Outside/In

Transcript - Nature Has Done Her Part

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. 

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 Laura Waterman: Believe me I didn't know that I was going to turn into a rock climber, And I don't really know how to explain it…

Sam Evans-Brown: do you remember your first climb,. 

Laura Waterman: Vividly.

Sam Evans-Brown: What was it?

Laura Waterman: Called Easy O, Easy overhang? Very simple Grade. And to me, on the last pitch where I was standing on a belay ledge, probably about that big... You know, like your toes are hanging over the edge of it into space. And as that fellow that I was climbing with at the time... was a beginner like me. And he was terrified. I realize that I have to merge. I was saying, oh, my God, this is incredible… It was exposure. That got him and thrilled me.   

Sam Evans-Brown: This is Laura Waterman. 

Laura Waterman: My name is Laura Waterman.

Sam Evans-Brown: And that’s it? 

Laura Waterman: I live in East Corinth, Vermont

For most of you that name probably doesn’t mean anything, but for some… the Waterman name is like mountain royalty. 

Laura was a pioneering rock and ice climber. She was the first woman and one of the first people ever to ascend one of the Northeast’s most storied ice climbing routes… the Black Dike, which Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard called a “black, filthy, horrendous icicle.” 

Laura Waterman: Well, it was, I’m sure, hardest climb in the Northeast at that time. And we had first generation ice axes and ice hammer's that were very advanced for that time, but are antiques today. It’s funny about you what can happen to you... we were just... staring out in front of you in time is either going very slowly or speeding up as you kind of lose track of time almost. You know, as a great that's an awesome, frightening, beautiful place to be. 

But more than all that, Laura and her late husband Guy helped create the very way people think about the outdoors today. 

And if you’ve ever fantasized about quitting your job, changing your whole life, and just living in nature… they’re the sort of people that did exactly that, and in so doing their life became a kind of dream… an ideal seized upon by the burgeoning back to the land movement.

But all of that is only part of the story. In the last two decades, Laura has reinvented herself. 

Laura Waterman: And in my later years of speak… I'm 80 now, and that just happened a few months ago.

Sam Evans-Brown: Oh your birthday. 

Laura Waterman: I t's it's as pretty powerful place to be… So, I mean, I think as humans, we're we're capable of tremendous change really through our lives. That's... well... what life is all about

[Outside/In SOMBER THEME]

Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Sam Evans-Brown. Today, the many lives of an outdoor icon: Laura Waterman … 

the moments that shaped her and the philosophy she helped create… a philosophy that still shapes how people experience the wilderness.

[somber theme]

Sam Evans-Brown: Laura Waterman lives in a house on a river in a tiny town on the Vermont/New Hampshire border. The entire house is wood — the framing, the finish work, the furniture… 

Laura Waterman: It absorbs moisture in the summer, and it gets rid of it in the winter and you can, every now and then, hear a crack… I’ve gotten quite used to it.     

Sam Evans-Brown: Every post has got these carvings in them… so that was the first thing I wanted to ask about, is there a story behind the carvings.

Sam Evans-Brown: and an old friend of Laura’s…

Laura Waterman: ...we went to grade school together...

Sam Evans-Brown: ...has been coming once a week for many years to carve and paint vines and birds and leaves and quotations all over the walls.

Sam Evans-Brown: So for instance, it says accuse not nature, she hath done her part, do though but thine.

Laura Waterman: Milton… Paradise Lost… a favorite book of Guy’s.

Sam Evans-Brown: Guy — again — was her late husband. This story is about Laura, but it’s not possible to disentangle Laura Waterman from Guy Waterman. Guy and Laura designed this house together, and their shared life is literally written all over its walls. For the  nearly twenty years since his death, Laura wakes up everyday to see the reminders of their life together.  

A life that they built, very intentionally.

Laura Waterman: I was born in Trenton, New Jersey. My dad taught at the Lawrenceville School Prep School. And I lived on a dead end street at that time and. Was. My our back is stretched into woods and we were as kids outdoors all the time.

Sam Evans-Brown: And your dad was an Emily Dickinson scholar. Isn't that right?

