Part 1, Tribute to Allan

ALLAN FREES

THE CREATOR OF MED-LIT
AND
LONETREE PICTURES

He climbed rocks.

He climbed mountains. He also had to scale some pretty big barriers to do it, like Reynaud's syndrome and his wife's adamant resistance.

Reynaud's is an autoimmune disease genetically somewhat similar to certain forms of arthritis but the symptoms are not at all the same. There are heart rhythm abnormalities, especially tachycardia (very rapid heartbeat). Blood pressure aberrations are common, ranging from very very low to exceedingly high. There is also marked sensitivity in the extremities to the numbing effect of the great icy hammer of winter cold.

Rather dangerous stuff for a mountain climber who aspires to very high altitudes. But he would not let it beat him. He would not let anything beat him. He would never give up. He would climb and climb until his fingers literally cracked, 'til his toes turned to stone and 'til his heart beat like the tat-a-tat-a-tat of a snare drum's roll. His throbbing aorta would burn out and burst with an internal gusher of invisible red and his brain would scream as all his neurons strangled before he would ever capitulate. Climbing was his life of life.

Part 2, Tribute to Allan

It was also his death; his pitiable partner's too. The collusion of their friends and the Park Rangers and others to try to prevent that single most dangerous of escalades only added to its potential for excitement. Such barriers only augmented the imagined momentousness of their grand assault on that mini-mount, that bestial pygmy of a rock that happens to boast the worst wall in the West.

With a concentrated but completely disguised effort, he and his good buddy used misdirection and camouflage worthy of an ace magician to defeat the U.S. Park Service and all the comrades who conspired to stop them from making that stupid, fatal ascent. It was good ol' Kevin who got the idea to feint so neatly as well and then to ruthlessly attack the Rock.

The Rock. Not just a big dumb crag to scramble atop but she offered the Impossible Climb. One for a mountaineer to really follow his bliss, a fine lithic rainbow to pursue into the clouds, a rock-solid dream-catcher it was. And it had a name: Colchuk Peak. Its single worthy facet is considered the most dangerously unclimbable little mount in the whole Cascade Range. Seattle boy climbers had better beware of her sheer and crumbling shale cliffside that marks the North face. Yet the two pals knew, sincerely thought, deludedly dreamed impossibly that a victory on this wall would make history and make them instantly Everest candidates. Reynaud's syndrome and all. Incredible.

Just a fantasy and they knew it, really. Still...

Don Quixote and Sancho. Cisco and Pancho. They would defeat the old fraud of a hag yet who calls herself Formidable and who loves to dabble as the Deadly Witch. Much more deadly than any of the ladies Al and Kev chased, she is. The two were out to prove that she was in truth nothing but a sunny puff of warm summer solstice breeze. That is, on any date in mid June - on any of these the finest days of the year.

But it was June 20th, the summer solstice to be most exact; a day of portent, of great astral significance. It was the very tip top of the season to any astronomer or astrologer. Allan was both.

Part 3, Tribute to Allan

But that's another overlong story that must wait. Yet, it is not so strange that a scientist as frustrated as he was had turned to astrology to impress the gals and to make sense of his own psyche. Art didn't help. Religion had no meaning. Even science itself was far too weak to ken the depths of his soul, if he had one, nor the enigmas of existence, if he even partook of it.

Long before the end, though, astrology turned out to be but a simple braided system of trite aphorisms in disguise that were about as enlightening as a tautology. About all that gave him any real solace were the mysteries of the Ancient Ones, the Old Men and Women of this land, the Fathers-Who-Create and the Mothers-Who-Give-Life.

These, our cousins, were the first Americans, the ones who built gargantuan ceremonial temple mounds and gigantic mountain medicine wheels. They were our equals, true builders of real cities and towns. Architectural and engineering creators, they effortlessly designed great pueblos and even those superhighways of commerce and industry. They built them of the crude stuff that Nature provides and so refined it to a technological standard Werner Von Braun would have loved.

We aver that the superhighways were merely a network of nonstop foot paths, that the cities and towns, sans the paleontological evidence of their ancillary tepees, lean-tos and mud huts, were but villages. But it is indisputable that trails like Chisholm and others linked the Pacific, Atlantic, Great Lakes, the Southwest deserts, Montezuma's palace and the Caribbean.

However, as citizens of a real New World, Allan did certainly know them well, far better than we. Too, they and he loved and lived by the same wide, darkly bright night sky.

But a privileged few they are now. And all of Them can listen to the music of the stars, as Al did often. Not by means of ceremonial drums or haunting flutelike melodies but by means of Mozart did he listen and mourn for himself and for us.

Allan George Frees, like our continent's aboriginals, knew that we Europeans, though wealthy in a narrow sense and with need of psychiatrists, social workers and policemen by the hundreds of thousands, are verily the Most Poor Ones. We are the destitute, desperate, Ignorant Plunderers, the Mad Debauchers. Possessed by a drive that we cannot fathom, like a mass demon, we Whites and our hangers-on all plunge crassly onward through time like an obscene avalanche. We leave nothing that is foreign intact.

No crowds of ancient Native American churchmen at convention nor aged armies of red policemen on parade could deny it. That the most idealistic worldwide civil changes of our day, spurred by Green movements, are nothing but systoles upon the great gut of the White Man's world of greed and speed and money. Great contractions these movements are. They must inevitably give the expected cathartic result, Al obviously could blindly see.

If only he might call Them his brothers and sisters. They could be his Saviors, if Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad or if Yahweh and even Jesus Himself would not.

