Fine Just the Way It Is (16 page)

The trail slanted steadily upward and was so badly overgrown that long sections melted into the general mountain terrain. Twice she lost it and had to scramble to a high point to see its continuation. She was close now to the height of land where the trail would run above tree line for seven or eight miles before starting down the west slope. This was country where great shelves and masses of shadowed rock displayed exquisite lichen worlds. She knew the lichen chemical factories broke down the rock into soil, some of them fanning across the stone like a stain, nitrogen-loving hot orange lichen where foxes had urinated. Marc had said once that lichens might have been the earth’s first plants, that over millions of years they had converted the world’s rock covering into the soil that allowed life; the lichens they saw were still devouring the mountains. On their hikes they had seen lichens in hundreds of shapes and colors—flames, antlers, specks and fiery dots, potato chips, caviar, blobs of jelly, corn kernels, green hair, tiny felt mittens, skin diseases, Lilliputian pink-rimmed cups. They always told each other that they were going to learn the lichens, and then, back home, never did.

The rocks themselves, wreathed to their knees in a foam of columbine blossom, were too beautiful to look at for long. One massive soft red rock, as large as three houses, was splotched with pea green lichen. She scratched at the lichen with her fingernail, but it was impervious to abrasion. Flowering plants grew on the rock’s small ledges and shelves. This perfection of color and place, too rare and too much to absorb, induced a great sadness; she did not know why and thought it might be rooted in a primordial sense of the spiritual. In this wild place there were no signs of humans except the high mumble of an occasional jet. The solitude provoked existential thoughts, and she regretted the argument with Marc which fell steadily toward the importance of a fuzz of dust. But she was not unhappy to be alone. “Puts things in perspective, right, Johnson?” she said to the grey jay who was following her.

On the next day around noon she reached a church-size rock about a hundred feet from a tan lake, really more cliff than rock, an interlocking system of glistening pink house-size chunks of granite cracked and fractured into blocks and shelves so huge a few young pines had found enough soil to keep them alive. Their forcing roots would split the rock in time. The ground between the cliff and the lake was littered with a talus of fallen boulders. A few miles away bare scree-covered slopes protruded from the gnarled krummholz, marking the trail’s maximum height. She did not want to hike up there in late afternoon, to be forced by darkness to camp in the lightning zone. Even now torn grey clouds slid over the naked peaks. The map showed the tallest as “Tolbert Mountain.” The sun was halfway down the western sky. She would quit for the day and camp here. She eased off her backpack and let it drop heavily to the trail. It made a hard clank. The trail here crossed a vast sheet of granite half a mile wide. To be free from the familiar weight was a luxury and she stretched.

High up on the pink cliff she thought she saw writing—initials and a date? Early miners and travelers had left their marks everywhere. She decided to scramble up and see what it was; maybe Jim Bridger, John Fremont or Jedediah Smith, or some other important historical figure. She felt a bitter dart of loss, like a thorn under the fingernail, that Marc wasn’t with her. He would have shouted with joy at this beautiful trail and the pristine lakes, and he would have climbed directly to the inscription on the rock.

The bottom third of the cliff was a rubble of fallen breakstone encrusted with the nubby fabric of grey lichen. Then came fifty feet of climbable clean granite that gave way abruptly to an almost perpendicular wall of glinting stone bristling with jutting blocks. She was determined to get near enough to read the inscription, for she was sure the marks were weathered letters.

The climb was more difficult than it looked. Several stones at the bottom wobbled a little, but so near the ground they seemed hardly a concern. Above them was a tiny trail formed by rain and snow runoff snaking down from an upper jam of more broken blocks, just wide enough for her foot. She inched up the tiny path as far as the lowest block and managed to claw her way around its side, not looking down. Now she was close enough to make out the letters daubed in black paint, J
OSÉ
1931. Not a famous explorer after all—just some old Mexican sheepherder. So much for that.

Getting down was surprisingly awkward. Small rocks turned and slid beneath her feet. In one place she had to slide down a rough incline that rucked her pants uncomfortably up into her crotch. She was in a hurry to set up camp as soon as she got down. This would be the night to break out the pint of rum, maybe mix it with the bottle of cranberry juice she had lugged for days. She craved the thirst-quenching acidity.

