Now more than half of my word-a-day calendar pages were gone as July ran out and the days got squeezed down. The word I picked for the season was Summerland, named after a trail on Mt. Rainier, one of Washington’s five active volcanoes. I’d summited it once with a bunch of coworkers, written a short essay about it, and handed it out to them at a party that September. Now 25 years later I remembered that essay as I was hiking up a glacier, 53 years old, thinking what I was like at 28.

I’d never been to Summerland because it’s one of the most popular trails in the park but with a name like that, you have to go at least once. I took the summer off from work since business slowed down in hopes it would resume again come September. I’d done that a few times before so I could do longer sections of the PCT or the Austrian Alps and only gotten burned once, when the work wasn’t there for months, a time that coincided with ChatGPT’s release and speculation that one day copywriters would go extinct. I tried to shake off those thoughts as my boots crunched through the snow and to remember that last trip to Rainier.

A colleague of mine at Starbucks had approached me at a work party around Christmas; he was a retired Navy SEAL named Perry I’d recently befriended. Perry had driven across the country from Virginia after his plans to get married fell apart. He just packed up his things and drove straight to the Starbucks corporate office, rode the elevator to the eighth floor and said he wanted to talk to a recruiter. He talked himself into a job that didn’t exist through his swagger and confidence. With all he’d seen and done as a SEAL everyone wanted to get to know Perry, but he kept his past well under wraps. I think he was used to packing things up and moving on.

Perry wanted to organize a summit attempt and raise money to donate to local charity. He got the idea when he heard about a colleague whose brother was a famous climber and planning his 400th summit of Mt. Rainier. Perry thought if we could ask that guy to lead our climb we could get some good PR out of it. In hindsight it’s hard to pinpoint his motive. I think he saw Corporate America as his next big challenge and wanted badly to move up the ranks—he may have viewed the climb as a grand networking maneuver. Perry was both modest and soft spoken, and intensely ambitious.

Rereading the essay I wrote, I realized Perry was on my rope team—meaning he and I were tied together with two other climbers. Perry was behind me with a guy named David in front and our guide Kent leading us. Twelve of us summitted that day and four stayed below to bivouac, a word our guide explained was French for “mistake.” To bivouac was to change plans, to put people in sleeping bags and stake them to the mountain so they wouldn’t slide off. In all the years that passed, I’d forgotten who summitted and who stayed behind, and the fact that Perry and I were roped up together. There’s a significance to that, because your rope partner may fall and need you to self-arrest so they don’t keep falling. Or they may be the one who saves you.

I was touched by the fact that Perry picked me as his rope partner because I think now in hindsight I may have been closest to him. And he was the kind of person who was hard to get close to; he didn’t let others in. A couple years later we climbed Mt. Whitney in California and Perry gave me a handwritten note afterwards, in a wooden box with a Starbucks logo on it and a small piece of rock he’d pocketed that day on the summit. He’d said how much that experience meant to him and how grateful he was to me for organizing it.

About 10 years after we climbed Rainier I got a mysterious package in the mail with familiar handwriting: it was Perry’s wife, Val. The two of us had known each other before Perry moved to Seattle and had a bit of a fling. In fact, when Perry and Val started dating she and I secretly agreed we’d keep whatever thing it was we had, which was more of an imagined thing than a real thing. The package included all the letters I’d written Val the summer of ’98, when I moved to France. How maybe she’d come visit, and my descriptions of what it was like. It had my letters with a little note from Val calling me “BP” the way she always did, and just said ‘delicious,’ signed Val.

She must not have wanted Perry to see those letters, or she wanted them out of her life. Either way, he must have known about us but Perry wasn’t the kind to feel threatened. His inner strength and restraint were unmatched, and we’d all see that the day we came down from Rainier the time he was tested.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest