From Here to Eternity

Farther on, the tundra petered out in an acreage of boulders, where the way forward became a matter of hopping from one huge rock to the next. This area is called (no surprise) the Boulder Field, and years ago, a stone cabin stood here, a way station for tourists and their guides to rest overnight before setting off for the summit. The lodge is long gone, but the Boulder Field remains popular with campers who want to break the climb in two. Low walls of piled rocks, used as windbreaks, gave the campground the feel of a Stone Age village and hinted at the misery of a gale-swept night on the mountain.

We were now on the north slope of Longs Peak, more than five miles and 3,300 vertical feet from our beginning. For the past hour, Mount Lady Washington had obstructed our view of the goal, but in the Boulder Field, we could see the wide summit thrown up into space, then halved as if by some terrible cleaver. In a patch of perpetual shade, a band of dirty year-round snow adorned the fat middle of the bare mountain like a sash on a sumo wrestler.

A couple of climbers struck out straight ahead toward the peak, but that route required skill and ropes, so we continued on the circular path up a river of rocks toward a distinctive gap in the ridge called the Keyhole.

The path turned suddenly steep.

By late autumn of 2004, Marilyn's health was collapsing. Her joints were nothing but pain, and her pain medications seemed to be doing more harm than good. Her circulation was terrible. Doctors warned of congestive heart failure. She was losing what little mobility she had. The indignity of it all was demoralizing to Marilyn, and the job of helping her was grinding Jay down. Shortly before Christmas, they decided she must move to a nursing home.

Her whole family gathered in Colorado for the holiday in a grim commemoration of the circle of life: her five children, their three spouses, 11 grandchildren. Marilyn visited from the nursing home, pale and breathing from an oxygen tube. I found myself wondering how long she would keep going. Her brains and wit -- sharp as ever -- could do her little good in the current crisis. The only way she might dodge death was to get up out of bed and start exercising, no matter how much it hurt.

As the new year began, I braced myself for the phone call I imagined was coming soon, the one that would break my wife's heart. Instead, to my amazement, Marilyn threw herself into physical therapy, dragging herself up from the bed and inching across the floor on ruined legs with such fortitude that she was soon able to return home.

The Keyhole is an unlikely calamity, a nearly complete circle gouged in the northern shoulder of Longs Peak. Stone fingers almost close overhead as hikers cross the ridgeline. The spot is so picturesque, and marks such a dramatic turn in the Longs Peak trail, that I found myself thinking it might have been fabricated on a Disney World back lot.

But an even stranger feature at this turning point reminded me of the hard reality of this great mountain. A stone hut, about eight feet high and eight feet across, shaped like a beehive, was mortared into the steep terrain a few yards below the Keyhole. A bronze plaque explained that the shelter is dedicated to Agnes Wolcott Vaille, the intrepid daughter of a wealthy Denver businessman. A skilled climber, she set out in January 1925 to make a winter climb of the perilous East Face with a Swiss mountain guide named Walter Kiener.

Deep snow slowed their hike to the mountain, and they were still climbing when night fell. They felt their way upward through the darkness. As Dougald MacDonald, author of a fine book about Longs Peak, tells the story, Kiener's thermometer read 14-below near the summit. Vaille was so exhausted she could barely take a step, and a fresh storm moved over the Peak.

Climbers have a saying: You're not done until you're down. Vaille and Kiener crossed the summit to descend the North Face to the Boulder Field, but when they came to an almost vertical pitch, Vaille slipped and tumbled 150 feet into a snowdrift. Kiener dragged her to her feet, and she staggered a little farther, dazed, battered and frozen. She begged Kiener to leave her and go for help; his heroic race down the mountain and back with a rescue crew cost him all his toes and several fingers from frostbite. A would-be rescuer, Herbert Sortland, was lost in the blizzard and froze to death. Agnes Vaille's body was found where Kiener had left her -- within sight of the spot where the hut now stands.

