Windy Rock Trail was one of the most beautiful hikes in the North Carolina Blue Ridge. No doubt it still is. I haven’t been on that trail since 2007, when I revisited it, painfully, with my mother.
In fact, Windy Rock was a family favorite, but Jack woke up in a bad mood that October morning—I never quite knew why. I speculated to myself for years afterward that it could have been because the previous day had been his sixteenth birthday. With that date had come a driver’s license, which my father had taken him to get, but of necessity no car. My parents had agreed that they could afford to put a few hundred dollars toward a car for him, not more, and that he could use his first teenage jobs to earn one. He had saved up a little, but not enough, by then, to buy a car they deemed safe.
Perhaps that was the immediate cause of friction between my father and Jack, or perhaps he simply resented not having wheels once the magic day had come and gone. He stumbled in, groggy and sullen, for our pre-hike breakfast, and I knew better than to speak to him. As we were putting on our boots and jackets, he made a half-hearted try at getting out of the excursion. My mother must have looked sad, or my father simply glanced his way, questioning and stern, because Jack desisted at once.
He was silent during the drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway to our trailhead. To keep my mind off his unexpected mood I looked out the window at the autumn foliage, which was dying away into brown and faded-gold poplars, and at the startling red berries of the mountain ash, set among gray branches. It was a brilliantly clear day, and I could see wave on wave of mountains—I puzzled, as I had throughout my childhood, over their being universally blue in the distance when they were sometimes so colorful in the foreground. When I first saw mountain ranges in the Balkans, twelve years later, I felt a pang of strangeness and then a pang of recognition: those mountains rose in peaks instead of falling softly back on themselves, and their slopes were a forbidding dark green and black, scarred with rock. But like my mountains at home, they were magnificently there, uncaring, solid, comforting.
My father parked at the trailhead and we climbed out and put on our daypacks, Jack tightening his boots one at a time on the back bumper of the car, his face dark. I loved the way he looked like himself but newly adult—his height, to which I wasn’t yet accustomed, his broadened shoulders and the powerful build of his legs under khaki cargo pants, the big leather boot with striped laces he set firmly on the bumper. He glanced up then and gave me the last smile that ever passed between us, I think, and nodded for me to go ahead of him—it was our family’s custom to let my father hike first, my mother behind him, then me. Since he’d grown big and competent, Jack brought up the rear. If anything chased us up the trail, it would have Jack to contend with first, which worried me for his sake, and pleased me for my own.
Partway along the first ridge, he called out, “Just a minute,” and I turned to see him retying one of his boots on the outcropping of rock there. I stood nearby, watching in silence, and after a moment he muttered grouchily that he hadn’t wanted to come anyway.
“I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do today.” He was yanking on the lace while I studied his tanned profile, so like our father’s. He seemed angry even at his boots. “Don’t you ever get tired of clambering up a mountain just because Mom and Dad say it’s time, right now, no matter what?”
“But we’ve always hiked,” I said clumsily. “I kind of like it.”
“Well, they’re forgetting I’m a little old to be ordered around. I mean, here we are again, in the middle of nowhere.” He had finished with his shoelace and now he waved one hand out toward the view, the open sweep of mountains and sky. I loved that view.
Then I said what I shouldn’t have. I suddenly resented his spoiling his one day with us. I hated his rudeness to our misguided but (after all) well-meaning parents, his previous desertions, his inability to simply enjoy being with me for a change, when friends and girls and basketball took all the rest of his attention.
“Well,” I said angrily, “why don’t you just get lost, if you’re going to be such a jackass about everything?”
He looked at me with disbelief in his face—how I loved that face, even when I’d sparked it to fury, and how I still do. Then he told me two things. First, to go to fucking hell. Second, that he might fucking do that himself.
Those were his words, and I will not put them in quotation marks, and they were the last ones we knew him ever to say to anyone. I was fighting tears—both of regret at my own meanness and of keen hurt. I turned my back and strode ahead, falling into a desperate rhythm, ignoring the silence I was rapidly leaving behind. There was no sound of his step; I told myself it served him right if I ditched him for a while. I crossed a stream, or rather the stream crossed our trail and I had to pick my way from stone to stone in the noisy water. After a few minutes I could see my parents ahead of me, hiking quietly along, and I followed them.
Jack had not caught up with us when we stopped for a water break at the first big view. It was an enormous panorama of mountains, surges of them, cresting on the horizon in smoky blue. The valley lay four thousand feet below, just beyond the wine-colored leaves of the huckleberry bushes that lined our path. My mother smiled encouragingly at me and glanced around for my brother, and then we all sat down and stretched our legs and waited for a few minutes.
“Was Jack behind you?” my father asked, after a while. I explained that he’d stopped to tighten his bootlaces but added nothing about our argument. “Well, he’ll catch up,” my father said. My mother must have shown some vague sign of unease, because my father added, “He’s a big boy.”
