Brightness on the Darkest Days

Mt. Katahdin's paper birches and my father-in-law, Chuck Radock

Mt. Katahdin in Maine, May 2022

I wrote about sycamores in my last post and quite enjoyed all the feedback. It’s wonderful to know there are others who appreciate the magnificence of the tree that one friend called “the star of the winter landscape.”

Today, I’m writing about the paper birch and something much more personal, the loss of my father-in-law, Charles Radock. Chuck lived a remarkable life. Known as Dad and “Jedo” (Serbian for grandfather) to his family, he had more jobs before he was 20 than most people do in all their working days. He had stories about his stints as a grocery delivery boy, pumping gas at a service station, repairing bikes for other kids in Pennsylvania’s Mon River Valley, and even starting his own newspaper, the Fair Hope Beacon, with his brother. (It’s this work ethic, evident from a young age, that eventually helped put his three children through college.)

He went on to work in television. He was a technician during the “Golden Age of Television” and through his retirement in 1995. But my favorite stories are from his time serving in the Air Force in the early 1950s. He worked his way up to Staff Sergeant at the Charleston Air Force Station in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. Those serving at the station were part of the country’s Air Defense Command. Their work was to provide air defense during the Cold War – important work in a scary time. The last story I remember him sharing is how they cleared the snow off of the station’s giant, white dome. A rope hung from the top and the guys would drag it around causing the snow to fall. He laughed as he talked about having to duck to avoid being walloped by an avalanche of dome snow.

One day in the fall of 1954, Chuck and two friends climbed Mt. Katahdin. I think he said it was a cloudy day with limited views. The photo below does seem to show the cloud cover. Assuming they did the nine-mile loop that includes the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail (A.T.), this would have been a strenuous, daylong hike. This was in the early days of the A.T., which was completed in 1937. To put it into context, their day hike was six years after the first reported A.T. through hike (Earl Shaffer) and two years after the first woman (Mildred Norman Ryder) hiked end to end. They shared in a special place before it became relatively commonplace to climb Katahdin. I loved hearing about it.

Chuck is the one on the left when viewing the photo.

Last spring, I picked up a copy of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s, My Wilderness: East to Katahdin. I shared Douglas’s thoughts on sycamores in my last post. In his chapter about Katahdin, the last in the book, he wrote about paper birches. From the book:

“Occasionally a lone one keeps vigil in a stand of maple, hemlock, spruce, or cedar. But usually the birches travel in family groups, possessing a large acreage. I remember groves so deep, so wide, that their limits could not be seen. These groves seemed to run to infinity. They were at their best on wet, gloomy days, when rain dripped from the leaves. Then they lighted the whole forest and made it gleam. They brought brightness on dark days, and made the heart rejoice.”

I like to imagine that Jedo saw the paper birches of Mt. Katahdin in this same manner. He was there on a gloomy day, after all. The perfect conditions for the birch to shine! Somehow, inexplicably, I had not noticed the birch trees outside of Jedo’s hospice room until after he had passed. But they were there, waiting to be noticed and to offer some measure of comfort.

In his final days, there in that room, Jedo heard passages from East to Katahdin. He also heard some of his favorite big band tunes, audio from the 1960 World Series, and the voices of his family.

It was hard to bear witness to his failing health over the last year. The man who climbed a mountain and who was climbing ladders until nearly the age of 90, was no longer climbing, at least not in a physical sense. Perhaps he was climbing in some other way…I don’t know.

My wife, Kathi, talked about Jedo’s fond memories of Katahdin during his funeral. She spoke with eloquence and tenderness and read the passage quoted above. As I listened, I thought about the birches “traveling in family groups” as we were surrounded in love by the Radock family. She closed with a few lines from Robert Frost’s “Birches”:

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more
But dipped its top and set me down again.

Thank you, Jedo, for opening up your heart to me over the years. We’ll all miss you as well as your stories and your ingenuity. And I’ll never look at a birch tree the same way again.