On the Passing of Bob Proudman

Like a lot of folks, I always assumed that the smoking aftermath of a nuclear holocaust would lift to reveal only a couple living things: the cucarachas, and of course Proudman. As it happens, Bob retained his proclivity for surprise right down to the bitter end.

The great warrior monk of the Appalachians is no more, and we are all impoverished for it.

I got to know Bob in the early 90’s when I was the Caretaker of the Scott Farm, the Appalachian Trail’s Middle Atlantic Crew Headquarters. We also bumped into each other in the course of various trail club activities (I’m a founding member of the Cumberland Valley Club) and we spent some quality time in the woods together, including an epic trip to Mount Rainier. We didn’t bump into each other often, but we were friends and enjoyed each other’s company.

Some of you don’t know who the hell Bob Proudman was. Enlightening you will be no mean feat, but I’ll try.

Bob was an employee of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, (formerly the Appalachian Trail Conference, a place he fit into much more comfortably). He arrived in Harpers Ferry in 1979 after 7 years as the Supervisor of Trails for the Appalachian Mountain Club in the storied White Mountains of New Hampshire (he started as an AMC crew member in 1965). His skills at building and maintaining foot paths in ferociously difficult terrain were legendary, rivalled by his ability to run trail crews, work with volunteers, and manage projects. He literally wrote the book on the subject…Appalachian Trail Design, Construction, and Maintenance with Bill Birchard and Mike Dawson. If you’ve ever hiked on any part of the AT, you’ve benefited from Bob’s handiwork, expertise and experience.

Larger than life is cliché, but there are clichés in the lexicon for a reason.

The first thing you noticed about Bob was a magnetic physicality. He was not overly tall or especially statuesque but when he walked in a room, everybody turned and looked. He was solid, strong, and graceful in the way that mountaineers are. He came by it honestly. In Laura and Guy Waterman’s Yankee Rock and Ice A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States first published in 1993, Bob’s name pops up in a variety of places. In the late 60’s and 70’s he put up a number of winter first-ascents in the Whites and on Mount Katahdin that seemed suicidal at the time (and still do to most of us). Much of this was done solo, in part because he was usually the only person nutty enough to try it, and with equipment that would be considered archaic today.

Dark, craggy, and blessed with a growling baritone, he was a mesmerizing conversationalist. He had a deep philosophical/spiritual bent (the only Presbyterian/Buddhist I personally ever bumped into) and was possibly the best-read person I ever knew, so he always had a lot of interesting things to say. In his dealings with family and friends he was reflexively kind and solicitous of people’s feelings, but he could also be as blunt as a ballbat, something I sort of liked. He was a passionate and effective champion for wild places. Indeed the Bigelow Range in Maine would likely be a very different and diminished place without his bull-headed and effective advocacy.

He had an abiding love of mountains. He had an abiding love of a bunch of stuff.

One day I was sitting across a picnic table from him, when out of the blue he exhaled a cloud of nasty cigar smoke and growled

“You know, I’m really a creature of excess…it’s kind of a problem…”

“Well no shit Bob!”

He loved his kids and family and friends beyond measure.

He liked to drink and eat. He liked women. He liked brutal, epic hikes and climbs in abominable weather. He liked to laugh and make others laugh and had an affinity for the lowest of low-brow humor. He liked a challenge. He liked to play music and sing. He liked to sleep. He liked tobacco. He liked the comradery of volunteers and trail crews. He liked sports. He liked writing and reading. He liked to stick up for people and causes. He liked to think and meditate. He liked rocks and sharp, well-maintained trail tools. He liked to be helpful. He liked mischief. And so on…

Often, moderation was not in him…

At his wake I remarked to two friends that the real shame of his absence was his inability to attend the event. We all agreed it was likely he would have drunk too much, delivered a loud, masterful and moving self-eulogy, made a spectacle of himself in various ways, and would have had to be spirited away and stuffed in a car to keep him out of any real trouble.

Bob’s angel was beautiful, and soared above the crags on great white wings, his devil had horns, a tail and a pitchfork. Neither was ever very far away.

So he was not Mother Theresa.

In his defense I offer the commentary of my departed and very dear aunt, who on being told her husband was a handful responded, “Yeah, he’s not a saint, but you wouldn’t want to be married to a saint. Saints are hard to live with!”

I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately, and I return repeatedly to certain memories.

He and Bob Smith are running side by side at breakneck speed down the Scott Farm lawn after a sailing frisbee in a game of Ultimate. Mr Smith, the crew chief of the Mid-Atlantic trail crew is as strong as an ox, as is Proudman. They are full-out stride-for-stride, eyeing the floating disk, and beating the living shit out of each other with their forearms. They are also cackling like schoolboys. I don’t remember who came down with it.

I have just unloaded on Bob over the phone about a mean-spirited and obstinate trail volunteer who has been making a lot of other volunteers and ATC staff miserable. I called the guy an asshole and I meant it. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and a soft, deep rumble replied “I think he’s just unloved and unhappy. I feel sorry for him.”

Bob and I are sitting on a streamside boulder at Mount Ranier. He and two of my best friends have just spent the last four days successfully climbing the mountain via a particularly difficult route. Now back down and decompressing from the climb, I’ve just shown Bob how to fly cast, and I then hook and land a few small native rainbows from the steep little creek. I explain that these little fish are likely steelhead parr, and that they may find their way to the open Pacific, then back again to this same small creek. The connection these little fish have to the enormity of the ocean fascinates him, and he asks question on question about them. The questions continue through dinner and a few beers back at the campsite, his mind racing to tidewater with the steelhead, and then, in an instant and almost in mid-question, “Bivouac Bob” is sound asleep and snoring.

At Bob’s memorial service, there is a moment when roughly 15 or so men my age stand up and walk to the front of the church. One of them has a guitar. Their spokesman explains that they are all guys who worked on Bob’s trail crews in the White Mountains back in the 70’s. They look like weather-beaten old pirates. They never forgot their old mentor. They sing a heartfelt Tom Petty song for Bob, and I tear up. I’ve run crews of young folks my whole professional life, and I know how much this means.

The world seems depauperate and incomplete without him. The loss for his kids and his siblings and the rest of his family must be enormous and unfillable.

I am not a devout person; the hypothetical hereafter doesn’t resonate with me all that much. That said, maybe somewhere along the Franconia or Presidential ridgeline, or in the wild scree of the Mahoosucs or the Bigelows, in the lee of a rock in a big gale, perhaps he has found a quiet place to think and to watch, his goofy gap-toothed grin visible beneath a wool watchcap.

I would like that a lot.