Fine Just the Way It Is

  “Oh no. I’m not eating that salad. It’s probably full of hairs.”

  He threw down the knife in exasperation.

  There were a few more verbal jabs and then suddenly they were in a shouting match about fried bananas, Africa, Mexico, immigration policy, farm labor, olive trees, California. She said he was not only a filthy lettuce nonwasher but a foreign creep who would probably eat caterpillars. He was a freeloader (he was occasionally short on his share of the rent) and he couldn’t even make a simple salad. He certainly didn’t know how to slice an onion. And why wear those stupid hobnail boots that made him look like a nineteenth-century Matterhorn guide? Maybe he’d like a pair of lederhosen for his birthday? He said he had eaten caterpillars in Africa and they were packed with protein and tasty, that the boots had belonged to his grandfather who had been a climber on serious Himalayan expeditions after the Second World War, that she had become controlling, headstrong, egotistical, provincial and unpleasant. Then came accusations of sexual failure and repulsive habits, of ex-lovers, of cheating and lying, the horrible wholesome flax-seed cereal she favored, his addiction to smelly cheeses and bread that had to be made because it could not be bought, and again the wretched hobnail boots. It was less argument than bitter testimony, as when, on the last night of Carneval in some towns in rural Spanish Galicia, a man presents the testamento, the rhymed and furious catalog of the village’s sins in the past year, and fictionally apportions the body parts of a donkey to fit the sins. He had told her about this, and now he awarded her the donkey’s flatulent gut as most expressive of her raving.

  Hundreds of irritations and grievances each had kept closeted spouted from the volcanoes of their injured and insulted egos. Marc threw the salad bowl on the floor, the onion slices rolling on their broad edges. She threw his shirt in the salad. She poured olive oil on the shirt and said if he liked olive oil so much, why, here was plenty of it. She raced to the stove, seized the frying pan and dumped the banana-chile mess in the sink. When he tried to stop her she delivered him a head-ringing slap. She screamed imprecations but he was suddenly very quiet. The expression on his face was peculiar and familiar; anger and—yes, pleasure.

  Then he recovered and as if to goad her began again. “You American bitch!” he said, almost conversationally, but his voice sharpening with each word. “You and this constipated place of white, narrow-minded Republicans with the same right-wing opinions. There’s no diversity, there’s no decent food, there’s no conversation, there’s no ideas, there’s nothing except the scenery. And the Alps have more beautiful scenery than the Rockies.” He folded his arms and waited.

  “Well, it’s good to hear what you really think. Why don’t you clear out. Go fuck old fat-legs Julia!” Her voice was a diabolic screech. Yet even as she yelled she was embarrassed by the florid theatricality of the scene. And he wondered how could she know anything about Julia. He had never mentioned her. Julia was his mother.

  His lips infolded, he stalked through the rooms collecting his remaining clothes, his books, the maligned hobnail boots, his GPS unit and climbing gear, his skis, his African mask collection, coldly packing everything into his truck. He said nothing while she continued to make caustic taunts. Striding through the kitchen he slipped on the olive oil and nearly fell. Humiliation deepened his anger. She noticed the bandage on his left hand was stained with pus and blood. A few days earlier, trying to strike flakes from a gleaming lump of obsidian Ed Glide had given him, he had driven a sliver deep into his hand. It must be infected, she thought with malicious joy.

  The last thing he did was to rip down her poster of Big Train Johnson, the centerpiece of her Shrine to Idaho Baseball, showing the pitcher just after he’d hurled the ball, right-hand knuckles bent, an expression of mild curiosity on his plain face. Marc glared at her. It seemed to her he was presenting his face to get smacked again. She didn’t move and abruptly he left.

  Through the window she saw him get in his truck and drive away. South. Toward Denver, where, as he had said, there was more than one skin color, a cultural mix and an international airport.

  She cleaned up the salad with his ruined shirt, crammed the greasy mess into a trash bag. Slowly she calmed and a brilliant thought came; she would hike the Jade trail without him. She didn’t need him.

  She slept only a few hours, waking twice to the knowledge that they had broken up. She got up with the first light, boiled a dozen eggs—good hiking trip food—and packed the Jeep. The phone rang as she was carrying out the last load.

  “Catlin,” he said quietly. “I’ve got two tickets to Athens on a flight tomorrow morning. I’m going to fight the wildfires in Greece. Will you come?”

  “I’ve got other plans.” She hung up, then pulled out the phone cord. She tossed her watch and cell phone in the silverware drawer and rushed out the door. Somewhere along the way, not from him, she had learned that discarding the technology sharpened the senses, led to deeper awareness.

  On the road driving north she felt she was once again in her own life. For miles she listened to music by groups he despised, reveling in the sense of liberation. He favored Alpha Blondy or monotonous talking-drum music on long drives. She could not stop thinking about the breakup, and after a while even her favorite tunes seemed to develop talking-drum backgrounds. Silence was better. She recalled the strangely pleased expression on Marc’s face after she hit him, familiar but impossible to place in context.

  It was dusk when she reached the town at the edge of the Big Bison National Forest. She found a motel. She did not want to miss the signless trailhead in evening gloom. The wind came up in the night, occasionally lifting her from sleep. Each time she stretched, thinking how wonderful it was to have the whole bed to herself. It was not until the morning that she discovered she had left the topo map back at the trailer in her haste to get out. At the local hardware store she found another, compiled from aerial photographs taken in 1958. It was better than the forgotten map as the Jade trail was clearly marked.

