Chapter 8. Where Are You Going, My Honey, My Lamb?
“You look like a nut,” she said. “Even assuming this is the right thing to do, is this really how you want them to find you? Sprawled on your back with your johnson hanging out? Is there something romantic about that? Isn’t it just kind of embarrassing? I thought you had more self-respect. It’s amazing the things you can still learn about somebody after living with them for 45 years.”
“What’s with you this morning?” he said. She’d been silent again all night, giving him some hope that she’d finally decided to leave him alone. But there was a different tone in her voice today, a real edge.
The first couple of days she’d taken the rational approach. “Shouldn’t you be taking more food with you? How about one of your foam pads, for those creaky old bones? There’s no point in being miserable while you die. It’s cold up there at night – don’t you need one of your fuzzy jackets? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to shave? Who’s going to give you a ride if you don’t at least look respectable? If they do pick you up, aren’t they going to be suspicious when they see you don’t have anything with you? How are you going to convince them you’re just taking a harmless little backpacking trip? An 80-year-old man heading into the mountains with a couple of granola bars and not even a change of underwear? Won’t they just call the Forest Service to send out the guys with the butterfly nets? How do you think Meg is going to feel about this, you just disappearing? She’s got a husband, and a job, and teenage kids. You really want her to have to deal with this?”
All perfectly reasonable questions, delivered in her best sympathetic tone, but mostly he hadn’t answered her, or had limited himself to one-word responses. He’d always armored himself with silence and stubbornness against her quicker brain and tongue. But he knew how he felt. The trick was to stay focused on that: make adjustments wherever she seemed to have a valid point, and keep moving. Thus he’d thrown in a couple of extra granola bars to allow for unforeseen delays, and added a warm hooded sweatshirt just because he hated being cold. Otherwise his dusty old backpack held only his ancient sleeping bag, a water bottle, and the white plastic garbage bag neatly rolled around its contents of a few pounds of ashes. On top of that he’d stuffed a lot of crumpled newspapers to make the pack look full without adding any serious weight to it. He’d also shaved and worn clean clothes.
The bus trip to Argento and the hitchhike to the pass had gone without incident. No one gave him a second look, although the buzzcut Marine lieutenant who plucked him off the shoulder of the highway and drove him up the hill was clearly curious. But the Marines had apparently taught him not to question authority, even the default variety conferred automatically by mere age.
During the long slog up the trail a thin edge of sarcasm had begun to frame her nonstop questioning. He supposed she was annoyed that things had so far gone smoothly and according to his plan. However, he’d last made this sort of climb at least 10 years before, and his physical condition had not improved in the interim. He’d forgotten how the elevation and the endless upslope changed everything. He was forced to slow and shorten his steps until he was barely creeping up the hill. The mere act of breathing required most of his attention. His scrawny thighs burned and trembled, and his head ached, throbbing in time with the veins in his eyeballs. A red-green mandala of hypoxia hung in the center of his vision all that first afternoon, dispersing only briefly whenever he stopped to rest and to take the weight of the pack off his aching shoulders. She’d withered away to almost nothing before she died; how could her ashes weigh so much?
His refusal to respond hadn’t discouraged her. “Isn’t this a gorgeous day? Kind of hot, though. Aren’t you surprised by how little wind there is up here? Us old folks have trouble regulating our body temperature, you know. I hope you’re not getting hyperthermia. Aren’t your legs killing you? How much longer do you think this will take – the hike, I mean. Shouldn’t you pick up the pace a little bit – it’s already pretty late. You don’t want to spend the night out on this unprotected ridge. I suppose it would have been a good idea to carry an extra water bottle. If you get dehydrated you’ll never make it over the ridge. Do you think three granola bars are really going to be enough?” He ignored her, although he stopped once to refill his water bottle from a glittering rivulet that hurried across the trail. “Aren’t you worried about giardia? It certainly wouldn’t be very romantic to die with diarrhea,” she said. “It takes a week to develop,” he pointed out, and she was briefly silent.
