Life - Part One
Chapter 3: Rendezvous at Mirror Pass
Jan moved into Wentworth at the end of September. Charlie borrowed an unused tipi and erected it in their clearing. Shivering by an old woodstove that he installed, reading by kerosene lamp, he dreamed of the cozy house he would build on that very spot.
Relations with Jan improved dramatically with their separation. She had him to dinner and overnight every three or four weeks - when the woman with whom she shared an apartment was gone. Why was Jan trying to keep him from meeting her?, Charlie wondered. Maybe she was very attractive, too attractive. Or maybe she and Jan were lovers - but Charlie was afraid to ask. Jan was good to him in bed; that's all that counted. In fact, she was better than ever. Maybe, he thought, they just needed this little break in the domestic routine.
Jan refused to stay overnight in the tipi. After one supper there she refused to come back for meals, either. "It's positively squalid," she complained. "Freezing cold and filthy, besides."
Charlie shrugged. "Yeah, well, my water froze."
He was becoming used to living as a bachelor. Jan had taken their Mazda pickup with her to town; but Charlie didn't mind holing up for the winter on the Co-op. Before too long he started noticing strong feelings arising whenever he was around Christie. During his periodic lovemaking with Jan, Charlie began to superimpose Christie's face and body on her. In real life he made no approaches to the single woman; she maintained a friendly, austere distance from him, as apparently she did with everyone.
Come spring, Charlie figured, Jan would give up her secretarial job and move back to the land, and Charlie's emotions would settle down. He and Jan could resume the building of their dream.
Through the winter Charlie made tentative queries in that direction. Jan was noncommittal. When it came to the subject of income and expenses, she turned critical. "That's our savings your living on," she would remind him.
In the spring Dennis was recruiting willing bodies for a treeplanting contract in a valley to the east of the Galena. Working his muscles into shape cutting firewood and digging new ground for his garden, Charlie felt he would give it a try. With Jan living on her own anyway, leaving the area would be no hardship.
Dennis gave Charlie a week's training before leaving. Charlie practiced his technique with hipbags and shovel, planting potatoes instead of trees. Then it was off down the highway, to new adventure; there had been vague, romantic talk of a rendezvous with Jan on a mountain pass between the two valleys sometime in June. Charlie rode out of the Galena valley with Dennis, in a rattling, roaring one-ton truck that Dennis aptly called "the crummy." He mentioned his idea of an expedition from both sides of Mirror Pass, feeling Dennis out on the question of an extra day or two off. "Hey, for sure," Dennis shouted above the noise of the engine. "What a great idea! That'll give you something to write home about."
Charlie worked hard and, when the time came, managed to arrange a couple of days off between contracts. He found a friend to hike with him up the east side of the pass; Jan came through from her side with another woman who brought her four-year-old daughter. A bad idea, Charlie had thought all along - he had to wait two hours for their expected arrival at the cabin in the pass; but it worked out nevertheless.
The romantic night in the cabin was less than ideal. A storm came up; the little girl was afraid and up crying half the night; they had not brought enough bedding and this negligence, somehow, was all Charlie's fault. Finally, Jan was having her period and not much interested in celebrating the reunion in any passionate way.
They departed the next morning with a perfunctory hug and kiss, Jan and her party disappearing first into the white mists clinging to the western side. Charlie might have stayed on with them hoping for a break in the weather, or even escorted them part way down toward their trail; but he had a tight schedule for making the next contract, and Jan insisted that he honor that obligation rather than worry about her.
Charlie found good ground at the crew's new location and started raking in the money, a hundred and fifty a day. He stayed on through that contract and the next, and returned to New Roots in August, lean, strong, and full of hopes for the new house. Except that Jan was no longer a sure thing, in the houseplans or in his life. He found he could hardly remember what she looked like. Her dreamed of her with wide hips and thighs, thick eyebrows and lips - exagerrations? He wasn't sure any more. Maybe she was changing.
Charlie's plans for working on house, firewood, or anything else quickly wilted in the August heat. The fact was, his body needed a rest. He took to spending long days at the beach on Galena Lake.
This wasn't the public beach near the wharf, but a more remote cove where Co-op members, and other stray counterculture types in the area, came to swim and sunbathe without the false need for bathing suits.
Occasionally Christie came there, to swim and soak up sun. She kept to herself. Charlie had a few words of greeting for her, and she responded in a friendly manner, but still there was something remote about her. Maybe it was all in his head. Maybe it was because he was still, officially at least, a married man.