We walked on, but more slowly. I wondered if my parents knew how angry he’d been about having to come out today, then allowed my mind to wander to other things: the new haircut I wanted to get, just like that of two girls in my social studies class, and then the story we were reading for Language Arts on Monday. It was a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood,” with teenaged characters, and I wasn’t sure it worked that well. I thought of writing another version, to see if I could do it better. I watched the swing of my worn hiking boots, which had once been Jack’s (my mother had assured me they were “unisex,” and as long as I didn’t have to wear them to school, I could accept that).
At the next overlook we stopped and my mother suggested that we get out our lunch a little early and sit there to eat it until Jack caught up. My father agreed and slipped his full daypack off his shoulders. My mother found a flat area near the trail and I helped her spread the small plaid cloth she always brought for our picnics. She had packed my favorite deviled eggs and slices of my father’s good homemade bread, and there was a bottle of sparkling lemonade for each of us, a treat in our thrifty household. She set Jack’s bottle next to the rocks, ready for him. My father saw no reason to wait, so we began our lunch. But the bread tasted dry in my mouth, as if I were already chewing the words I’d said to my brother in anger, and I saw that my mother was looking back down the trail every few minutes. None of us had cell phones yet—they were rather new to our world then—although the remaining three of us got them a few years later.
Finally my father touched her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Clarice,” he said. “Jack’s a very experienced hiker. He probably needed a little time to himself. He’s growing up.”
“I know he’s growing up.” She sounded almost irritable, a rare tone for her.
“Well, would you like me to walk a little way back and give him a wave?” My father collected the remains of our picnic, not leaving even a crumb for the wild birds: pack it in, pack it out.
“Yes, could you do that?” My mother smiled, as if this was a mere bit of trouble we ought to go to. “We can wait here for you two.”
My father was gone about thirty minutes, and he returned alone, with a shadow of displeasure on his face.
“I walked all the way back to the big bend,” he said. “I even shouted for him for a while, but he didn’t answer. I’m afraid he may have gone to the car by himself.” I k
new that edge in his voice: it meant Jack had broken the rules of outdoorsmanship and would be in trouble for it later. I also knew that Jack had a driver’s license now—and a key to our car, which had been my father’s concession for his birthday.
“We didn’t hear you calling,” my mother said doubtfully. “You couldn’t have been calling very loud.”
“It was loud enough.” My father sat down for a moment. “How about if you go on slowly and enjoy the views, and I’ll go to the car.” If it’s there, he didn’t add. “If I haven’t returned with him in an hour, head back this way and we’ll just all wait at the parking lot.” And even if the car’s there, Jack will have consequences.
I could see that my mother didn’t want to hike on without knowing where Jack was; years later, I realized that she must have felt that if she did, it might make everything come out right, or at least make everything seem normal for a little while longer. I realized this after I became a mother myself—the feeble bargains we strike with risk, with our own fears.
My father loped back down the trail and my mother and I headed out slowly, keeping his pack with us because it had extra water bottles in it. We were soon just two women feeling small under a big sky; the trail opened into meadows, crossing a natural bald I’d always particularly liked because it was dotted with the ruins of trees, weather-beaten and silver. My mother consulted her watch from time to time, and at last she told me in a reluctant voice that we would have to turn around.
As her driver turned back toward the hotel, Alexandra saw that the street where they’d parked was a short one, lined with fraying apartment buildings, laundry hung on balconies. She could look around again a little, now that he was helping her. The beauty of the city lay in its trees: heavy canopies tasseled in those yellowish blooms like thousands of insects with folded wings, sunlight threading through them to dapple the parked cars. She saw a long-haired man with a backpack strolling past under the trees, brushing his teeth. At one door on street level, a woman in a tan and blue dress stood fitting a key into the lock, plastic shopping bags heavy over her arm. Two old men in suits wandered by, carefully navigating the treacherous sidewalk. Alexandra wondered why they did not fix the sidewalks in such a beautiful place. The two men gestured to each other, deep in discussion. Everyone seemed more alive here than she normally thought people were, or perhaps they just waved their hands around more, or she was just so much more tired than usual that she herself was partly dead. She held the stranger’s bag on her lap, her arms around it, not wanting to leave it on the seat beside her like something ordinary. At least she could hold it until she gave it back, although the urn’s smooth heaviness through the canvas made her feel queasy.
A moment later they were in the flow of the big boulevard again. Alexandra’s driver pulled in to the hotel taxi line and jumped out. Alexandra got out more slowly, leaving her bags on the seat but staying close. The driver ran up the steps. She felt grateful for his energy on her behalf; he was thin and moved strongly, dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, black tennis shoes, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he ran. He disappeared through the glass doors at the top.
