The T-shirt was too big. It also was cheap, probably having shared shelf space with gasoline additives, stale saltines and straight-to-video DVDs awaiting customers at a nearby convenience store.
And Allison McGill loved it.
McGill, overseeing a day-long effort to give health care to homeless people, was shaking with fever. She was nearly swaying on her feet when a young woman approached her on a rainy Sunday morning three years ago.
“Here.” The woman, a fellow volunteer McGill hardly knew, handed her a T-shirt.
With that simple gesture, Michelle Trojanowski made a friend. This was not uncommon. She made many in a life that ended earlier this year on the frozen slopes of Washington’s Mount Rainier.
Last week, searchers at Mount Rainier National Park found the Atlanta resident’s frozen body 8,200 feet above sea level on the edge of a crevasse, a rip in the ice. She vanished during a mid-January camping trip when sudden snow and ice storms stranded Trojanowski and her fellow camper, Mark Vucich, 37, of Agoura Hills, Calif. Trojanowski, a Florida native, was 30.
Also last week, searchers discovered a third body, Sork “Eric” Yang, 52, of Springfield, Ore. They have not found the remains of his hiking partner, Seol Hee Jin of Korea. They also started hiking up the mountain when storms swept over the peak. Based on evidence collected from the mountain side, searchers surmise that the couples teamed up when the weather turned bad.
For McGill, executive director of Lazarus Ministries Inc., a nonprofit that helps care for the homeless, the discovery of her friend’s body is a reminder of an appointment they won’t keep. Before heading to the West Coast, Trojanowski promised to meet her friend for coffee when she returned.
She’s relieved searchers found Trojanowski’s body, but still …
“It’s bittersweet, the feeling,” said McGill.
For Cathy Phillips Kerr, who worked with Trojanowski, the discovery closes an emotional door — she’d worried that her friend’s body might never be found — but hardly eases the hurt.
“She was just such a genuine person,” said Kerr, who works in information technology for Greystar Real Estate Partners, a nationwide apartment management company where Trojanowski also was employed as an information technology analyst. “She just had that spark.”
A spark extinguished in snow and ice.
Mount Rainier is an active volcano, simultaneously molten and frozen. At 14,410 feet above sea level, it’s the highest peak in the Cascade Range, a sierra that stretches from British Columbia to northern California. Covered in ice, with crevasses that open and close suddenly, it may be the most dangerous, too.
Since the federal government created Mount Rainier National Park in 1899, more than 300 people have died on its slopes. Searchers have managed to retrieve most of those fatalities, but not all.
“There are more than one or two bodies still up there,” said Chuck Young, the park’s chief ranger.
In 1946, an airplane carrying 32 Marines crashed on the mountain’s western slope. Eighteen months after the twin-engine plane disappeared, a keen-eyed ranger spotted wreckage strewn across a glacier 9,000 feet above sea level – the missing transport.
Today, that airplane remains on the peak, entombed in ice. So does its human cargo.
When he heard that a parishioner was missing on Mount Rainier, the Rev. Kris McDaniel of Trinity Anglican Mission turned to a higher power, praying for her survival. He urged others in the Atlanta church’s congregation to do the same, and they did.
But as one day followed the next, with searchers returning with no news, McDaniel knew: Trojanowsi, who’d joined the church in 2009, was gone.
“She lived life to the fullest,” said McDaniel, whom Trojanowski’s family asked to speak on their behalf. “That’s indicated by the fact that she tried to climb a mountain in wintertime.”
Trojanowski, said McDaniel, was not the sort of church-goer to sit in the pews, sing a few hymns and then leg out the door in time for lunch. Not long after she joined, he said, he got an email from her. The holidays were approaching, the young woman wrote, and she wanted to buy food for a needy family. Could he recommend one?
“So many people are looking for what they can get,” he said. “Not Michelle.”
She treated everyone with dignity, said Gino Lloyd. When he met Trojanowski more than two years ago, he was homeless, battling drug addiction. She was volunteering with Lazarus Ministries.
“She hugged me,” said Lloyd, still sounding surprised about that encounter. “They [Trojanowski and other volunteers] served me more than just food.”
Lloyd recalled an afternoon, standing on Peachtree Street, when —
“Gino!” someone yelled. “You behave!”
Lloyd looked in time to see Trojanowski, leaning out of a passing car and waving, her grin as bright as the afternoon sun.
“OK!” he yelled. “I will!”
Lloyd kept his end of the deal. He’s been drug free for 15 months. An Army veteran, he has a temporary job with the Veterans Administration. He’s got an apartment, is paying the bills. And thanking God for people unafraid to hug a homeless man.
“She made me feel like a human being,” Lloyd said.
She loved to serve, enjoyed the company of others, but occasionally Trojanowski would slip away for some quiet. Mary Beth Cowan, also a member of Trinity Anglican, recalled her friend hiking to the top of Brasstown Bald to take in the windy peace of the Georgia mountains. She also liked to stroll the serene slopes of Crest Lawn Memorial Park, not far from her home in northwest Atlanta.
“Sometimes she was just go-go-go” said Cowan, who hosted a church fellowship group with Trojanowski. “And then you’d go a few weeks and not hear from her.”
Trojanowski’s friends know they won’t hear from her again — not in this world, anyway. So they hold close to memories and share stories about a young woman who trudged up a faraway mountain.
McGill still has that cheap T-shirt, too.
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