West of Here (34 page)

Instinctively, Timmon squatted for cover. Surely, this approaching tandem were no more than recreational hikers crossing the divide from Sol Duc on their way to the trail’s terminus at Crooked Thumb. But they were people. That was the problem. Hadn’t he had his fill of hikers already?

Prairie-dogging over the ridge, he followed the slow, steady progress of the two hikers up the switchback and guessed that they would be upon him in fifteen minutes, maybe less. He hunkered in the brush thirty feet off of the trail until they finally came trudging through his midst. They were an oddly paired couple of dudes, that much was apparent at first glance. Timmon guessed them both to be in their late twenties or early thirties. One of them — the lanky one with the feral beard and the unmanageable hair — looked homeless. He was hiking in tennis shoes. He had an ancient olive drab external-frame backpack that had seen better days and an army-issue canteen that looked like someone had kicked it there from Fort Bragg. The other guy was a pantywaist, a real yuppie: fancy hiking gear, head to toe. A lot of Velcro, a lot of zippers, a lot of gadgets strapped to his person with carabiners. His wristwatch probably had an altimeter. Timmon caught a brief snippet of their conversation as they passed.

“I don’t know,” the dirty one was saying. “I guess I just figure there ought to be some sort of like, you know, quality-of-life index or something, you know?”

“What a load of crap,” Fancy Pants said, checking his watch impatiently. “Either you play the game to win, or you’re grist for the mill. Christ, is that the type of shit they taught you at Evergreen? It’s a wonder you don’t
live
in a tent.”

The Dirty One laughed.

Timmon followed the hikers a quarter mile down trail, where they set up camp in a hollow below the ridge. Fancy Pants had a bivouac tent which would have served Sir Edmund Hillary well at eight thousand meters. The Dirty One simply laid out a tarp.

“Pu-
leease,
” said Fancy Pants, beginning to unpack his shiny things and situate them on the ground. “Don’t be a boob. There are no nations. It’s all about money.”

“For some people.”

“Yeah. The smart ones.”

The Dirty One didn’t say anything to that. He just lay on his back, with his arms behind his head, and looked up at the treetops.

“It’s the same old game,” said Fancy Pants. “Get with the program, Woody Guthrie. War is business, face the facts. We need it. You gotta look at the big picture. Seriously, if Grandpa’s generation, or even Dad’s had been like you, we probably wouldn’t even
be
here. You don’t like it, go stand somewhere else.” Fancy Pants started repacking his shiny things. “That’s the problem with you people,” he pursued. “Your ideas. Heh. This country was founded on one idea, and one idea only.”

“What about the Boston Tea Party?”

“My point exactly.”

Timmon hated that smug little fucker with his fucking gadgets. Mr. All the Answers. Mr. Climb Everything Like It’s a Fucking Mountain. Guy like that will lie, cheat, and steal his way to the top. Meanwhile, a guy like Timmon had to lie, cheat, and steal just to stay afloat. All because of the fucking system. Any reservations he had about turning his back on civilization fled while listening to Fancy Pants. Satisfied that the two hikers posed no threat to the pursuit of his destiny, Timmon was just about ready to forge ahead, up and over the ridge, when the Dirty One suggested that they do a little collateral exploration and maybe look for a natural hot spring.

“Shit, you never know. I totally keep smelling sulfur. C’mon. We can just leave our shit here.”

“I’m not leaving my shit here,” said Fancy Pants. “My BlackBerry and all my shit’s in my pack.”

The Dirty One was incredulous. “What, Bigfoot’s going to steal your shit?”

“No,” said Fancy Pants, annoyed. “Animals could get into it or something — bears got my iPod at Whitney last year.”

“So, duh, we’ll tie the shit up.”

Timmon decided in advance, even as the mismatched pair hoisted their packs up and over a nearby fir bough, that he would take nothing from the Dirty One. The Dirty One was okay. He didn’t play life like a game and he didn’t whine about his stuff. For these reasons, Timmon did not even rifle through the ancient green backpack but turned his attention straight to the fancy pack, which still looked brand new, nicer than anything Timmon had seen at Big Five. Bonded construction, urethane mix, external compression straps, binary hip-belt components. Even a load transfer disc. Fucker must’ve paid five hundred bucks for the thing. This guy wasn’t interested in climbing mountains or communing with nature, thought Timmon. This guy was here to conquer. It even occurred to Timmon that he was doing Fancy Pants a favor, doing the whole world a favor, by stealing his propane stove, his carbon-filtered water system, his
Camp Cook’s Companion Guide
(featuring over 150 recipes, made from both fresh and dehydrated ingredients — from simple one-pan offerings, to creative Dutch oven repasts!), not to mention his Enertia Trails dehydrated meals — Switchback Spaghetti, Pinnacle Pasta, and Teton Teriyaki.

