EAST MONTPELIER – It appears that the older you get (and assuming you don’t lose your wits), the more convergences you experience. Separate arcs become circles; old friends from long ago send letters or call. Something you’re doing reminds you of something you’ve done before, and the old feelings reemerge. You will never again, for example, break 4:30 for the mile; but the sight of the track where you did it, the smell of the spring grass, and the thunk of a 12-pound shot can recreate the day and the way you felt far better than any film. Old friends may be dead – some for many years – but you hear their voices and see their smiles as clearly as if they stood before you.

It was a week like that, this week. It started when I finished two books and picked up another that Mother had given me for Christmas: Everest –The Mountaineering History, by Walt Unsworth. This is not an easy book to read. It’s almost 800 pages and weighs at least two pounds. Lying in bed and holding it up high enough to read is an isometric exercise. The blood slowly drains from my hands, and in our unheated bedroom my fingers turn icy cold. Add to that the subject matter – intrepid climbers fighting hurricane winds and below-zero temperatures – and the romance becomes almost palpable. Finally, considering that my life began during the early British attempts on the mountain – the week I was born, a British expedition left Darjeeling for the long trek across Tibet to the Rongbuk Glacier – and you can imagine I can get into it.

The other morning, shuffling down the hill of the driveway for the newspaper at 8º below, clad in down coat, balaclava, and mittens; shod with fleece-lined Sorels armed with Yaktrax; and drilling the slippery snow at each stride with my spike-tipped cane, it was easy to imagine myself thousands of feet higher: in the Wind Rivers, perhaps, on the snow slope down to Titcomb Lakes; on the snowfield below the East Face of Longs Peak; hell, even descending to the South Col with its brightly clad frozen bodies strewn about. Just then I realized that it was the first anniversary of shattering my femur in that very spot in the driveway, and on the same errand (but without the Trax). I got the paper, turned, trudged back up the dangerous slope to the house, and took down my copy of Americans on Everest to read the note from Willi on the flyleaf.

William F. Unsoeld was his real name, but back in the 40s and 50s any of us with pretensions of being mountaineers or alpine skiers gravitated to the Swiss/Austrian persona. We grew beards on our faces, sported Gamsbärte on our hats, and often climbed with a coil of rope over our shoulders, whether we needed it or not. And – hard to believe now – we actually yodeled! So William morphed into Willi somewhere along the line.

Willi was a climber, one of the best: energetic, athletic, aggressive, optimistic, charismatic, companionable. He’d worked his way up from early climbs in the Cascades and rock climbs in the East to guiding professionally in the Tetons and eventually to the Himalayas. In 1960 he was in the climbing team that made the first ascent of Masherbrum in the Karakoram, 25,660 feet.

Somehow, in the middle of all that activity, he managed to get a Bachelor’s degree in physics, a Masters in philosophy, and a Doctorate in Theology. You can see where he was headed. He also married, and he and his wife, Jolene, had four children.

I first heard his name in May 1963, in the news. He and his climbing partner, Tom Hornbein, had pioneered the West Ridge route of Mount Everest, completed the first traverse of the summit – amazing at the time – and descended via the South Col. In the process, Willi had quoted Robert Frost from the summit and lost nine of his toes in a freezing bivouac at 28,000 feet.

Six years later Willi blew into our lives like a summer thundershower. I was directing an Outward Bound program at Dartmouth at the time. The national office of Outward Bound, cognizant of Willi’s star power, had hired him as an executive vice-president, spokesman, and motivational speaker. He came to visit us in Hanover and to inspect our program venues. We made an unauthorized speed-hike through Baxter Park in Maine, one jump ahead of the rangers; but after a night camping in the Maine forest plagued by no-see-ums, Willi declared the woods unfit for pedagogical purposes. We gave him some bug dope and netting, and managed to calm him down. He led us up the Chimney, a scramble and rock climb on Mount Katahdin. When he came to the crux of the climb, a chockstone that I’d always found pretty interesting, he looked at it for a few moments and said, “Hmm.” I’ll never know if that was a genuine expression of concern, but its effect on me was permanent: I could climb with this guy!

Which, of course, is what Outward Bound was all about: perceiving your abilities as far more expansive than you’d thought. He showed me once a photograph he and Hornbein had taken as they left their last camp on the West Ridge and headed for the summit. It was obvious there was no possibility of retreat, return, or descent by that route. They were utterly committed.

During the Outward Bound course here in New England, he was the rock climbing instructor. Somehow he managed to coax Mother successfully across a river on a Tyrolean traverse and get her to lower herself backward over a cliff on a rappel. Later, he coached me through a rough patch in my life, and still later went back to teaching in the State of Washington. He died in an avalanche on Mount Rainier 31 years ago. But we still think of him often: his brilliance, energy, and eccentricities, his exhortations never to give up, always to play for more than you can afford, as each day I trudge, like an old man, up the perilous, snowy south ridge of my driveway.