The Last Season (7 page)

Bill Taylor thought that with the threat of a draft, Randy was crazy even to consider not going back to school. Full-time students were eligible for deferment, a no-brainer to Bill. Dana expressed his concerns as well.

If Randy went back to school in the fall and spring, he could come back to the high country the following summer. That wouldn't be an option if he were to be drafted. He agreed to think about it.

Back in Yosemite, Dana confided his concerns to Randy's friend Nancy Williams, a young woman who worked with Dana in the Curry Company's accounting department. Dana expressed to her his disappointment in Randy for not continuing his education and his worry that he was exposing himself to the draft. But Nancy understood that “Randy was answering a higher calling.” She describes it as an irresistible pull, like Jack London's “call of the wild.” “I think Randy had a distinct purpose in life,” Williams says, “and back then, he wasn't exactly sure what that purpose was. He just followed his heart, which wasn't in the classroom. The
mountains
were his classroom.”

Such idealistic reasoning provided Dana and Esther little respite from their worries. War, they knew, was not their son's calling—he wasn't programmed for it. Before he'd left for the mountains, they had urged him to continue with his education. In the mountains, Randy
reasoned, that was exactly what he was doing. When he wasn't writing in his logbook or practicing with the camera Ansel Adams had given him, he was memorizing the backcountry management plan.

As summer edged toward fall, Randy made it a point to speak with everybody he encountered. His knowledge and charm led people to invite him for dinner at their camps, and he reciprocated by inviting backpackers into his tiny yet cozy cabin for tea when a rainstorm passed overhead. Despite his comfort with solitude, he was extremely social and could dive into conversation and not come up for air for hours. On one long patrol to Upper Basin, he met a man and his daughter atop Pinchot Pass and spent some time with them, chatting about the Sierra. Afterward, Randy turned to hike down into Marjorie Lake Basin, toward Bench Lake. The father, obviously impressed by the young ranger, told him, “I hope this is your career—we need you.”

“I was pleased,” wrote Randy in his logbook, “that he felt I was a credit to the service.”

 

FOR WHATEVER REASON
—to avoid the war or to please his parents—Randy was back at Arizona State College in Flagstaff the following fall. He carried with him the memories of an enchanted summer, and a folder that bore the quote:

Perhaps it was a tribute to Zahniser, a former executive director of The Wilderness Society, as well as the author of the Wilderness Act. He had died four months before President Johnson signed the act into law on September 3, 1964. Or maybe it just kept Randy's mind in the right place as he studied cultural linguistics, religious philoso
phies, and Asian cultures and philosophy, all classes that played into his longstanding dream of visiting the tallest mountains in the world: the Himalayas.

Not unlike the military, the Peace Corps used romantic photographs of exotic locales to entice potential volunteers and recruits. Such photos of Asia, and in particular the Himalayas, struck a chord when Randy happened by a Peace Corps booth at his school, where, as in many other college towns and campuses, Peace Corps recruiters shared the sidewalks with Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine recruiters. In 1966, the Peace Corps was considered either an honorable exemption from the draft or, as Richard Nixon put it, a “haven for draft dodgers.” The crowds gathered around the Peace Corps recruiters told the story of that era.

As with many things in his life, Randy didn't consider being drawn to the Peace Corps to be merely a chance encounter. He filled out an application, requesting Asia as his top choice. There were no guarantees, but he made it clear that the Himalaya region was his dream assignment—another beckoning doorway that seemed to be leading him down a specific path in life.

“The master intended for me a life in the wilderness, a life of awareness and discovery of the forces of nature and humanity. A life…that carries me toward more entire manhood, and perhaps one that brings some of this into the rest of the world, counterbalancing some of the forces that presently carry us along.”

Randy wrote this in a letter to his parents while looking out from the terrace of the mud house he had been assigned in the village of Golapangri, in the Maharashtra region of India. It had been more than a year since the Peace Corps acceptance letter was delivered to him by mule at the Charlotte Lake station during his second year as a backcountry ranger. His journey from that point forward continued like a fable.