Laura Waterman: That's correct. Yeah. He was chairman of the English department. Our was  filled books,

Sam Evans-Brown: Laura graduated college, got a good job editing manuscripts at one of New York City’s best publishing houses… and for a number of years lived a New York City life… 

Laura Waterman: I spent many happy years not doing anything very much other than going out to Fire Island or walking through Central Park. 

Sam Evans-Brown: But then for some reason, she started to feel the old itch to go outside. She had hiked the White Mountains as a summer camp counselor when she was a teenager, and she decided to pick it up again — joining weekend outings with the Appalachian Mountain Club. It was one of those trips that she met Guy… and suddenly, her desk job wasn’t quite so thrilling anymore.

Laura Waterman: I couldn't concentrate on my work and in fact, I was let go and began to collect unemployment.

Sam Evans-Brown: This was Laura’s first reinvention. She abandoned the desk job and got hired at a gear shop. 

Guy was older. He was separated from his first wife, with whom he had three children. He had worked as a speechwriter for Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, but had flamed out of Washington, and was nestled in a comfortable corporate job with General Electric.

Most everything I know about Guy comes from Laura’s book, but if I may offer up my read of the situation, it sounds to me like he was struggling to live up to some sort of idealized masculine perfection. He was objectively smart and talented, yet had a failed marriage, and had been forced out of his big-time political career… I think he was haunted by his inability to live up to what he quote unquote should have achieved as a man, and struggled to stave off depression as a result. 

And like so many before him and after him, he turned to the mountains for solace. Where he became somewhat of a figure in the outdoors community.

Laura Waterman: He had a lot of magnetism, and it — I think a showed up, you know, in his eyes and his body actions… he was very quick. He was very articulate. He was not someone who made small talk, but yet, you wanted to have a conversation with him. He was never boring. [chuckle] I don't think he was really aware of the power that he had over people? He could be very social, but he could also… He also required a lot of alone time. A very volatile temperament.

Sam Evans-Brown: It’s hard to not acknowledge that Laura was somewhat in Guy’s shadow throughout their marriage. In talking to their mutual friends and reading what has been written about them… his charisma is kind of legendary, but his darker side… that, it seems, mainly Laura got to see. 

Laura fell for Guy very quickly. Guy fell for Laura not too long afterward. And before terribly long the two had hatched a plan to leave their city lives behind. They would buy a small piece of land in Vermont… plant a garden… build a 500 square foot cabin… and start homesteading. 

Laura Waterman: I had an incredible learning curve of rock climbing, winter mountaineering, ice climbing. I'm preparing to homestead wrapping up life in New York. Falling in love with someone really for the first time. I wrote in my memoir in. I guess it's still true that if I had not met Guy Waterman, I wouldn't have married anyone.

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: The two were married at a grand hotel in the Shawangunks — the rock-climbing destination outside of New York City, where they had met. And shortly after set off for the woods of Vermont. They named their homestead Barra, after the island in Scotland that Guy’s ancestors had lived on.

Laura Waterman: It was very important to us to climb as much as possible. And a big part of our reason for adapting a homesteading life, was to be able to base ourselves near the mountains, to be able to get to the mountains as often as we wanted to. For a Guy that was extremely important as he needed the mountains more than most people do, more than I did. 

Sam Evans-Brown: Laura and Guy’s life at Barra has been a source of fascination for many of us who live connected to the grid. They read books by candles, hauled water in buckets, tended a huge garden, and split unimaginable quantities of firewood by hand. They weren’t cut off from the rest of the world, they served on non-profit boards and hosted an endless parade of guests, but lived on about $3,000 dollars a year from their savings and income from writing projects. 

Sam Evans-Brown: One of the quotes that really struck me is ...Guy would say that what we're doing, at Barra isn't a model for anybody. What do you think that... What do you think he meant by that? And do you agree with it?

Laura Waterman: Mm hmm. I think he meant that. That people didn't need to take our life as a blueprint. It was I think he was aware that. We are probably too far back in the 19th century for most people. 

Sam Evans-Brown: What does that mean? You just don't think that the rest of society is ready to follow you there?

Laura Waterman: Yeah. And you know, there have been no reason really why they need to. I mean it was a personal choice that fit in with all of our temperaments I mean, we actually enjoy going down to get the water on a daily basis. I'm carrying it back to the house. I mean, that's things that looked very labor intensive to most people. We took a lot of pleasure out of them.