Still, the climb had gone much more slowly than he’d planned, and he did end up spending the first night huddled in his sleeping bag on the steep slope, with his feet propped uncomfortably against the base of a Jeffrey pine to keep himself from sliding down the hill. He felt drained and sick, and was beginning to doubt whether he’d even make it over the ridge, let alone down into the little valley whose green and flowery image had exerted such a pull on him while he’d sat like a stone in the apartment listening to her friends leave their concerned messages on the answering machine.
“You’re going to be really sore tomorrow,” she said. “What if you can’t get going again in the morning? Wouldn’t it be silly for them to find you up here, right on the trail, with nothing but a bag of ashes in your backpack?” As usual, the more obviously correct her comments, the more they annoyed him. This wasn’t a matter for rational argument, he reminded himself. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just need some rest,” he told her.
But fatigue and the awkward position had made sleep difficult, although during the night she was quiet, for some reason. He occupied himself through the long dark hours by shivering and watching the stars drop, one by one, behind the ridge high above him.
The sky was light, but the sun still hadn’t climbed above the eastern peaks when he woke up from what seemed like only a few minutes of sleep. He was stiff and sore, almost incapable of moving, and simply lay still for a long time, staring up into the dark branches of the pine. I can’t do this, he thought. I can’t even get out of the sleeping bag, let alone walk the rest of the way up over that ridge. He watched its edge sharpening in the first rays of the rising sun. Take your time, he thought. You’ve got all day. Finally he managed to roll up on his side and reach into the pack he’d dropped heedlessly in the darkness the night before. He ate one of the granola bars and swallowed a little water, and after a short rest he found he was able to crawl out of the sleeping bag and even to stand up, bracing himself on the trunk of his pine tree.
“Well, look at that!” she said as soon as he’d gotten to his feet. “He can actually stand up! As long as he’s got a tree to hang onto, anyway.” He was embarrassed by the wobbling of his knees, but remained standing, waiting for his strength to return. “Wouldn’t this be a really good time to just turn around and go back down the hill? You could be in Argento in a couple of hours. You know you’re never going to make it up to that ridge. Think about it. Back to Argento. All downhill.”
He sighed. “Back down to what?” Thinking about the apartment, with its countless deadfalls – unfinished knitting projects, stubs of mascara pencils, the pots of dwarf roses that refused to die on the fire escape. And the kindly people he didn’t want to talk to, the long afternoons with the sound of distant sirens outside his window and, when the sirens stopped, the wind.
“To breakfast,” she said, a little impatiently. “Whatever. Doesn’t some scrambled eggs and home fries sound good about now? A nice big blueberry muffin. Coffee.”
“That’s a low blow,” he said lightly. He lowered himself carefully to the ground and pulled on his night-cold shoes. His feet hurt, along with everything else.
“Well? What about it? Where are you going, old man? Really.”
“You know.”
“Have you got the idea this is something I’d want?” she said. “I hope you don’t think you’re doing this for me. Because I don’t want it.”
“I’m not doing it for you.”
“Well t
hen why?” He stood up slowly, without answering, leaning on the tree trunk. A sliver of the sun broke the ridgeline behind him and began to warm his back. “Doesn’t that feel good?” she said, evidently trying a different tack. “I think it’s going to be another beautiful day. Do you remember the first time we came up here? How many years ago was that? I always loved being here. But that first hot shower after we got home – now that’s my idea of paradise.”
He’d continued to ignore her needling, thinking how even his narrow streak of diffident mysticism had always irritated her. A few minutes of sunshine warmed him enough that he was able to shoulder the pack, work his way painfully back down to the trail without falling on his ass, and start upward again.
He finally made the top about noon. A strong wind was blowing over the ridge from the west, so he sheltered himself behind some boulders and ate his second-to-last granola bar. Her voice had never stopped during the whole exhausting climb, and it continued while he chewed, more out of duty than of hunger. He felt strangely light and remote.