 

RANDY HAD BARELY STRAYED
from Yosemite's granite womb when he boarded a jet and set out on a pilgrimage to the abode of the gods, the
land of the Sherpa who climbed the mountains of the Himalayas with reverence and awe. To gaze upon those majestic peaks and walk even in their shadows was the ultimate treasure he sought when he joined the Peace Corps. Any assignment, he felt, would be worth the reward.

For two years he lived in a small village nearly 2,000 miles from the mountains of his dreams. His vistas were dry and dusty farmland, void of anything green, and flat for as far as the eye could see. The Himalayas were “over there” somewhere beyond the horizon, where the sweltering 115-degree heat distorted the view. He would awaken each morning and watch the village come to life: women bringing the day's water home from a central well with jugs balanced on their heads, bullock carts bouncing off toward the fields, smoke from cook fires, and neighbors chatting over mud walls. “It seemed a thousand or two thousand years ago,” he wrote. Everything was exotic, from the colorful open-air markets, always with Indian music blaring “to the point of distortion” from unseen speakers, to the slow, rural pace.

While Randy taught the farmers “Western” agriculture techniques, the Indians taught him their religion. He came to understand the prayer rituals at the village temple, the daily offerings at family shrines, the deities—more so, he thought, than he might have learned had he stayed at the university his parents wished him to attend.

One day, Randy's Indian friend Limbaji explained how everybody in the village thought he was a Christian. Randy, who had erected a Christmas tree that December in his mud home, replied that he did not consider himself a Christian.

However: “Your people are Hindu, my people are Christian; you are an Indian, I am an American; your skin is dark, my skin is white,” he said. He held his pale arm against Limbaji's dark skin. “What is the difference?” asked Randy. “There is no difference—we are the same.”

At this, Limbaji grinned widely and reached for a stone. “But this is what different religions mean,” he said, placing the stone on the ground. “God is for all men, he is always the same. There is only one. And all men finally go to the same God.” He drew lines toward the stone in the dust. “But there are different roads.”

From the dry seasons to the monsoons, Randy put his 720 hours of training to the test as one of fifty individuals in the Peace Corps India Food Production Project. By the end of two years, Randy and the other volunteers had shown the Indian farmers how to double, sometimes triple, the yields of their crops. It seemed they had, after many roadblocks, succeeded in their quest. Not long before Randy left, he asked one of the farmers whom he'd worked especially closely with if he intended to continue farming the land as he had been taught.

The farmer, with a cheery disposition, said no, they wouldn't. Once the volunteers left, he explained, most of the farmers would go back to their old ways.

Randy couldn't believe his ears. “Why?” he asked.

“Because,” said the farmer, “that is how you farm in America. This is how we farm in India.”

Dumbfounded, Randy packed his bags and traveled down the roads of Eastern religions in Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, China, and Japan. In the religious melting pot of Kathmandu, he began to favor aspects of both Hinduism and Buddhism. In Bangkok, he explored hedonism; it had been a long time since he'd been in the company of a woman. In Japan he was drawn to the meditative contemplations of Zen. But it was in the Himalayas that he experienced his greatest pleasures and felt most at home.

Randy enrolled in a monthlong guide school taught by Sherpas to learn technical mountaineering skills and expedition planning. When he completed the course, the school's head instructor, Wangdhi Sherpa, wrote a letter of recommendation in broken English, stating that Randy Morgenson “is keenly interested in the mountaineering and he has proved that his climbing tactics in rock and high altitude during the course. He is very cheerful all the time and good discipline among the peoples. We have no doubt he is a good mountaineering in the future.”

