Mountain time, p.22
Mountain Time, page 22
“Mitch? You okay with this?”
“Not particularly.” He let it gust out of him.
Beyond that he felt it was too complicated for words: his father’s absence seemed so prominent it was a stand-in for his presence. As though no inch of territory around Lyle, past or present, could ever be neutral: either Lyle was going to be hugely there or hugely not there, take your choice. Mitch felt Lexa’s gaze still on him. The best he could give her was quirked bemusement with himself and his burden of ashes. “But flinch and bear it, right?”
Lexa’s van entered the driveway with an eager washing-machine roar, Mariah returning from her photographic scavenger hunt.
When the van door slammed decisively, Lexa called: “We’re around back, in the used-equipment dealership.”
Mariah picked her way to them. “Hi, gang. Another mission of focus-pocus accomplished.” She looked worn down to her socks but persevering. After the long siege of Lyle’s illness and the emotional drain of being around death, all three of them must look something like that, Mitch reflected. He watched her put down her camera bag like a traveler at the end of an extended journey.
“When are your pictures of my dad going to run, do you think?”
Mariah gave him an odd look and said, “Some slow week. You know editors.”
“Cover your ears, Lexa, I’m going to say something nice about your sister.”
“Don’t, you’ll spoil the kid,” Lexa warned with a grin.
Her arms crossed, Mariah stood and watched Mitch, looking medium wary.
“I never thought I’d be saying so,” he brought out, “but your pictures are my father. For better or worse.” Seeing the whole portfolio for the first time last night, he and Lexa both had exclaimed time and again at Lyle to the life: sniffing, sneaking that extra air in; or pooching out his lower lip, dubious of everything over the horizon; even when he was at his most parade-ground grand, watching himself go by, her shutter click caught him against the hard soil of age. Unsparing but heart-catching, Mariah’s camera work. Mitch smiled congratulations at her. “You nailed him.”
“Just about.” She gave her head a shake that rattled her cut-glass earrings.
Mitch and Lexa glanced at each other. Her gallery of Lyles, they both figured, likely outnumbered Matthew Brady’s of the whole Civil War.
“Kind of late to be second-guessing, isn’t it?” Lexa pointed out, not unkindly.
“Yeah, really,” Mitch began, “you bagged him in every conceivable—”
“I still need the right shot of you,” Mariah was saying impatiently, “spreading his ashes on Phantom Woman. That’s what he told me he wanted, you know.”
Two
IN AN ALMOST CRYOGENIC STATE of cool at getting to palm the wheel of the rattly retired Forest Service pickup, Matthew Brainerd had driven them to the trailhead next to Agency Lake earliest that morning, hung around restlessly while they checked over their packs, then took off back down the one-lane gravel in a road warrior’s plume of dust.
“I hope he knows the meaning of a week,” Mitch said, watching him go.
“Did you when you were sixteen?” was Mariah’s contribution.
“He’ll be back for us okay,” Lexa said absently, tying on a Sierra cup with a little length of parachute cord so it would bang on her pack frame as a noise against bears. “I threatened to hack his home page if he screws up on the time.”
Their packs were leaned against old stumps on the lake shore like bulging creatures after a meal. They had gear and more gear. Nice new nylon tents, a change of clothing apiece, extra socks, sweatshirts for warmth, rain jackets that would double as wind shells. Caps, dark glasses, sunblock, moleskin. Candle lantern and pencil-sized flashlight. Binoculars, smallest pair possible. Toothbrushes with the handles sawn off. Waterproof container with pitch fire starter and matches. Lexa’s sleek little Bleuet camp stove and sufficient butane cartridges. Food, much food.
When they helped one another heft into their pack straps, Mitch in particular appeared laden, his pack threatening to tip him over onto his back like a beetle. Lexa had had to buy him an extra-large sleeping bag called the Big and Tall model, and since it was too bulky to ride at the bottom of his pack frame it had to be strapped atop. Now she took an inspecting look at him, top-heavy as a moonwalker, and for the first time in years had a pang for Travis and his nature-boy fit into the outdoors.