She would step demurely out of the lapping water, a veritable Venus. To Charlie's admiring eyes, she seemed a perfectly formed figure. She had Jan's blond hair, but it hung loose and free, not always tightly braided. She had Jan's creamy skin and soft features, but her eyes were round and clear. He had never heard her speak in anger or spite. But she was like a goddess of her private temple. Charlie was not yet comfortable enough to attempt to penetrate that aura Christie kept about her and her isolated dwelling on a thickly forested corner of the Co-op.
Then Jan made another move - from Wentworth to Galena. She came to see Charlie and told him she wanted to be closer, to try to work things out. "What things?" Charlie asked her.
Jan glared at him. "Don't you know by now? Are you still interested in working it out?"
"Oh, 'it,' the relationship. Yeah, of course. I thought you had in mind some specific grievances - "
"I can think of a few. But look, let's not get into it now. I felt good about you as I was driving here. Jesus, I just gave up a good job for a lower-paying one in Galena, with the hope things might work out better between us. Now already I'm not so sure. Maybe I made a mistake."
Maybe I did, too, Charlie said to himself, thinking of that impulsive marriage, what, four and a half years ago now. "No, no," he told Jan, who looked genuinely sad and, in a way, still beautiful to him. "Let's work it out." He hugged her as she stood up. "Leaving already?" She was starting to cry. Had he said anything wrong?
He watched her walk back to her truck. She had put on a little weight, and walked with what Charlie thought was almost a waddle.
Jan seemed happier with the move. Charlie was willing to talk about problems between them, during more regular visits back and forth over the next couple of weeks. He felt the biggest problem had been simply their physical separation, itself helping to create an emotional distance between them. Jan did have, as it turned out, a list of specific complaints about the way their relationship had developed. It seemed to Charlie she'd spent a lot of time practicing for these sessions, covering areas they'd never really talked about, what she called their "personal styles": styles of communicating, socializing, housekeeping, lovemaking. Charlie was respectful of Jan's desire to become closer, and so he listened, for the most part, without a lot of defensive arguing. And he appreciated the healing and learning that was taking place within and between them. Yet, he felt strangely detached from her. She had changed; and, Charlie supposed, so had he. They seldom slept together in this period of time. When they did, their mutual loneliness flared up in brief flames of desire that they took as a sign of their still-surviving love.
As the fall days shortened Charlie wondered what the winter had in store for them; and then Jan invited him to share the duplex apartment she'd rented in Galena. Charlie compared the prospect of shivering through another winter in the tipi with the thought of snuggling through the cold nights with Jan's warm, soft body, her cushioning breasts and smooth belly and welcoming thighs . . . and said yes.
Galena, a one-street town near a lumber mill, was no center of culture. At first Charlie was bored there. While Jan worked at her new job staffing the Galena Highways office, he took long walks back up the road to the Co-op to visit his old neighbors. Chiefly that meant Dennis and Harold - Charlie having discovered an appreciation for Harold's eccentric sense of humor, and a somewhat common slant on political matters.
Harold wrote for certain periodicals catering to the radical fringe in Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle. Now Charlie, with a warm house, a well-lighted desk, and a dry place to keep books and papers, began to see his new milieu as a good site for renewal of intellectual activity. Jan's shelves of books that she'd had her parents ship out west, her subscriptions of glossy magazines and collection of art prints on the walls, all stimulated a dormant urge to explore the literary life again - to try a little writing of his own. After all, he had a Masters' degree in Comparative Literature. . . .
In his farther flights of fancy, Charlie thought he might even escape the drudgery of rural labor, if he could succeed at the writing game. Surprisingly, Jan was all for it. After all, she said with easy laughter, she had married Charlie for his brains, not his body or his money. The funny part of that joke, Charlie thought, was that Jan had always criticized him - and his academic writing - for being "too abstract."
But maybe there was some hidden truth in her joke. They had met and courted and become engaged while attending university together, studying together, discussing books and ideas. Besides, she had nothing to lose. She was self-supporting now, and so was he, from his earnings as a treeplanter. As the Kingsleys had said, the secret was to live cheaply.
So - a new career in the offing! Jan bought a bottle of wine for them to toast the occasion. There was just one hitch - what would sell? They discussed the matter thoroughly: Charlie, with the fervant hopes of the would-be writer; Jan, with a rekindled if still-detached interest in literature. Charlie latched onto the obvious angle. True-life adventure, to the popular magazines: that was the ticket to fame. It would force him to be concrete, he pointed out. He had a true-life adventure close at hand.
"Oh, yeah - and what's that?" Jan asked, eyeing him suspiciously. "Or do I want to know? Maybe I should ask first if it fits in the sex or the violence category. Probably both." She giggled, her face flushed from the wine.