Near the bottom she jumped eighteen inches onto the top stone in the jackstraw jumble. The stone swiveled as though it were on ball bearings. Her foot plunged down into the gap between it and another rock and with her weight off it, once more the huge stone shifted, pinning her leg. At first, while she struggled, she ignored the pain and thought of her situation as a temporary obstacle. Then, unable to move the rock or to pull out of its grip, she understood she was trapped.

It took a long time—several minutes—for her to grasp the situation because she was so furious. On the climb up that same block had shifted slightly with a stony rasp as though clearing its throat. Because it was less than two feet from the ground she had considered it inconsequential. She had not taken care. If Marc had been with her he would have said something like “Watch out for this rock.” And if Marc was with her he could push or pry up the rock long enough for her to pull her leg out. If Marc was with her. If anyone was with her. She certainly knew the stupidity of hiking alone. She had climbed up there because that was what Marc would have done. So, in a causative way, he was there.

She kept trying to pull the rapidly swelling leg free. The rock pressed against her calf and knee. She could slightly move her ankle and foot. That was the only good news. As a child she had learned that those who did not give up lived, while those who quit trying died. And sometimes those who did not give up died anyway. She thought of her chances. If Marc went back to the trailer he would find the forgotten map on the kitchen table. He would see her camping gear was missing. He would know she was on the Jade trail and he would come. Unless, said her dark, inner voice, unless he was in Greece on some fire line. And if he was in Greece, would Forest Service personnel notice her jeep sitting there day after day? Would they see her note on the front seat, now six days old, and come looking? Those were her chances: to free herself; for Marc to come; for a Forest Service search and rescue. There was one more slender possibility. Another hiker or fisherman might take the closed trail. In the meantime she was mad thirsty. Her backpack was on the trail where she had dropped it, but because it was behind her she could not even see it. In it were the cranberry juice, food, the tiny stove, matches, a signal mirror—everything. In frustration she heaved at the rock which did not move.

As twilight advanced she cried angrily, raging at the tiny misstep that might cost her everything. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her dry mouth. Eventually, leaning against the cooling rock, she fell into a half doze, starting awake many times. Her trapped leg was numb. Thirst and the cold mountain air fastened onto her like leeches. Her neck ached, and she pulled her shoulders forward. She shivered, wrapped her arm around herself, but the shivering intensified until she was racked with deep, clenching shudders. Possible scenes rolled through her head. Could she get so cold the trapped leg would shrink enough to let her pull it out? She pulled again, the fiftieth time, and could feel the edge of the huge stone pressing down on the top of her kneecap. Could she summon the strength to pull the leg relentlessly up even if the edge of the rock cut or crushed the kneecap? She tried until the pain overwhelmed. The effort eased the shuddering for a few minutes, but soon her muscles were clenching violently again. She prayed for morning, remembered how hot it had been every day. She thought if she could just get warm she would get back some strength, and if she had water, after she drank, surely she could get the leg out. She could pour water—if she had it—down her leg and perhaps the water would provide enough lubrication to let her get free. As she thought about this she realized that urine might both warm her and lubricate the trapped leg. But the warmth was fleeting and any lubrication went unnoticed by the rock, which had now passed from inanimate object to malevolent personality.

Between shuddering spasms she fell into tiny snatches of sleep just a few seconds in duration. Finally the stars paled and the sky turned the color of crabapple jelly.

“Come on, come on,” she begged the sun, which rose with interminable slowness. At last sunlight struck the ridge to the west, but she was still in cold shadow. An hour passed. She could hear birds. One perched on the edge of the cruel rock just out of her reach. If she could seize it she would bite its head off and drink the blood. But the air was slowly warming even if the sun rays were still not touching the rock. Her leg felt like a great pounding column. At last the blessed sun fell across her body, and gradually the shuddering slowed. The wonderful heat relaxed her and she nodded off for long minutes. But each time she snapped awake her thirst was a disease, enflaming every pore of her body, swelling her throat. She could feel her fat tongue thickening.

