A Requiem

An old friend of mine was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in the fall of 2021.  Normally, this is a fairly quick and immediate death sentence.  He lived way longer than they expected him to.  

I went to see him a week, maybe a week and a half before he passed just last month.  He was so thin…I said, You know, usually I say that they take the good ones way too soon.  Us A-holes live forever.  But you’re wrecking my dataset.  

When the writing is on the wall, a good laugh with an old friend counts for something.

❄️ Fate whispers to the Hunter, You cannot withstand the storm.

❄️ The Hunter whispers back, I am the storm.

I replace 'Warrior' with 'Hunter' because I knew him to be one.  I once wrote on an avalanche forecast, “I’d call it LOW danger but I know Old What's His Name will be out there prowling around.”  He triggered a wind pocket in some odd terrain feature of Mineral Fork that afternoon.  

The thing I loved best about him was his absolute and wide-eyed capital 'C' Curiosity.  There was a time he was skiing UFO Bowl 2 with Craig Patterson.  It’s a long run and hard to keep eyes on your partner.  He told Patterson, “Give me 45 seconds and then come on.”  Near the bottom of the run, he triggered a little soft slab pocket on surface hoar and stopped to take a look.  He just couldn’t not look.  Meanwhile, those 45 seconds are up and here comes Patterson, who triggers a small pocket of his own, but to our protagonist, looking up at the freight train, it was something else.  It washed over him and blew out his knee.  

Another time, he and I were skinning up a long steep southeast facing path on a LOW danger day in the south fork.  It has a subtle nose that separates two paths in the middle.  We were 100’ from the top when we started triggering long dominoes of thunderous collapses in the snowpack. Bill was 40’ across from me, with a question.  It wasn’t What the f*ck are we doing here; it was Which way do you want to go when this thing shatters?  

Our relationship became complicated and strained when he became head of an avalanche program.  I felt he had lost his curiosity about things…and I missed my friend.  When he ultimately lost that job, we started skiing again but by this time his diagnosis was known. 

What I appreciate is that he refused to be a victim in his long professional arc after he had crashed back into the earth.  There was no Phoenix Rising but he just channeled his energy into different things.  He said his proudest thing was being a father to his 12yo daughter.  

This last winter, he was fast on the uptrack and we debated and looked for the presence of beautiful weaknesses in the snowpack.  He was as curious as ever.  

If he had any curiosity about the afterlife, he never let on. I do know that he had a great certainty on how to live this very short life.