  She found some paper in the glove compartment—the receipt for the last oil change—and with an old pencil stub that had rolled around on the dash for a year she scrawled her name, “Jade Trail” and the date and left it on the seat.

  Even in broad daylight the abandoned trail was difficult to find. Years before, the Forest Service had uprooted the sign and blocked off the entrance with fallen pines and boulders. Young lodgepole had grown up to shoulder height. The map showed that six miles north the trail flanked an unnamed mountain, then curled around half a dozen small glacier lakes. Marc had planned to fish those lakes. A disturbing thought came to her. He might not go to Athens but return to the trailer and find her gone, notice that all her camping gear was missing. He would know immediately that she had come up to hike the trail without him. He would follow her. She would have to watch and dodge.

  The first mile was unpleasant; the trail was rocky and the soil a fine dust half an inch deep. It was clear that many hikers ignored the “Trail Closed” legend on the forest map and ventured up it for a mile or two before turning back. They had marked their passage with broken branches which clawed her arms.

  Gradually the head-high trees disappeared as the trail led into the old forest. She walked soundlessly on the thick needle duff. The trail bent and opened onto views of forested slopes, showing thousands of deep red-orange trees killed by the mountain pine beetle infestation and drought. In open areas the trail was choked with seedlings reclaiming the ground. The young trees looked healthy and green, still untouched by the beetles. She wondered if the world was seeing the last of the lodgepole forests. If Marc had been with her they would have talked about this. The memory of his stained bandage came to her. He had determined to learn how to make stone projectile points. They had talked about prehistoric stone tools, and when he told her their edges were only a few microns thick and sharper than razors, she idly wondered aloud why terrorists did not arm themselves with chert knives that would escape airport detection.

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nbsp; “That’s stupid,” he said.

  After several miles of level ground the trail began to climb and twist in a steep stairway of roots and rocks. Snowmelt had scoured it out to slick earth packed around bony flints. Around noon the trail broke into an explosion of wildflowers—columbine, penstemon, beautiful Clarkia, chickweed and Indian paintbrush. Delighted by the alpine meadow and a few banks of snow packed into clefts on the north sides of slopes, she looked down at a small lake. The scene was exquisitely beautiful. But even here it was not as cool as she had expected. The sun was strong and a cloud of gnats and mosquitoes warped around her in elliptical flight. She ate her lunch sitting in the shade of a giant boulder. She did not miss Marc.

  She looked west at Buffalo Hunter, the highest peak in the range. Its year-round snow cover was gone and the peak stood obscenely bare, a pale grey summit quivering in radiant heat. Rock that had not seen sunlight in hundreds of years lay exposed. Another hot, dry summer, the sky filling with wind-torn clouds and lightning but no rain. Occasionally a few drops rattled the air before the clouds dragged them away. Next month the Arizona monsoon would move in with blessed rain, but now the flatland below was parched, the grasses seeded out and withered to a brittle tan wire that cracked underfoot. In the mountains the heat was almost as intense as at lower elevations, and the earth lifeless gravel.

  By late afternoon she was tired and reckoned she had hiked thirteen or fourteen miles. The Jade trail ran for another sixty-odd miles and came out on a dead trailhead near a mining ghost town. From the ruins to the main road was another four or five miles. She was sure she could do it easily in ten days. She pitched the little tent beside an unnamed glacier-melt lake. As she ate her hydrated tomato soup she watched trout rise to an evening hatch, the perfect circles spreading outward on the water, coalescing with other spreading circles. The setting sun illuminated the millions of flying insects as a glittering haze over the lake. Marc would have been down there matching the evening hatch, but he was probably in Greece by now. A grey jay, remembering the good old days when hikers had scattered bread crusts and potato chips along the trail, watched expectantly. She crumbled a cracker for him and gave him a name—Johnson, in honor of Big Train Johnson. The day left her a sky veneered with pink pearl, the black ridge against it serrated with pine tops like obsidian spear blades. She was not afraid of the dark and sat up listening to the night sounds until the last liquid smear of light in the west was gone. There was no moon.

  She had slept on a stone and wakened stiff and aching in the vague morning. As soon as the sun came up the mountains began to heat, the few remaining snowdrifts melting to feed the gurgling rivulets that twisted through the alpine meadows. The snow patches lay in fantastic shapes, maps of remote archipelagoes, splatters of spilled yogurt, dirty legs, swan wings. There was no wind and the gnats and mosquitoes were bad enough that she slathered on insect repellent. She limbered up with a few bends and stretches, boiled water for tea, ate two of the boiled eggs in her pack and started off again. The eggs had picked up insect repellent from her fingers and the nasty smarting taste stayed in her mouth for a long time.

  She hiked past half a dozen small lakes dimpled with rings from rising trout and thought of Marc. She could hear but not see a rushing stream under the willows, a stream that cascaded from the high melting snowbanks. Obscurant mountain willow grew thick wherever the water trickled. The shallow lakes, the color of brown khaki and denim blue, reflected the peaks and shrinking snowfields above. Some lakes were a profound, saturated blue shading out from tawny boulders at the edge to depths where the big fish rested in the coolest water. The waterlines marking shore boulders told that the lake levels once had been four or five feet higher.

  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, JOSÉ 1931. Not a famous explorer after all—just some old Mexican sheepherder. So much for that.

  Ge
tting 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.