Abraham of the Adirondacks

The Forty-Sixer

“I’m a Forty-Sixer,” the patient said, perched on the side of a hospital bed in the psychiatric emergency room. His baseball cap said the same thing, 46, stitched on the front.

“Do you mean a Forty-Niner?” I asked, ignoring the cap, wondering if he had panned for gold or played football in San Francisco.

No, it was forty-six, just like the hat said. The number referred to the forty-six Adirondack peaks over four thousand feet high.

“I climbed them all,” said the man.

“Actually, there’s forty-seven,” added the man. “But, by the time the altitude of the last was determined, the phrase Forty-Sixer had already been in use. I climbed that one, too, even though I didn’t need to.”

“Do you need to climb any of them?” It was the end of a long shift.

It took the Forty-Sixer a long time to consider, but finally he answered, “Well, yes. I think I did.”

“I don’t know why I think I have to climb mountains. I just do, and I feel great whenever I’m there. It’s like something tells me to go to the mountains. If I was religious, I’d say it was the voice of God, but it’s not a voice and I don’t know if it’s God. It just says go and I go, but it doesn’t even really say anything more. When I get there, I know this is where I belong; it’s my place and those mountains are more kin to me than my family.”

Such talk can get you a rousing applause at a Sierra Club dinner, but in a psychiatric emergency room, it can get you committed. Trouble was, the Forty-Sixer didn’t look crazy. I can spot crazy. I’ve seen it all.

The Forty-Sixer had kept his hat on despite having shed all his other clothes in compliance with hospital policy. There’s no real reason for psych patients to wear those silly hospital gowns, except to humiliate them and transform them from people into patients. Well, the man wasn’t about to be transformed into a patient. He was staying who he was, a Forty-Sixer.

In some ways, he was like another guy, Brian, who would frequently come into the emergency room for no other perceived purpose than to show his report card from the sixth grade. Brian had gotten an A in math, the greatest achievement of his life. He would unfold the document carefully so as not to tear it any more than it was. He’d make everyone marvel at it. I once offered to take the treasure and get it laminated for him, but he wouldn’t let it go.

The Forty-Sixer was no Brian, however. He had a clear-eyed, I-can-make-camp-and-catch-a-trout-and-fry-it-before-you-take-off-your-pack manner. You’d follow him anywhere, even up a mountain, if you could keep up. He looked puzzled, though; as if he had just discovered he had brought the wrong topographical map, the trail had ended in a bramble thicket, and all the streams were running uphill.

I asked him what was wrong.

“I could never get my boy to climb with me,” he said. “I got him up Blue Mountain when he was young, but as soon as he became a teenager, he had better things to do. He liked video games.

“I finally talked him into doing Algonquin as a kind of farewell-I’m-going-to-college thing. At first, he said he’d do it; but he cancelled at the last minute. Then, the guilt finally got to him, I guess, that and freshman homesickness, so we went up during Thanksgiving break.”

The Forty-Sixer’s tanned legs, all tendons and bug bites, obtruded from the gown. Translucently white feet swung freely.

“Algonquin is the perfect peak to start on, even though there are easier ones. I’d done it a few times before. It’s short enough for the attention deficit, but high enough to be impressive. It can be difficult, but it’s not a technical climb and the difficulty is all at the top, where there’s no turning back. Enough others are on the trail to encourage even the most reluctant. I knew that no young adult male would give up when others were pressing on.

“The first mile of trail is muddy. Real hikers will just trudge through the slop because getting dirty is part of the fun, but my son had just gotten new pair of sneakers. He tried to pick his way around the mud and, when he couldn’t, he’d stop afterwards to carefully scrape it off and touch his sneakers up with a can of sneaker paint he kept in his pack.

“`Wait till we’re done before painting them,’ I told him. ‘The mud’ll just stick to the paint and make them look worse.’

“`I want to keep them looking good, Dad,’ he said; but he didn’t stop to paint them again.”