Within weeks of finishing the course, Randy organized his own expedition to climb Hanuman Tibba, a 19,450-foot peak named after a Hindu god. It was reportedly only the third or fourth ascent (there
was some dispute about one of the claims), which was an attraction, but first and foremost, the mountain was beautiful. He hired a high-altitude porter and two Sherpa guides, and climbed successively for eight days to establish a high camp. He experienced near-vertical slopes where the front-points of his crampons were all that were in contact with the mountain and there was nothing but air beneath his heels; he felt the sickening sensation of dropping suddenly as a snow bridge settled while he crossed a crevasse; and he understood the satisfying “thunk” an ice ax makes when it is placed solidly in “good snow.” He learned to breathe and walk at altitude, to build anchors in the snow and rocks, and to work as a rope team in dangerous terrain and playfully torment his rope mates in safe terrain. He came to appreciate “bed tea” served by the Sherpas, and made it a point to awaken early one morning in order to return the favor to his bewildered crew, who had never been served tea by a Westerner, especially a Westerner paying for their services.

Randy summited the peak at 9:15
A.M.
in June 1969 after a 3:30
A.M.
start. The view was completely obscured by clouds.

Since he had first read about the Himalayas, “I've wanted to enter this world,” Randy wrote his parents, “to live some time among the higher peaks, surrounded by ice and snow and deep blue sky only…a silent world. An intense world.” He continued to trek through the Himalayas, visiting Everest's base camp and climbing a handful of peaks that approached 20,000 feet, always with just a few porters and Sherpas, for all of whom Randy prepared and served tea as a sign of respect.

“Now I've really become expedition minded,” he wrote his parents. “I have thoughts about doing this sort of mountaineering again, beginning with winter mountaineering in the Sierra, and including vague intentions of returning to the Himalaya. Oh there are so many mountains: Alaska, the Andes, the Rockies, and Cascades, and yes, even the Alps. And such a late start I am getting.

“How wonderful to wander among virgin hills! I suppose whiteness is a symbol of purity (skin color being an exception) and how pure I
found that world. As you've heard me say many times, the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing. They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru. If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.”

After three and a half years, Randy flew home. During the drive from the San Francisco airport, he was blessed with a clear day, able to look east toward the white-tipped spires of “his” mountains—the same “snowy saw-teeth” of the Sierra Nevada that captivated Spanish explorers when they sailed into San Francisco Bay in the mid-1500s. As he drew closer, he felt in his heart the pull of the high country. And so the moral of his fabled travels read like Santiago's, the boy in Paulo Coelho's
The Alchemist
: Randy had traveled around the world in search of treasure and came home to find it in his own backyard.

He placed the cherished letter from Wangdhi Sherpa into a box and filed his memories neatly, as one does with memories from great journeys. And then he made the telephone call to his old boss at Sequoia and Kings Canyon and held his breath after inquiring whether there was still room on his backcountry ranger staff.

“When can you start?” asked the district ranger.

 

AFTER HIS SABBATICAL
overseas, Randy, at age 28, was assigned to deep, dark LeConte Canyon, where every day he awoke and looked to the sky, usually from his sleeping bag, beyond the tops of the lodgepole and white-bark pine to the granite spire of Mount Langile. As guardian of LeConte Canyon, Langile was first to feel the warmth of the sun each morning and last to bathe in its glory from the west come sunset. Randy tuned in to these and other cycles, noting that after the third week in July, the hermit thrush often stopped singing; that here in the canyon's bottom the robin's song was heard, but above 10,000 feet it scarcely, if ever, used its voice.

His job hadn't changed since 1966; neither had the physical attributes of the high country. But the spirituality of the place had shifted noticeably since his travels in the East. LeConte Canyon was no longer just a wooded canyon with sheer walls and a melodic rushing river. It
was a massive meditation garden, the antithesis of the “superorderly” domesticated Japanese gardens that were “clipped, trimmed, and cleaned” to the point of sterility. In Kyoto, Randy had watched temple gardeners sweeping the dirt beneath trees. “No sooner does a leaf fall,” wrote Randy in his diary, “than it is swept away and burned.”

Randy preferred what he described as the “shaggy wildness of nature untended.” He was “nourished” by the chaotic glacial rubble of the Sierra, where rotting tree bark and fallen pine needles obscured the lesser-traveled footpaths. There were no bonsai gardeners sculpting their human vision. Instead, there was the unpredictable, gusting winds that pummeled altitude-stunted pines to the finest artistic expression.