Mariah was going with what she insisted was an absolute basic irreducible minimum of photographic apparatus, which included a tripod and two spare cameras and enough film to send Fuji stock up.
Lexa resolutely reviewed her trail troops. Could be worse. He at least left Lyle’s desk home and she didn’t bring her darkroom. Despite her own hefty enough pack she could have charged off into the mountains at a high trot. This was always a moment she loved: the pumped readiness as she jockeyed in the saddle before the start of a barrel race; the palette of food made by her own hands gloriously ready to meet the partycomers; the minute before setting boot onto trail. Right this instant she felt something like a hum of delight circling through her, a neural scat melody that seemed to break out into the air when a redwing blackbird flew from the top of a willow near them, its chevrons bright against the limestone palisade of Jericho Reef.
She reminded herself to throttle down; there were three days of footsteps ahead to the Divide, along with one trail companion who was not exactly a lean whippet of the highlands, and another with about the same attention span as her shutter speed. Trying not to sound doubtful, she asked:
“Ready?”
“Red-aye,” Mitch proclaimed, giving her a game little salute.
“Anytime,” said Mariah, buckling the belt strap of her pack like a gunfighter.
• • •
There was a scatter of trails near the lake, a delta of footsteps before geography narrowed the choice. Jericho Reef steadily stood on its head in the lake’s mirror of water, a perfect unwavering stalactite of itself, as they threaded along the shore, Lexa in the lead by unspoken vote. Shortly she was pointing left, where the trail turned up Agency Creek, and that quick they were into the first of the funneling valleys, the flumes of the continental drainage. The top flap pocket of Lexa’s pack held three transparent waterproof packets, each with a U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle map folded with a day’s traced-in-red route showing out. Today’s crawl-line of trail angled behind the length of Jericho and led on into the mountains beyond the north rampart of neighboring Roman Reef, less arduous than tackling the canyon between the huge shields of stone straight on.
Even this junior valley, however, was so deeply cut that its walls dictated when the trail would be allowed on one side of the creek or the other. Not more than an hour after leaving the lake, they had to cross Agency Creek in water uncomfortably far up their thighs, water swift enough that to stay on their feet they had to lean into the current like slow, slow prowlers.
Seeing both Lexa and Mariah sit down on the bank, remove their boots, and take out the insoles, take off their socks, then put their boots back on to cross the rock-bottomed creek, Mitch had followed their example.
When they booted up for real again on the opposite bank he felt almost pathetically grateful for the solace of dry socks and insoles.
Before resuming on the trail the three of them stood and gazed up at the formationed mountainsides virtually overhead, reefs and deeps like an ocean tipped empty and left on its side. Agency Creek, all the creek any of them wanted to have to tackle in one wading lifetime, skittered between these skyscraping valley walls.
Then the clong of Lexa’s cup in rhythm against her pack frame was leading them onto the narrow table of trail ahead.
• • •
They forded the obstinate creek twice more that morning, wet blue jeans and clammy loins convincing them lunch was deserved at the last ford.
Packs were shed gratefully, even by Lexa. Mariah and Mitch chorused that the cheese and crackers, cherries and banana chips she passed around were easily the best food she had ever fixed. There was scenery to munch on, too. Drying out on the creek bank, they could see ahead through the turn of the valley to the mountains that carry the continent, dividing its waters and halving its scenery into the West and the rest.
Lexa zeroed in on the one that was central on the skyline.
“Phantom Woman,” she said dreamily. “The great goat photo studio; Mariah McCaskill, girl proprietor.”
“Career built on a golden stream, thanks to you.”
“You’re getting awful.” Lexa laughed and flipped a banana chip at her.
“Did I miss a hairpin turn in the conversation?” Mitch wondered.
“Sister talk,” Lexa told him as if it were higher physics, a flicker of commiserating grin coming his way from Mariah. This country was just west of childhood for them. Lexa the tomboy ranch kid then, and rambunctious big sister Mariah already halfway to another planet—Mariah maybe was another planet. Mitch hadn’t a doubt that there were sibling zones no only child could penetrate.