Sam Evans-Brown: Just as an example: they kept a lot of records. They kept track of  temperatures in three different places at three different times of day. They tracked the record minimum and maximum temperatures every calendar day of the year. They kept an index card with every bird that they saw or heard every day. Their favorite time of year was late winter into spring… when the maple sap started to run and they boiled it to make syrup...

Laura Waterman: We carried three by five cards with each trees name written on it, and carrying measuring sticks that are marked for quarts. And so we would measure the sap and write that down on the card, and factor it into our records that we had on a board on the wall of the sugar shed.

Sam Evans-Brown: They tallied the records by day, by month, by year… and turned it into a contest. They declared a tree of the year, a rookie tree of the year, a tree of the decade, a tree of the century… that one was called Mad Dog, by the way. 

My favorite story of this record keeping, is from Laura’s book. They used to keep count of every blueberry they picked from their bushes… and followed the yield of each bush throughout its lifetime. Once two friends went picking blueberries with Guy, and while they began in concentrated silence to keep track of their harvest, eventually they broke into conversation. Supposedly, the friend admitted  “Oh, Guy. I have to confess, I’ve lost count.”

“Don’t worry,” Guy said, “I’ve been counting for you.”

Sam Evans-Brown: Some people might see it as, as sort of, you know...

Laura Waterman: Obsessive. 

Sam Evans-Brown: Obsessive. Right.

Sam Evans-Brown: But Laura says… this routine… this kind of attention… changes you. 

Laura Waterman: it made us take note of what was actually going on. If you're keeping records on birds, say you're going to have your ears sharp. Tuned in. You're working in the garden, you're working in the woods. And one part of you is listening for the birds. So it's it's connecting with nature in a way that we don't really have a mechanism for doing.

Sam Evans-Brown: I will say, as someone who looks at his phone too much and really would like to be more aware of things outside, I found this all really appealing… I want what she’s describing.

So after reading her book, I’m going to start keeping my own record: I got myself a rain gauge. Why a rain gauge? Well, the idea of checking something absolutely everyday, along with a toddler and a couple of jobs and a bunch of other hobbies  — felt overwhelming, but occasionally heading out the yard, looking around, listening to the birds, looking at the clouds, and feeling the wind... and then writing down how much it rained? I can handle that… 

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: Guy and Laura lived this way at Barra together for nearly 30 years. A friend of Laura and Guy’s told me that they were not actually famous… Not for the public at large, anyway. This friend told me, they were more like the Velvet Underground… famous among famous bands, but still… you know… underground...

In the case of the Waterman’s, that came from their writing.  

Laura Waterman: When I began running with Guy, and began learning about how to be a writer, and it was mainly from Guy. I mean, in a sense, the writing that we did together, I I would say I was more his apprentice.

Sam Evans-Brown: From the earliest days of homesteading, freelance writing was their sole source of income… they found their voice writing a monthly column for a magazine called New England Outdoors. 

Laura Waterman: We could write the column in a morning and we would, Guy would say. You pick why you want to write about and I'll do the rest. I mean, he was a professional writer. So, you know, I would scribble away and he would scribble away and then we would read what we have written to each other and he would,  sort of, link together. 

Sam Evans-Brown: This is where they began to set-down the ideas that would later become their books, Backwoods Ethics, and Wilderness Ethics. If Laura and Guy were the Velvet Underground of mountain stewardship, these books were like The Banana Album. 

[music]

Sam Evans-Brown: They started writing in the mid-seventies and continued for two decades. So, when a national collaboration formed in the nineties to develop what would eventually come to be called “Leave No Trace” — the style of low-impact recreation that a lot of outdoors-folks advocate — Backwoods Ethics was one of the foundational texts they used to come up with the guidelines.

Laura and Guy thought that everybody deserved to experience wilderness like they did. But  they also knew, that if everybody did get out into the wilderness.. they could accidentally ruin it. Trample it. Smother it. 

Their writing wrestles with this central tension: How do you let a lot of people get up into the mountains and get excited about the outdoors… and not destroy the very thing that you so treasure?

