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rebeccmeisterToday is my younger sister ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sytharin's birthday. Happy birthday, sis!
Eight years ago today, my cousin Zachary Weston disappeared on Mt. Rainier.
He'd been spending the summer hiking on the Wonderland trail, in sections. Friends would sometimes join him; another couple of times his dad hiked along. He spent a fair amount of time eating wild huckleberries and reading Rumi's poetry; his book of Rumi had purple huckleberry stains on it.
Zack was like a younger brother to me. He grew up with my aunt and uncle and cousin A in Connecticut, so when I decided to attend college in Boston, they became my East Coast Family for all of those holidays and long weekends when it didn't make sense financially or time-wise to make the day-long trek across the country back to Seattle. He was two years younger than me, so on those holidays and long weekends, when I'd come into town for a visit, he'd often be in and around, playing made-up songs on one of the pianos or working away on some interesting project with friends. He gave an award-winning speech, once, about one of those projects - digging an enormous, ten-foot-deep hole in a friend's backyard. He called it "un-filling the hole." At another point, he and a couple of friends got into major trouble because they'd come up with the grand idea of building-climbing, having forgotten that the interesting, three-dimensional landscape they'd discovered might constitute something else, known as "trespassing."
Two years in to my college degree, he started college at another university just down the road from me. You may have heard of it - MIT. His first year there was rough, as is true for many students who leave home and go to a prestigious institution to study to become an astronaut. Many dreams are shattered in that first year of college. Suddenly, students are no longer superstars because they're surrounded by superstars, most of whom are smarter. Takes some getting used to. MIT is fully aware of this, and takes a number of steps to help students adjust; first-year courses are pass/fail, and there are other safety nets in place.
It was a good thing, too, for Zack. He continued to have all sorts of odd things he wanted to try out - I remember one time when we went to drop him off with some groceries and he wanted to know if it was possible to survive on just flour and water. My aunt and uncle and I just raised our eyebrows, handed over some groceries, and said, good luck, kiddo. His own breed of minimalism.
His alternate perspective on the world around him came through most clearly in a couple of the films he created in a media course there. I wish they were available somehow, but they could only be experienced there, in person. One was atmospheric, yet not; red, yellow, green, blue, elemental colors, with a sound somewhere between breathing and a heartbeat. Oddly soothing. Another was a simple film taken of reflections on the window of a Boston subway car as it traveled and stopped.
At some point, thinking over his relationship with the universe and his concept of fate, Zack started telling us that he was ready to die, that he was okay with dying. MIT takes this sort of thing quite seriously, and I didn't know everything that was going on, but the result was that he was hospitalized for a period while sorting out what was happening, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I think some people would have diagnosed him as clinically depressed, but I'm still not so sure. Regardless, he had things going on in his mind that didn't necessarily match up with conventional expectations, and this can be challenging to deal with. Challenging, but good.
It took him a while to get reoriented after that. MIT is reluctant to take back students who they perceive as a risk to themselves/others, so Zach spent some time mulling over other options, and eventually settled on continuing his education at the University of Rochester, where one of his other good friends was going to school. In the meantime, that summer, he would road-trip across the US with friends and then hike the Wonderland trail.
His road trip actually took him through Arizona - a good friend of his was going to school in Prescott, so on his way there, he made arrangements to stop in Tempe for lunch and to catch up a bit. By that time, I'd graduated and moved away from Boston and was in my second summer of graduate school, just starting to get settled in Arizona. At the end of lunch, he gave me a gentle hug goodbye and continued on his journey.
Dealing with a person's disappearance on a mountain like Mt. Rainier is...unusual. The day he disappeared, a friend had dropped him off along a trail that paralleled a glacier on the south side of the mountain, the Kautz Glacier. In later conversations with family, I learned that he had been experimenting with constructing his own homemade crampons out of duct tape and tent stakes. When he didn't show up to be picked up as expected, the friend called my aunt and uncle, and sometime thereafter they called up Search and Rescue to get to work.
The Search and Rescue team at Mt. Rainier keeps fairly busy. I believe that almost everyone who summits Mt. Rainier now approaches the summit from the north side of the mountain. From Sunrise, a lookout point on the north, one can point viewing telescopes up the slope and observe tiny figures traversing across glaciers on their way to the top. I don't have any experience with ice climbing or *real* mountaineering, but my impression is that it takes quite a bit of preparation and precautions to navigate glacial hazards - crevasses, all sorts of icy conditions, the thin atmosphere, inclement weather. Occasionally, people will get stranded on the mountain when bad weather unexpectedly crops up, but in almost all cases, it isn't a matter of pinpointing the stranded people (or their remains), but instead a matter of figuring out how to get to them, and/or waiting out the bad weather.
