Mountain time, p.24
Mountain Time, page 24
“Miles on the trail,” Mitch adamantly steered his topic past theirs. “Marshall kept track of every one of those babies. I’m up to nineteen thirty-eight in his notebook and here’s the kind of thing, over in the Flathead: ‘8 day totals: miles, 288 . . . feet climbed, 54,000 . . . number of peaks ascended, 20.’ ”
As she heard this, the back of Lexa’s neck prickled. She, too, had the impulse to always tally the distance she had covered, calculate the outdoors into herself incessantly. The same mainspring that drove her to measure herself against the clock in barrel racing, perhaps. Whatever installed it, ever since the first time she set foot into these mountains and took off up a grassy mountainside with Mariah while their father dealt with a sheepherder, she would run through her mind a sweet-sad estimate of the amount of time ahead, how many more years of hiking she had left if she lived to be such-and-such. Who knew, Lyle maybe had some such soul calculus when he was up here at eighteen.
“Jesus,” Mariah let out in a way Bob Marshall would have given her extra points for, “what’d he do, run?”
“Pushed himself like crazy,” Mitch confirmed. “That probably was what killed him. Remember, all he was doing in the Forest Service in the meanwhile was installing the whole wilderness system, against every old bull of the woods who figured trees are there to be chopped down. So there he was, dead at thirty-eight. Makes those of us who are too old for drugs and too young for Alzheimer’s wonder what the hell we ever spent any time at.” Broodily he heaved a piece of wood onto the campfire, sparks taking to the air. “Spooky last chapter for you,” he told the women watching him in the firelight. “The obits say Marshall went back to Washington from one of his high lonesomes out here and right away died on the train to New York. Conductor found him in his sleeper when the train pulled into Penn Station.”
“Lead us not into Penn Station,” Mariah said reflectively in preacher tone. Lexa seemed to be appraising every scuff on her veteran hiking boots.
They talked on for a long while, held by the fire and a demon hiker who believed mountains made the difference in the world.
• • •
The wind came up in the night, the canvas walls of the tepee flapping as if wanting to sail away. When the canvas commotion woke Mitch he rolled over, listened to Lexa breathing in her sleep as regular as a swimmer and Mariah in the minor key of z, then went out and built up the campfire. For once he was up first, the next morning, starting the oatmeal and coffee by the time the women ducked out under the tepee flap.
Lexa kept them on the move all this day. One step, another, rhythm across the hours. Up Ledge Creek the country roughened into abrupt little gulleys with muddy bottoms. Then at the head of the creek a boggy area lay in wait with clouds of mosquitoes. Amid three sets of voluble swatting, they doused repellent on their necks and the backs of their hands and cuffs and collars and slogged through. When they came out into Big Elk Meadow, over them stood the crag with an outcropping that resembled a nose of delicacy, its placement of eyes a lucky accident of symmetry by winsome sockets of rockslide. Phantom Woman lived up to its name in its bearing, comely at first glance but then oddly withdrawing; at the mountain’s hem, the timber began green-black and luxurious, then gradually silvered away upward on its slopes where forest fires of old had left a coarse shawl of snags. Wordlessly Lexa pointed out a certain pocket of rock, and Mariah whipped out mini binoculars but could discern no goats.
By noon the tightly bunched trio of hikers was edging toward the mountain through Flathead Gorge, with Yosemitelike rock thrusts browing in above them on either side. The trail here was no more than a ribbon across a talus face, with a clear creek plunging along sometimes two hundred feet below them. At what passed for a wide spot in the dizzying trail Lexa decided it was the time for the reward of lunch, and had it backfire when they heard the sound of rocks avalanching somewhere not far behind them. They ate on the go until they were out of the gorge and at the base of the trail up Phantom Woman.
They climbed the mountain slope in perfect sunshine and a ripping wind. It caught at their packs absurdly hard, the three of them leaning into the cloudless gale swearing and laughing. Around them the wildflowers, lupine and Indian paintbrush and daisies, tugged against the tethers of their stems. Dandy day for a picnic up here, if you didn’t mind a hurricane as a guest. Over the force of the wind Lexa yelled that she was going to have to shed her hat. Mariah complained that her eyes kept watering up so that she couldn’t see to sight in her camera. Mitch said little, just trying to cope against this air avalanche down from the mountain. He was taking the rest steps Lexa had tutored him in: step—pause a moment—another step.