In an oft-cited passage of Wilderness Ethics, they wrote "Without some management, wildness cannot survive the number of people who seek to enjoy it but with too much management, or the wrong kind, we can destroy the spiritual component of wildness in our zeal to preserve its physical side.”

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: And you can find an example of what this means, practically, in the work they did up on Franconia Ridge.

Laura Waterman : Franconia Ridge really needed help. That became really the central focus of our. Our trips to the mountains.

Sam Evans-Brown: The struggle to find balance on the most popular trail in the Northeast... That’s after a break.

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Sam Evans-Brown: Everything about Franconia Ridge destines it to be incredibly popular. It’s right off I-93, New Hampshire’s major interstate, and at about 2 hours North of Boston and three hours south of Montreal, it’s a reasonably short drive from some major population centers. It’s a gorgeous chunk of White Mountain ridgeline, that ascends steeply from the road so you’re up out of the trees after just a few miles; the classic hike is around an 8-mile loop, which is a relatively approachable day-hike, and includes a mile-and-half of simply spectacular ridge walking… 

And with the post-war hiking boom in full swing, the crowds had already found Franconia Ridge. 

Laura Waterman: And if you looked at early pictures of it, you would see that, you know, there. It's all scattered footpaths and worn through the tundra and no distinct trail. 

Sam Evans-Brown: The weather in the White Mountains is terrible. For many years, it held the record for the world’s fastest recorded wind speed. The treeline is at low elevation, and above treeline, it’s literally tundra… like the plants you find up there are remnants of what everything looked like when the glaciers retreated after the ice age. There’s a plant, the robbins cinquefoil, that is found in only two patches, on the entire planet, and one of those two patches is on on mount washington… the other is on Franconia Ridge. And when hundreds of people step on those plants, they die… and take a long time to grow back.

In response, in the seventies the Appalachian Mountain Club’s trail crew put up scree walls… piles of rock on either side of the trail, to keep hikers from trampling the rare alpine flora.

Laura Waterman: And the scree walls themselves. We really took offense to them because we felt that it was making people walk between two walls... very much a feel of a sidewalk in... the wildness had been impacted…. 

Sam Evans-Brown: They lowered the scree walls and tried to redirect the trail so that people would stay on it a little more naturally… letting the trail flow to view points and then back from the edge. They covered side-paths with brush to make them hard to walk on, and ensure that people would keep to the main trail. 

But Laura says the most effective thing… was just talking to people. 

Laura Waterman: we could now go into something about the plants. And how they've been here since the Ice Age. and It's a rare tundra habitat and they don't like being stepped on. And usually a person who was... we were talking to is stepping on them and they sort of jump off the plants, and  onto the trail and. And it was a, you know, a pretty easy way to spread the stewardship message.

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: Laura’s involvement with Franconia Ridge, though, has continued well past the point where she is no longer physically doing any of the trail work up there. It continues today.

She helped launch something called the Waterman Fund… along with an essay contest and awards for people who work in stewardship… they also fund grants. And  just a couple years ago one of those grants went to a trail worker who went up to assess the state of the trail that Guy and Laura had maintained ...

Because things up there were changing.

Laura Waterman: But then we get up to closer to the present day and the Franconia Ridge somehow made it to like a hundred best climbs in the world, right? So that's drawing a lot more people.

Sam Evans-Brown: On a beautiful summer weekend day, there have been counts that found more than 700 people walking the ridge.  The path between the scree walls is too narrow to pass in many places, and so the trail just keeps getting wider

Laura Waterman: There's the main scree walled path and then on either side of that are trails worn into the tundra. And so that's what's happening up there. And in a way, it's out of control.

Sam Evans-Brown: For instance -- as more hikers come up to climb Franconia Ridge, the trailhead parking lots fill up pretty quickly. So, for years, people just parked literally on the side of the interstate. Sometimes, cars were lined up on both sides of the road for upwards of a mile.

There’s a task force that’s working on solutions, which, so far have included actually enforcing parking bans on the side of the interstate, and instituting a hiker shuttle from the parking lot of a nearby ski area. 

But the foot traffic up there is still way beyond what it ever has been… all of those feet tromping through the rare plants… so what would you do?

Laura thinks, the Franconia Ridge trail itself - might need an update for the 21st century.

