The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [248]
Two ranger guides had volunteered to lead the Roosevelt family from the Tahawus Club up to the summit dome, where there was a spectacular view of the divide between the Hudson and Saint Lawrence rivers. Also accompanying the Roosevelt party were McNaughton, a governess, and two law students from Harvard. Their first day on the Calamity Brook trail started out golden but turned to slate-gray as they boarded canoes and paddled toward Lake Colden at an elevation of 3,500 feet. There, at lakeside, they lodged in two cabins with, as Edith put it, “miserable little cots.” The next morning, September 13, a pall of fog hung in the air so thick that it was hard to see five yards ahead. The ledges were getting slippery. At this juncture Edith and the children bailed out of the expedition. Theodore had a ranger take them back down to the Tahawus Club. With his family out of harm’s way, Roosevelt, clutching a walking stick, waving the other men forward, grew more determined than ever to reach the summit. If Pinchot could pull it off in a blizzard, surely he could make it in a damp September rain.
As his correspondence bears out, Roosevelt was in a deeply reflective mood during those grim days since the attempted assassination of President McKinley. Like a falling barometer or a dropping temperature, Roosevelt’s mood had sunk low in Buffalo. He had written Jacob Riis a cryptic letter about losing his youth, saying that at age forty-two he felt a “shadow” coming over him like a dark shroud. Perhaps reaching the summit of Mount Marcy with his companions would help renew his optimistic spirit. After all, how could he not feel uplifted by the sight of wild New York unfurled beneath him, a blanket of green forestlands and long valleys and a pattern of blue lakes for as far as the eye could see. At that high an elevation, where only balsam fir and a few stunted spruce thrived, he could think in an unmuddled way.
The mountain climber Jon Krakauer, in Into Thin Air, wrote about the out-of-body sensation encountered when one is rubbing up against the “enigma of mortality,” finally reaching a summit after days of difficult climbing. Krakauer’s reward was a glimpse across the “forbidden frontier” of death.85 Somehow 360-degree views from mountaintops, staring at the horizon in a cyclorama, remained the closest humans could get to comprehending the afterlife before the advent of modern aviation. Some climbers have called it a “rush.” To others it’s a “little taste of heaven.” To Roosevelt it was another moment of perfect clarity like the one he had on Mount Katahdin as a young man. For hours he basked in his own romantic profile; he was the explorer hero, at one with the backwoodsman on the trail in a Leatherstocking story at one with Audubon and Thoreau, Boone and Crockett, breathing fast, wondering what had happened to McKinley in Buffalo. He made a personal pact to become a habitué of Mount Marcy—the summit was that inspiring. “Beautiful country!” Roosevelt kept repeating, while standing on a great gray rock at the edge of an anorthosite cliff. “Beautiful country!”
Once the spell lifted, Roosevelt, his head cleared, started making his way down the mountain with the others. Unbeknownst to him, meanwhile, President McKinley had taken a sharp turn for the worse. Quite suddenly the vice president was desperately needed in Buffalo; the odds were high that he’d be sworn in as the next American president. The only problem