The Professor of the Precipice

Look up. No, higher than that. Put your eyes on that wall of rock. A man who taught dead languages for a living went up it with a line of iron. Rudolph Brunnow was a scholar. In eighteen ninety-seven and ninety-eight he surveyed Petra, the rose-rock city in the desert, and helped make the first modern map of it. His wife Marguerite went along. The family tells it that a woman wasn't allowed on that journey, so she dressed as a man and went anyway. That's the kind of marriage it was. They had five children. In nineteen oh seven, in Germany, Marguerite died giving birth to the fifth. He had promised her, the family says, that the children would be schooled in America. So he brought all five of them across the ocean to keep that promise, and he took a chair at Princeton, teaching ancient languages. In nineteen oh nine the family came here for the summer. He'd been a climber all his life. In nineteen twelve he took over the path committee in Bar Harbor. Other men had put iron on this island's trails already, but nobody had gone straight up the face of a cliff. Brunnow did. His crews set iron rungs and ladders into the east face of Champlain Mountain, and he put in his own money to do it. In nineteen sixteen his son Eric, a Princeton freshman, seventeen years old, died of polio. The next spring Rudolph Brunnow took pneumonia. He died in April of nineteen seventeen, at fifty-eight. You may hear the old professor fell on his own mountain. He didn't. His great-granddaughter set that straight. It was a brother-in-law who fell, years before, and he lived. Rudolph Brunnow lost the woman who went to Petra with him. He kept his promise to her. He lost his boy. And the path he left behind him is up there on that rock right now. One iron rung above another, every one of them a place to put your hand, on a line laid out by a man who had run out of places to put his.