by By Laura Waterman
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005
In February 2000, noted climber and writer Guy Waterman ascended to the summit of Mount Lafayette to freeze to death, deliberately.
Laura Waterman’s new book, Losing the Garden, places the stark incident of her husband’s death in the larger, more intricate setting of his life and their more than 30 years together. Even given the intrinsic drama of Guy Waterman’s end, this is a book of survival and continuance, as Laura Waterman demonstrates the resourcefulness, probing honesty, and literary gracefulness that have given her a renewed understanding of life’s possibilities beyond the devastation of a loved one’s suicide.
In addition to the enormous difficulties confronting any writer who seeks to chronicle the complications of her own personal and family life, especially in the wake of a disaster, Laura Waterman had a sprawling bundle of subjects, all potentially important. Devising a form for this story must have been very challenging.
She and Guy Waterman left New York City in the early 1970s, part of a wave of seekers for authenticity and a new connection with nature and traditional ways. In marrying Guy, she had also joined his existing family, including three sons from a previous marriage, two of whom later died tragically. Also, she was the daughter of one of America’s most influential literary scholars, Thomas H. Johnson, a man who suffered the ravages of alcoholism.
As she has described in interviews, Laura Waterman had to find a form and sequence for her story. And she had to cease thinking of herself continually as a “we” – one portion of the organism “Guy and Laura” – in order to discover her own existence as an “I.” She chose to begin the book with a tender evocation of Guy’s final breakfast at home before he set off for his long-pondered appointment with death. Rather than saving this incident for the book’s climax, which would have been a much more melodramatic option, with characteristic forthrightness Laura Waterman attends to one of the book’s most difficult episodes straight away.
Without presuming to be able to answer, Laura Waterman poses there at the outset these riddles for herself and her readers: how could a man who excelled in so many ways – as climber, author, gardener, jazz pianist – suffer so long from depression in secrecy? And how could she fail to resist, and in some ways even aid in, her husband’s plan to commit suicide?
While readers may come to this book from a number of directions, drawn by its vivid and entertaining accounts of rock-climbing and homesteading or by its searching candor about the experience of living with relatives who are plagued by depression or alcoholism, ultimately what all of us will find here is a revelation of love’s stamina and resilience, described with the vividness and beguiling inventiveness of a lifelong reader who has truly found her own voice.
Likely to be particularly fascinating to readers of this magazine are the book’s often delightful accounts of the Watermans’ life in the woods, the seasonal round of building projects, sugaring, gardening, and co-authoring wonderful books about hiking and wilderness ethics. Here were two citified professionals whose experiences with “roughing it” were their weekend jaunts for upcountry camping and rock-climbing. They succeeded in figuring out how to keep themselves warm and well fed for three decades, without a driveway or electricity but with a splendid library, irrepressible sense of whimsy, and well-seasoned reverence for the natural world.
When one finishes reading this complex and lovely story, the title Losing the Garden seems misplaced in its emphasis, offering the wrong impression of Laura Waterman’s remarkable achievement. Like the treasured books the Watermans read aloud every evening for solace, instruction, and delight, through times of enchantment and times of great pain, here is book that proves again that whatever life’s catastrophes, the garden surrounds us.