So, back to Zack. Search and Rescue looked for two full weeks - well past the point where there was any hope of a person surviving. They used a helicopter to scan the south face, mapping out the deep crevasses in the glaciers there. Some days in, some rescuers discovered bootprints in the snow along the Kautz Glacier. Ice-climbing teams were lowered into the crevasses, checking everything they could possibly check, despite fading hope. I learned that while glaciers seem to be giant, static chunks of ice, they actually move and change shape quickly. Apparently at one point some time ago a helicopter crashed partway into a crevasse during especially bad weather. When another helicopter returned to the crash site the next day to retrieve it, the crevasse had closed around it, trapping it in place.
Towards the end of the search, two of my uncles hiked up as far as they were allowed, to place rocks near the base of the glacier, in memory of Zack. When they reached the highest point, they discovered Zack's food cache, tucked back between some boulders - a stuff sack holding a can of corn and some other tins of things. That meant - the footprints were indeed Zack's, he had been there, he had gone up on the glacier to try climbing it and hadn't come back out again.
Zack is only the second person to ever vanish without a trace on Mt. Rainier.
I also learned that glaciers' reputation for grinding and sculpting and shaping a landscape meant that anyone or anything soft that disappears into a glacier is unlikely to ever emerge as anything recognizable. There would be no closure. There it is - water, shaping our landscape, bringer of life and death. Turning Zack to stardust once again.
sytharin's birthday. Happy birthday, sis!Eight years ago today, my cousin Zachary Weston disappeared on Mt. Rainier.
He'd been spending the summer hiking on the Wonderland trail, in sections. Friends would sometimes join him; another couple of times his dad hiked along. He spent a fair amount of time eating wild huckleberries and reading Rumi's poetry; his book of Rumi had purple huckleberry stains on it.
Zack was like a younger brother to me. He grew up with my aunt and uncle and cousin A in Connecticut, so when I decided to attend college in Boston, they became my East Coast Family for all of those holidays and long weekends when it didn't make sense financially or time-wise to make the day-long trek across the country back to Seattle. He was two years younger than me, so on those holidays and long weekends, when I'd come into town for a visit, he'd often be in and around, playing made-up songs on one of the pianos or working away on some interesting project with friends. He gave an award-winning speech, once, about one of those projects - digging an enormous, ten-foot-deep hole in a friend's backyard. He called it "un-filling the hole." At another point, he and a couple of friends got into major trouble because they'd come up with the grand idea of building-climbing, having forgotten that the interesting, three-dimensional landscape they'd discovered might constitute something else, known as "trespassing."
Two years in to my college degree, he started college at another university just down the road from me. You may have heard of it - MIT. His first year there was rough, as is true for many students who leave home and go to a prestigious institution to study to become an astronaut. Many dreams are shattered in that first year of college. Suddenly, students are no longer superstars because they're surrounded by superstars, most of whom are smarter. Takes some getting used to. MIT is fully aware of this, and takes a number of steps to help students adjust; first-year courses are pass/fail, and there are other safety nets in place.
It was a good thing, too, for Zack. He continued to have all sorts of odd things he wanted to try out - I remember one time when we went to drop him off with some groceries and he wanted to know if it was possible to survive on just flour and water. My aunt and uncle and I just raised our eyebrows, handed over some groceries, and said, good luck, kiddo. His own breed of minimalism.
His alternate perspective on the world around him came through most clearly in a couple of the films he created in a media course there. I wish they were available somehow, but they could only be experienced there, in person. One was atmospheric, yet not; red, yellow, green, blue, elemental colors, with a sound somewhere between breathing and a heartbeat. Oddly soothing. Another was a simple film taken of reflections on the window of a Boston subway car as it traveled and stopped.
At some point, thinking over his relationship with the universe and his concept of fate, Zack started telling us that he was ready to die, that he was okay with dying. MIT takes this sort of thing quite seriously, and I didn't know everything that was going on, but the result was that he was hospitalized for a period while sorting out what was happening, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I think some people would have diagnosed him as clinically depressed, but I'm still not so sure. Regardless, he had things going on in his mind that didn't necessarily match up with conventional expectations, and this can be challenging to deal with. Challenging, but good.
It took him a while to get reoriented after that. MIT is reluctant to take back students who they perceive as a risk to themselves/others, so Zach spent some time mulling over other options, and eventually settled on continuing his education at the University of Rochester, where one of his other good friends was going to school. In the meantime, that summer, he would road-trip across the US with friends and then hike the Wonderland trail.
