Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage, a Suicide, and a New Life of Self-Discovery

In 1971, Laura and Guy Waterman left New York City for thirty-seven acres in Vermont, where they would live in a hand-built cabin without running water or electricity for the next thirty years. It was a life based largely in the nineteenth century, a life of hauling their own water and growing their own food, of lighting candles in the evening and heating their cabin with wood from the surrounding forest. Combined with the trail tending they did in the alpine zone of the White Mountains and the books they wrote about environmental stewardship, it made for a rewarding, healthy, and fruitful existence. But that was only part of their story. Guy’s depression was another part, and his ultimate decision to take his own life on the wintry summit of Mount Lafayette--a decision he made with Laura’s support--was the crux, a term climbers use to describe the hardest move on the climb. Being a climber herself, Laura had to confront the crux. This meant taking a close look at Guy’s suicide and asking herself a hard question: How, or why, had she come to support the decision of the man she loved? In Losing the Garden, Laura Waterman comes to terms with her husband’s long depression and the complex nature of a gifted, humorous man who was driven by obsession, self-absorption, and a strange lack of confidence. Her account of her own marriage, idyllic from the outside but riddled from within, is nonetheless a love story, a portrait of an intense and unusual marriage, and an affirmation of life after loss.

Laura Waterman is the author of Calling Wild Places Home: A Memoir in Essays (also published by SUNY Press) and Starvation Shore: A Novel. With her husband, Guy Waterman, she wrote numerous articles and books on the outdoors, including The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping; Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness; and Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States. In 2019, SUNY Press published the thirtieth-anniversary edition of the Watermans’ book Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains. Laura Waterman lives in Vermont.