Touching Mountains

Hi. I’m Ryan. I’ve written books about Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett. I was a sportswriter for a long time. Now I’m writing this. It’s a newsletter about sports, music, travel and other things we enjoy and that make us feel alive. It’s called Portfolio of Enthusiasms. It’s free, but we’d love it if you subscribed and/or shared this with your friends. Welcome to Issue No. 5, the story of why it’s been months since the last newsletter.

A long time ago, my mom called and said she was worried about Dad. He was working too much and sleeping too little. He didn’t really have any hobbies, so he couldn’t retreat into those. I imagined him sitting quietly in the dark with his frustrations, because most everything Dad did was done quietly. I’m not sure I ever heard him complain about anything except Michigan handing the ball off too much.

He did like the beach, however, and Jimmy Buffett, and he loved us. So, I called him up and made him a deal: If he met me in Miami, I’d take care of the rest. “Sure,” he said. I rented a car, booked a room in Key West and watched the weather. Hurricane season let us off with a warning and we arrived along with a tropical depression. We checked into our hotel and then sat in our room watching it rain on Duval Street until it finally let up just a little. 

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where?”

Capt. Tony’s Saloon has been a lot of things over the years, but on that day, it was mostly empty. I eyed a pool table and ordered a beer. I got Dad the Pirate’s Punch and warned him to be careful. Dad wasn’t a drinker. Neither of us could play pool for shit, but we couldn’t care less. We laughed a lot, listened to the guy singing by the door and waited out the rain.

We spent the next couple of days wandering the island. We climbed the lighthouse and explored Hemingway’s house. We went sailing and watched the sunset from Mallory Square. We ate a lot of fish. He ordered a drink with lunch once in a while. He seemed lighter as we made our way back to Miami, and I felt good about that, like I’d maybe helped in some small way. Helping had always been Dad’s thing. He was as dependable as the tide. You could set your watch to him — as long as you were willing to be 10 minutes early. The man believed in extreme punctuality.

His obituary was the hardest thing I’ve had to write. Ronald White was a good man and a great dad. He was honest. He was humble. He did his best. He was present, always. He didn’t live a life that made headlines. He lived a life that made lives. The one he and Mom built. The ones my brother and I enjoy. The ones his grandkids are just assembling. He didn’t push us. He simply loved and supported us.

He deserved better than what he was handed, but “deserve” doesn’t have anything to do with anything in this world. Look around.

He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2024. Doctors lay the blame on his time on a Navy base in Da Nang. The day after a bone marrow biopsy, not a terribly comfortable procedure, he insisted on driving me to physical therapy as I began to recover from shoulder surgery. Then he mowed our lawn. That’s who he was. A Good Midwestern Lawn Guy™ and a man who believed in helping others. He did so much to make things a little easier for so many. The hell of his disease was that nobody could do a thing for him. He never caught a break.

In April, the decision was made to stop treatment. In early June, we threw a party to celebrate Mom and Dad’s 55th wedding anniversary. Two weeks later, Mom called around 4:30 a.m., because Dad had a fever north of 104 degrees. At the hospital, they diagnosed pneumonia and a secondary lung infection. Six days later — six days in which he never once complained while thanking every doctor, nurse, therapist and janitor every chance he got — he took an ambulance home and into hospice. We watched Tigers games and sat beside him and did what we could to make him comfortable amidst the hum of an oxygen machine and the inevitability of what was coming.

One evening, after baseball and at the end of a rough day, he pushed himself up in his bed. “I think I’d like some ice cream,” he said. We loaded up a bowl of mint chip. He loved mint chip. That was his last meal. Later, I fell asleep on the couch watching fireflies dance outside the window behind his head. 

He died in the early hours of July 8.

Did you know you can just walk up to mountains? In a lot of places, not only do they allow it, they encourage it. They set up visitor centers and staff them with wonderful people who are happy to tell you whatever you need to know and also sell you T-shirts and postcards and magnets. There’s a small entry fee, but that’s all there is, and the National Parks are every great thing anyone has ever said about them. Don’t believe me? Go to Wyoming, get out of your car and walk toward the Tetons. Then keep going. They won’t stop you. You can touch those mountains, but even when you do they hardly seem real. It’s breathtaking, the kind of thing that can make you feel alive.

A week after celebrating Dad’s life, my wife and I drove to Kalamazoo to see the Drive-By Truckers. It’s possible I’ve seen DBT more than any other artist or band. They walked on to Warren Zevon’s “Boom Boom Mancini” and walked off as the final notes of “Angels and Fuselage” faded into a perfect summer night. 

Driving home, I felt more like myself than I had in months, as if all that sound — three guitars, bass and drums — had knocked me out of the fog of grief and exhaustion and pointed my feet back toward solid ground. Then I got on a plane with my wife and daughter and flew to Salt Lake City.

This trip was my daughter’s idea. She wanted wilderness and mountains and fresh air. She wanted to “frolic.” Her word. In Utah, we bummed around Park City. We hiked the Wasatch National Forest. We saw Hozier. In Jackson, Wyoming, I became the proud owner of a can of bear spray and we walked right up to the Tetons and around a lake. I drank whiskey in an old cowboy bar and rode a horse in the hills above the National Elk Refuge.

In Montana, I showed them the Murray Bar in Livingston, and we drove out to at the Crazies. We sat above the Yellowstone River reading books. We drove back to Yellowstone (the park) and hiked around the Mammoth Hot Springs and saw Ol’ Faithful. On the final night, at the Old Saloon (est. 1902) in Emigrant and saw Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans play cow songs for people who know about cows. Not to mention drinking songs, gambling songs, Hayes Carll songs, songs about military history and survivalist strategies. Spirits were high.

Grief doesn’t need a lot of square footage. It travels light and waits in the shadows for a quiet moment to interrupt. I cried a lot alone in my car this summer and even more in the dining room after everyone else had gone to bed. But songs lift spirits and mountains stir souls. Friends and family pick each other up. The exhaustion fades, the fog lifts and all the good memories flood back to fight back against the horrors of the brutal final weeks.

Summer is ending and it was profoundly sad and, also, unexpectedly inspiring. To honor a good man, you want to live in a way that would continue to make him proud.

When Dad retired in 2016, he was given a Breitling as parting gift. He didn’t have or want or need a lot of expensive things. Careful, responsible financial planning was his jam and so a high-end timepiece wasn’t going to be how he spent his money. That doesn’t mean he didn’t appreciate the watch. He wore it all the time.

I think he valued the watch not because of its value, but because it represented a job he’d done well. For a lot of years, he ate a lot of shit, professionally speaking. But he got up every day and he did the work as best he could because it was his job and it helped him take care of us. And so quietly — again, always quietly — that watch meant the effort didn’t go unnoticed.

There are going to be a lot of first withouts in the month to come. There’s a true freshman quarterback starting in Michigan Stadium on Saturday night, the first Michigan game without him, and I’m going to want for all the world to text him about it Sunday morning.

As a kid, Dad always found a way to get a couple of tickets and take me to a game. One of the reasons I love college football is because I loved those days with my dad. I still remember being scrunched in next to him with cigar smoke blowing in my face from a row in front. I can still feel him reaching to grab me under my arms and lift me up when the stadium would rise to its feet as a big play unfolded.

Saturday, I’ll get up and lift his watch from its box the way I do most mornings now. I’ll wind it exactly 40 times, because that’s what the instructions say and so I’m sure that’s what Dad did. Then Saturday night, I’ll think of him as my daughter and I head into the stadium and I bet I’ll feel little lighter for the time we get together.

Portfolio of Enthusiasms will soon return to a semi-regular publishing schedule. More or less.