The mysteries of Guy Waterman’s suicide

If you started a book (or finished one) just prior to the war, pick it up now. You very well might see it through different eyes.

The book that proved this to me was Chip Brown’s Good Morning Midnight, the story of Guy Waterman, a former political and corporate speechwriter turned dean of the homesteading movement in rural Vermont. On Feb. 6, 2000, Waterman, who was 67, marched up his favorite trail in New Hampshire and deliberately froze to death. Brown begins his book with a scene of Waterman’s friends heading out to retrieve his body, and the search occasions a look back at his life. But Good Morning Midnight isn’t a biography; it’s an investigation. Not a whodunit, but a whydunit. Slate

Prompted by an interview with author Chip Brown I heard yesterday on All Things Considered. A puzzling and arresting detail about his suicide — all he carried in his pack to his death at the summit of New Hampshire’s Mt. Lafayette (one of my favorite mountains in the Whites as well), in addition to some whiskey, were several stuffed animals and two (two?) alarm clocks. Here’s some discussion in an Appalachian Mountain Club forum about Waterman, and a short teaser from National Geographic Adventurer magazine.