Susan Oakey-Baker, Finding Jim (Rocky Mountain Books, 2013).
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine,
Under every grief and pine,
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so,
We were made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
William Blake
I met with Sue
for an hour Harvest Thanksgiving weekend at Whistler to discuss her published
book Finding Jim as the sun turned to
the west--autumn trees spoiled us with their flaming red, rust and yellow
hues. Sue had recently returned from her 15th
climb of Kilimanjaro to raise funds for Alzheimer’s--her first trip to the
summit of Kilimanjaro was with Jim Haberl and the trip is poignantly and
honestly recounted in Finding Jim (chapter
4).
Many of us remember, with predictable understated Canadian patriotism, the day Jim Haberl reached the summit of K2 in the summer of 1993--he and Dan Culver were the first Canadians to do so. The climb was marred by the death of Dan Culver who died on the descent. Haberl recounted, in evocative and graphic detail, the climb in K2: Dreams and Reality (1994). Haberl continued his mountaineering tales with a follow up book, Risking Adventure: Mountaineering Journeys Around the World (1997). Risking Adventure was dedicated “To Sue, my partner in the biggest adventure of all-life”. Haberl in the Acknowledgements, doffed his grateful cap to Sue once again—“And a very special thanks goes out to Sue Oakey, who supports who I am and gives me perspective”. Jim Haberl died in an avalanche in the University Range in Wrangel-St. Elias National Park in April 1999, and in 2006, the ACC-Jim Haberl Hut was opened in the Tantalus Range in the Coastal Mountains (Cloudburst: Fall/Winter 2006, pgs. 22-23). I remember, with some fondness, the ACC week trip in 2006 to the Tantalus Range to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ACC--the Haberl Hut was ever in our sights and imagination---it opened a few weeks before our trek.
Finding Jim is a fast paced and energetic book (44 chapters) that, in a vulnerable and raw sort of way, retells the intense phase of Jim-Sue’s relationship in the 1990s and, more to the telling point, walks the reader, in a tender and transparent way, into Sue’s extended mourning phase after Jim’s death in 1999---there is nothing opaque in this see into the soul book. There can be no doubt that Sue had knitted deeply with Jim (Goethe calls this “elective affinities”) and such an unexpected death shredded the knitting and unravelled Sue’s hopes and dreams for a life that was supposed to unfold well and successfully. Joy (mixed with some early confusion in the early relationship) tended to dominate until the death of Jim altered the script of the drama--woe entered Sue’s life and joy was dimmed in the process of mourning searching for meaning--there is a surgical like precision as Sue touches, in a vivid and deft way, her many feelings and reactions to Jim’s tragic death.
The burnished gold of Finding Jim is the way Sue does not flinch from feeling her pain, trying to ease such suffering and the varied places she goes (where she and Jim had spent life giving moments) to what the Celts called “thin places” where she might refind Jim. Death is never easy, but it is doubly difficult when it occurs at the beginning of lives that had much promise, a promise that will never be fulfilled. Life does go on, though, after death and to Sue’s credit, she courageously lived into and through the mourning season. Each chapter in the mourning quest is packed with Sue’s intense longing to find Jim yet knowing Jim, at one level, is gone and can never be found. There is a certain comfort in being at places, wearing clothes etc, that were there in the bonding stage of the relationship--letting go is more difficult and refinding how to live again equally demanding--such are some of the deeper themes of Finding Jim.
There are tender letters in the book, fine mountaineering photos near the end of the book and many wise quotes worth meditating on for those seeking a way onward and forward after the unexpected death of a soul friend. Sue’s journey forward is one of seeing that joy and woe are part of the texture and tapestry of life--when both dwell well and wisely in the soul and mind, the pilgrimage through time is made in a more mature way---never easy to live through, though, when the tragic side of life rears its demanding head and will not leave.
Sue brings to a close Finding Jim with a parable (pages 354-356) not to miss---the brief tale compares/contrasts a shallower view of what it means to be human (all bluster and bravado) with a more honest, soft hearted and humane way of living life that recognizes the transformative power of suffering. The book does end in a rather positive way in which Sue is married again and has a child, but most of the book is more about Sue processing, in her unique way, Jim’s death. The book, in some sense, should be called “Finding Sue” or “Sue Finding” for the simple reason that it is more about Sue in search of herself--Jim is the icon and portal she must see and live through to go deeper on such a quest, to ascend such a peak from which more can be seen and sifted through.
Finding Jim is as much about Sue’s journey into insight as it is about entering the larger perennial issues of life----knitted relationships ending, death and life, joy and woe, hopes dashed and dreams crushed yet living forward---each and all can tell their own story of such growth experiences, but Sue’s confessional approach and limpid prose makes for a read that is virtually impossible to put down—I read the book in a few hours sitting on a mountain ridge on a clear blue canopy day after fresh snow returned for another season and autumn was fading--autumn brings endings, the cold of winter can be hard to live through, but spring does return--such is the latent message of Finding Jim. Sue has clearly demonstrated she is a writer of much passion and skill—we await a sequel with more delving and deeper dives---it seems a book on Kilimanjaro might be in the offing.
Ron Dart
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