Eric was giving me a tour of his yard one afternoon following a day of climbing when he stepped on a tomahawk that was laying in the grass. He nearly exploded as he danced off of it, trying not to break its wooden handle.
"Darn kids, leavin' stuff all over the place!" and with that, he picked it up and heaved it at the huge cross-section of a tree that serves as a target, hitting it dead-center with the blade of the weapon. I was impressed.
"Wow, Eric. Izzat how your wife picks up the house, too?"
Born two hundred years too late, Eric embodies the North American hunter/trapper from the bygone days of the Rendezvous, and if you could see his place... you'd probably think, like I do sometimes, "Gee-whiz, I wonder what it's like to kill a bear with a bow-and-arrow, skin it for mucklucks, boil its fat for soap, and chew on its greasy flank..."
Alot of the times I've climbed with Eric, he seemed just as content to hunker down beneath the base of any certain crag and eat a big lunch. That's because he has to feed that tall, lanky body of his. He's been a logger for years, even doing a brief stint as a horse-logger when times got lean. He will take you out in the forests, road or not, in his pick-up, and when he can't navigate a track to drive on, he will take you on a hike, tirelessly walking in places without landmarks, getting lost, and sorting out where he is by walking even farther. He will show you clear-cuts that are re-growing, and he will show you old-growth forests, telling you the probable ages of the trees there, and as he connects you to the past in much the same way he connects himself to it.
"When this tree started life, John Adams was president of the United States of America..."
When we first met, I was something of a thorn in his side, telling him about the checkerboard clear-cuts I've seen in the Bighorns which have never healed. He would cite the Yellowstone Fires of 1988, telling me we could have waited for that to happen in the Bighorns as well (which actually did that same summer). Ever since then, it seems he has made it a point to give me a tour of every clear-cut he knows of, whether it be a week old, or fifty years old. And in a sense, he has opened my eyes. It's not so bad...
This summer past, Eric picked me up from Ranchers' Camp to explore a big rock some where out there in
"Here's something to getcha going. There's a dozen fresh eggs in these, a half-pound of sausage, fresh cheese, sliced bacon, yellow onions..." he rambled on like a side-meat TV salesman. I stuffed my face on the bumpy ride, slugging down Eric's Complimentary Joe as he pointed out, you guessed it, another clear-cut...
If Eric is a tough, heroic woodsman, then there's his wife Debby, his boss. Eric often forsakes climbing to be a family man, and his mindset is genuine, made up like a cloth woven from his duties as a husband and a father, not to mention his love for the bounties and the blessings of the Great Outdoors. He balances ocassional climbing with all of the other truly essential pleasures and chores in his life. For people like Eric, and for most of the rest of us for that matter, climbing is an optional pleasure. For all the other stuff, there is no option: one has to be everything else first.
"We oughta take our kids climbin'," he said to me once.
But then we wouldn't do any climbing, I thought to myself.
But Eric knows that.
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