“You brought sheep up in here, with your dad?” He had been trying to fathom low-slung wool-laden animals crisscrossing this creek that was close to hip deep on him.
“We weren’t in through here.” The explanation came from Lexa. “This was Primitive Area even before Phantom Woman and the rest ever got set aside and they started calling the whole thing the Bob Wilderness. No mutton conductors allowed, orders of the Forest Service. So we trailed in south of here, along Roman Reef, didn’t we, my ridin’-double sister.”
“Wait a minute. There’s an easier trail?”
“Longer. Not as interesting.”
“For wimpy tenderfeet,” Mariah put in with a straight face.
“Maybe I qualify,” Mitch proposed. “How many tender feet does a guy have to have to apply?”
“Company,” murmured Lexa, sharpest outdoor eyes among them. Mitch was sitting across from Mariah, and when she went rigidly still at the word he did too.
Fifty yards upstream the four-point buck deer, horns in velvet, stared at them in poised surprise. Then was gone in dolphinlike leaps into the brush.
• • •
By early afternoon the creek was a wistful dabble behind and below them. The hike now was steadily up, across the shoulder of a high stony ridge. The Overthrust Belt, this sea of Rockies was called, a vast tectonic slosh that left behind rank after rank of tilted mountains, like frozen tidal waves aimed east toward the continental beach of plains. Cross one of these slabs of strata, and your reward was another of the alpine valleys raked into the geography by glaciers. But first you had to cross it. The three hikers now were spaced with great unevenness on the hard gray clay trail over the first of these mile-long upturns.
Mariah had taken the lead, launching off into a head start so that she would have time near the top to scope around with her camera. A couple of hundred yards above Lexa now and letting out anti-bear yodels every so often, she was pushing herself in long climbing steps that she would pay for in stiffness by tonight, but Lexa knew that was simply par for Mariah.
So, Lyle. Lexa allowed herself a little roving of her own. I never would have bet you had it in you. To pass up a townwide funeral for a procession like the three of us strung along this mountain. How ever Phantom Woman did it, she got hold of you for good.
Going up this sharply, Lexa loosened her bootlaces enough so her ankles could flex. That done, she concentrated on matching her breathing with her climbing stride, inhaling when she lifted her right leg, letting the breath out over the next step or two. How that rhythmic lungful of air within you could give the illusion of lift, she didn’t know, only that it worked. Here on this high and starkly open section of the trail she had the same elevated feeling as being on horseback. The torso has memory, too. For one sweet selfish and quite guilty moment she let herself wish she was doing a high lonesome, up here. Solo, she could maintain the pace her exhilarated body wanted to reach for.
Mitch, though. A hundred yards behind her, and not noticeably keeping up. Apparently Mitch had not been put on earth to traverse mountains. Even from here she could see the dark wash of sweat on his shirt. Even as she watched, he sought a convenient boulder to sag onto and rest.
She half jogged back down to where he had plopped.
“Getting your second wind?”
“I’m already on about my ninth,” he panted.
“You’ll toughen in. First day is the hardest.”
He devoutly hoped so. Too tired to crane around to see where Mariah had yo-yoed off to this time, he asked between breaths: “The roving photographer still roving, is she?”
“Yup.”
“You’re starting to talk like a backcountry guide, you know that?”
“Indubitably.”
“Tell me something. You’ve got some excuse for being good at this, from tromping around Alaska those years. Where does Mariah get it from?”
“She got the family share of legs.”
Sitting and blowing, he gandered around at the rock faces, the quilled forest below, while Lexa watched him.
“Lex? Everybody thinks I’m as strong as a Bibleful of oxes. I’m reasonably sure myself I don’t have a leg in the grave yet. This country could not be prettier. Then why is this so hard?”
She patiently pulled out the quad map to show him. “We’re climbing about, oh, a thousand feet an hour in through here. See these contour lines? Each of those is a forty-foot rise in elevation—that’s not what you mean, though, is it.”
“The guy on my back is what I mean.”
• • •
At the bottom of Mitch’s backpack sat the box of ashes.
