The Mountain Story

  “Northeast through the little meadow and over the huge boulders straight ahead and around that short ridge. Got it?”

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly, glancing at her hiking companion.

  Neither of the women had taken in my directions. I gestured toward the sulking sky. “Look, Secret Lake’s a hard mile and a half from here and it’ll be dark in a few hours. Maybe you should try to find it another day.”

  A pair of sleek black crows found a branch nearby and you couldn’t help but think they were trying to warn us by the way they cawed in our direction. The clouds hung so low and heavy that when the birds flapped away we lost sight of them before they reached the tips of the pines.

  “Why don’t you take us?” Bridget asked. “Could you take us?”

  “Yes! Could you?” the older woman asked. “We’ll pay you. Of course we’ll pay you.” She pried open the mouth of her big black knapsack.

  I could see that, in addition to the wallet, the knapsack contained a kitschy white wool Christmas sweater and a large plastic peanut butter jar. I wondered if she meant to bait animals for photographs—I’m embarrassed to say Byrd and I did that sometimes—but I didn’t see a camera.

  She waved a bill. “Twenty dollars? It’s all I have. But I could send you a cheque. Do you have an hourly rate?”

  I didn’t take the time to explain that I wasn’t a mountain guide. I simply shook my head and mumbled, “Sorry,” then, without a backward glance set off again through the brush.

  But there was that overgrown sterasote bush again, blocking my way to Angel’s Peak. With a rapid succession of sneezes I began to rip at the branches with my bare hands, cursing myself for leaving my knapsack on the hook by the door.

  The sound of laughter, a familiar baritone chortle, made me pause, and then I heard Byrd call my name—Wilfred. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Byrd’s voice on the wind, or whispered behind a musical refrain, or crying out to me in the darkness. I looked around for him, and instead caught sight of the two women heading off in the wrong direction.

  Bridget was leading the woman in the red poncho to the left of where I’d pointed, toward a precipitous drop camouflaged by a shallow wall of manzanita and sage scrub.

  I tore back through the trees hollering, “Hello! That’s the wrong way! Hello!” But I could not be heard over the wind. “HELLO!”

  Mercifully, finally, they heard, and stopped. I was breathless by the time I reached them. “Other way. North—this is west.”

  “She forgot the compass,” Bridget said, rolling her eyes.

  I didn’t take them through the bushes to show them the deadly drop. Maybe I should have.

  The older woman smiled sheepishly. “Can you please just say right or left?”

  “You should really head back to the Mountain Station. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and get an earlier start?”

  “I’ll pay you twice your fee,” the older woman said quietly.

  “I’m not—”

  “Three times! I’ll pay you three times your fee! You’ll have to take my word that I’ll mail you a cheque when I get home tonight.”

  “I don’t want your cheque.”

  “Name your price.”

  “Why can’t you just come back tomorrow?”

  “It has to be today,” Bridget said.

  “It’s my anniversary. My wedding anniversary. It has to be today.”

  I guessed by her expression, and his absence, that her husband had recently passed away.

  “We came here to celebrate our anniversary every year for forty years.”

  Bridget sighed. I couldn’t tell if she was being sympathetic or impatient.

  “If you don’t take us we could get lost,” the woman said. “You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?” She was right. I didn’t want that on my conscience. A sufficient amount of DNA from my mother had infused my character with character. (My father wasn’t exactly the selfless type.) How could I have said no? How could I have shuffled off this mortal coil if my final deed was the refusal of a request for help?

  “I’ll take you to Secret Lake but I’m not staying. You have to get yourselves back to the Mountain Station,” I said.

  “Your mother raised a gentleman,” she said with a smile. “I’m Nola Devine.”

  “Bridget,” the woman with the ponytail reminded me.

  Too petulant to introduce myself, I brushed past them and pressed on, trying to ignore Bridget performing stag leaps from boulder to boulder in my periphery.

  I led the two women back past the bloomless wild flowers and through the flecked grey river of rock between the sugar pines. I remember being slightly curious about Red Poncho’s relationship to skinny Bridget, but not enough to inquire. I suppose I didn’t want to risk being drawn into more conversation.