It’s unusual for psych patients to tell their stories so carefully and take pains with details. They’re usually all tragedy and angst, indefinite pronouns and mislaid information. Impatient to get to the point, they nonetheless lose track of it and take you around the barn a dozen times trying to catch up. Dangling, they never connect their participles. They neglect imagery and blend metaphors in unappetizing combinations. They fail to pause at appropriate times to give you a chance to assemble your imagery. They don’t pay attention to whether you are lost or still following and go on and on and on without you. Listening to psych patients tell their stories is hard work, but that’s why I get the big bucks. Sometimes all therapists really do is help people tell their stories; a kind of rewrite desk, making comprehensible the chaotic; polishing the patient’s prose before they set it out at the dinner table for their families.

“In the second mile, the grade increases, and the mud has all been washed away, leaving behind boulders that’ll turn your ankle if you’re not careful. Here my son starts texting, probably saying to his friends can you believe what my Dad is making me do. I lost my temper and barked at him to put the damn phone away, watch where he’s going, and appreciate nature for once.”

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“`Whatever;’ he said. You know how kids say, Whatever.

“I can’t begin to describe the fury I felt when he used that dismissive word: whatever. I didn’t say anything, though. I kept it to myself and tried to work out why he got me so upset.”

“What’d you come up with?”

“I don’t know. I love the mountains. I really do, and I wanted to share them with him. He wasn’t interested in them, and that got to me, but there’s more. It’s like he wasn’t worthy of them, and that was a reflection on me. It’s almost like I was ashamed of him and didn’t want to let the mountain know he was my boy.”

He looked down at his pasty feet. Was the Forty-Sixer thinking what I was thinking? How could a man love a pile of rocks better than his own son?

“In the third mile the grade steepens some more and even the boulders are washed away. All that’s left on the trail is a smooth rock face, and it’s colder, so ice is forming. We buckle on crampons and I try to show him how to use the crevices for support, but he just charges up the rock, showing off to some girls who were nearby. Of course, he doesn’t make it, so he slides back down and the fool girls giggle at him. He’s not hurt and he even keeps his pride in front of the girls because he makes out like he’s just goofing off. That gets to me, too. It’s like he doesn’t have respect for the mountain.”

“The voice came back to me then. That voice I was talking about, only this time I heard it loud and clear, like God was climbing up the trail next to me. It was an actual voice.”

“What’d it say?” I asked.

“`Kill him.’ The voice said to kill my boy. If I love the mountains, I had to kill him.”

The Diner

After my shift, I sat at the counter for a lonely supper at the diner. I like to talk to whoever is sitting there and get their perspective on the things I just heard, without violating confidentiality, of course. I could talk to another shrink, but that would just give me a shrinkish perspective. I like to talk to real people for a change. With the way I spend my time, it keeps me in touch with reality.

Just once I would like someone to lean over to me and ask, How was your day? It would save me the awkwardness of launching into whatever story I needed to tell. I used to try to ask them first, but sometimes they’d tell me, and we’d never get to what I wanted to say. Besides, at the end of every shift, I’ve heard enough of peoples’ lives.

On this day, after meeting the Forty-Sixer, when I most wanted to talk to someone, no one was eating at the counter with me. I spun around, surveyed the booths, and asked myself if I was brave enough to sit with someone uninvited and start talking about what I had heard. I decided I would be too much like Brian, pulling out his old report card, soliciting attention. I was not that bad off, yet. Instead, I talked to the waitress.

She was was quiet through most of my account. Then I came to the part where the man heard God tell him to kill his son.

“God wouldn’t do that,” she declared.

“Of course, he would. God’s always wanting someone to kill someone. He ordered Abraham to kill Isaac; and preachers are always telling us that He sent His own Son to die. He seems to have a thing for killing children.”

She left with the coffee pot and patrolled the diner for people wanting more coffee. I wasn’t sure she’d come back, but she did, refilling my cup without asking, spoiling my carefully calibrated coffee/cream ratio.

