For the Want of a Nail

By all descriptions an experienced and fit hiker, Jeff Rubin, 53, of Newton, Mass. dreamed of climbing the 100 highest peaks in New England. Lost in the near impenetrable Klondike region of Baxter State Park June 3, he died just one short of that goal.

Officially the cause of death was listed as drowning. According to park superintendent Buzz Caverly, Mr. Rubin apparently slipped on an algae-covered rock in a stream and fell, landing face down, stunned, in shallow water.

“The area is a true wilderness with massive beauty but it is an unforgiving place,” the superintendent said several days after the accident.

To learn something from Mr. Rubin’s demise we have to go back hours before and peer beyond the ruggedness of the terrain or severity of climactic conditions to a series of decisions that combined to bring him inexorably to his last rendezvous with fate.

In examining the technological detritus of catastrophes such as airplane crashes, investigators try to piece together a critical path, a sometimes linear series of often minor miscues that together can conspire to bring down even the safest airliner. They look for, in effect, the modern version of the old saw, “For the want of a nail a shoe was lost. For the want of a shoe, a horse was lost….” etc., etc.

Jeff Rubin and a companion started on the trail to the top of 4,143-foot tall North Brother Mountain west of Katahdin about 7 a.m. They reached the top three hours later. Tired and soaked from steady rain, his companion wisely elected to return to the trailhead.

Through breaks in the dense fog, Mr. Rubin, who had already climbed North Brother previously, could probably see his 100th peak, Fort Mountain to the north. It lay about a mile away on an unmapped but recognizable trail. Mr. Rubin told his companion when they parted he would meet him at the car. Faced with a 650-foot descent and an 200-foot scramble up Fort, he expected to be about two hours making the round-trip traverse.

Hours later when he did not return, rangers were notified. Searchers found his backpack containing some food, a cellular phone and some climbing protection gear propped against a post on North Brother.

A helicopter crew spotted his rain jacket Sunday morning. A ground searcher discovered the body about 75 feet away.

Stressing that no one will ever know for sure, Buzz Caverly said rangers theorize Mr. Rubin, who it was reported had suffered dizzy spells and loss of consciousness while hiking before, never made it all the way across to Fort Mountain. Leaving the pack behind may have been done to make it easier to traverse the rugged, thick wilderness. Or it could be a sign that the victim was early on suffering from the first stages of hypothermia characterized by unclear thinking and confusion.

From his bruises, rangers believe Jeff Rubin slipped and fell frequently. He was severely scraped and cut by the gnarled vegetation as he descended in the rain and fog and growing darkness down “near vertical terrain,” Mr. Caverly said. Getting to a relatively flat spot, he spread his raincoat over a bush, perhaps to signal air searchers. Just a few yards away lay the branch of Wassataquoik Stream where he died.

In reviewing Jeff Rubin’s critical path, some bending of accepted tenets of wilderness travel which at first glance seem minor and manageable, emerge. Most were probably something Jeff Rubin, or for that matter, hundreds of experienced outdoors people have done casually many, many times before.

In his battle of man against mountain, Jeff Rubin won 99 times. Several times he had to have hiked in the rain, or lost the marked trail yet suffered little harm. He had probably even been able to come back from being mildly hypothermic on previous excursions.

From time to time he may have split up from a companion with both getting back all right. Maybe he had bushwacked without gear, and like all hikers he had undoubtedly survived numerous spills on algae-covered rocks. But on June 3, a combination of by now familiar insults took its toll.

The one decision that would have made it all academic was never made. Along with his abandoned pack, Jeff Rubin apparently left behind his willingness to call it a day when the unforgiving forces of nature railed against him. Perhaps the voice he should have listened to was drowned out by the Siren’s song of that last, unconquered peak looming so tantalizingly close through the mist.

Not listening for that voice, though, was the key miscue and set in motion events that later left him stumbling alone down a dark, damp untracked mountainside to his final, fatal step.

Buzz Caverly, speaking with a homespun wisdom typical of the late Gov. Percival Baxter himself, perhaps best sums it up.

“We are talking about Maine’s most rugged terrain…. In this situation we are humbled that we are mere visitors to the land, and that no one conquers mountains.”