I looked inside. The shelter was as cold and damp as a New England tomb. It struck me as a huge effort, but somehow pointless; after all, what was the chance that someone would make the same mistake in the same place? I was about to say so when a voice behind me remarked: "I know some people who were awful glad it was here when the storm hit yesterday."

Stepping through the Keyhole felt like stepping onto the ledge of a skyscraper. After 41/2 hours of traveling through forests, meadows and broad glacier tracks -- more "Sound of Music" than "Eiger Sanction" -- we found ourselves looking down a precipitous slope into a rocky valley about 1,500 vertical feet beneath us. The abrupt change made the drop look even sharper than it really is. A slip at the wrong moment probably wouldn't mean a quarter-mile fall. You'd bounce to a stop after a few hundred feet.

The view to the west was spectacular. Across a gray valley studded with black lakes, we saw the jagged peaks of the Continental Divide and the Never Summer Range. East of us within 50 miles lived millions of people, but the country to the west could be reached only by the hardiest of them. There wasn't the slightest sign of human existence. It was like looking through a time machine into a world stripped to its prehistoric elements: rock, sky and water. I shivered.

This is a point where many Longs Peak hikers turn back. "Beyond the Keyhole," MacDonald wrote, "Longs is a more serious mountain, unusually difficult and steep for a popular fourteener in Colorado . . . Of the dozens of people killed by falls or exposure on Longs Peak, nearly one-third died not on the technical climbing of the East Face but along the hiking route between the Keyhole and the summit."

One death in particular haunted me: Gregory Koczanski was, like me, a Washingtonian in his 40s, married with young children. He was an important man in town, a lobbyist for the financial giant Citigroup and a member of the Federal City Council. We never met, but we knew some of the same people. In August 1999, shortly after passing the Keyhole, while feeling his way along the narrow path known as the Ledges, Koczanski lost his balance in a sudden gust and plunged 450 feet.

I took a deep breath and started along the path, which is marked at intervals by bull's-eyes painted onto the rock. The Ledges were perhaps three to five feet wide in most places, roomy as a sidewalk, but a sidewalk can be intimidating when death waits just over the curb. We came to a point where an iron handhold was drilled into the wall; we had to grab on, lean out over the abyss and step around an outcropping to go forward. The newspaperman in me thought briefly what a good first sentence could be written on the obit of a man who died on the way to scatter ashes.

This section of trail led slightly upward until it reached the bottom of a long, steep stretch of boulders and scree known as the Trough. We were now above 13,000 feet, where breathing is an ordeal for flatlanders, so the ascent through the Trough was a slow, unhappy slog: two or three steps up, pause to pant, another step or two, another pause. And each step must be chosen with care to avoid sending loose rock cannoning down the chute toward hikers below.

Jim Somerville's superior fitness began to show as he opened a lead of two or three minutes. I found myself glad for all the Metro escalators I had climbed two steps at a time. The Trough seemed to last forever, but after about an hour of steady progress, 10 vertical feet per minute, I caught up to Jim at the tall, slippery stone marking the end of the Trough. Ahead of him were two hikers flummoxed by the smooth block. They couldn't figure out how to climb it -- a reflection of its trickiness, yes, but also of the muddling effects of oxygen depletion. "How are we supposed to get up there?" one of them asked. Jim surveyed the impediment for a moment, then grabbed a tiny handhold with three fingers and pressed the toe of his boot against another rough spot and raised himself high enough to scramble over. I followed, marveling at the fact that serious climbers ascend massive walls with no more purchase than this.

We squeezed through a notch in the cliff at about 13,700 feet and entered a section of trail called the Narrows -- another ledge system, steeper and tighter than the one before. Eyeing these little ledges and the long, long drop, I felt sick but kept moving because I realized that, if I stopped for more than a few seconds, my fear could master me. About two-thirds of the way along the Narrows, we met a hiker who had stopped too long. She was a strong young woman, obviously more than a match for the trail. Nothing ahead of her was any more difficult than the challenges she had already met, but her fears had accumulated until they froze her. She couldn't see how to move forward or back. As she sobbed, her hiking partner tried gently to persuade her to take just one more step.