“Everyone says God is a loving god,” she insisted, evidence to the contrary.

I knew we would get nowhere with that discussion, so I asked, “What would you do if you heard a voice you thought was God telling you to kill someone?”

“I’d go see a guy like you, a psychiatrist, because I’d be crazy.”

“Was Abraham crazy? He thought he heard the voice of God telling him to kill his son.”

“It seems like Abraham was crazy,” pronounced the waitress, “but nothing is as it seems with God.”

She must have heard that in a sermon.

“Here’s what gets to me about this story,” I said, encouraged she might be able to follow the finer points of my argument. “Abraham hears this voice, commanding him to kill. He might have responded any number of ways. He could’ve said, oh, I guess this god isn’t as good as I thought he was, I won’t follow him anymore. Or, if he was alive today, he’d worry that he had schizophrenia and he’d go find a doctor and take medication.”

“Or, he might say that the command to kill his son really came from the Devil,” she added. “That’s what I’d say,” forgetting that a minute ago she’d said something else.

“Yeah, but this is the thing that gets me. What Abraham does is not justified by God’s command, because he can always doubt that it came from God. Rather, God’s command is justified by Abraham’s decision to interpret it a certain way. It was Abraham who makes god, God.”

The waitress looked at me blankly. She couldn’t follow my argument. She left in search of more cups to fill.

“So,” she asked when she returned, “what happened with your patient? What did he do?”

Walking

“Kill your son,” said the voice which would have sounded like God to the Forty-Sixer, had he believed in God. “When you get to the top, push him off. If you love the mountains, kill him.”

The Forty-Sixer had come to my Emergency Room to confess; or to get help, if it was not too late for help. “What did you do?” I asked .

“I didn’t know what to do. I don’t believe in killing, least of all my own son, but everything in me said to kill him. I don’t believe in God, at least not in the usual way, but when God tells you to do something, you have to listen.”

“If you don’t believe in God in the usual way, what is your way?”

“Preachers are always trying to get me and God shut up in a building somewhere. I don’t think He likes it any better than I do because I never find Him there. He always escapes and heads to the mountains where I catch up to Him. That’s where I find Him and believe in Him. But it’s not belief in the usual sense, like I agree to certain declarations. It’s not like that at all.”

“What’s it like?”

“If I tried to explain, it would ruin it.”

“OK,” he continued, “It’s like walking. When you walk, you start off by standing upright and then you throw yourself off balance and stick your foot out at the last second to stop yourself from falling. Then you bring the other foot up and come back into balance. Repeat the process and you propel yourself forward. That’s walking. If you do it in the woods, it’s hiking, if you do it up a mountain, you’re climbing; but it’s all walking, basically.”

“I never thought of it like that, but what’s your point?”

“Walking’s an ordinary thing, but if you really consider what you’re doing, throwing yourself off balance like that, you might never do it. If you tried to teach someone to walk, who knew nothing about walking, by explaining it to them, they’d say, what are you, nuts? I’ll fall on my face.”

“I don’t get how walking is like the way you believe in God.”

“I believe in Him as long as I don’t think about it too much. When I’m on the trail, my legs are working, I’m breathing hard, I’m watching my footing, I’m heading to the top of a peak; I have a goal in mind, but I’m OK where I am. All is right with the world. I fit in, everything fits together as it should, and everything is right.”

“Then your son comes along and ruins it.”

“Yes, I never should’ve invited him. I should have kept his world and my world separate. He wasn’t a good guest. When you’re a guest in a different world you have to respect their ways and take your shoes off at the door.”

“It didn’t sound like he even knew he was in a different world.”

The Forty-Sixer took off his 46 cap and scratched his head. The plastic hospital bracelet dangled from his sinewy wrist. His tanned face, incongruous in a hospital gown, his healthy body, absurdly perched on the gurney; this outdoorsman was too vigorous to be locked up in a psych ward. This awkward visitor clashed with the hospital’s world as badly as his son had clashed with his.

