MARY LYN is a physically powerful woman; she is strong emotionally, too. "I don't think she cried a teardrop until the day he died," Jim says. It devolved upon her to report Bob's deteriorating condition to Jim after he returned to Harvard from spring break.
"While he was in a coma for two-and-a-half months, she went to see him every single day. For about two weeks, she maintained hope that he would be back to normal. Then for about two weeks after that, she hoped he would live. And then, by the first week in May, he was very close to brain death. There was only enough of him left to perform very simple motor functions. At that point all of us realized that it would actually be much better for him if he were to die. We all came to expect it, because he was down to about ninety pounds.
"I talked to Mary Lyn about twice a week on the phone. I'd just call her up, and there would never be any change, he would have just lost more weight, and his features were more deformed. He'd gone into the position with his elbows bent and his toes and hands pointed in, typical of comatose people with serious brain problems." Bob had had a natural-death will drawn up in California the year before, requesting that his life not be preserved by artificial means if he were severely incapacitated. His parents refused to honor the will. Near the end he looked ghastly, the skin on his face drawn into a horrible sneer, his lips pulled away from his teeth, and his arms colored green from the intravenous tubes. He had been a very handsome man, with blonde hair cut at the neck, a jutting chin, and an easy, ready smile.
Jim remembers Bob that way. He arrived in Denver after finals just before midnight on June 8, planning to visit Bob the next morning with Mary Lyn. She called about 7 a.m. that morning and told him Bob had died of pneumonia about 3 a.m. There would be no funeral, Bob's father announced. The body would be cremated immediately.
Shortly after Bob's death, Mary Lyn and Jim decided to organize a memorial service. On July 11, about 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, they held a service in a natural amphitheater atop Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking Boulder. It was a beautiful day, the sky an unmarred shell of deep blue, the sunlight too bright, etching the outline of the city against the verdant farmland to the east. More than a 100 people, all Bob's friends, attended.
"Mary Lyn talked, and then I talked. It was all sort of extemporaneous. This was the first really close person that ever died for a lot of these people, and they didn't know quite how to deal with it. It was just an attempt to put it all in perspective. The fact that he was a great guy, but that he lived on the edge, and like a lot of these people who I had talked to said, he realized it was something you sort of bargain for a little bit. I said that Bob realized this was always a possibility, and that while it was a tragedy that he died, his life itself was tremendous, and that sort of thing should be celebrated."
"It wasn't the sort of group of people to be inhibited by somebody's being killed. I'm not going to try to take away from the tragedy of it; it was shocking and it was terrible, but it was believable. We had talked about the possibility of dying, and Bob would always say, 'You have to go for it. You have to live day by day. You can't live a boring life.'"
WHAT IF Bob had lived? What if there had been no accident? "I've thought about that a lot. Reality would have caught up with him pretty soon. All these years we'd talked about it, 'Oh, we'll both go to medical school, we'll both be doctors, it'll be a great life.' But I knew that he was not going to get into medical school. Maybe he would have gone to work as an EMT somewhere, kind of working part-time. Just sort of rolling along, I think that's where he'd be right now. But you have to be careful with Bob. I used to think he was always going down the tubes, and then he'd come up with something that was very ambitious, and do something I was pretty amazed at."
Jim describes the older professional ski patrolmen he knows as "rural, crusty guys," and he doubts Bob could have long tolerated professional patrolling. "Bob was not a rural, middle-class type guy. He had very expensive tastes, he was very cosmopolitan. He loved good food and he knew a lot about good wine. It might be something that he could identify with as a goal, similar to the 'move out of the East Coast, go to Colorado, get back to nature' type thing. But he wouldn't have been happy in a rural environment, he liked too many big-city things.
"Besides, I know some guys who have been professional ski patrolmen for about 12 years, and my honest opinion is that a lot of those guys are just going nowhere. There's nothing romantic about it. It's a job. You sit most of the day and play cards or backgammon or something, and by springtime everybody's on everybody else's nerves.
"BOB'S DEATH was the omega of that experience. If he hadn't died it would have been like everything else in life, it just would have faded away. That chapter of my life was notable in that it was very enjoyable, I was very involved, and it had a very definite end."
After the omega, the wind resumed and scattered the old Winter Park juniors. Joe Ward is an EMT and an ambulance attendant; he's also worked as a keypuncher, and for a while he sold peanuts and eggs wholesale. Barry Buckman is a construction worker and his sister Linda is a Bible freak at Colorado College. Paul Muffly and Lindy Moon are both pre-meds at CU; Lisa Norling and Bill Heiss are also at CU, where she is studying physical therapy and he is studying partying. Gale Lehman is a circus clown, Jim believes. Charlie Thompson, who was a professional ski patrolman at the time the Telluride picture was taken, is still a professional ski patrolman. On July 1, 1976, Jim Baldwin skied off a permanent snowfield atop Mount Epworth into a pile of rocks, fracturing his skull; he died half an hour later. Mary Ann McGerry, Diane Hanna, Jim Warner and Peter Fader are all in school. Debbie Moon is engaged to be married. New people spend their weekends in the patrol shack now.
Jim keeps in touch with Mary Lyn. He is still a senior patrolman at Winter Park, and he skis there every Christmas and every spring, taking injured skiers gently down the mountain, cradled behind him in an aluminum toboggan that whispers as it rocks through the snow. Mary Lyn and Jim talk late into the evening in his cabin sometimes, then hug and say goodnight. Mary Lyn drives off in her Vega. Jim trudges through the snow to his Jeep and connects an extension cord to the plug sticking out of the grille, starting a heater which will keep the engine warm all night. Without heat, the engine freezes tight in the bitter-cold thin mountain air. Jim puts his ear to the metal hood and stays very still, listening for the sounds that will tell him the heater is working. He knows that unless he is careful, he will not ski tomorrow, and he wants to, very much.