There was nothing we could do to help, so we edged past and continued around one last left turn, which revealed a stunning view of empty air between us and Pagoda Mountain and, rising above us, a nearly vertical ramp called the Homestretch. The granite of this final test shone golden in the morning sun, striped black where rivulets of ice melt oozed from the cracks and moistened the already slick incline.

The top, about 30 stories up from where we stood, seemed to be pulling us toward it, but earlier Jim had warned us of such moments. "Gravity," he said gravely, "it's not just a good idea. It's the law." I reminded myself of hikers -- such as Boy Scout Robert Silver, a teenager as I was on a June day in 1980 -- who have slipped here, so close to the goal, and died on the rocks 300 feet below. Testing each step, breathing heavily, I moved slowly up the last few feet, popping my head over the rim of the summit at 9:30 a.m.

Marilyn, who had been dying at Christmas, felt so well by autumn that she decided to join Jay on a drive from their home in Loveland, Colo., to the 50th reunion of his Navy shipmates in Branson, Mo. Her recovery had been arduous and impressive, and I give her all the credit. She

didn't have to get up from that nursing home bed and take one more step, or another and another. The pain of rehabilitation was intense, and the payoff -- a few labored steps, at best -- seemed modest. But she did it.

Her doctor wasn't crazy about the idea of her spending several long days in a car, and Jay was inclined to listen to her doctor. Neither man knew, though, how important it was to her to get moving again. She had not struggled up from the bed just to stare out the window. Marilyn overruled them with a pleading determination. She simply had to go.

Marilyn and Jay covered about half the distance on the first day, a long, easy drive, one of those pleasant days when long-married people remember some of the things they love about each other. The next day, they stopped to visit Jay's sister near Kansas City, and that's when Jay noticed what looked like a blood clot behind one of Marilyn's knees. This was precisely the thing her doctor had worried about.

She was admitted that night to a small hospital and dosed with anti-clotting agents. But instead of dissolving, a clot floated free and traveled to her lungs.

It all happened quickly. A sunny phone call announcing that they were making good progress. Then a partly cloudy call reporting that Marilyn was in the hospital but that everything would be fine. Then a more ominous call from Karen's sister, who was on the scene and said Marilyn had worsened and was about to be transferred to a bigger hospital. Karen dialed her father's cellphone and reached him just as he stepped out of Marilyn's room. Her agony was too much to watch. As they talked, Karen overheard a nurse saying that Marilyn couldn't survive without life support. A moment later, Marilyn Ball was dead at 73.

In the days and weeks that followed, I thought a lot about that car trip of hers. Wasn't it foolhardy? What was the point of risking so much? Marilyn stood to lose not just additional days or months of pain, but also days or months of her husband's love and the smiles of her grandchildren. Eventually, I decided that getting in the car wasn't a death wish, but an affirmation of life, which is measurable not only in length but also in depth.

That's what I was thinking up there on top of Longs Peak, among other things. The morning had turned perfect. Not a trace of the pre-dawn thunderheads could be seen. The sky was the color of water just after a child has dipped her blue paintbrush, and the afternoon's weather was still white cotton balls and wisps of cirrus to the west. We were on top of the visible world. We could see more than 100 miles in every direction, line after line of peaks, indigo and snowy, stretching away to the west and south. The Great Plains unrolling forever to the east. And down below us to the north lay the valley where Marilyn had so often sat, tired and crippled, gazing up at her favorite mountain.

The summit of Longs Peak is a surprise: enormous -- four acres -- and almost as flat as a board. Perhaps two dozen people shared the space with us, mostly conquerors of the Keyhole Route -- though we looked with awe on the climbers who surfaced from the East Face, trailing ropes and exuding competence. After catching our breath and congratulating ourselves, Joel, Jim and I walked a good distance away from the others to a spot where we could look down on Estes Park.

