Alternate Title: The Summit, or There and Back and There Again
It was hiking today, [PERSONAL INFORMATION EXPUNGED], with my mother, father, and that powerhouse of a young girl my sister. It got off to a poor start when we left our car, losing sight of first the trailhead and then each other; but we were quickly reunited and came to the wooden bulletin announcing our (second) departure. It advertised the trek as “rocky” and “moderate”. This would prove to be fairly optimistic.
The drive from our rented cabin was long: several times we passed from gravel to pavement and back again. I had been alternating between staring out the window and reading Several Short Sentences About Writing, more for distraction than advice. I left off on a passage about transitions: “The obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing, a magical truth. You can get anywhere from anywhere, always and almost instantly.” Wouldn’t that be nice, I thought. I tossed the book in the backseat and ducked out the door.
In a few short steps we reached the promised “creek crossing,” though it seemed to be much more of the creek with no clear path to the crossing. The water was too wide to jump and its temperature lagged at least a season. We took stock of our materials: eventually and with much shouting we devised a route, dragging each other across with sticks and boulders. I stumbled over my final step, freezing my feet and then my hands as I reached the other side and made to empty my shoes. The cold would haunt me for the following hours, my fingers periodically turning icy and immobile.
We had come here – first on vacation, then to the trail – with hopes of escaping city life. We had largely succeeded so far, our cabin having a beautiful view and no internet service. But now all around us we found evidence of the crush and clamor of human habitation: twin moats of branded consumer junk flanking each side of the highway; an abandoned and rusting farm vehicle stamped JOHN DEERE (I now think it was a backhoe); a full hillside of felled trees. Nature showed too, in flashes: a pair of eagles dipped and rose to meet each other off the backs of thermals; drips of meltwater furnished a carpet of ancient ferns and mosses beneath our feet. It seemed effortful, like it was a great struggle for the oaks and mycelia to root among scattered cigarette butts and beer cans.
My sister drew from some endless well of energy, invisible to the rest of us, that allowed her to yell at full force, swing from vines, scale perilously sheer rock faces (to the mingled awe and dismay of my onlooking mother and myself), and kick a foot over a high edge that dropped to the road beneath, staining her faded pink leggings with mud. If I had to guess, that would be the color of her soul.
Not to be outdone, my father plodded a great distance ahead of us all, as seemed to happen when we walked anywhere, up a mountain or down a block. After some time he reached a forking path and, without hesitating, turned right. (Two roads diverged...) We were confused coming behind him: setting aside the rather minimalist tastes of whoever had marked the trail, it seemed to us that the correct way was left. But he continued stubbornly on, as though inertia had lodged itself in his stride to drown out my sister’s shouted calls. So we followed.
And we did, for a time: left foot, right, the blue markers petering out, eventually reaching a railway, which we traced a mile further to the start of a logging trail. We were almost certainly not where we were meant to be now, but we clung to vain hope that we would soon rediscover a path to our car. We were exhausted (even my sister), and we were lashed with biting cold, and it was nearing lunchtime. At a turn in the trail we stopped to check a GPS — but it was no help, since we weren’t sure of where we had started from in the first place. The mood was rather miserable by now.
But then: Through the trees, we caught a glimpse of a rusty machine sitting off the edge of the path. A backhoe, a yellow one, stamped JOHN DEERE. Somehow, by complete accident, we had brought ourselves nearly to the start of the trail!
My hand had gone numb again, but I was relieved. Thank God we hadn’t gotten anywhere. Why had we come in the first place, again? We walked from the highway, which we drove to from the cabin, having come from the house where they took me out of the maternity ward a few days after I was born… before that was a vague blur of lauded ancestors, who crossed seas and prairies in search of Freedom, Riches, New Ways of Life, whose insatiable ambition stuck daggers in the hearts of men and prodded at their backs with the butts of rifles. We hadn’t come nearly as far, or killed anywhere close to as many; but here we were, on a journey, or a crude simulacrum of it. Maybe this was the whole shape of life: walking the length of innumerable paths, hoping, striving, knowing that one day you would return to the source and the world would be lost to you. Or maybe the dehydration was getting to my head.
We came down the hillside, splitting into two groups. We forded the river once more, pushed through scratching chest-height plants, and we were free.