Jim, Forever Young
Jim’s mother called me on a Wednesday night in late October 1997 to give me the news. Jim was dead. His note, found next to his body, gave reasons, but no excuses. It was a hard night to get through.
In our youth, Jim and I spent countless hours in the woods together. We both made our Eagle Scout rank and even shared the same ceremony for this achievement. As older teens, we backpacked over 100 miles together in the foothills of the Rockies.
College separated us, but we remained close friends. Jim ended up working in Maine chasing moose into the water, canoeing up to them, then attaching radio-tracking devices to their antlers. This job led to further research radio-tracking grizzlies in British Columbia, then in Alaska as a game warden during the endless summer light and as a federal inspector on foreign fishing vessels in US waters during the long winter darkness.
We wrote letters to each other often, detailing our recent adventures and family stories. In March 1996, Jim wrote:
…I went hiking up this snow-covered mountain. Before I knew it, I was sliding down the mountain side on a football field size sheet of snow. I was able to run up the snow slide and jump off before it crumbled up at the bottom of the avalanche area. It was like running on a treadmill…Once the avalanche stopped, I had to hike over the same stuff to go back on the same path to return home. Don’t worry, I had my crampons on and carried an ice ax.
Jim came back east every two years or so. We’d pick up the conversation where we last left off. We’d hike. Then we’d talk about what we were going to do together as old men when work didn’t get in the way. And of course, we’d drink beer. We were always making life-long plans.
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The thing about committing suicide is that it never stops the pain. It only transfers it to others.
It’s almost twenty-nine years since I got the phone call, and it’s still hard. Even today I can’t listen to certain songs on the radio that remind me of Jim without shedding a few tears.
I see Jim’s mother often. She looks at my photos on Facebook of me guiding hikers up Oregon’s South Sister, over the July snowfields on Washington’s Mt. Rainier, or through the alpine meadows in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and always says, “I picture you and Jimmy doing that.” I always smile and say, “Yes, as do I.”
Then sometimes, when I get my old and aching body out snowshoeing through a secluded hemlock grove, and feel the frigid wind bite my nose and cheeks, I’ll look back over my tracks and see Jim, forever 35-years-old, nudging me to walk a little faster, followed by that deep laugh from the bottom of his belly. And I’ll pause to reflect in that bitter cold, that I’m glad we’re still doing these things together.
In August 2022, my essay The Sanctuary was published in Yankee Magazine. It is about finding comfort in a stand of hemlock trees along the Mid-State Trail in Massachusetts. It was the death of my friend Jim that brought me there that day, a place that I still occasionally visit. Click the link below to read The Sanctuary.
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Jim (L) and me (R) somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, 1978.
