearing, who urged their readers to move back to the land and renounce the frivolities of consumer society.
The Watermans were determined to whittle down expenses, grow as much of their own food as possible, gratify their shared love of writing, and spend all their free time hiking and climbing the mountains of the Northeast. Guy had already distinguished himself as a mountaineer, one of the first to climb the 46 tallest Adirondack peaks in winter. Laura would climb the 48 tallest New Hampshire peaks seven times; in 1975, she became the first woman to make an untethered ascent of New Hampshire’s daunting Black Dike cliff near Franconia.
Then, in 2000, Guy took his own life, climbing up to New Hampshire’s Mount Lafayette on a February night and letting himself freeze to death. Having grappled with depression even through their happy marriage, he had informed Laura of the date on which he would end his life a year in advance.
Laura’s 2005 memoir, Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage, recounts how the couple spent those final months together — the last sugaring season, the last round of splitting for the woodpile, the last planting and harvesting of a summer garden. In the process of writing Losing the Garden, as she explains in that book, a friend challenged Laura to “pull apart the ‘we,'” and she learned how to write as an “I.”
She’d actually begun to experiment with writing alone before Guy’s death. In the essay “The Ascent at Eighty,” she describes how, in the early ’90s, “when my knees were signaling that I needed to back off climbing mountains, I turned to writing short fiction … a form that can deliver a remarkable emotional punch in a few well-chosen words.” She acknowledges that “this work was preparing me for what was around the next few bends in the trail.”
In 2001, Laura left Barra, as homesteading alone was no longer practical, and moved to a small house near the village of East Corinth, where she spoke with Seven Days on an unusually warm afternoon last month.
The house is a log cabin, sunny and welcoming, with a compact writing alcove where a manual Royal typewriter resides. Laura types her drafts after first composing with pencil and paper; then her friend and Corinth neighbor Sue Foster transfers the texts to a computer.
Laura is the beneficiary of years of physical exertion paired with disciplined habits; she is lithe and lively and laughs frequently. She said she loves being a writer. In her new book’s prologue, she concedes, “Memoir writing is immodest; it can be seen as selfish if not self-indulgent, but it can also be immensely validating.”
Her background in journalistic nonfiction infuses her more recent essays, giving them rigor as well as tenderness. It took her some time, as she attests in her prologue, to realize that even in the most personal writing, she wasn’t just reaching for her own catharsis but writing for an audience: “Everyone who had read our books, which extended to people I had never met and would never meet: people who had heard about Guy’s death — and the shocking manner of it — I was writing for them, too.”
In Calling Wild Places Home, Laura writes probingly about the tumult of living in close proximity to people mired in depression — specifically, Guy and her father, the trailblazing Emily Dickinson scholar Thomas H. Johnson, who taught at a prestigious prep school in Princeton, N.J.
Johnson was so engrossed in Dickinson research that he withdrew from his family. “That had to happen,” Waterman told Seven Days, “but it had severe consequences. He was an alcoholic. My mother ended up an alcoholic herself, though I don’t think she was born one, like my dad.”
In person and on the page, Laura has a zest and buoyancy that must have been instrumental in her thriving among troubled people, in childhood and in her marriage.
When Guy was in one of his dark periods, he couldn’t respond to emotional overtures, even from those closest to him. In her prologue to Calling Wild Places Home, Laura writes:
I see my husband turning away. My question is making him uncomfortable. He stands up and walks across the pine board floor and looks at the window. I am facing his back. I debate pushing it, but experience with topics that turn Guy silent causes me to fall silent, too.
As she wrote about other people, Laura told Seven Days, she found fresh ways of understanding herself. “I’ve found from writing memoir, if you’re completely honest, as honest as you can be — when you dig down, down and down — the reward is so great, because you will have no secrets from yourself,” she said.
In addition to her two memoirs, Laura has published short stories and a novel, the 2019 Arctic thriller Starvation Shore, and she is working on another novel, about opera diva Maria Callas. She often begins her writing day by listening to recordings of Callas arias, fascinated by how the singer’s voice changed as she aged — “the steely edge grown steelier, harsher, a wavery … sound like old cloth ripping,” as she describes this in Calling Wild Places Home.
“I had, without much conscious thought, constructed for myself an emotional exercise program … I was moved by this great singer’s fearlessness. She had become my guide.”
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or text VT to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. Trained counselors are available 24-7.
From “Making the Break”
Even climbers say that climbing has no social value. It is, however, very real. It requires utter concentration, a heightened awareness of where you are both physically and mentally. A great deal of rapid reasoning goes into each move up the rock. This thinking — or processing — is all connected to the physical movement. Without doubt, the risk is an attraction, and this risk is constantly calculated. Climbers, contrary to opinion, are not risk-takers. They are careful planners. They have placed themselves in what appears to be — in fact is — a risky situation, but with intelligence, training, and physical skill, they work to keep a safe passage up the rock. Climbing can change lives because the very nature of the risk can call into question what’s not working in your life. You can’t hide from yourself the marriage that’s gone sour or a job that no longer fulfills. In my case I fell in love with climbing and with Guy, and had no wish to defend myself from either. Both had come to feel a lot more real, more meaningful, to me, than my job at one of the best publishers in New York.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Wild Life | Laura Waterman’s new memoir recalls a life of extremes”
Related Stories
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
