David Cooke Obituary

I was a friend from Alabama and since it was so long ago cannot remember why he was in Mobile Alabama. Maybe he had family here? We both were young working at the Mobile Infirmary/ Doctor´s hospital. We became friends. He was alway so kind and decent, upright friend. I am looking through old letters and have come across so many he had written me. I am so sad to never keep up with him.

I am privileged having had the opportunity to talk with Dave shortly before his passing in December. He had just decided to surrender to the burden of his illness knowing he had done his best to master his disease. His passing came swiftly and freed me to reflect on our friendship and the quality of man that was David Cooke.
We met freshman year as next-door neighbors in Pauley Hall at Occidental College. We found we had similar carrier goal and interests: medicine and the outdoors. We ended up, to nobody´s surprise, taking virtually all the same classes at the same times and studying together. Equally important was our shared abiding love of the mountains. Thus, joined at the hip, we became roommates and spent our 4 years sharing math, biology, chemistry, German, and physics classes as well as the MCAT test on our way to our respective medical schools. Dave was a smarter and had better grades and test scores, and also a way-better draft number but we both graduated "cum laude" and eventually made our separate ways to medical school to complete the medical careers we had started together.
There are certainly some stories about those crazy young college roommates Dave and Fred that are best forgotten but there are also others, fondly remembered, that had nothing to do with academics. Our first outing was a hike from the dorm to the top of 10.000 ft Mt Baldy where David finagled the key to the Sierra Club hut for free. The racoon car raid in Yosemite and the blizzard at Chocolate Lake also come to mind.
But there is one particular trip that I think best describes our friendship. It was during the 1970´s gas shortage and Dave had the perfect solution to the 5 gallon limit on even or odd calendar day mandate: his Volkswagen "bug". Small with no usable back seat, so light a few fraternity brothers could pick it up and move it, powered by a "lawn mower-like" engine that got the best mileage of the day, the "bug" with 2 people and gear could, going downhill and on the flat, achieve freeway speeds and with limited fuel availability had enough range to reach the Sierras.
For whatever reason we picked Fin Dome as our objective: a Sierra high country granite dome with, according to Roper´s "Climbers´ Guide to the High Sierras", "an "easy 5th class" climb to a summit with a grand view and an unfortunately big 20 mile approach hike. I figured we´d only need to carry light packs to go really fast. So I asked could we do it all in a single weekend, did we really need to study anymore for that chemistry test and could we make it back in time on Monday to take it? David thought we could and the only way to test the hypothesis was to roll the dice and see.
From Eagle Rock to Independence to Onion Valley, the faithful "bug" put us in position at the road head well after Friday midnight. A pre-dawn start saw us over Kearsarge and Glen passes, finally after a long day, throwing our sleeping bags out at the base of Fin Dome in 60 Lakes Basin.
Travelling light without a stove we ate a cold meal and watched out on the lakes the armies of trout having their dinners. I have never in my life seen so many fish in one place at one time and they were feeding on more mosquitoes than I had ever seen in one place at one time and they in turn were feeding on us. Fearing exsanguination, David and I hid in our sleeping bags waiting for the temperature to drop below freezing when surely these pests would disappear until the sun returned for trout breakfast time. Why didn´t "Roper´s Guide" warn prospective climbers about the pests? Perhaps because the guide itself was the solution! Dave reading the guide and cursing the omission began to slap the book closed in front of his face as he read and nominally and transiently reduced the number of mosquitoes on his face. Slap, slap, slap and Dave had fashioned a Mc Giver-like answer to the mosquitoes. We shared the book back and forth for through our meal pretending we had the pests under control while at the same time obliterated the print on the Fin Dome and Kearsarge/Glen Pass pages with smashed bodies and traces of blood.
Morning came. The climb was a joy and the view of the high county from the summit was just as superb as Roper had promised. As the dice would have it, the descent back to camp, the long hike back to the `bug" and the 250 miles drive down highway 395 back to Occidental College were completed before the sun came up Monday morning. We had pulled it off and felt on top of the world. Dave got and A and I got a B+.
That "Roper Climbers´ Guide to the High Sierras" remains on my book shelf to this day. Over the years it has travelled to the Sierras many times and seen much abuse: now with tattered cover and many dog-ears and dirt. But to this day David´s memory is renewed by riffling through the pages, there remains a section that is still made unreadable by the mosquitoes David and I brought back from Fin Dome.
Dave was my best man and I his. I cherish my memories of David Cooke; best of friends; a kind and gentile man.

My deepest condolences to the Cooke family and friends. I knew Dave through my son Fred Ziel. Both went to Occidental College and they were Best Man at each of their weddings. I´ll remember their close friendship and Bonded with the same interests.

So sorry to hear of his passing. He was my neurologist for almost 10 years and we enjoyed many a talk. He was truly one of a kind. My condolences to the family. Janet