The sun’s warmth, so pleasant and grateful, became heat, burning her exposed arms, her neck and face. The eagles screamed overhead. By noon her smarting skin and clamorous thirst overshadowed the injured leg. Her eyes were scratchy and hot, and she had to blink to see the distant scree cones that seemed to pulse in the heat. By sunset those naked peaks had changed to heaps of glowing metal shavings. Several times throughout the day she imagined Marc’s approach and called out to him. A fox ran up toward the snowbank with something in its mouth.

Now she took new stock of the object that was imprisoning her. It was an irregularly shaped block of granite roughly three feet long and two feet high, the top a sloping table with a scooped declivity a foot or so long and perhaps two inches deep in the center. She could just reach the declivity with her fingers.

The sun notched down the sky, changing the rock shadows. A curious marmot ran to the top of the adjacent rock and stared at her, ran down beneath it, reappeared from a different direction. Johnson, the grey jay, flew in and out of her vision so often he seemed a floater. There was nothing to see but Johnson, the marmot, the dots of black lichen, the eagles in the sky. There was only one thing to think about. Then, as the sun declined, there was another: night and cold.

The rock lost its heat slowly but with cruel inevitability. The sun crashed below the horizon and immediately a stream of chill air flowed down from the snow slopes. At first the coolness felt good on her burned skin, but within the hour she was shivering. She knew what was coming and so did her body, which seemed to brace itself. Far overhead she heard the drone of a small plane engine. Her mind raced to think of a way she could signal a plane the next day. She had a reflecting mirror in her backpack. If only she had worn her watch; if only she had brought the cell phone. If only she was not alone. If only she and Marc had not quarreled. If only he would come. Now. She thought that the sounds of his approach she had imagined during the day must have been a fox raiding her backpack. The night dragged and she dozed woozily for longer periods, minutes instead of seconds, bent over at the waist, for the rock made a kind of slanting table at just the height to cripple cotton pickers and short-row hoers. The leg alternated between numbness and throbbing.

The morning was bitterly familiar. She felt she had been trapped here since infancy. Nothing before the rock was real. She was a mouse in a mousetrap. Everything was the same, the brightening sky, the yearning for the sun’s heat. Her tongue filled her mouth and her fingers were stiff. She mistook the grey jay, Johnson, standing two feet away from her on the far edge of the rock, for a wolf. The dull peaks at the height of land were very like monstrous ocean waves, and she could see them swell and roll. The surface of the rock holding her in its grasp was fine-grained, lustrous, dotted with pinprick lichens. The sky bent over the rock. Something smelled bad. Was it her leg or her urine-soaked jeans. Again her drying eyes went to the ocean waves, back down to the rock, to Johnson, who had now taken the guise of the sleeve of her grey chenille bathrobe, to the surface of the rock, to her cramping hands and back again to the naked scree slopes. She had not known that dying could be so boring. She fell asleep for moments and dreamed about the granite mousetrap, built with such care by an unknown stonemason. She dreamed that her father had pulled up a chair nearby. He said that her leg was going to wither and drop off, but that she could make a nice crutch from a small pine and hop back down the trail. She dreamed that a rare butterfly landed on the rock and an entomologist who looked like Marc came for it, easily lifting the stone from her leg and showing her the special mountain wheelchair he had brought to get her down the slopes.

When she snapped back to consciousness the sky hunched over the rock, the slopes, the high snowbanks oozed and sagged, undulating in rhythm with the bald knobs. Time itself writhed and fluttered. Johnson the jay was making thick booming sounds such as no bird had ever before produced. He was a drum, an empty oil barrel on which someone was beating a message, a talking drum. She almost understood. The sun seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo, splitting her eyes with light, then disappearing. Something was happening. She could just make out tiny lichens, transparent, hopping on the stone, on the backs of her hands, on her head and arms. She opened her mouth and the lichens became rain falling on her roasted tongue. Immediately she felt a surge of gratification and pleasure. She cupped her hands to catch the rain but they were too stiff. The rain poured off her hair, dripped from the end of her nose, soaked her shirt, filled the declivity in the top of the rock with blessed water that she could not quite reach.