“I don’t understand how he could fail to see he was in a different world once we got above the tree line.”

“What’s so different above the tree line?”

The Forty-Sixer looked at me with a mixture of pity and wonder; as if he said he had never tasted sweet corn, or had sex, or seen a sunset, or heard jazz.

“Everything is different above the tree line.”

Above the Tree Line

“Everything is different above the tree line,” repeated the Forty-Sixer, sitting on the hospital bed. “It’s like the mountains are so high, the tops are no longer part of this world; they begin to be part of the next.”

The man was beginning to sound more like a psych patient, the kind who’s not content to let the ineffable be and tries to eff it up with words.

At the tree line, a marshal, clothed in a polyester jacket that the wind got in, had blown up to twice the size of a normal human being. Stern instructions of some kind came from within the deep crevasse of his hood. An unruly gust snatched away his words, but the Forty-Sixer knew what they were and repeated them for his son. Stay on the marked trail and don’t disturb the fragile plants.

No trees grow above the tree line, as the name suggests, nothing but delicate moss and lichens. A constant gale, blowing in from the west, unimpeded by anything since the Rockies, twisted the stunted trees at the edge. Here the climbers fought against the wind as much as the incline, which pitched steeper in the fourth mile of trail. It was all ledges and crags, dictating that they crawl like apes or scuttle like crabs up the perpendiculars. Although the rock was split, affording kind footholds, these were all coated by a spiteful sheen of ice. Dabs of paint and heaps of stones, enameled by the ice, marked the trail like ancient hieroglyphics or mysterious monuments. It had begun to snow, but the downy flakes had been transformed into Ninja stars that obliged them to squint their eyes into slits.

They stopped for a rest at a rock face. Sipping a water bottle, the Forty-Sixer heard his boy yell, “Did you bring a flag?”

“A flag?” he shouted back. “Why would I bring a flag?”

“To put on top of the mountain,” he pantomimed.

The father gave a dismissive wave of his hand. A Forty-Sixer, he had climbed all forty-six Adirondack peaks over four thousand feet, a few of them, including Algonquin, several times. No, he didn’t bring a flag.

“What do we do when we get there?” shouted the son.

“You’ll know what to do,” he said as he clipped the water bottle to his pack and began again to climb. His son started after him.

No, he hadn’t brought a flag. He had no need to flaunt his accomplishment beyond what was done by wearing his cap. Nor did he presume to claim the peak as his own. Above the tree line belongs to no one. What he did bring was a kite.

The Forty-Sixer had developed a tradition of his own. Whenever he summited a mountain, he would take his kite out of his pack, assemble it in the lee of some rocks, and fly it in the high wind. To him, it better expressed the joy of reaching the summit and announced his accomplishment. He liked to think that having climbed as high as the earth allowed him, he reached further still. He would play out the line till it reached the very end, the kite so high that it was a bare speck against the sky, then he would sadly reel it back in, having arrived at the limit beyond which he could not go.

“You rarely can see the peak of a mountain as you climb,” he told me. “You have to trust that it’s there and you’ll at last arrive if you climb far enough. On that final fourth mile of trail up Algonquin, you think you might be just about at the peak several times before you are. Then, at last, you clamber up a rock and stand and find that you can climb no more because there’s nowhere else to climb.”

When the Forty-Sixer reached the top, he looked down for his son, but the son had summited before him.

“How d’you get here before me?” he yelled.

The boy laughed, “Beat you to the top, Dad. You’re not such a great mountain man after all.”

“How d’you get here?”

“I found a better way.”

“You’re supposed to stay on the path,”

“That marshal dude can’t see me.”

“We’re supposed to protect the environment.”

“Hey, man, it’s all right, I didn’t break anything.”

Furious, the Forty-Sixer pushed his son.

“Hey, Dad, chill out.”

He pushed him again until the boy slipped on the ice and began to slide off the peak. Reflexively, the Forty-Sixer caught the boy by the hand and held him from sliding further.

