'Not At All Reliable for Climbing On'

Decades ago I interviewed a guy who had climbed all forty-six of the high peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains in his bare feet. Surprisingly, he completed the shoeless stunt without serious injury. It was one of those Ripley’s-Believe-It-or-Not accomplishments that seems impressively ridiculous. I can’t remember his name but I remember two things about him: he was related to John Cheever and he was the first person I ever heard use the word scree in conversation.

 

The OED defines it as “a steep, often unstable slope on a mountainside formed by a mass of stone fragments and other debris” and “the material composing such a slope.” It’s an oddly incomplete-seeming word, two-thirds of scream, screech and screed. The Dictionary tells us it’s rooted in “early Scandinavian.” I think of scree as a hillside covered with loose stones, largely the product of gravity and always treacherous to traverse. Dick Davis uses the word in a poem titled “Words” (Love in Another Language, 2017):

 

“Words are like scree – abraded, hard, but not

At all reliable for climbing on;

Just look how far you’ve slipped back, trusting them.”

[A reader asks for the newspaper article I mention in the first paragraph. I'm sure I have a clip -- one of thousands in my files. I would love to organize that stuff. I'll see if my middle son can locate it electronically It dates from the early nineties.] 

[Addendum, 4/2/2024: My middle son, Michael, found the profile I wrote of the shoeless climber.]