But when he came out again, minutes later, his face was empty. He stopped to question a few of the people on the landing, others on the steps. Then he came back to the taxi line and stood in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I asked every person there, and some clerks do remember the family with the wheelchair.” He said it “clarks,” like an Englishman. “Those people are not here now. They had coffee with a man at the restaurant before they went away. They did not take a room. One of the clerks said that the younger man was in a bad argument with the man they were drinking coffee with, a journalist—I mean, the man they met there was a journalist well known at the hotel. The journalist went away, angry, through the back door, and then the tall man and the old people left through the front door.” He made a couple of vivid gestures, his hands pointing opposite directions.
And then, Alexandra thought, she had spoken with them at the foot of the front steps.
The driver behind them was beginning to tap his horn. Alexandra’s driver got into his taxi, and she climbed reluctantly back in, too. He started the engine and pulled out of line, then stopped again at the curb.
“What do you want to do now?” he said. She detected wariness in his voice and body—as if he thought he might not like her answer—but also curiosity.
“I think I have to go to the police station and show them this,” Alexandra said. “Could you take me there?”
He was silent for a moment. “Okay,” he said at last. “Just to tell you first, the police are not always very helpful here, unless they are getting money from you for going too fast or talking on your mobile phone while you drive. Then they are very efficient.” His face had darkened to a scowl. “But I can take you to a station if you would like. That is probably the right thing. Maybe they can discover some information about this name on the box, but I will be surprised if they do very much.”
In the heart of the old city, he stopped half a block from a concrete building with glass doors. “That is the nearest police,” he said, pointing discreetly. “Probably they will want to see your passport at the entrance.”
“Would you be able to help me just explain to them? They might not speak English.”
He shook his head. “Please excuse me if I do not come inside. I would like to help you, but—” Then he seemed to find his own lack of gallantry unforgivable. He turned and met her eye. “I have been in trouble with the police recently, you see, so this is not my favorite place.”
Alexandra’s heart sank under the weight of the surreal. Two hours in Bulgaria, and she had already fallen in with the wrong people, in addition to receiving the burden of the bag in her lap. She could imagine what her parents would have said, even if Jack might have understood. But it had simply happened.
Her taxi driver seemed to expect a response. She said, “So you—what did you—?”
“I’m not a criminal,” he said, and his chin jutted forward. “Please do not think I am a criminal. I was arrested in a demonstration last month. It was just an eco-demonstration, but we did not go with them quietly. There was a little madness and they made an example of me, so I was in jail for three days.”
She softened. “What were you demonstrating about?”
“The government is reopening some mines in the northwest of the country—these mines were closed for many years because they were not safe for the miners and because they let a terrible poison into one of our biggest rivers, which many towns use. The government thinks everyone has forgotten, and some businessmen think this, too. But we know that they only want to open them without fixing anything, and to make money from them again. You see.”
He snorted. “The police told me I might go to a real prison the next time, and they told this to some other people who were arrested.” Then he was silent for a moment. “I have several reasons to not like them very much.”
“Well,” said Alexandra, relieved. She’d been in a demonstration or two herself, in college, against wars. “I understand why you wouldn’t want to go in there again.”
He rubbed his jaw. “There are a few decent chaps in the police, but also some who still think that you can beat up people, even in a democracy.”
She nodded. “I know.” Although she had only the vaguest idea. “All right. Or—wait—” She paused. “What did you call this, again—the ashes?”
“Prah,” he said patiently.
She repeated it. “Also, I don’t know how to get to my hostel, but I’m sure I can figure that out if you have other work to do. Would you rather I paid you now?”
He waved away any consideration of money. “Later. You are already very tired, and I have your suitcase in the boot,” he said, as if he were her father, or at least her elder. Then he shook his head. “It’s okay. I’m not going to steal it.”
“I believe you,” said Alexandra. She found that she did
.
“Meet me just here. It will take you more than half an hour to see someone inside, but I will get the newspapers.”
The return on any trail always seems to take half the time of walking out it, whether it’s a downhill retracing or not, and this time we were mostly going down. We moved swiftly, and as we went I couldn’t help glancing over the most dramatic edges of the mountainside, where it ended in that sheer drop to the valley below. I felt sure my mother, behind me, was doing the same. When we reached the parking lot, my father was there, leaning against our car with his arms crossed. He didn’t say anything until we came close, and then he sounded grim. “I’ve spent an hour and a half looking for him and shouting up and down. If this is his idea of a joke, or a rebellion, it’s one too many.”
“You don’t think anything’s happened, do you?” my mother said, and her voice quavered. When we found Jack, there would be a scene, and if we didn’t find him, or at least didn’t find him for hours—that was unthinkable.
“Of course not,” snapped my father. “But we’ll have to talk seriously about this. It’s not funny to scare people.”
“I don’t think he intended to scare us this much,” I said in what I knew was a small voice.
They suddenly seemed to remember that I’d seen him last.
“Honey,” my father said, “did Jack mention he was going off the trail, or back to the car, when you were with him?”
“No,” I said, miserably, “but he was in a pretty bad mood.” I was having trouble swallowing. “Actually, we had an argument.”