“Isn’t it a marvelous view? Have you ever seen the air clearer than this? Look at how sharp the mountains are against the sky. The colors are so rich! It’s amazing how many wildflowers there are up here, even this late in the season! All blossoming like crazy before it gets too cold. The birds are so busy, aren’t they? They must be getting ready to head south. Doesn’t it all give you a sense of . . . life, everywhere, just bustling about its business?”
“It’s nice,” he said.
“Well, what are you going to do now?” she asked. “Isn’t this kind of a turning point? If you even make it down into that valley, do you really think you’ll be able to climb back up?”
“You know I don’t,” he said.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t go down there, then? Isn’t this enough? You’ve had a nice hike. You’ve proved you can still do it. You spent a lovely night in the great outdoors and you made it all the way to the top. This is 11,000 feet or something. Not bad for a guy who’s supposed to be shuffling around in crocheted bed socks. You’ve earned that hot shower.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything.”
“Well, what then? What are you doing?” But he’d shouldered the pack again without answering, and climbed back up over the ridge and then continued along the trail, stumbling occasionally with weariness. The main trail was more or less level up here and parallel to the ridgeline, but a hundred feet or so below it. To his left and above, the dark crags gazed silently down on him. Far below to the right lay the little green valley, dotted with patches of yellow flowers and divided by a meandering ribbon of water that was frozen by distance. The sun was still high, and very hot. “I don’t suppose you bothered to bring any sunblock,” she said. “Not to mention bug juice. Remember what the mosquitoes were like down there? They ate us alive. We had to spend most of the time noodling around in the tent. Not that I minded. We had some pretty lively afternoons.”
“I don’t have a lot of juice left,” he retorted. “For the mosquitoes or anything else.” A barely discernible trace branched off the main trail to the right and angled down the slope toward the valley, winding its way through a patch of dwarf whitebark pines. The unrelenting hand of the wind and the weight of the winter snows had flattened the trees into a crouch almost parallel to the slope and left them barely waist high, but their trunks were a foot in diameter. He followed the trail slowly on a long diagonal, stepping carefully so as not to lose his footing and roll all the way to the bottom. The serious hikers, he knew, never bothered to explore this little Shangri-La, because it meant giving up too much elevation, which was why he expected to be alone in the valley for as long as it took. In a couple of hours he was on the valley floor, kneeling on the grassy bank of the stream and trembling with fatigue but rather pleased with himself, splashing the icy water on his face and drinking from his cupped hands.
He’d been hoping for a little peace and quiet. All his efforts of the last couple of days had been directed to making this solemn moment possible, and he’d wanted to give it the proper attention. But her badgering had become, if anything, more strident and annoying.
“So here you are, old man. I’m sure you’re feeling very pleased with yourself. You’ve always been great at inventing pointless projects. Won’t your friends be impressed? ‘80-year-old man drags himself up to 11,000 feet’. Let’s not ask why, though.”
“I know what I’m doing,” he said. He opened the backpack and began pulling out the crumpled newspapers one by one, vaguely noting fragments of headlines as he dropped them on the ground next to the pack. Car bombs, hurricanes, baseball scores. Even this minimal task seemed to take an eternity. Before he finished, the wind rose and took them all, a gleeful flock of tumbleweeds fleeing like naughty children, rolling and bouncing along the tops of the tall bending grass and finally disappearing over the first ledge. He felt a twinge of guilt. I guess I can litter once in my life, he decided. Anyway, there was nothing to be done about it. Still kneeling by the stream, he worked the white plastic bag out of the backpack and untwisted its neck.
It took him several minutes to empty the bag. Its long neck undulated like bleached seaweed as the scarf of white ash unfurled into the icy water, holding together for a few feet, then breaking in a stampeding mob of particles that rushed away from him over the rocks, between the grassy banks, following the stream’s twists and turns down and away. He visualized their route through gorges and waterfalls, alpine meadows, quiet pine groves that darkened the surface of the water, and on to the Central Valley, the reedy wetlands, and finally the brackish bay. A few grains might eventually accompany the yachts and black tankers out through the Golden Gate to the ocean. The bag slowly softened and deflated like withering flesh between his gnarled hands, until it was only a sodden, empty rag. With deliberate care he rotated the neck to face upstream and let it fill with clear water, then slowly emptied it again downstream, the water swirling away the last few remnants of white powder.