  Nola sang quietly as we broke through the brush. I don’t remember the song, Stevie Wonder, I think. I liked the tremolo in her voice and the way she played fast and loose with the lyrics. She reminded me of Frankie, and how he’d always belt out the wrong words to the Motown on the radio in the kitchen. I hummed in my head, until I began to grow anxious that a tender memory of my father might weaken my resolve to get to Angel’s Peak.

  I raised my fingers to shush her, whispering, “Don’t want to disturb the animals.”

  “Well, aren’t we supposed to be loud in the forest?” Nola asked. “To scare away the bears?”

  “Won’t see bears up here, Mrs. Devine,” I said. But there were mountain lions, I thought, and bobcats and coyotes.

  My friend Byrd leapt into my thoughts once more, and in my mind we were boys again, on the path to Secret Lake.

  “Are there bears?” I’d asked Byrd as we boarded the Palm Springs tram together the first time, before I’d even turned fourteen. “Where’d you see the bighorn sheep? Ever see a mountain lion?”

  The tramcar launched and my gut contracted as the earth floated away, and Byrd (my friend of only a few days at that point) became a silhouette against the bone white desert.

  I couldn’t hide the fact that I was trembling when the tram operator leaned in to the crackling microphone to warn about the sway. Watching the tram shadow wash over the steep moraine of scrub oak as we rose, I was all too aware that it was a mere six-inch cable that held us above the jagged granite.

  When we hit the first tower I screamed. Byrd laughed so hard he nearly puked, and the rest of the riders on the crowded tram erupted with chortles and guffaws too. Even the driver. Even the bespectacled elderly man standing next to us.

  As we approached the next tower, I noticed the elderly man watching me through his bottle-bottom glasses. He appeared to be enjoying the theatre of my terror. I gripped the pole and closed my eyes. We hit the tower. I found my balance. I did not scream. Byrd thumped my back in brotherhood. The old man huffed in disappointment.

  Through the open window I felt the breeze grow cooler. It smelled like Michigan—conifers and cold earth, wet rock and green grapes. I grasped the pole tighter when we hit the next tower and barely noticed the towers after that. Then I turned toward the rock face, because I wanted to see where I was going, instead of where I’d been.

  Midway up the mountain, before the sub-alpine zone, I’d caught the sharp odour of camphor, which made me sneeze repeatedly. Byrd smiled when I leaned forward to sniff discreetly at the shoulder of the elderly man.

  “That’s sterasote you’re smelling,” he said. “I’ll show it to you when we’re up there. Smells of nothing when it’s dry but like bad medicine when it gets wet.”

  I sneezed again.

  Far below us I noticed a red baseball cap caught on a dead tree branch and tugged my Detroit Tigers hat down on my head. I didn’t want to lose it. “Some guy lost his hat,” I said.

  Byrd looked down at where I was pointing. “Jack’s hat,” he said, wagging his head. “Been there for years.”

  “He drop it from the tram?”

  “Not exactly.” He lowered his voic
e as he gestured at the precipitous mountainside. “Jack missed the last tram down one day—hiked farther than he should have, later than he realized—and he panicked when he found out he was locked out of the Mountain Station. Jack was a pretty experienced hiker and he was young, in great shape, so he figures he’ll climb down between the tram towers so he won’t get lost in the dark. He starts down but he’s miscalculated how steep the mountainside is and he ends up sliding, inch by inch, bracing himself with his heels but basically slipping all the way down this slope here.”

  “Looks almost vertical.”

  “Exactly. So by the time he gets about here, his pants and his underwear are gone, burned off by friction and his ass is this oozing bloody mess. The soles of his boots are gone and he’s worn his heels right down to the bone. He slides all night long, six more hours, and finally Jack makes it to the bottom and passes out in some dense bush. He just about scraped off his entire ass—he seriously had to get skin grafts for years and they never worked out and he can’t put any weight at all on his left cheek. I’ll show him to you—he hangs out at this coffee shop near the museum—sits like this.” He demonstrated.