Laura Waterman: We need to build a trial that can accommodate a heavier amount of foot traffic than we've ever seen before. And that is going to be controversial because to widen the trail, you're going to be destroying plants. But on the other hand, there might not be a lot of choice. 

Sam Evans-Brown: I had assumed, given how Laura sees these crowds, that solutions  might include some sort of restrictions on how many people can hike… like having to get a permit to hike the ridge, which some popular hikes do… but she surprised me. 

Laura Waterman: I mean are there any good answers? I don’t know. But in general, I feel permit system really is the last resort and that education and. Some kind of cultural. Change is needed. I mean that will be hardest, but we don't want to go to a permit system that's been talked about for years, and it would be really a shame to do that... for me personally, it's really telling you when you can go to the mountain and when you can’t and it interferes with that wild spirit, which is why you’re going to the mountains in the first place. 

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: There’s something that we have to acknowledge before we go any further. There’s a chance that if you’ve heard of the Watermans it’s not because of their pioneering work as wilderness philosophers, but because of how Guy died. 

About 20 years ago… When his depression finally got the best of him, Guy walked up onto Franconia ridge on a brutally cold winter day, and succumbed to exposure, leaving many devastated friends and admirers in his wake. 

I just want to editorialize a bit here, because I find some of the journalism devoted to Guy Waterman’s death downright disturbing. There seems to be a sort of lionization of his death by suicide, as if it was a brave way to not fall prey to the un-manly, un-dignified dependence of old-age. For example: a very long Outside Magazine piece about the incident is titled “A Natural Death.”

I had an uncle who died in a similar fashion, and find suggestions that this is some sort of noble choice personally offensive. It’s not a natural death… it’s the result of deep depression.

If there’s anyone listening right now who doesn’t believe me, pick up Laura’s memoir: Losing the Garden. Reading her book makes it clear that Guy was a person who struggled with untreated mental illness for his entire life.  

And if you’re struggling with thoughts like these yourself… get help. The national suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255.

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: Following Guy’s death, Laura moved away from their homestead on the mountainside down to the village, into the little house the two had designed together, just a half-mile from the library. That’s where she goes to answer emails from the rest of us… the overconnected hordes eager to hear from someone who has lived another way.

And in the twenty years that she’s been in the village, Laura has reinvented herself again. While she may have seen her writing partnership with Guy as her apprenticeship, now that she is able to write on her own, she has been able to find her own voice… take her own space.

And as she’s had time to reflect, it was her childhood, and listening to her father that has most influenced her.

Laura Waterman: His colleagues would come and talk to him, and they would get talking about what they were working on and and they were so energized by it. It was so much fun for them. I think that colored actually, my whole life. And when Guy and I began writing books together I was carrying that that joyousness basically that I could feel that my father had felt. 

Sam Evans-Brown: She’s published her own books, under her own byline. The latest is historical fiction… a retelling of a doomed arctic voyage called Starvation Shore. She’s never been to the arctic, but says being above treeline in the winter in New England taught her all she needed to know about that climate.

Now, while on the homestead it was Guy who woke up before dawn while Laura slept in until seven. Now Laura is up at 4:30 each day… just like her father used to do,  and just like Guy did. She’s at her typewriter by six.

Laura Waterman: We all have different habits. That we're fond of. And, yeah, I just really like the routine of getting up when basically everybody else is asleep and watching the day move in

[Music] 

Laura Waterman: It's really important for me to feel like I've accomplished something by the time the end of the morning comes and basically the end of the morning for me is about 11:30 when I walk up to the post office to get my mail. And it's when I moved here after his death and that's 20 years ago now or will be soon. That's when I began to, in a sense, move into my own space or head as a writer. But it's taken some years for that to happen

Sam Evans-Brown: Her past life isn’t forgotten, their homestead, Barra, is still there… it’s only a few miles from where she lives. But Laura says she never goes anymore. 

Laura Waterman: One really actually major drawback, is that since I don't have the reason to go outside to keep records, I'm not going out as much as I have been. And so I'm not out as much and I'm not as tuned into nature the way I was, and I regard it as a great loss. But I'm just in a different phase of my life. So while I miss it. I'm leaving it at that. 

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. It's like we can't do everything.

Laura Waterman: Not all at once. Yeah, yeah.

[Outside/In theme Music]