She kept after him the whole time, not conceding him even a single free minute to examine his emotions or spread his melancholy over the 45 years of their married life. Talking, talking, question after annoying question, while he folded up the plastic bag and packed it away with numb hands, while the afternoon thunderheads reared up in the west, blocking the sun, then gathered in the invisible lower reaches of the valley and swaggered up toward him. She kept talking over the rising moan of the wind as he made his creaky way back toward the overhang where he’d thrown his sleeping bag in preparation for the night. The storm broke before he got there, drenching him in an instant. “The last roundup, just like you pictured it,” she taunted, as he crawled through the curtain of runoff that spilled over the entrance to his hideaway. “You’re going to have a really pleasant night in your nice wet sleeping bag, plenty of time to thumb through your memories and brood about the ineffable tragedy of existence.”
He managed to strip off all his wet clothes and pull the only dry thing he had left, the hooded sweatshirt, over his head, and finally to crawl, sick and shivering, into the sleeping bag. There he lay watching the blue electrical flashes through his closed eyelids and listening to thunder somersault angrily around the high peaks.
“You’ve accomplished your great goal,” she said, speaking right into his ear so he couldn’t ignore her. “You carried a bag of ashes up a hill and dumped them in a stream. OK, I give you some credit for determination and of course stubbornness – you’ve never been short of that. Not too bad for an old man. So now what?”
“Now nothing,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Now nothing! Now nothing!” she mocked. “So that’s it. You finished your depressing little project, and now you’re satisfied. You can just settle down in your chimney corner like an old grease spot.”
“That’s right,” he flared up, or as much as he was capable of flaring up under the circumstances. “And then maybe I’ll give you some of your own medicine.”
“Don
’t be a jerk,” she said. “You know it doesn’t work that way. I’ve got a new project for you: get your ass up and out of this valley before it’s too late.”
“Why don’t you just shut up for a few minutes?” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to a few minutes of peace and quiet to think things over, without the phone ringing or one of your old-lady friends dropping by with a tin of brownies. We’ve had more than 45 years together, and I’ve got some nice memories. I’d like to spend a little time with them, if you don’t mind. But I can’t even think, with your constant jabbering.”
“Oh yes, life!” she said. “Yes I’ve enjoyed it, too. We’ve had a good life together, I won’t deny it. One of the better marriages. The point is, though, your part of it isn’t over yet.” He was silent. “Dammit, where do you think this leaves me?” she yelled, over a final dramatic clap of thunder.
He lay quietly, every part of his body dragged down into the rock by the unfamiliar gravity of a darker, heavier planet. The shivering had almost stopped. The thunder and lightning and wind, having had their say, moved off. All he could hear was the dripping of water from the edge of the overhang and, farther away, the stream talking softly to itself as though the storm had never happened. He listened for a while.
“I just want to sleep,” he finally said. She didn’t answer.
He awoke thinking, optimistically, that maybe this was already it. He felt strangely rested, and yet at the same time incapable of moving a finger. Despite this paralysis he was able to hear, and to see all around him: the waving tall grass and clumps of yellow wildflowers at the level of his recumbent body, the willows crowding down to the glistening stream, the impassive red-brown mountain slopes and peaks, and behind all that the blue sheet of sky, crossed here and there by hurrying birds and orderly flotillas of clouds, and thick with ingenuous sunshine. He could see all this at once and without moving his head or even, it seemed, his eyes; as though vision had been converted into something more like hearing, merely receptive and almost directionless, an awareness of all light without the necessity of focusing on anything.
