Laura Waterman is a rock climber, an advocate for wild places, and a writer. She founded The Waterman Fund, after losing her husband, writer and mountaineer Guy Waterman, to continue their mission of conserving and stewarding alpine areas of the Northeast. The Waterman Fund provides grants that support ecological research, trail rehabilitation and maintenance, and education. Laura and Guy were foundational in cultivating a stewardship ethic in the mountains and authored several books on the subject together. Laura lives in East Corinth, Vermont, where she continues to write.
I grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. My dad was chairman of the English department at the Lawrenceville School, a prep school, and we lived on a dead-end street. When I was growing up during the late ’40s and early ’50s, we never thought of staying in the house. And there were no restrictions on kids, so we could go anywhere. There were kids on my street, and we’d climb trees and play in the brook, and looking back on it, it was kind of an ideal of childhood experience. We had a camp up in the woods in Wilmington, Vermont. It took me years to really see how formative that was. We didn’t have close neighbors there, so my brother and I were on our own. There was a lake across the dirt road, and we had a rowboat there, so we were always getting up to something.
When I got to Hollins College in Virginia, I basically had no choice in a major, because I was really only good at one thing: English. I come from an academic family, and my dad was an English teacher, so that’s what I majored in. I wasn’t into real writing then though, I was just focused on reading and writing term papers. I graduated in 1962 and moved to New York City. The choices women had then where you could get married – and many did – or you could work either as a librarian, a teacher, or in publishing. The last was the only one that interested me, and I did it for 10 years. I worked for a number of different book publishers, and it was great. It was kind of a golden time then, before computers. We had two-hour long lunches if we wanted. I don’t recall ever taking work home.
Still, I was starting to burn out and the editorial office I was in was shutting down, so I decided to take six months off. I had heard that people traveled by freighter sometimes and thought it sounded like an interesting thing to do. I was looking for something different. I ended up on a Greek freighter – Greek sailors, Greek food – and the journey took us through the Strait of Gibraltar and along the north shore of Africa, with stops at various ports up into the Black Sea. The trip was about six weeks, and then I stayed in Europe for about another month. I met a woman on the freighter who was studying opera, and we had some adventures together. I met a friend from college there, and we went hiking in the Bavarian Alps, which was crazy because I knew basically zero about hiking. I had the worst case of blisters I’ve ever had, and I just put band aids on and kept walking.
Before I had left on the trip, I had lined up a job back in the city, but when I came back, I was feeling even more disengaged. I was offered a couple of jobs, but I knew if I took them, I would quit. I just didn’t have it in me anymore. One day, I was visiting Camp & Trail Outfitters, which was just about the only camping store in New York, and one of the sales guys told me someone came in talking about starting a backpacking magazine. He said he was upstairs looking at tents, and that I should talk to him. So, I did. His name was Bill Kemsley, and he founded Backpacker magazine. I ended up working for him, as basically his first employee.
I was still looking for ways out of the city, and people mentioned the Appalachian Mountain Club to me. I got their calendar of events and saw that they had rock climbing in the Shawangunks. Somehow, I knew that’s what I was interested in even though I barely knew what it was. I wanted to climb bigger mountains, any mountains. I made the phone call to attend that beginner’s weekend, and it was life changing.
I went climbing in the fall of 1969 for the first time, and that was that. I met Guy that weekend, too – he was in the process of getting a divorce, and I found out later that he had promised himself he wouldn’t start a relationship until he was more settled. He was going snowshoeing in the Adirondacks every weekend that winter and had the goal of climbing all the 4,000-footers in winter. I had torn my Achilles tendon skiing that winter, but I came up to the Gunks in April, at the beginning of the climbing season, on my crutches. I just wanted to be around climbers and climbing. Guy was in charge of the beginners, so he wasn’t climbing much, and we began to talk – not about anything in particular. That was the beginning of it. He was living in Marlborough, New York, at the time, and he was set on making a big life change. He wanted to leave New York and leave his speech writing job at General Electric. We were both at transition points and spending all our time together.
