In memoriam: Alec Stall 1981-2005
This Monday I recieved the sad news that Alec Stall, a fellow student from my boarding school days, died last February 14 in a tragic skiing accident. Working as an indie filmmaker of extreme skiing techniques, during a run above Smuggler's Notch he fell down about 30 feet away from a cliff face, before being consumed in a small avalanche which sent him tumbling over the cliff to the ground 500 feet below. He was 23.
Initially I had no idea how to really feel about his death. Of course, shock and sadness were the first emotions to register, even though Alec and I were not especially close. I tried to imagine what he must have been thinking as he fell: if he realized what was happening, if he fainted or was unconscious, or if he knew and if he was screaming as he plummeted towards the earth. Death is inevitable and ubiquitous: we see it all around us and read about violent and horrible occurrences on a daily basis, but I came to realize that the gulf between imagining hypothetically such a situation, and trying to conceive of it once it has actually happened to someone we know personally is quite wide indeed. The news struck home, I understood what had happened, yet despite reading the account on five different websites, I still had trouble imagining that Alec Stall, my fellow Willistonian, had perished in such a horrific manner.
I had the bit of bad news from my friend Ben Hoyle, another school chum who lives a mile away from me here in London, one who, in contrast to myself, was very close to Stall as they both lived in the small dorm called Logan House on a remote section of campus. The Logan kids were an exceptionally tight-knit crew, with many a misfit but all decent guys among them (excepting Brad Beitz, of course), and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for all of those guys.
For me personally, I often got rubbed the wrong way by Stall. This could be attributed to the fact that I didn't live in close quarters with him, so I never got to know him that well. I felt that he was somehow representative in many ways of certain facets of boarding school life that I hated: the pervasive cliquishness, aloofness, and bravado that such institutions famously exude and inculcate. Of course, with the exception of cliquishness I was very much guilty of the same sorts of behavior, indeed probably more so than was Alec Stall. Yet beyond those attributes, he was a strong student, enthusiastic in the activities he pursued, and even then I respected him as one of the kinds of students we needed to recruit more: all-around acheivers who made their mark on the community on their own terms. Much like the case in the early days with Jeff Rose, Scherling's roommate at Wisconsin, I think that Stall and I never got along because in a lot of ways we were really similar, but such tough beginnings can also be the opening for strong and enduring friendships. Though I had no reason to talk to him after graduation (he was, by the way, a year below me) , I've come to think that, under different circumstances, we might have gotten along quite well. I don't feel qualified to write any eulogies for Stall, but I do send his family my deepest sympathies in what must be unspeakably painful times, and hope that they can take solace in the knowledge that he died doing what he loved so much and what he did so well.
There was a piece run by CNN specifically on Alec and extreme sports. It can be viewed here:
Initially I had no idea how to really feel about his death. Of course, shock and sadness were the first emotions to register, even though Alec and I were not especially close. I tried to imagine what he must have been thinking as he fell: if he realized what was happening, if he fainted or was unconscious, or if he knew and if he was screaming as he plummeted towards the earth. Death is inevitable and ubiquitous: we see it all around us and read about violent and horrible occurrences on a daily basis, but I came to realize that the gulf between imagining hypothetically such a situation, and trying to conceive of it once it has actually happened to someone we know personally is quite wide indeed. The news struck home, I understood what had happened, yet despite reading the account on five different websites, I still had trouble imagining that Alec Stall, my fellow Willistonian, had perished in such a horrific manner.
I had the bit of bad news from my friend Ben Hoyle, another school chum who lives a mile away from me here in London, one who, in contrast to myself, was very close to Stall as they both lived in the small dorm called Logan House on a remote section of campus. The Logan kids were an exceptionally tight-knit crew, with many a misfit but all decent guys among them (excepting Brad Beitz, of course), and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for all of those guys.
For me personally, I often got rubbed the wrong way by Stall. This could be attributed to the fact that I didn't live in close quarters with him, so I never got to know him that well. I felt that he was somehow representative in many ways of certain facets of boarding school life that I hated: the pervasive cliquishness, aloofness, and bravado that such institutions famously exude and inculcate. Of course, with the exception of cliquishness I was very much guilty of the same sorts of behavior, indeed probably more so than was Alec Stall. Yet beyond those attributes, he was a strong student, enthusiastic in the activities he pursued, and even then I respected him as one of the kinds of students we needed to recruit more: all-around acheivers who made their mark on the community on their own terms. Much like the case in the early days with Jeff Rose, Scherling's roommate at Wisconsin, I think that Stall and I never got along because in a lot of ways we were really similar, but such tough beginnings can also be the opening for strong and enduring friendships. Though I had no reason to talk to him after graduation (he was, by the way, a year below me) , I've come to think that, under different circumstances, we might have gotten along quite well. I don't feel qualified to write any eulogies for Stall, but I do send his family my deepest sympathies in what must be unspeakably painful times, and hope that they can take solace in the knowledge that he died doing what he loved so much and what he did so well.
There was a piece run by CNN specifically on Alec and extreme sports. It can be viewed here:
posted by Det. John Kimble at 10:34
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