December 13, 1989 – Dear Sir – You are cordially invited to participate in the NINETEENTH ANNUAL INTERSTATE GERIATRIC SKI TOUR and GRAND SUB-ARCTIC BUSHWHACK to be held at the Hell Gate cabins in the Dartmouth College Grant from Friday, February 16, to Sunday, February 18, 1990.
I see that this particular invitation, issued just after the mid-point of the life of the Geriatric Adventure Society (hereinafter GAS), is from the modern era; viz, written and printed on a computer, rather than the typewriter and copier of the early days. It limits participation to only twelve. By the time the winter bushwhack quietly died, it was attracting about thirty hardy souls. There were rituals: coffee and ice cream at the Errol Restaurant Friday afternoon, an ambitious thrash through the woods with map and compass all day Saturday, and shirt and tie Saturday evening at dinner.
I used to get asked this question a lot: You were only in your thirties when you started this organization. Why did you call it “Geriatric”? I always answered that I wanted a name we could grow into. I mean, how would it look if in our seventies (which we all aspired to reach) we were calling ourselves something like the Boy Scouts?
Questioners also alluded to our males-only membership. Weren’t there women who could ski all day in the bushes, paddle hundreds of miles on our summer canoe trips, carry heavy loads into mountain campsites, and climb with the best of us? Of course there were; and several women over the years asked to join us. But there was another woman, with whom I shared a home (and most nights, a bed), and who also planned, organized, and packaged our rations for every trip, for whom the subject was not up for discussion. And I have to say that every evening of a trip, as the cooks (a rotating job) were doing their thing and the rest of us were enjoying what’s called, in pretentious circles, our libations of choice, I loved to just close my eyes and listen to the badinage: men’s voices, every one familiar, laughs, and stories getting told. It’s always been one of the great pleasures of my life to work with a crew of men – at the bobsled run, in camp winter or summer, road construction. A comfortable chair or Crazy Creek lounger; a warm fire or, alternatively, plenty of bug dope; a cool drink with just enough bite and peat – Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! I can still hear the rumble of the voices as I sit here in my quiet office years later.
Our language was borrowed from the mock heroic of 19th-Century England; our unofficial watchword was the closing lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbefitting men that strove with Gods.”
In 1989 we took our first of more than a dozen canoe trips to the Canadian Arctic. Americans always respond with “Alaska?” when they hear “arctic.” These are the same folks who, deployed to Germany, ask for “Lowenbrow” and chat up the “Frowlines.” Alaska, big as it is, can’t hold a candle to Canada for territory. From Yukon to Labrador, from the Ottawa Valley to the muskox country of Banks and Victoria Island, sparkle hundreds of wild rivers. Looking back, I can recall swimming in a few of them, but never in an orderly or planned fashion. Surrounded by wildlife only cautious of us – caribou (even, on two trips, the elusive Peary caribou), muskoxen, wolves, grizzlies (of which, another week), ground squirrels, snowy owls, and trout the length of our arms – we made as little noise as possible.
I always sent out lists of recommended equipment and clothing (suggestions only; we’re all adults here). My favorite response was from a doctor, a Harvard man, who questioned the number of underpants I specified – three for three weeks. He felt that wasn’t enough. Well, I responded, you wash ‘em now and then.
Right in the cold river water? No, I said. You know how every night we wash the dishes in hot, sudsy water, and then rinse ‘em in scalding water? Well, if nobody sees what you’re using for a dishrag… That got me out of the dishwashing detail for the rest of the trip. After that, he wouldn’t let me anywhere near the fire.
I’ve come across something I wrote during one bushwhack: There is, most of all, the tacit sharing of the struggle with the others, each of whom is suffering at least as much as I, but suffering less because we share it. Almost all those worthies are now scattered to the winds. But they — and what we did together — live on in memory.