But all his philosophizing and mountain climbing and star gazing and art loving and lady chasing and music listening took financial support. It was luck, pure luck, that led him to found his library literature research firm, a company that supplies medical documents to those who truly need them. Indeed, it is an establishment that freely supplies startling facts of life or death to those who could not otherwise get hold of them at all.

It was luck and libraries. Fortunately, he fell in love with libraries as an astronomy student at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the mid 60's. He fell in love there where the libraries are almost as numerous as the very stars themselves. There's Cudahey and Scholl, Galvin and Washington and at least two dozen others within a stone's throw of the famous city's elevated Loop. But it was the distinguished John Crerar that furnished the neatly hard-bound photocopies of the rare astronomy texts Al clasped to his chest once, so eagerly, as a young high school student from Lane Tech.

It was luck and libraries and ladies. One lady he chased and who he also did love very much, but not enough, took him to Seattle where his amour of libraries led him to the University of Washington. Here, within the enormous National Library of Medicine Regional Medical Library, he worked happily for a while, for a pittance.

He could not stand some professors back at UIC. Many bored him. A most important few ranked him as an amateur, applying the Quadruple Standard of judgment that only certain frighteningly arrogant Ph.D.s can master so artfully. He was but a teenager, yet already their professional equals. He even had experience as an expedition leader who organized a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine. As a high school junior he observed the scientific mysteries of the solar eclipse of 1963.

Part 4, Tribute to Allan

Hell, it was just no use. Dropping out, he fled Chicago now with his Lady Love, as one crazily flees the abject and frustrating failures that devil. Satan couldn't have loved it more.

His wife thought that the bastards had managed to squash a Mozart: those overstuffed Theses who mocked. He would never blossom now, but he could go on to follow the Indian trails into the mountains he grew to so love. A Midwest flatlander, he converted to the religion of the Big Sky country. Here the gushing rivers and rushing streams boiled over rocks and waterfalls of the aptly named Cascades. Here, thick snowy blankets and great icy glaciers nestled snugly in the stony arms of his beloved Rocky Mountains.

His True Love hated to see him go. She hated the risks he took, the mad tricks he played on the mountain rises that he so masterfully greeted with line, strong hands and, rarely, a pick. His coffin was a thought she could not at all abide while the mountain waters would roil so furiously, so bitterly, so poignantly.

And he could not tolerate the thought of emasculation, sheer detesticulation, by the all too real Lady he once chased but now possessed. Hanging a cattleman's little castrator on his lonely bedroom wall, a blade that was so fiendishly curved; so pointed and to the point. He could feel it as it transformed a fine raging nascent bull to a docile doggie destined only to be unceremoniously eaten.

He pondered the bleak words that he would say to his departing feminine friend, his Love, his unknown secret reason for living and cherishing it all so much. Well, anyway then, farewell My Lady Fair. Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if I could but say that I adore you and beg you to stay...

But no, this must be but one more aggravated antagonism he would somehow have to sadly bury. He just wouldn't volunteer to be an eunuch with his balls in a box for any body.

Death was nothing to him. She feared it as a woman fears for the fruit of her own womb; the One who must live for her to even just be. The Skull was inevitable, even preferable, to him at least, it was. Worse than life itself it could not ever be.

Nothing could be more of a Hell than this inhuman torture that lays the hammer down when the beating about the eyes and ears succeeds only to numb the inner sanctum's vitality. But picks up the hammer again when the numbness finally begins to fade away. Away into the back of the mind it cruelly hides until the steely mallet starts pounding again with the insistent banshee cry of that same infant. Was this the One who only she could possibly want with her whole being?

But babies are just another way to apply the curved blade, he thought. He didn't guess they are of the few true paths to eternity. That is, after all, why the Jesu Christi is so often depicted as a child.

You couldn't have designed a worse mismatch. They simply could never really sing in the sunshine. Only as they left each other, the last few weeks, did they laugh every day. At last they kissed goodbye as friends and hugged each other as only true amigos can do. Once again, habitually by now, those forsaken lovers walked away from it all as the hammer pounded and pounded and pounded.

A bloody mess. Life is a Damned Bloody Mess. From the jungles of Viet Nam to the rolling plains of cattle ranches, life is for fools. Give me Death, the Tarot says, give me rest. Allan could at least think this much, therefore he was - was nothing but an ultra super genius of an idiot.

So he died on Colchuk, plunging from the vertical vertigo rock-face as the skydiver aims for his 'chute's target spot. When her deepest black glacial lake rose to meet him and Kevin from its hiding place far far below, Kev could not help because he was already smitten. So the line that was to guarantee their safety only insured their demise together as real brothers at last. They were born together into oblivion or maybe even into Heaven, if their real luck held true.

Al could only imagine, with a few final flickers of his still conscious but seriously severed cerebrum. His ethereal brothers, those Ancient Ones, the siblings he so longed for as an only child, might greet him now in his mind as no Christ ever would. So, in the previous last seconds, he had hi-dived him into the deceptively shallow waters near the rocky shore.

This was his error. For once again that deep, cool, tender Lady of Safety, his soft mama who was always so tragically absent in her very presence, could now elude him again, like everything else that was precious in his life.

As his head exploded like a bloody pumpkin-smash on an unseen rocky shelf just below the rippling waters of that crystal black, nearly frozen icebound pond, he could not have known that his only lasting creation would fall to his one really closest living relative, his cousin. His business would become a living donation, a lasting charity that he would have truly liked as a real memorial.

But this time, it's true, once he actually saw the stars up close, took pictures of them. Med-Lit was dead at last. Long live Med-Lit. And LoneTree Pictures.

By the way, you will note that his surname is really spelled Fries. Not French fries but Allan Frees. He loved the irony in that little mnemonic.