Timmon would teach that little fucker about real survival.

In a kangaroo pocket, Timmon found Fancy Pants’s wallet. Thirty-six bucks. A couple of credit cards. A fucking Starbucks gift card — a lot of good that would do him out there. He scattered it all on the forest floor, except the thirty-six bucks. He took the thirty-six bucks. Later, he would ask himself why he took the money if he had no intention of ever returning to civilization.

Just before he took flight, Timmon briefly considered just one peek into the old green backpack, just for the sake of curiosity. But he decided against it, he supposed, because he felt something of an affinity for the Dirty One, maybe the last affinity he would ever feel for anyone. Besides, there was probably nothing decent in there anyway.

At the top of the ridge, Timmon paused for one last look at mighty Olympus. But this time a shiver didn’t run through him as he stood on the Devil’s Backbone — this time he swelled with courage and conviction. His new fancy pack rested comfortably on his back, so that neither his shoulders nor his lumbar were forced to bear the burden alone. There was still two hours of light left. Not a cloud in the sky. Everywhere the warm smell of fir needles, birdsong, the burbling of nameless streams. Somewhere out there in that big country was his destiny. In between, who knew? Timmon began wending his way down the bald face of the ridge toward the tree line, three hundred feet below.

FEBRUARY
1890

Even as the men stood on the ridge looking over the steep valleys toward Mount Olympus, the weather was threatening to take a grim turn. Rolling gray cloudbanks tumbled over the sawtooth range that would soon be christened the Baileys. Mather could not help but wonder at the party’s fortunes had they wisely embarked upon this journey in spring rather than winter. But spring was too late. Destiny could not wait until spring.

“Best be getting on,” said Mather. “Before our friend Thunderbird comes calling.”

And without further pause, the Mather party and their one remaining mule, Dolly, packed tight to the tune of 250 pounds, began trudging through the chest-deep snow, down the bald wayward face of the Devil’s Backbone toward the tree line, three hundred feet below.

With the wet wind stinging his face, Mather could not help but wonder where this mythical valley of wide prairies and lush grasses lay. Might they be buried in the snow beneath their feet? Where was this place where the wind stopped howling and the sun nested in a bowl of green goodness? Would this be the place that would awaken in Mather the yearning to pause, to stop, to settle even? He doubted it, as he was beginning to doubt that such a place even existed. The lay of the land was only getting rougher and more precipitous. Between the ridge and Olympus, Mather counted no less than three steep valleys. And none of them appeared to offer easy passage. More disquieting than the terrain was the sleeping wilderness of his spirit, which nothing could seem to stir. While he had little doubt that the passage ahead was to be the greatest and most perilous physical challenge of his life, he could not summon the same thrilling intensity he had experienced along the Mackenzie. He was alert, his senses were
sharp, but his steps did not spring with aliveness, the cold air did not excite his lungs. Driven not by his customary restlessness, nor by any crowning sense of anticipation, Mather led his men into the heart of the Olympics mechanically.

For a day and a half the party battled their way through wet, heavy snow, over rugged spurs, switchbacking up and down heavily timbered inclines — valleys within valleys. This terrain had a strange quality that did not speak to its natural formation the way the Yukon, the Rockies, or the Cascades had.

Haywood was also moved to note the odd topography of the Olympic interior.

27 February 1890
There is an observable lack of uniformity to this rugged terrain that suggests great chaos and upheaval in its past. These mountains do not seem to rise up, so much as explode out of the earth, colliding, as though they were competing for room, all crowding in on Olympus as though huddling around her for warmth.

On those increasingly rare occasions when his thoughts turned to Eva, something bitter began to rise in Mather’s throat, not because he would never possess her, and not because he could no longer summon her smell or the touch of her delicate hand, but because, like everything else, the thought of Eva did not arouse him; not even the thought of her swollen belly stirred him. Love may abide in some quieter form, Mather thought, but nothing was more transitory than passion.

