The Best American Sports Writing 2014(143)

There’s a brutal fairness to this sentiment, but I left these conversations feeling that it’s too easy to write off Michael LeMaitre as careless, reckless. How many of us have had near misses—the somersault over the handlebars 10 miles from the trailhead, or the mini-avalanche deep in the backcountry—and then laughed about those epics around the campfire later on when all was well? Have you ever thought how close you’ve come to disaster? We all have a strange friendship with risk. We crave its thrill—who doesn’t want to edge a little closer to the redline where the adrenal gland squeezes and the colors grow brighter? Yet we rarely understand how close we’ve skirted that line, or what’s on the other side. Accidents? Those happen to the other guy. Nobody ever laces up his shoes thinking he’ll lead off the 10 o’clock news.

Does that make us all irresponsible?

So now you’re Michael LeMaitre, toeing the starting line last July 4. You haven’t been up the mountain, and you’re a little nervous. Then you look up and you see the peak, so close you can almost reach and tap its summit. It’s just three measly miles, round-trip! Straight up and down again, with hundreds of new best friends! You’ve been through so much more than this. Take it slow, you think, and you’ll be fine.

Honestly—if you were Michael LeMaitre at the starting line, what would you do?





The morning I left Seward, I dragged my luggage into the hotel parking lot. The previous day’s bright, smiling sun was gone. The rain had returned, and with it a shivery dishrag bleakness. In the harbor the season’s last tourists milled about wearing crabbing gear, waiting for their tour boat to depart.

As I opened the trunk, the skies across Resurrection Bay split open. Bars of Annunciation light burst across glaciers and water and shabby hotel parking lot—the kind of unrestrained, overspilling Alaskan beauty that swells your heart and also breaks it a little bit for its fleetingness, and that makes every other soggy, frigid moment here in the far north worth it.

I turned with the light and faced Mount Marathon. The mountain stood as it always did, its Egyptian bulk leaning over town—not glowering, not protective, just . . . indifferent. With the sunlight a clear rainbow had appeared, arcing out of dark skies and landing clearly in the thick brush a few hundred feet up its face. It was silly and maudlin to think anything of it and I knew it, and I turned away. Then I turned back and spent a long time memorizing the location, though unsure who I would tell, or what I would say.

Eventually my eyes drifted down the long, meandering ridgeline. A second rainbow had appeared, falling to earth in the undergrowth some distance away from the first. And now an unlikely third rainbow tumbled from the sky and rooted itself, bright and promising, in still another place. Then, one by one, they disappeared.