Climbing with Dad

I remember two mountains I climbed with my dad. The first time I wondered how on earth I’d make it to the top. The second time I didn’t break a sweat at all. They were both long climbs. I guess it depends on what you’re doing while you put one foot in front of the other.

Okay, so these were not “mountains” by most people’s standards. Both trips were in the Adirondacks of New York, where even the highest peak barely gets above 5,000 feet. There wasn’t any snow and ice, but the trees gave out before the top and above that line there was only wind and big rocks. But, hey, I was only 12 or 13! Yeah, well, my younger brother was along, too, and he managed to get to the top, so I guess it wasn’t all that hard. Hard or not, climbing mountains was what we did with dad on summer camping vacations. Mom and the younger siblings stayed back at the tent.

My brother and I had been inaugurated into the climbing fraternity little by little on earlier trips. It started with short hikes, when dad carried the gear and my brother and I just worked to get up the hill. At the top we each did the obligatory headstand, a family tradition from generations back – or that’s how the legend ran. Then it was back down, not worrying about knees, just taking care not to slip off the edge.

The first big hike was up Cascade Mountain, maybe a 10 mile roundtrip. We each carried day packs with the lunches mom packed. And of course hiking sticks. After the walk in to where the ascent started, my brother and I started to sweat. We walked ahead of dad – he was always careful to let the slowest ones set the pace. Even much later, older than I am now, he never had any trouble keeping up with us teenagers. There were places in the trail where we had to grab onto protruding roots and pull ourselves around the next corner. Sometimes a trickle of water would run down the middle of the trail and we’d have to be careful not to get it into our boots.

I bet it was my brother who was first so winded that we had to stop. We both wanted just to sit down and let our hearts and lungs catch up. But dad insisted that sitting would just make it worse, and he compromised by letting us bend forward with hands on knees and stand still for a couple of minutes. That was it. Then back to plodding up the hill. We thought we were going to die! “What are we doing here?” we whispered to each other. “Who cares about a bunch of trees and rocks and this mountain?” We were too young to take a chance on cussing in the middle of the complaining. Frankly, we’d rather have been back in camp, fishing or swimming in the lake.

Dad said, “Don’t worry. You’ll make it. Soon enough you’ll get your second wind.”

“Second wind?” What the heck is a “second wind?” we thought. I could tell my brother was thinking like me just from the look in his eyes. If there was going to be some new source of energy, it sure wouldn’t come from inside. Our batteries were almost worn out already.

But we kept plodding along. When you’re 12 or 13 you have something to prove, if only to your younger brother, you know. Up through the maples and the aspens and the shrinking pine trees. Then we came out of the woods into the bright sunshine and onto the rocks. The view exploded past the nearest tree trunks – across valleys to other, bigger peaks. And we realized we weren’t that tired after all. How our legs understood about being closer to the top, I’ll never understand, but suddenly it was like they stood up at attention and were ready to continue the march.

Dad was right. My thoughts changed from how to escape this sentence to how to get to the top before he and my brother!

A few years later, while my brother and I were still teenagers, we were hiking again with dad on another summer vacation. Each of us carried our own backpacks, complete with tent, pots, food and sleeping bags, and we wore real hiking boots. We were on the trail for more than one day! I don’t remember if we’d already slept overnight or even if we’d already been to one summit, but I do remember coming up a very long, steep canyon. We were hemmed in on both sides by trees and cliffs, and only a spattering of sunlight came through the canopy. We were tired. I think even dad was tired. Chasing another summit was not enough of a goal in itself anymore. We were just following through with the trip’s itinerary. “How much further ‘til dinner,” two of us were thinking.

My dad was evidently thinking about something else. Although we rarely spoke much on these hikes (concentrating instead on breathing), he opened up with a tale. It was a true tale, one which had happened to him many years before. One my brother and I had never heard.

Dad told about the war years. Growing up in Germany, fighting in “their” army, being wounded in France, traveling by rail car to and from the front line. And ending up in a POW camp for nearly two years at the end of the war. We had heard none of this. We were silent while we walked up that trail.

This was the father who’d raised us in the security of an east coast suburb? The father who’d worked at the same job already for 20 years, with 15 more coming? The father who never spoke anything but English, who had no childhood photo albums and no relatives who came visiting? Where had he hidden this tale?

That mountain wasn’t steep at all. My brother and I wanted the trail to be longer, not shorter. Who the hell cared about dinner?

When he was talked out, he stopped. We all kept walking, got the summit and down the other side and eventually made a campfire and dinner.

It was years before I heard any of those wartime details from him again. This time he was telling my kids some of those same tales. What steep mountain trail squeezed those memories out of him then?