He wondered idly if this paralysis meant that death wasn’t what he’d imagined in his more optimistic moments – the release of his spirit to fly free, anywhere in the universe, at hyperlight speed. Was this instead his first day of an eternity spent pinned precisely to the spot where he’d given up his material being? An observer forever – not even a restless, interfering ghost, but instead merely watching his own earthly remains sag, shrink, disarticulate, enter the soil by way of the roots of plants, be carried away in the digestive systems of animals and scattered throughout the mountains, until only his loose-jointed bones remained. And eventually not even those. He foresaw the days and nights alternating at an increasing pace as his familiarity and boredom grew, until they were merely a flicker in his eternal vision; the mountains jostling and slumping with the slow heavings of the earth, seas invading even these once elevated zones and retreating, and advancing again. Finally the parent sun turning red and puffing up to devour its offspring, then collapsing into a spinning white tombstone, leaving him hanging alone in space to watch the cosmic cement dry.
In which case the whole effort had been a mistake. If he’d really wanted to spend eternity with Emily he should have pulled a Romeo and Juliet, shot himself over the hospital bed where she’d failed to take that one last breath, or maybe, in consideration of the hospital staff, neatly emptied his veins into the sink. Instead, he’d wasted several days and subjected himself to considerable discomfort in a misguided effort to rescue her ashes from the gray, unattractive bustle of the city, to haul them up here and consign them to the cheerful stream, and then to lay himself down permanently in this wilderness where they had more than once, decades before, cuddled in their zip-together double sleeping bag.
He noticed that he had to pee, however, which made him suspect this wasn’t quite the end just yet. It seemed unlikely that of all possible earthly sensations this would be the one a person would carry with him into eternity. The sensation of pressure brought a dim recollection of creeping out of his bodybag in the middle of the night and crawling a few yards from the shallow cave to urinate on all fours under the cold stars, like an old dog too tired even to lift his leg. How could you be so near the end of it all, he wondered, and still be worried that the next hiker in this valley might find your carcass rotting inside a urine-stained sleeping bag? But such was the case; and once he’d left the bag, it had seemed far too much trouble to drag himself all the way back. Anyway the night cold, he had thought, would quickly wind up this project, which was taking way too long and revealing itself to be not nearly as noble and tragic as he’d imagined. But somehow he seemed to have survived the night.
“You look like a nut,” she scolded him. Back again. Well, at least she was still speaking to him. He had to admit it was a graceless picture: flat on his back on the stony soil, dressed only in the hooded sweatshirt, which had somehow protected his vital organs sufficiently to keep him alive during the frigid night. Late August, and it already feels like fall up here, he thought. “You’re going to get an awful sunburn, lying out here like that,” she added. The rising sun was beginning to touch his bare legs. It felt wonderfully warm, and he knew she was right: later it would fry him. But for awhile he stayed still, remembering a lot of shivering mornings up here, waiting impatiently for the sun, the marvelous inflation of relief and well-being when it finally peeped over the ridge and you could begin to strip off a few layers of clothing. The light of this new day had that clarity and freshness that never failed to thrill him.
He was unable to stand up without support, but managed to cross the stony ground to the overhang on all fours. There he spent some time staring at his soggy shirt and jeans and underwear and thinking about crawling back into the sleeping bag. But it was so early, and the day that stretched ahead seemed too long to spend in a cave. The sunshine was flooding the valley now.
He struggled with the stiff, wet jeans for a good 15 minutes before finally getting them up around his skinny shanks, and belted, and even zipped. After resting for a while, he rummaged around in the pack and came up with the last granola bar, which he ate, washing it down with a couple of swigs from the water bottle. Then, with the rocks to lean on, he was able to stand up. He stood for a long while on trembling legs, looking around at the silent peaks, the shining stream, the random nodding of the grass and the yellow wildflowers in the lightest of breezes.
“I was too hard on you last night,” she said. “It was dark, and I know you were tired.”
“I’ll never make it back up out of here,” he told her.
“I know,” she agreed. “Never mind. The main thing is you’re on your feet.”
“That’s right. And I’ve got my pants on,” he said. “An old grease spot in pants.” She laughed. He was happy that he could still make her laugh.