EXPLORING THE MOUNTAIN WEST WITH JEREMIAH GUNDELBERG: Prelude, part 2

Gundelberg Country

To continue.  Keller/Gundelberg was perhaps not the first faculty member hired for Fairhaven College, but he certainly was the most distinguished.  His field is American history, broadly defined.  Despite a brutal load of teaching responsibility -  at Fairhaven faculty are expected to involve themselves closely in student lives; listen to their complaints, commiserate with their failed love-lives, play marbles with them in the afternoon -  Bob published several books and numerous scholarly articles, in the process missing the WWU all-campus research award by the flattest of flattened hairs.  He handily won the all-campus teaching award.  Moreover, he was odds-on favorite for an honor that never quite came into being - faculty member most likely to be assassinated by an  administrator – owing to the fact that he conceived it to be part of his duty to inform Deans, Provosts, Presidents and all their hangers-on when they were screwing up.  We all (college faculty) see these things all the time, but for the most part we simply roll our eyes and look away.  Not Bob.  If it were imperfect, it needed fixing.  Thanks, Bob: while you were fighting all those battles for me, I was busy writing summer research proposals to keep myself in beer and beans.

And despite all this activity, Keller/Gundelberg found time to persecute me in the Faculty-Staff newsletter – and drag me all over several ranges of mountains.

So now I find that I have run out of excuses to stall, and I have to attempt to describe the relationship between K/G and mountains.

 Most of us like mountains.  Some of us like them more than others.  Next to my family, mountains have been the most important thing in my life since I was perhaps 14.  I rarely have felt so completely alive as when I have sweated and grunted my way to the top of some exposed knob, plunked myself down with an open beer, and begun to enjoy the view.  I consider myself as lodged near the top of the spectrum of mountain lovers, and one of the most painful tribulations of aging for me has been having to give up my mountains.

Bob Keller cannot be placed anywhere on that spectrum of normal mountain lovers.  That he loves mountains is not in doubt, but the feeling is vastly more complicated.  Much of his pleasure in the mountains consists of testing himself against them – and surviving the attempt.

Thus, if our way upward was impeded by a particularly ugly segment of cliff, I would skulk around one side or the other; Bob would go straight up.  If a particularly nasty norther was blowing out of Canada on a February week-end, before I could settle in with a good book Bob would have persuaded me to climb Winchester Mountain in blowing snow, using my new snowshoes.  Or test my newly acquired canoe against the Nooksack River on a day so cold that ice formed on the paddles and my feet turned numb (I actually lost a shoe in a mud bank and didn’t notice for several hours).  

And so it went.  The problem was that I have always been a clandestine wuss – and Bob knew it.  I was a Sierra Nevada/Colorado Rockies trail hiker; he was a Cascade/Olympics mountaineer.  I couldn’t hike as fast as he, but I could hike just as far.  I could carry as heavy a load.  While he set up the tent with spectacular efficiency, I could catch trout for dinner.  I was better on steep snow than Bob – but I would turn back first.  And, as I said, so it went.  In the mountains Bob was leader – and that resulted in some amusing adventures, a few of which I will relate when I find the energy.