They plodded, swayed. Dusk came to their side of the mountain. Lexa knew they were cutting this pretty fine. She had them gobble granola bars and raisins and keep trudging.
They made it to the top as the setting sun was washing the fire tower in light, peaks and valleys stroked into heavier outline. Straddling the summit of the mountain and windowed all around, the tower faced four directions at once. Its stilty legs were a bit spraddled, built to angle all possible support to the sky-riding cabin at their precarious top. The sunset ran through its gradations, yellow to gold to pewter, as Lexa, Mitch, Mariah made for the tower with the last exertion they had left. Drifting over from the west were small puffy clouds all the same size, as if being turned out by an ice machine. Ridiculously on cue, as the trio reached the base of the tower the last of the light set the clouds glowing red, like coals of the sun. The done-in hikers trooped up the steep flights of stairs, their bootsteps tattoos of sound in the mountain silence. Did hurried housekeeping to the lookout cabin, sweeping mouse droppings into the stairwell with a broom worn down to its nub. Feasted on the hot meal Lexa conjured in record time. Then slept, slept, slept as night came to the Bob.
• • •
Mariah’s sleeping bag was empty when Lexa sat up in the first of light the next morning. Rolling her shoulders a little to unstiffen from the night on the floor and vaguely combing her hair with her hands, she blinked around at the aged cabin, elemental in its furnishings and decidedly not built for three. Their packs and cooking gear and Mariah’s movable photographic emporium were strewn as if everything had been dumped out in the dark. Which, she reflected, had pretty much been the case. She peeked past the rickety old table in the middle of it all to see how Mitch was faring in his share of the cluttered space. His sleeping bag, too, was vacant.
Her every motion stopped. Silence, heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat . . . Now she heard a cough from out on the railinged platform that cupped around the cabin on all sides. “Mitch?”
“Taking a whizz,” he warned her against coming out. “Care-ful-ly. Got your choice up here, claustrophobia or acrophobia.” After a minute she heard him zip up. “Okay, the scenery is undiluted again. Come see.”
She stuck her feet in her boots but didn’t lace them, pulled on a sweatshirt and clopped to the open door to the deck.
She came out yawning, and then simply stood catching her breath at the view. The lookout tower was aptly placed; you could see out over a dozen watersheds and headwaters, out to the dark pelt of pine on a hundred mountains, out into supple valleys, out all the way to the half-mile-high walls of stone that fronted the mountain range. Up here the continent was tipsy with mountains. Three ranks now stood between them and the trailhead at Agency Lake, and throngs of peaks to the west. And of all these, the beadline of gravity rested here on this stony brow. Down Phantom Woman’s back, the snows and rains of the seasons ran off into the west-going rivers that culminated in the Columbia and the great gate to the Pacific at Astoria. Those trickling off its front streamed away to the Missouri River and thence the Mississippi River and at last into the vast delta catchment at the Gulf of Mexico. Inclines of the continent under her in both directions, Lexa moved to the railing beside Mitch and went up on tiptoes, seeing all the way back to when she was a girl with her first horse.
After a while she said, “No wonder this place stuck in your dad’s mind.”
“It should have.” Mitch bounced a fist on the railing as if testing the tower.
She glanced sideways at him. The fatigue lines in his face made her remind him, “Day off.”
“Going to use it, too. Catch some more sleep. Then maybe have a nap. And after that, relax with my eyes closed.”
He seemed to be serious. Can anybody be that tired and still be breathing?
But then he gave her a difficult little smile and admitted: “Need to collect my thoughts. Today isn’t anywhere on what I thought was the graph paper of my life.” He arched his head partway around toward the cabin and his pack with the box of ashes in it. “Or what I thought was the guest of honor’s.”
“You want mental health time, you’ve got it,” Lexa bestowed. “Let’s get some breakfast in us, and I’ll go see what Mariah is burning film on.”