“Pull me up, Dad, I’m slipping,” called the boy. As well he should. He was at the edge of a precipice. If he slipped more, he would fall to his death.

The forty-five other Adirondack peaks over four thousand feet stood silently around the two men atop Algonquin. They were ready to sit in judgment over the choice the Forty-Sixer would make.

“Let him go,” said the voice in his head. “Let him go.”

The Kite

Someone at a booth raised his cup to get the waitress’ attention. An old couple stood by the cash register to pay, but she was hanging on to hear the end of my story.

“I was holding on to my son by one hand,” the Forty-Sixer had said. “His feet were dangling over the drop and his free hand was clawing for a hold on the ice. His life was literally in my hand and I had this voice in my head that said let him go.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“You know, time slowed down. It felt like it was an hour, but it couldn’t have been. It had to have all been over within a second or two.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“I was certain that this was God telling me to do this, but I was trying to reconcile the voice in my head with everything I knew or was told about God. It wasn’t fitting together too well until I had it all aligned right. Then everything made sense, I knew why He was telling me to let my son go and what He meant by it.”

“So, you let him go?”

The Forty-Sixer stopped and, for the first time, looked at me and then around at the room. The room was not much to look at: a hospital bed, a table on wheels, a camera in the corner at the ceiling that fed into the security office, and a plastic chair upon which I uncomfortably sat. It was too small for me; my butt spilled over. I’m not much to look at, although there is a lot of me. I had a notebook in which I normally jot things down, but I hadn’t written anything. I would have no trouble remembering. I may have had an expectant look on my face from which I banished eagerness and condemnation.

I tried to assure the patient, “Before you go on, you should know that I have no interest in prosecuting a crime, if a crime has been committed. If you were to tell me that you let go of your son when you could have saved him, that information will be confidential. My only concern here is seeing that you get the treatment you need, if you need any. I am only obligated to report crimes that you might be planning or threatening to commit.”

Of course, I would later encourage him to confess to the authorities and claim it would facilitate healing and the taking of responsibility. But I chose not to mention that right away.

“Did you let him go?” I pressed.

“Well, yes and no.”

Things are very different above the tree line, explained the Forty-Sixer. The weather is different, the topography is different, you can see further; moreover, the thoughts that you have down on earth are very different when you reach up to heaven. You see things in a new light. Concepts and commandments take on new meaning.

“It occurred to me what the voice meant when it said to kill him, to sacrifice him, to let him go. It meant something very different when I was above the tree line.”

“What did it mean?”

“I decided that the best way to let him go was to pull him up and just — let him live his own life. To sacrifice him, to kill him meant to end my expectation that he would be just like me.”

“So, your son is still alive? He came down with you off that mountain?”

“Yeah, I pulled him up and said I was sorry for pushing him.”

They hugged on the mountaintop till he felt his son’s trembling stop. It was all very confusing, but somehow made sense to him in the rarefied air at that altitude. Let him go by not letting go. Kill him by letting him live. Sacrifice him by hugging him on the mountaintop.

The Forty-Sixer went on to explain that it’s a father’s job to make himself dispensable, to work himself out of a job in his child’s life. Mothers have got to do it, too, but it’s the father who leads the way.

When the boy stopped shaking, the two did their own things. The son took out his cell phone and went on about the great reception; how many bars he had. The Forty-Sixer only felt a little anger at this, just a portion of what he had felt before. Mostly he just rolled his eyes. He took the kite out of his pack and assembled it in the lee of some rocks. The wind pulled it away and it flew.

The Forty-Sixer played out the kite string to the very end. He held it between two fingers. He felt the tug of the kite, eager to go higher. Then, instead of sadly reeling it back in, as he had always done, he let it go. It flew on, above the forty-six Adirondack peaks over four thousand feet, until it was out of sight.

“Why did you come to the hospital?” I asked.

“I wanted you to tell me, am I crazy?”