Pulling into the Rozier driveway the night before with her Great Falls–bought trove of trail gear for them, Lexa had managed to not quite run down Mitch as he headed for the machine shed, the beige box in his hands.
“Caught me at it,” he said. “Give me a hand with this, okay?”
Together they went into the shed and Mitch handed her the box, stepped on the antiquated platform scale and weighed himself, grimacing. Then he took the box and had Lexa do the weighing while he held it. She pushed the balance along with her index finger, a little a time. At six pounds more than Mitch’s weight, it balanced.
He backed off the scale. “Then it’s so. A person’s ashes weigh about the same as a newborn baby. Trite and true.”
Lexa held her tongue about any such neat arithmetic of life.
In the flurry of assembling gear for the hiking trip, Mariah crossed paths with them as Lexa was closing the machine shed door. Her eyes fastened onto the box Mitch held.
“Weighing in our distinguished hitchhiker,” he joked lamely.
Without a word Mariah stared on at the box. In India she had witnessed a public cremation. Fire on the Ganges, the funeral pyre floating. One of maybe fifty funeral pyres: she’d had to choose among that flotilla of conflagrations, fire rafts of souls she had never known. Several summers before when the big fires swept Yellowstone Park, she had spent weeks shooting on the firefighters’ lines, had seen every part of nature burn, lone trees suddenly aflame, the persisting lick of fire on a charred buffalo, entire mountains red in firestorm. Yet it had not prepared her for what came into her viewfinder at the eternal and filthy river: that the flames of a person were like any other. Maybe that was what had made her hands shake when she took that picture of human fuel flaring into the universe and again now as she looked at Mitch and all that remained of his corporeal father.
• • •
Now Lexa flexed the straps of her pack off the front of her shoulders by thrusting her thumbs under the strap pads, as if to unloosen Mitch from his rock perch, too. “You’re still on that? Your dad going woo-woo in his last wish? What happened to ‘flinch and bear it’?”
“Goddamnit, I can’t help having trouble with this ashes idea. It feels operatic or something.”
She did not want this trailside repose to go on too long. Periodic brief stops, a few quick deep breaths were better than a long leadbutt sitdown. “Mitch, not to get on your case or anything, but we ought to keep moving.”
“That’s one opinion.”
“As we say in the barrel-racing profession, giddyup.”
“Minute more.”
“Come on, town kid. What’d they tell you back there in UW football practice—‘Roll on, Iron Tumbleweed’?”
His head snapped up. “They did not!”
“Or, oh ho ho, I bet I know. Those coaches of yours knitted samplers of this one from pairs of their old white socks, didn’t they. The one that starts off, ‘When—’ ”
“Lex, don’t. Not that old crap, okay? Honest, I’ll—”
“ ‘—the going gets—’ ”
“Lexa, I’m warning you!”
“ ‘—tough, the tough get—’ ”
“Look, I’m on my feet. Holy Kajesus, you’d have made a hard-ass coach.”
• • •
They dry-camped that first night, high but shelved out of the wind, they hoped.
Their only company at the timberline campsite was the crests of the gigantic reef formations and the portals between. Jericho, its bowed palisade the nearest to them, appeared to arch its back in everlasting surprise as the plains butted into its bedrock. Across a deep thickly forested gulch from Jericho, Roman Reef stood higher and a mile longer, its rimrock crest as regular as the frieze of a vestal temple but incalculably more ancient. Grizzly Reef, true to its name, seemed to threaten on into eternity with its half-turned slab face targeting north toward the flanks of the other two.
Moving stiffly as marionettes, Mitch and Mariah had gone to their packs to dig out sweatshirts, hours of dusk yet ahead here under the timbered shoulder. Lexa already was setting up things for supper. Loaf of heavy dark bread, tough nourishing stuff. Uwajimaya noodles, a good carbo load. Thuringer sausage, protein supreme. A menu that would have set off prepare-to-waddle alarms in them all down on the flatlands but would be welcomed by digestive systems up here.
“What can I do to help, cookie?” Mariah inquired as she came back over tugging down a sweatshirt which read across its front, Mount Cook Guide Service—Glaciers are a kick in the ice.
