Sad postscript
One of the members of the Mahoosuc traverse, my lifelong friend, Tim Stearns has died from injuries received in a motorcycle accident on May 31.
I was asked today to publicly say something and was very grateful for the chance. I am appending, to this post, the text of my words .
Since T.R.s can be quite lengthy I'm supposing that this is not going to offend anyone.
So if you want the abbreviated version of this eulogy skip to the last paragraph and look at the picture. It's a shot taken during our Feb. Mahoosuc traverse.
P.S. I'm not looking for condolences. In fact when you "celebrate" someone's life you can really look at it as a celebration. It's a bittersweet kind of happiness but I really am content at this time.
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Speaking about Tim is both easy and difficult. Easy, because he was so unique. No one I knew had a friend like Tim. I could share Tim stories with everyone and no one could ever seem to top them. Talking about him really borders on the realm of telling tall tales.
It’s difficult to speak about him because you can’t sum him up in a few words. His life was not a single thread but more of a whole cloth and the threads run in too many directions and make too many intersections.
I’ll try and grab just one of those threads and follow it a short way. It started when, at the age of 15, and newly moved into a house in Lenox, I saw some kid ride his bike into our driveway and start shooting baskets against the backboard on the side of our house. I was prepared to not like someone who, uninvited and unannounced, decided to take advantage of our hoop. I can’t remember how long that resolve to not like him lasted. I don’t think it outlived the first meeting and in fact I’m prepared to say it probably didn’t make it past the first couple of sentences.
Tim was the kind of person who immediately let you know he had your best interests at heart. It probably became obvious to me within the first minute of our first meeting that the whole reason he was at our house was to welcome us to the neighborhood and introduce himself as a possible new friend, though knowing him now the way I do, there were criteria to his selection of friends and how I reacted in those moments went a long way toward determining the length and depth of that friendship.
Fortunately there were many common interests that we shared and the most important at that early stage was the cabin that he and a select few of his friends were building in the woods above the shore of Lily Pond. I don’t remember how long it took for me to be brought into that inner circle of friends but for the first epoch in our friendship the cabin was the focal point. If Tim and I had later grown apart with age and only rarely kept in touch over the years the cabin could still have served as the foundation for a rich and well-remembered experience. How often do teenage kids follow through on their dreams of having something like their own log cabin in the woods? It may have been the combination of all our efforts but I have to believe that Tim was the linchpin that held the group together and kept us working at it.
I returned the favor by introducing Tim to my family’s love for canoeing and backpacking. When I learned to rock climb he became one of my steady climbing partners. Perhaps the biggest favor we did was introducing him to sailing; a seed that grew in such rich soil that there are not many of us here that don’t think first of Tim’s love for the sea and the boats that have carried him upon it.
But that came later. High school drew to a close. During my senior year Tim, Steve Crowe and I did two multi-day winter trips together, one in Vermont and the other in New Hampshire. It was the first of many winter trips that he and I would do over the years, the most recent having happened just this past February.
But still I keep following the intersecting threads and I need to get back to the one I am on. Tim and the family went to Israel. I corresponded regularly with him and learned of his plan to travel through Europe. I dropped out of UMass halfway through my sophomore year and went to Europe to be with him and hopefully travel that part of the world together. I finally tracked him down living in a room at Frau Weigle’s house in Kafertal near Mannheim. Tim was working for Uri Bessler helping in the installation of lightning rods. There are some very funny stories from that experience but telling them would take me off of the thread that I’m on.
Try as I might I could not find work to stretch my meager travel budget long enough to tide me over until he’d earned enough money from his job for us to set out on what would have been the adventure of a lifetime: riding bicycles from Europe to Israel. I left Germany and eventually found myself living in a Christian commune in Geneva. By the time Tim came through, on his way back to Israel and then the States, I was very committed to the work I was doing there and our paths looked as though they were parting for good.
And though we did reconnect when both of us were back in the States a couple of years later there were no more multiday shared adventures for quite a few years as Tim made his way south on board I.I. and settled for a while in the Chesapeake, started a family and lived the life of a waterman; yet other threads we could spend time following.
The winter trips did eventually resume with an ascent 23 years ago of Camel’s Hump in Vermont that brought Tim, Steve and I back together again. After that, these trips became annual events and Tim was there for the majority of them. They became important platforms for dreaming about other shared adventures as well, such as the transatlantic passage and the North Sea trip.
The thread that I am following is about his life of adventure. Tim was my ideal when I think of that kind of life, as he was with very many of us. In Edward Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother Bobby he quoted Shaw’s statement to say of him that: "Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not?" The same can be said about Tim.
To launch out into the unknown, to tackle seemingly impossible tasks, to continue on in the face of setbacks all seemed to be a natural part of Tim’s constitution and he was able to do it, most of the time, in good humor; and even when not, the dark clouds seemed to pass quickly enough. I loved adventure too but early in our mutual relationship there was something lacking in my background that prevented me from adopting Tim’s easy acceptance of whatever life happened to dish up.
I think I found out what I had been lacking the day I became a Christian. Tim had been giving me hints all through our high school days together but I was pretty resistant to them. There were two though, that will stay with me forever.
The first time was on our high school wintertime Vermont Long Trail trip. We had planned to reach a cabin for the night but found ourselves woefully short of our goal when night closed in. There was no trail to follow once we lost the daylight and our equipment was inadequate for the bitter cold we were in. I openly despaired of our eventual survival and told Tim so. He turned to me and said “fear not little children” and when I reacted unfavorably, responded with “oh ye of little faith!”
Not long afterward, on a warmer trip to the summit of Mt. Jefferson, I wanted to proudly share my appreciation of the magnificent vista that was laid out before us as we gazed toward the north from above treeline in the White Mountains. Tim was able to put all of my, at the time, agnostic skepticism into a little neat package for me to weigh when he responded, “and you think all of this happened by accident.”
For those of us here, adventures await; some that are even “Tim-sized.” But big or small, there is an ultimate adventure that still awaits every one of us. I would desperately have loved to follow Tim into many more adventures like the ones we’ve already had but he has left me behind for now.
If Tim was the skipper and I could be his crewmate, all was right with the world.
When I left college and went to Europe to meet up with him it was during a period of intense confusion in my life. I was reluctant, but Tim insisted, writing that I would forever know “only the taste of American apple pie” until I tried something different. I also went there because Tim had led the way out of some tricky places before and I felt he had the ability to help lead me out of that one too.
Tim didn’t directly lead me out of that morass but he more than anybody was the one who had first shown me the path to Him who leads us all out of our morass. Our friend Steve later found the same path when he came to Europe in a similar frame of mind to see me. So in a very real way those words of Tim’s, to fear not and keep faith, have continued to point the way for both of us during this whole adventure we call life.
My favorite picture from our winter traverse of the Mahoosuc mountain range last February was of Tim leading the way up the final pitch to the summit of Goose Eye Mountain. The sun was just breaking over the summit and he appears to be climbing right into it. The stunted trees on both sides of the trail are covered in rime ice and snow adding a startling antiseptic whiteness to the scene. It’s another picture of Tim leading the way, just as he is right now, going ahead on our way toward that ultimate adventure.
