The Best American Sports Writing 2014(141)
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Peggy asked her husband.
“I’m going to be fine,” he replied. “I’m going to take it slow.”
“Honey, you come back to me.”
He kissed her.
“I will. Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”
When the gun sounded for the second wave of the men’s race at 3:10 P.M., LeMaitre and about 175 others charged through a tunnel of noise up Fourth Avenue. They ran past the fire hall, past the Chinese restaurant, past the other Chinese restaurant, past the United Methodist Church that advertised WORSHIP AT MOOSE PASS, 9 A.M. After two blocks the runners took a hard left on Jefferson Street and ran beneath the large mural of the Mount Marathon Race, painted on the side of the senior center and bearing a list of past winners in the way another small town might celebrate its prized graduates or war dead. They passed a low-slung building with a large red cross—the hospital. The road kept rising. In another block the asphalt turned to gravel. LeMaitre and the others ran past a warning sign at the foot of the mountain that read, GOING DOWN IS EVEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN GOING UP. Then the runners ran out of road entirely and faced the great green bulk of the mountain. They started to climb.
In Peggy’s dining room stood a large photograph, the last ever taken of her husband, shot by a photographer on the course at about 4:30 that day. In it, Michael is just emerging from the thick brush midway up the mountain. Seward lies below, a toy landscape of streets and yards as neat as an ice tray. There is no one behind him. His knees are dirty, his gloves are soiled. He is completely soaked through by rain and sweat—shorts, shirt, headband. What you keep returning to, though, is his face. It isn’t a face of misery, or complaint. The blue eyes are wide. The grin is gritted but large, even a little wild. Last place doesn’t faze this face at all; it has been there before. You realize then that you know this grin: it is the grin of the Crazy Frenchman.
Fuck it, the grin says. Drive on.
Peggy shivered alone in the rain, honking her car’s horn and screaming her husband’s name at the base of the mountain to guide him home.
By eight o’clock when he had not appeared through the spruce—two hours after Tom Walsh had radioed to race officials that LeMaitre would soon be on his way down—the family notified authorities. Hasty searches turned up nothing. The temperature was dropping, the rain increasing. By two in the morning, an Alaska State Troopers helicopter equipped with infrared radar sensitive enough to see footprints left in snow arrived and scanned the mountain through the dusky night. Searchers landed and blew whistles—still nothing. Had anyone looked up from town in the late afternoon, he might have watched LeMaitre, seen exactly where he’d gone—he was that close. But the race was long over; everyone had turned his back on the mountain, toward cold beers, hot showers. The evening ahead. Now it was sleeting at Race Point. LeMaitre had been on the mountain for 12 hours dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts. Searchers feared that if he wasn’t already injured, he was almost surely suffering from hypothermia.
The next morning the 210th Rescue Squadron of the Alaska Air National Guard, which specializes in searching for downed pilots and missing hikers, arrived with its HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter for another infrared scan. The two choppers stalked the mountain all day. On the ground a team of 40 searchers, which soon ballooned to 60 or more, canvassed the mountain. They tried to think like the lost man: Did LeMaitre hike right past Race Point and continue up a goat path toward the true summit—only to slip down treacherous cliffs beside the path? Did he fall through a melting snow bridge created by the streams that run beneath the lingering snowfields on the racecourse and now lie, injured, out of sight? Desperate, did he beeline straight for Seward through the impossible jungle of alders and devil’s club? In the following days they checked everything, to no avail—even tying strips of pink and orange surveyor’s tape to branches to mark the places searched. Weeks later when I climbed it, the mountain remained tinseled with hundreds of poignant Day-Glo ribbons, each one a hope unfulfilled.
Days passed. Rescue quietly became recovery. The bar-stool sages jawed that LeMaitre had pulled a fast one on everybody. “He’s in Cabo,” they said, “nursing a frosty margarita.” But for many Sewardites the hurt was personal. “This is our mountain,” Sam Young told me. “We can’t have someone up there suffering.” He and others took days off to search the mountain—some with teams, some on their own.
But where did LeMaitre go? The high tundra and rock slopes were easily enough searched. Soon the snow tunnels also had melted out, revealing nothing. Only one general scenario seemed to fit: Something sudden and drastic happened to LeMaitre—a fall? A broken ankle in the scree? A heart attack? He managed to reach the worst of the brush, or else wandered into some of Mount Marathon’s frightening, unseeable cliffs—dense and difficult areas where searchers might have missed him. Shock and hypothermia took hold. And he died there.