[pct-l] RE: Scott Williamson

[waynekraft at verizon.net (Wayne Kraft)]

This was a great article because Scott's story is a great story.  I agree 
about the author's writing style.  Unnecessarily arts-fartsy.  After years 
of making opening statements to juries as a prosecutor I discovered that 
some stories are best told straight out.  Sure, sometimes you need to inject 
your sparkling wit and brilliant personality to hold your audience's 
interest (explaining the accounting maneuvers of an embezzler), but often 
the facts, related simply and chronologically without injecting yourself 
into them are jaw dropping enough (brutal murder cunningly executed). 
Scott's story is a jaw dropper. To tell such a story well, the storyteller 
must disappear into the story.

It makes me wonder.  How many of us hike with these ghosts?  I know I do. 
When I am alone on the trail my mind returns again and again to the pleasant 
memory of hours spent with each of three friends who died without saying 
good bye (one fell into a crevasse on North Sister, one died of a sudden 
aneurysm while I was away in the Canadian Rockies and one more or less 
inexplicably drowned while kayaking alone).

There is something compelling about these reveries.  We are not completely 
at peace with God's timing and we see, in God's grace that surrounds us and 
so often saves us from our own foolishness, what seem to us like signs our 
lost ones still look out for us.  Trail magic. And we want to respond 
somehow.  So we walk 5000 miles or run 300 miles (Dean Karnazes in 
Ultramarathon Man) or run through Death Valley in the summer heat (Kirk 
Johnson in To the Edge) in their memory, as though we are somehow thanking 
them. Maybe we are.

Wayne Kraft


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Coyle" <jcoyle@sanjuan.edu>
To: <pct-l@mailman.backcountry.net>
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 1:00 PM
Subject: [pct-l] RE: Scott Williamson


>
>.  I don't
> particularly like the writer's style, who must set a record of his own for
> using the pronoun "you" the most times in a single article, but that is 
> just
> my opinion and doesn't reflect on Scott Williamson and his accomplishment,
> which is truly admirable. (Scott Williamson did not write the article.)
>
> John Coyle
> Sacramento
>
>
>
>
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