The King of California by Mark Arax
Author:Mark Arax
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-04-14T16:04:32+00:00
The Stud
The rain poured down through a canopy of ponderosa pine and white fir, a cold summer storm, and Jim Boswell was growing wetter and more chilled by the minute. The two men hiking with him—each one two decades his junior—had the sense to bring along hooded ponchos in case the weather turned on them, as it often did this time of year. Boswell, though, fancied himself stronger and tougher than just about anybody he knew. Beyond a bedroll and a stash of his much loved Jack Daniels, he was disdainful of packing a lot of gear. The only thing protecting him from the elements was a plastic trash bag, with a slit cut in the bottom for his head to poke through. And it was doing a pitiful job of keeping him dry.
It was 1980, and the trio had been tramping for several days across the High Sierra, twenty to twenty-five miles at a clip, ascending and descending thousands of feet, always to the same rhythm. Boswell, pushing age sixty, raced out on the trail, way ahead of the others. “His whole deal,” said John Grant, one of his companions, “was to bury you.” Eventually Grant and his buddy Chris Reynolds found Boswell perched atop some rocky ledge with his feet hanging over the side. “Where have you been?” he asked, and then, to rub it in, he stared at his watch.
Practically everyone who had ever accompanied Boswell into the great outdoors had some variation of the same experience: “He hiked my ass into the ground.” “He left me in the dust.” “He skied me into the mountain.” The ailing little Georgia boy with the asthmatic wheeze had, as a man, turned into a bona fide stud. Boswell’s friends took to calling him “the Cheetah” because he was so hard to catch. Even before he quit smoking Marlboros in the early 1970s, taking long drags that made his voice a little gravelly, he was a wellspring of energy. After the ’69 flood, Boswell had treated several of his executives to a fishing trip on the Dean River in British Columbia. The furious pace he set to reach the campsite nearly killed Stan Barnes, the company’s top water engineer. The other guys finally divvied up Barnes’s pack to help him make it up a steep ridge. Boswell didn’t care; he just stood at the top of the trail, yelling for everybody to go faster, faster, always faster. “Come on! Come on! Let’s go!” At least the laughs were worth it. On that trip, Boswell decided to drink his Jack Daniels from an old body lotion bottle that his wife, Roz, had given him. But the smell of the stuff, called “Intimate,” never came out, and the boss was left choking and spitting.
Now Boswell decided it was time for another hike, and the two stooges he brought along were Grant and Reynolds, both of whom had worked for the company at different times. They knew going in that Boswell would make
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