His road trip actually took him through Arizona - a good friend of his was going to school in Prescott, so on his way there, he made arrangements to stop in Tempe for lunch and to catch up a bit. By that time, I'd graduated and moved away from Boston and was in my second summer of graduate school, just starting to get settled in Arizona. At the end of lunch, he gave me a gentle hug goodbye and continued on his journey.
Dealing with a person's disappearance on a mountain like Mt. Rainier is...unusual. The day he disappeared, a friend had dropped him off along a trail that paralleled a glacier on the south side of the mountain, the Kautz Glacier. In later conversations with family, I learned that he had been experimenting with constructing his own homemade crampons out of duct tape and tent stakes. When he didn't show up to be picked up as expected, the friend called my aunt and uncle, and sometime thereafter they called up Search and Rescue to get to work.
The Search and Rescue team at Mt. Rainier keeps fairly busy. I believe that almost everyone who summits Mt. Rainier now approaches the summit from the north side of the mountain. From Sunrise, a lookout point on the north, one can point viewing telescopes up the slope and observe tiny figures traversing across glaciers on their way to the top. I don't have any experience with ice climbing or *real* mountaineering, but my impression is that it takes quite a bit of preparation and precautions to navigate glacial hazards - crevasses, all sorts of icy conditions, the thin atmosphere, inclement weather. Occasionally, people will get stranded on the mountain when bad weather unexpectedly crops up, but in almost all cases, it isn't a matter of pinpointing the stranded people (or their remains), but instead a matter of figuring out how to get to them, and/or waiting out the bad weather.
So, back to Zack. Search and Rescue looked for two full weeks - well past the point where there was any hope of a person surviving. They used a helicopter to scan the south face, mapping out the deep crevasses in the glaciers there. Some days in, some rescuers discovered bootprints in the snow along the Kautz Glacier. Ice-climbing teams were lowered into the crevasses, checking everything they could possibly check, despite fading hope. I learned that while glaciers seem to be giant, static chunks of ice, they actually move and change shape quickly. Apparently at one point some time ago a helicopter crashed partway into a crevasse during especially bad weather. When another helicopter returned to the crash site the next day to retrieve it, the crevasse had closed around it, trapping it in place.
Towards the end of the search, two of my uncles hiked up as far as they were allowed, to place rocks near the base of the glacier, in memory of Zack. When they reached the highest point, they discovered Zack's food cache, tucked back between some boulders - a stuff sack holding a can of corn and some other tins of things. That meant - the footprints were indeed Zack's, he had been there, he had gone up on the glacier to try climbing it and hadn't come back out again.
Zack is only the second person to ever vanish without a trace on Mt. Rainier.
I also learned that glaciers' reputation for grinding and sculpting and shaping a landscape meant that anyone or anything soft that disappears into a glacier is unlikely to ever emerge as anything recognizable. There would be no closure. There it is - water, shaping our landscape, bringer of life and death. Turning Zack to stardust once again.
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no subject
Date: 2013-08-11 06:13 am (UTC)I read about people disappearing in climbing accidents all the time, but they're almost always in Nepal, not in the continental US. That's unsettling.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-11 04:06 pm (UTC)There were a couple of things about Zack's situation that contributed to his disappearance. First, he wasn't supposed to be climbing on glaciers. Second, he didn't have any previous ice-climbing experience. And third, people don't generally climb on that side of Mt. Rainier. It's still a little crazy-making, though.
I think we all would have had a slightly easier time coping with the situation if he'd been willing to learn how to PROPERLY climb before attempting shenanigans. But young men are hard to stop when they're hellbent on taking risks.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-11 04:06 pm (UTC)This is a really beautiful piece.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-11 04:10 pm (UTC)I can remember going trail-running about a month after he disappeared, and having really strange feelings while running by myself (I was with other people who were ahead of/behind me). It changed my sense of "communing with nature."
It also changed my family's relationship with Mt. Rainier. We've always gone out to the mountain each summer to visit, but now it's a visit to Zachary on top of being a visit to an incredibly beautiful place.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-12 03:30 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing your thoughts, eight years on. I too remember when you were first writing about his disappearance, and processing the strangeness and suddenness of it all.
Thank you for sharing, it's a privilege to be witness.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-12 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-12 04:27 pm (UTC)http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/494/hit-the-road
The young man who occupies the first half of the episode strongly reminded me of Zack, too. I've never really known what to do with this particular story, as it is so personal and yet I can understand others benefiting from reading it.