• • •
Mariah did not know—who ever does?—how she had arrived at past forty and still had to figure out her job every cottonpicking new day. Wouldn’t you think the act of taking a picture was essentially the same each time: camera, lens, film speed ought to add up to abracadabra, no? This picture, this morning, no.
She rambled around the summit of the mountain, trying from here and there in the early morning light she adored (not for nothing were television commercials for cars shot at dawn in front of the Tetons or the Rockies, after all) and each time she sensed with the click of the shutter that the shot was a throwaway. Too bad you don’t believe in the Zen Zone, she tweaked herself, and just leave the lens cap on all the time. In Grenoble she’d had a battle royal with one of the old lionesses of photography, a portly presence who had been in the Magnum agency with Capa and Cartier-Bresson. “I no longer anymore need to take the photograph,” the grande dame insisted. “I see it, and it stays forever in my mind.” Mariah went at her from every which way, arguing that whatever was in her mind, it was not a photo. (She had got into a similarly intense debate, but full of bowing and ducking, with her host in Kyoto over haiku. Why always a seventeen-syllable poem? What if an eighteenth syllable would make it better? What if sixteen sounded just right? Her host’s reminder that sonnets too had a set form did nothing to change her mind. Mariah was not your sonnet type.) She hoped she never reached the point of scorning the photo for the shadow in the brain.
“How’s it going?” Lexa called as she cut across the mountain’s topknot of meadow to her.
Mariah made a face. “As we high-toned photographers say, I seem to be trying to polish a turd here. Hoped I’d get a book shot out of this”—she nodded toward the fire tower—“to pair with the Bell Rock.”
“Nothing wrong with that idea.” Lexa deeply meant it. Their grandfather’s mountain-topping tower for his lookouts, one of the string he caused to be built across his English Creek ranger district after being handed the wounded district—the inferno of 1929 had burned on for nearly a month up here, a generation of trees charring away, Phantom Woman madly determined to wear black. His great-grandfather’s lighthouse on an impossible smidgin of rock off the coast of Scotland—stonemasons, Alexander McCaskill among them for three years, plying their tools on granite at low tide and fleeing in boats at high. Marks against the sky, Mariah and Lexa both knew, in their family history.
“But it doesn’t hold up in the viewfinder,” Mariah lamented. “Old lookout tower here just won’t compare to a granite lighthouse. I’ve shot it from every fancy angle I can think of, and it sits there like a stack of toothpicks and says—” Mariah gave a chorus director’s downbeat.
“Duh!” the sisters chimed together.
“Anyway, it’ll do to slap on a Sunday page,” Mariah concluded. “So that’s my day so far. What’ve you been up to, a little ten-mile hike?”
“Mariah? You know your trouble?” Lexa told her with narrowed eyes, startling the daylights out of her. “You don’t put your munchies where your mouth is.” Lexa whipped a bag of trail mix out from behind her back.
“Breakfast? I’ve heard of that. My sister the foodie, what will I do without you?”
Mariah wolfed into the trail mix, Lexa taking an occasional handful herself as they kept track of the morning’s tones of light on the mountains around. Through most of a mouthful Mariah asked: “You and Mitch heading back to the Coast as soon as we get down out of here?”
“I’m going to have to, or turn the business into Ex-Do-Re-Mi Catering.”
“Mmm, know what you mean. I need to haul butt into the Falls and that museum residency, or change my name to Absentia.” With a ghost of a grin Mariah turned to face Lexa. “Three more days of each other’s unforgettable company, then, kitten. If our guide knows how to get us back.”
“Nothing to it.” Lexa grinned back. “All you have to do is roll downhill for thirty miles.”
• • •
They gathered on the observation deck just before dusk. Mariah positioned Mitch at the railing in the best light, scenery galore behind him for the ashes to cascade out into. “It’s going to be so good,” she crooned of the picture-to-be. Then frowned around the deck. “Wish I could get higher.”
“You came into the world wishing that,” Lexa told her. She gestured at the mountains everywhere below Phantom Woman. “There isn’t higher.”
“Actually,” Mariah mused, “there is. Up by the lightning rod.”