  “So the moral of the story is go against your instinct?” I asked.

  “It’s just a story. What happened happened and now I’m telling you.” Byrd grinned. “I don’t like morals.”

  At the Mountain Station we leapt from the tram, bounding toward the viewing decks where we stood in the thrall of wide, white desert, and the blurry seam where it met the blue sky. Palm Springs glistened at our feet. The orchards of windmills waved from the distance. Far beyond the city sprawl a lashing of dust outlined the border of Santa Sophia and Tin Town. Byrd gestured to the southeast, squinting, “You see out there—the Salton Sea?”

  I did see it, like a mirage, the pale paper lake nearly seventy miles away. The thin air was making me dizzy.

  “The Colorado River broke through a hundred years ago and filled the basin there. Poof—there’s a lake. This resort grew up around it but then the lake started to dry out and got salty and people left. It’s like a ghost town. Ghost lake. Old trailers half sunk in mud, camping gear, rusted-out cars. You believe in ghosts?”

  “No,” I lied. “You?”

  “Only the ones I’ve seen for myself,” he said.

  Byrd called the desire to climb mountains “King of the Castle” syndrome. There is powerful symbolism in the act of ascension.

  “You should see the view from the peak,” he said.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Too late in the day, dude. And you’re not in shape.”

  “I’m in shape.”

  “Weak isn’t a shape.”

  Having subsisted on snack food and second-hand smoke for some time, I supposed he was right. “Isn’t it only three hours? I can do that.”

  “When you get to the top you’re only halfway there,” Byrd reminded. “Plus, you can’t climb in those cheap drugstore sneakers. You need boots. Footwear is your number one concern. Have you not learned that yet? Seriously? Storms blow in this time of year and you have to have warm layers and good boots. Rain makes the rocks slippery. Snow. Not in July and August but still—you don’t want to know about frostbite. Needs a better name. Something to scare the shit out of you so you never risk it.”

  “Necrodigititis,” I blurted.

  “Necrodigititis!” My friend grinned. He liked wordplay. “Come on.”

  “The peak?” I asked.

  “Another place. A secret.”

  That first time, with Byrd, I made a mental map of the path to Secret Lake as we leapt over a slender stream and waded through the grasses in a round meadow, then climbed up and over the collection of speckled granite boulders, muscling down the other side, past Circunsisco Gigantesco and up again to a small mesa, then over the tumbled cairns and the fields of cracking chert. At last we arrived to find a magical oasis alive in the afternoon sun. I would have believed there were elves dancing in the pines, fairies riding the waves of deer grass. The light was different, diffused and dreamy, the lake rippling with life.

  “Secret Lake,” Byrd said. “It’s not on the trail maps.”

  “Cool,” I breathed.

  Byrd stopped, planting his feet in the deer grass, closed his eyes and told me to do the same. “The plates are shifting. Can you feel that?”

  “I think so.”

  “My uncle Harley says that to feel it is a gift.”

  “I feel something.” I didn’t want Byrd to think I was ungifted.

  Next Byrd directed me to the cluster of low spiky white flowered shrubs on the western end of the small, oval lake. “That’s endangered,” he said. “That’s mountain phlox. That’s the reason the lake’s not on the map. It’s everywhere out here so watch your step.” He couldn’t have sounded graver if he’d been warning me about land mines.

  “How do you know about it?”

  “My uncle taught me everything he knows,” Byrd said, and then added, “He knows everything.”

  After that he led me to a long, smooth slab of granite downwind of the water where we could watch the lake from a slight elevation. But before we settled in Byrd revealed the perilous drop at the end of it. This would be another good place to watch my step, I knew. Fate isn’t kind to the careless.

  Sitting there in the cool thin air, watching the rippling waters of that hidden lake, we drank from Byrd’s old camouflage canteen, which had a dent in the spout and tasted of tin. I decided to buy him a new canteen—Frankie’d given me fifty dollars from his poker winnings that morning out of guilt for his poor parenting—when we got back down to the Desert Station. I’d noticed a huge rack of yellow ones at the gift shop. I don’t know why I didn’t wonder if the gesture was unmanly or worry that the gift would be misunderstood, but I didn’t. “We should have binoculars,” I said.