I think that because rock climbing is so good, and you enjoy it so much, it really makes you see the areas of your life that are not so good and gives you the courage to think about it and do something about it. You’re doing something that’s hard physically, and the better you get at it, the more addicting it becomes. It’s funny, I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do. I didn’t really have anything that I wanted to do, other than what I was doing right then. Guy was serious about the move, about homesteading and using writing as a “cash crop,” so to speak, and I thought it sounded pretty great. We read Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, which was very influential. We used it basically as a textbook. So that summer of 1971, we hiked in the White Mountains in New Hampshire and looked for land. We ended up in East Corinth, Vermont – between the Whites and the Greens.
We lived on 27 acres, without electricity, and hauled water up from a little stream and grew much of our own food. We had a huge garden and a root cellar, and really only bought things like butter, powdered milk, and toilet paper. We’d collect four cords of firewood for sugaring and four cords for heating the house. Sugaring was our favorite thing, and if I miss anything now, it would be that. We did it with buckets and an open fire. It was extremely inefficient, but we loved it.
It was around then, in the early ’70s, that rock climbers began to see that we were damaging the rock. Pounding in the pitons, which we were using then, or really taking them out, was eroding the cracks. It was destructive. John Stannard, a climber, took initiative and he began giving out pitons that he made – ones that you could pound in and leave. We climbed on private property, at the Mohonk Preserve. It’s about 6,000 acres and some of the best climbing in the east, owned by the Smiley family.
It was through Dan Smiley that we first heard the word “stewardship” and we climbers took it seriously. I mean, we loved the rock. That was the transition from being casual in the outdoors, of not thinking about what we were stepping on, where we might build a fire or wash dishes in a stream. We were fortunate to be there right at the start of thinking like this and be able to influence it. We were members of the Appalachian Mountain Club, and Guy was on the huts committee for 3 or 4 years. We began maintaining the Franconia Ridge trail in New Hampshire in 1980. We did a lot of trail work and stewardship over the next 15 years.
Writing together was part of Guy’s vision, and we ended up writing a monthly column on hiking and camping for New England Outdoors. It was all about stewardship, and lightening our impact. It lasted for 5 years, and it was really great doing that column. It’s funny to think now: it was cutting edge, I mean, it was the beginning of people really talking about stewardship. Two of our books, Wilderness Ethics and Backwoods Ethics (now called the The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping), came out of those columns.
In hindsight, I felt like I first really became a contributor when I wrote two columns back-to-back on winter hiking, and it was really about my experience. I liked that memoir style and it’s what I do best, although I did write a novel, called Starvation Shore about an American expedition to the far north. That came out in 2019, and I’m working on another novel now, about the opera singer, Maria Callas. Sometimes people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that, because it’s different from other things I’ve done. But I grew up listening to opera. Callas was one of the greatest singers, not because of her voice, but because of her ability to take you into the heart of the character. I’ve done a lot of writing in recent years, and it sort of amazes me, actually. It wasn’t that long ago that I first thought, “Oh, have I become a writer?” Sometimes I feel like one, but most of the time I don’t.
The Waterman Fund came about right after Guy’s death, within a couple weeks. Guy was very discouraged about our stewardship ethics books and felt that they hadn’t made the difference that he had hoped they would. It really affected him. Two of our young friends, Sarah Heidenreich and Eddie Walsh, knew this and came to talk to me right after he died, and said, “Your books really changed our lives, and we don’t know how Guy could have felt that they had no impact.” We talked about Franconia Ridge, too, and all the work we had done talking to people. Guy was an expert at it. I remember one time we were out doing trail work with our group – we called ourselves the West End Trail Tenders – and we were on Lafayette, headed over to North Lafayette, when we saw a tent above treeline. We noticed the people were in the middle of having breakfast right on top of the plants! I don’t know how Guy did it – he had kind of a magic touch – but he went right over and asked them about their night, started talking about how it was illegal to camp there and telling them about how the tundra plants can be crushed by boots. “Let’s take your tent down by only stepping on rocks,” Guy said. He got them laughing and hopping from rock to rock. They got engaged with the idea. It was amazing!
This conversation after his death planted the seed, and we thought, “We have to keep this going.” It happened quickly: we got a group together to serve as the board, and now it’s somehow 25 years later. I don’t work as hard as I used to. We’ve always had great boards. We’ve given out a number of grants to organizations like the Green Mountain Club, the Forest Service, UVM, Antioch, and others. It’s really positive. And it’s really educating for the benefit of the plants and the people. There is a need for it, and it’s as simple as that.