The other two could see, as she did, that the shingles didn’t amount to much anymore, but the roof boards looked sound. She strode over and tested the board rungs up the side of the cabin to the roof. “They’ll hold me. I think.” And began to climb.
Grimacing, Lexa watched her progress. “Mariah, you fall off there and we’ll have to scoop you up with spoons.”
“Yes, little mother.” She did, though, lodge herself firmly above the stanchion base of the lightning rod.
It was time, Mitch knew. Lexa waiting with her patented get-on-with-it expression, Mariah up there like a sniper in heaven. Nerved up as he was, he approached the railing of the platform as if it lipped out over the Grand Canyon.
“Mitch?” Lexa’s tone was light but meaningful. “Figure out where downwind is, then don’t be there, okay?”
Feeling silly, he licked a finger and held it up for a minute, the drying telling him the direction of the barely perceptible breeze, and moved so that his body was between the whisper of air and the box clutched to his middle. Then he balanced the ash receptacle on the gray wood of the railing, his gaze fixed on the rock brow of Phantom Woman below. We take you now to the tomb of the known soldier. My father, the sergeant of the Continental Divide. For a crazy moment all he could think of was his father’s habit of sniffing deeply, as if trying to snare air in from this most distant horizon of the nowhereville where he led his life. If he had such a taste of this country the summer he was up here, then why . . .
One more time Mitch reminded himself this was a how occasion, not a why. He made sure that he had the ashes in a firm enough grip to be shaken, sprinkled out in prescribed fashion, except—he was determined—not in the direction that would carry them toward the eye of the mountain. Gathering breath, he tried to find the words to commend his father to this wilderness, the peace of pine valleys and windsinging mountains.
What came out was:
“This is too weird.”
He took the box off the railing, holding it cradled as if not to let it squirm away.
“My father never cared a whoop about any of this”—he spoke as if to the surroundings—“one way or the other. No, I take that back. He wanted it carved up into money. Just never quite managed to figure out how.”
Lexa gave him a careful looking at. This was not the send-off Lyle had in mind, pretty surely.
Mitch met her eyes. “I’m not going to do it. His ashes don’t belong up here.”
“Mitch, very, very funny,” Mariah called down from where she was sprawled on the roof with camera cocked and ready. “You gave my chain a real yank there for a moment. The rest of the kidding later, though, okay? My light is starting to go.”
“For real, Mariah. No performance.” Mitch stepped away from the railing, then thought to say in the direction of the cabin roof: “Sorry about your picture.”
“Oh, come on, you’ve got to.” Peering at him over her camera, Mariah appeared perfectly diplomatic except for those two perturbed indents between her eyes. “You can’t haul—carry—someone’s ashes all the way up here and then not go through with it.”
“You’re seeing it.”
“God damn,” Mariah emitted. She came down the ladder in nothing flat and over to Mitch at least that swiftly.
“We hiked three days to do this! The light is right, the setup couldn’t be better, you’ve got the ashes right there in your hands the way your father asked you to. All you have to do is open the box and”—Mariah gestured as if madly salting soup—“shake!”
Mitch shook only his head, at her.
She stood planted there, looking at him with whatever is beyond disbelief. “Lexa, you could pitch in,” she said through her teeth.
Lexa made a despairing noise in her throat, then managed:
“Mitch, you did promise him—”
“It saved a fight while he was dying. What choice did I have?” Mitch retorted. “But I can’t believe he lived up to his end of this, either. Here’s a man who told forty thousand stories in his life, everything that ever happened to him, and he never once mentioned this.” He nodded emphatically downward. “So where did it come from all of a sudden, his big notion that this fire tower owes its existence to him? That he ever did anything for country like this?” The expression on Lexa went even more pinched. Mariah still looked purely furious. He felt bad that Mariah was taking it this way; here went being bosom fishing buddies and all that. But this was his to contend with, him and the mischief merchant boxed up in his hands. “The whole thing doesn’t sit right,” Mitch stubbornly maintained to the two women. He swept a hand out toward the earthly kingdom of Marshall, the wilderness, then whapped it against the side of the box. “My father didn’t earn his way up here in the least; he worked against the Bob every chance he could.”