  “I have some. I’ll bring them next time. We need a decent camera too. You can get good money for wildlife shots. I only have an old Polaroid.”

  We observed a few ground squirrels fighting in the tall grass. I didn’t see the golden eagle or the Cooper’s hawk or the white-headed woodpecker in the surrounding pines until Byrd pointed them out. I leaned into the wind and caught a scent—coyotes—which my olfactory memory cross-referenced with a disastrous camping trip in Traverse City with my father when I was eight.

  Turning toward the scent, I sighted a pair of the wild dogs, mangy and lean, not like the fat pups we’d tossed wieners to at the campground. Byrd saw them too—past the far end of the sage bushes, the animals were staring us down. One of the coyotes snapped at the air, narrowing his gaze and licking his snout before he and his friend disappeared down the escarpment. “Los Coyotes,” Byrd said, grinning. “That’s my people.”

  “Mine too, I guess,” I said.

  Byrd saw me notice the bump in the sock at his left calf. Grinning, he pulled out a sizable Swiss Army knife.

  “Cool,” I said. “What’s it for?”

  “What’s it for?”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “Everything. Make kindling, open cans, skin rabbits.”

  “You skin rabbits?” I couldn’t decide if I was impressed or disgusted.

  “I could,” he said, proving to me that the blade was razor sharp by using it to scrape a layer from his thumbnail.

  “You ever killed anything with it?” I asked.

  “I could,” Byrd promised.

  “If you were starving?”

  “If I was starving. Or if an animal was dying. If a bird broke its wing.”

  “You’d kill a bird who broke its wing?”

  “Course.”

  “With a knife?”

  “With my bare hands if I had to.”

  “I could never do that.”

  “You could,” he said. “You do what you have to do.”

  It took us months of shifts at the gas station (where Byrd’s guardian, his uncle Harley Diaz, hired me on) to save the money for the camera, tripod and lens att
achments we hoped would bring us fortune and fame as wildlife photographers. Byrd and I took hundreds of photographs in the days we spent at Secret Lake. Sometimes we took turns with the camera but mostly I was the shooter, Byrd the spotter, and keeper of the logbook chronicling our sightings: hundreds of deer, seventeen striped skunks (or the same skunk seventeen times), sixteen gophers, seventy-three kit foxes, a vole (at least we thought it was a vole), hundreds of chipmunks and deer mice and wood rats, dozens of great horned owls and golden eagles and hawks and falcons, a hundred woodpeckers and thrashers and jays, those cool yellow tanagers and that pygmy owl and the finches and the blackbirds and on and on.

  One time we were hanging out on the slab of rock at Secret Lake when Byrd heard this ticking sound, like a lawn sprinkler, and he pointed to a spot beneath a fountain of mugwort where a huge Southern Pacific rattlesnake was reticulating. I pissed my pants a little when the six-foot-long snake’s mouth yawned open and I saw the last twitching inch of a wood rat’s tail disappear down its throat. I didn’t want Byrd to know I was shaking—he seemed so fearless—and besides, he badly wanted a close-up photograph and so did I.

  We climbed down from the rock carefully, quietly.

  “We gotta get a shot with his mouth open,” Byrd said calmly.

  I crept forward, inch by trembling inch, lifting the camera and finally capturing the snake in my lens. I was about to take the photo when the snake snapped its tail and shook his rattles. I dropped my camera and ran away through the tall grass in the short meadow.

  When I stopped screaming long enough to catch my breath, all I could hear was Byrd’s laughter bouncing off the rocks. He was howling like he’d just seen the funniest show on earth. Then the humour of it struck me, and I laughed pretty hard too.

  We averaged twenty or more hours a week up there and in all that time we never once saw another human being at Secret Lake, except, that is, for the memorable night we convinced two college girls to join us there.

  It struck me that on this day, a year ago, Byrd and I and those college girls must have just missed Nola and her husband celebrating their last anniversary.