Upon the second morning following their departure from the Devil’s Backbone, the party broke camp from the narrow wooded bottomlands of the first hollow. The steep valley was bitter cold, receiving only scant hours of sunlight each day. Ahead lay a convergence of ranges, a sort of eruption in their path resulting in two giant clefts running west and southwest respectively.

Reese, who in recent days had become quite friendly with his former nemesis, the mule, was pulling up the rear with Dolly’s lead firmly in his clutch, as the party ascended the rise past the tree line, past the last stunted firs, and onward toward the next ridge.

“Hope you know where you’re going,” Reese shouted. “Because I sure as hell don’t!”

Gathering all the spirit he could muster, Mather looked over his shoulder and, raising a fist, broke into a bearded grin. “Straight down the gullet of Thunderbird, gentleman!”

Only Runnells laughed.

The truth was that Mather did
not
know where he was going. Throughout the previous afternoon, he had been pondering the two massive clefts that lay ahead and knew that within two days’ time a decision would have to be made as to which direction to cast their fates. In spite of the levity he projected for the benefit of the party, Mather understood all too well the gravity of this decision. The stakes did not get higher. Stores were dangerously low. The weather and the terrain were growing increasingly hostile. The decision could well mean the difference between success for the expedition or the death of the entire party. Never along the Mackenzie had Mather agonized thus over his course. With the Mackenzie, decisions had been rather clear. The river had been his guide in most cases. In this case, the Elwha seemed to offer no clear guidance; this was not the wide river they’d come to know but rather a narrow and circuitous channel dashing their expectations at every turn. Neither did the mountainous terrain suggest a logical route through the high country.

The very morning of the impasse, while eating his cold stack of gillettes by the weak fire — the last gillettes he would eat for the remainder of the journey — Mather pondered the decision still.

“You ain’t said two words all morning,” observed Reese, on his haunches by the fire.

“Just putting some coal in my belly,” he said, producing a half smile.

Indeed, there was coal in Mather’s belly, and it was a slow burning panic. Was it fear that had him leaning toward the west? Fear that the southwest route would be the longer crossing and that food scarcity was more likely to catch up with him and his men? Or was it recklessness that drove him west? The courage to lower his shoulder and charge straight at Olympus, just as he’d charged up the gut of
the Elwha. An honest accounting of himself that morning by the fire yielded the unsettling suspicion in Mather that it was the former. And had he given his own doubts the power, had he been able to summon any passionate response whatsoever to the journey ahead, it might have been one of mortal fear.

After an hour march up a pristine snowfield — the last visible thing approximating a gentle rise — the party arrived at the base of the wedge-shaped collision of mountains that formed the junction of the two valleys, one running southwest to the head of the Elwha, the other due west toward Olympus. Mather stopped in his snowy path until the others pulled nearly even with him. The wind was whistling on the plateau, swirling with snowflakes, stinging the men’s faces.

To be heard over the blow, Mather was forced to project his voice. “Well then, here we are,” he said.

“And just where the devil is here?” said Cunningham, uneasily.

“In the thick of it,” was Mather’s reply.

Reese was scratching Dolly’s neck, though the beast was disconsolate. The skin of her legs was scraped clean below the knee. Her forelegs festered. She wheezed for breath in the thinning air and did not bother to narrow her eyes against the windblown snow, as Reese tried to give her comfort.

“What have you got in mind?” said Haywood.

Mather had both options in mind. “I suspect west will get us where we’re going more directly,” he said. “Does anybody reckon differently?”

Nobody reckoned differently — at least, not out loud — that the westward route was not the right choice.

1 March 1890
I fear that leaving the Elwha, rather than rejoining her on her southwest journey, will prove to be a fatal mistake. Given the state of our fortifications, it is madness to proceed due west. I held my tongue only for fear of dividing the party, and I strongly suspect I shall regret not saying my piece. We’d be infinitely wiser to follow the Elwha as originally planned. All things considered, this broad valley has been good to us, and I suspect she would
offer more of the same eventually. There is a wisdom to water, and I would sooner follow this wisdom than put my trust in the instincts of men. Especially not the James Mather we’ve come to know in recent months. Though perhaps it bears mentioning that I have doubted Jim’s judgment in the past, and he has proven me wrong. For this reason, alone, I consent to go west.