A friend of mine died while climbing a mountain. He was a professor of physics, a baseball player, a lover of women, a fly fisherman, a student of astronomy, a man with a car in which were clothes, books, coffee cups, cleats, student papers, beer bottles, boots of various sorts, a gyroscope, reels, and the front wheel of a bicycle. A thousand tons of ice fell on him and he died. He was the last man in a line of thirteen men and women climbing Mount Hood late in the afternoon of a sunny day in May. He volunteered to be last so he could help with any trouble above him. An avalanche missed the first twelve climbers and caught Tom McGlinn. This was on a Sunday. The next Friday there was a ceremony in the chapel. The chapel had seen funerals before, o yes, plenty of funerals, people die like flies, they die young and they die old and they die every step of the way from young to old, but this was a raw wound, a young man crushed on the mountain that gleamed coldly behind the chapel, and it wasn’t a funeral exactly. It was a remembering, and it was different.

      People stared at the mountain for a long time as they walked up to the chapel.

      The doors were flung open and the side door was propped open and the back door was propped open too, and the wind sifted through, shuddering the candles — a west wind with cedar in it from the huge forest across the river.

      He had been a headlong man, furious and passionate and merciful and disorganized, which breeds great affection. His friends were alive with stories of him. He had forgotten this and that, shouted and courted at the wrong times, wandered the world. His mind was a clean machine and his house and car and office were monuments to chaos. He once ran out to left field in a baseball game wearing fishing waders, having driven furiously from a river to the game without bothering to change. He asked of his students “ragamuffin irreverence,” as he said. He asked to teach a university course in astronomy because he knew nothing about it and wished to know a great deal about it. He kept a class out all night until dawn counting meteor showers. He took a class snow-shoeing in April on the mountain that would kill him.

      A priest stood and said that he had not slept for days after Tom died, and had not known what he would possibly be able to say at this event, but then suddenly the Psalms came to him, whole singing snatches of them, and the night before he had risen from his bed and opened a Bible and found Psalm 24: “The man whose heart is pure will climb the mountain of the Lord ... The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples. Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place? The man with clean hands, who desires not worthless things, who has not sworn so as to deceive his neighbor ... Such are the men who seek the face of God ...”

      Those words rang around the wooden chapel and I watched as hands went to mouths, hands covered eyes, hands rose suddenly, hands folded into prayer wings. The travels of hands in their infinite emotions, hands as the birds of the heart.

      Hours after the remembering was done there I went back to sit vigil and I noticed that the doors were still open, and slicing through the chapel in glee and confusion were dozens of swallows, barn swallows and tree swallows, their bright bellies flashing in the russet light as they wheeled over the baptistry and altar and organ and balcony, up into the little turret at the top of the building and back down with zooming swoops, in and out of the chapel in numbers I could not count although I tried, feeling it important to number the hairs on the heads of even the smallest of quicksilver visitors that day. But there was more life than I could measure.