Jim asked me if I wanted to say anything. I choked out a few poor words about courage. Joel did much better, reciting from memory a spirited passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poetry:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! --

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

When Jim took over, he kept it pretty low-key for a Baptist preacher, which Marilyn would have appreciated. He affirmed how thankful we were to have reached this place, and talked of all the people who would have liked to be there with us. He spoke of the beauty of Creation and the beauty of a life well-lived.

Then he took the plastic bag and began to shake out the remains of the body that had kept Marilyn down there when she dreamed of being up here.

The gray ash was barely noticeable on the gray stone. It wouldn't stay long. Indeed, some rose immediately into the breeze and vanished. I pictured Karen in the valley looking up in our direction and singing to herself: No more cold, iron shackles on my feet . . .

We took turns flinging ash downwind until the bag was empty. We huddled together for a little prayer. Then we piled a half-dozen stones into a cairn to mark the spot, although I can't say why or for whom we did that.

Over the years, I have done more than my share of thinking about death, but I can't say I've figured much out. I tell myself: Everyone does it; how hard can it be? Still, it scares the bejabbers out of me. Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician and philosopher, put it well in his Pensees: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and can even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened . . . the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

As we made our way back down Longs Peak, I tried to picture some of those infinite spaces. Longs Peak seems timeless if anything can be, but it, too, has a life story. The Rockies of today are actually third-generation mountains. The striped schist and gneiss boulders we admired along the way were once softer shale and sandstone at the bottom of a primordial sea. Then, about 1.7 billion years ago, the plates of Earth collided, crumpling the crust of the planet. In incomprehensibly slow motion, mountains rose above the sea, while the friction created a furnace so hot it changed the soft undersea stones into the very hard stuff of the Rockies.

Meanwhile, granite was cooking down in Earth's crust, and, for some reason not yet understood, a great vein of it was pushed up under the mountains when they were about 300 million years old. Then the wind blew endlessly, and water ran and froze, and ice thickened and retreated and so on for 800 million years -- until the mountains were worn flat, leaving the granite and the schist and the gneiss exposed.

Another sea spread over the land, and, after 200 million years, another collision of plates thrust another range of mountains skyward, and these, too, wore away. And another sea spread.

About 130 million years ago, it happened again. Tectonic plates collided. Volcanoes erupted. A sea withdrew. Soft rock eroded. And if this eternal story of rising and falling mountains were compressed to the span of one hour, we would now reach the last three or four seconds. That's what 2 million years looks like to a rock.

Two million years of freezing and melting. Great glaciers, hundreds of yards thick, carved the smooth slopes of the mountains into steep valleys and sheer cliffs. Each new ice age deepened and sharpened the work done by earlier glaciers. Longs Peak took shape.

The last glaciers began to recede about 15,000 years ago, an eyeblink in geological time but almost eight times the interval from Caesar Augustus to Marilyn Ball. Presumably, after more eons of wind and another sea, even Longs Peak will pass away.

Why do we dread the eternity ahead of us so much more than the eternity behind? Hamlet's question is a false choice: To be or not to be? Our moment of being is but a hiccup in the normal order of not-being. As we passed back through the Keyhole and down the Boulder Field, it struck me that Marilyn had dignified both of these conditions. She lived her moment as if it mattered. And when it ended, she surrendered her molecules gracefully. Creation can reuse them as the Creating Force sees fit.

I guess I had been trudging under my burden of imponderables, because suddenly Jim Somerville burst past me into the lead of our little group and began bounding down the trail. "Enough of this sleepwalking!" he called over his shoulder. Until that moment, I thought I was worn out. Joel and I took off after him, and together we galloped three miles back to the parking lot, laughing, feeling our blood race, alive.

David Von Drehle is a Washington writer. He can be reached at 20071@washpost.com, and he will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.