"No, seriously," Charlie said. "Our trip up to Mirror Pass."
"An adventure story? I don't know. More like a disaster story, if you ask me. Going down our side with that screaming kid, getting lost - it was a nightmare, not an adventure."
"Even the part at the top, in the cabin?"
She shook her head, swallowing wine. "No sex, no violence. It'll never fly. See," she said with another giggle, "I'm already talking like an editor."
"No," Charlie said seriously, taking another sip of his own. "I've been thinking about it. There's lots of potential there, beyond what actually happened. We're talking fiction, dear, remember?"
That winter Charlie made good on his plans and, incorporating some key changes, worked their story up into a novella. "No way," Jan had complained from the outset; "that's a totally unmarketable format." Charlie countered that his too-short novel had the perfect length for being serialized in one of those high-paying mags like Argosy or Esquire.
Entitled "Rendezvous at Mirror Pass," the story opened with a propitious arrival:
The cabin appeared in the distance, nestled beside a half-frozen pond. It was a scene from an old-fashioned Christmas card - except the cabin's chimney pipe showed no smoke.
"Looks like we're the first ones here," I said to Matt. I checked my watch again.
My hiking companion bent forward with the weight of his pack. He rested his hands on his knees, catching his breath. "Yeah - what time is it?"
"Twenty past three."
"Well, we're behind schedule from losing our trail. They could have had the same trouble on the other side."
"I guess so. Or maybe they got a late start."
Matt turned his eyes from me toward the cabin. Sweat generated from our last steep climb up the scree slope dripped from his limp, wet mustache.
I tried some other explanations: "Maybe they're already in the cabin and there's no wood; or they've just got there and haven't lit a fire yet." I started to shiver. It was the end of June, but at six thousand feet a sweating body cools quickly.
We trudged on through wet, foot-deep snow to the cabin. The rustic structure appeared stoutly built, with walls of rough planks supported by a stone foundation. Little matter that a couple of the wooden steps were falling apart.
I pushed open the creaking door; wind whipped into the single room. There was a neat pile of split firewood stacked beside a little stove, with cobwebs stretched between.
The cabin was well-equipped, for all its remoteness. There were stacks of blankets and sleeping bags and spare shoes, all on a drying rack overhead; four built-in bunks complete with foam mattresses, a kitchen with various supplies in the cupboards: matches, toilet paper, tea, cocoa, canned soup, a little rice, along with a portable campstove and fuel, cookware and dishes.
Matt started unlacing his wet boots and suggested we get a fire going to dry our clothes and heat water for tea. I was too anxious for the arrival of the other party to sit tight just yet; I told him to go ahead, and I'd scout around to see if I could see or hear a sign of their approach. He tried to reassure me that they were probably just running late. But I left him to the stove and took off with map in hand to the end of the ridge, calling out and peering down into the dim vastness of the Glacier Creek drainage.
There was no response to my shouts in the empty wind. Far down the mountainside, the creek streamed out from its source icefields and wound away beyond sight. Somewhere down there, a trail had to run along the heavily wooded slope; and at some point it had to veer up on a final ascent to the pass. Somewhere down there were Faron, Suze, and their hiking companion, now over half an hour late - not a big deal, if you're meeting someone at a restaurant; but this was wilderness. The higher stakes made all the difference.
It was cold sitting out there on the exposed rock, and so I got up and walked, with a growing uneasiness, back to the cabin. A gray plume of smoke now curled out of its chimney. Looking beyond, I hesitated in my steps, struck by the awesome beauty of the mountain peaks that loomed all around. A beauty so desolate, and incomplete . . .
It was Jan's suggestion to open with the cabin scene - "It's more of a hook." Charlie preferred the chronological approach, and had begun his original version with a fateful morning at home (their still-hypothetical house) in bed with Jan (alias "Faron" for the purposes of the story). In the end, as with most of the editorial decisions, Charlie bent to Jan's opinion. He was only the wishy-washy, amateur writer; what did he know? Jan had an Honors B.A. in English. The graduate work aside, Charlie had a plain B.A. with no Honors. "Besides," Jan reminded him with a smug smile, "the reader is always right."
"Suze," of course, was modelled on the child of Jan's companion who had come along on the hike from the west. Jan objected strenuously to the idea of making Suze her and Charlie's daughter - just as she always found some practical excuse to counter Charlie's "naive" idea of having kids: "Let's wait till we settle down somewhere. . . . Let's wait till we get a nice house built."
And, she complained, had Charlie ("Will") really expected to see Faron, Suze and Ron all cozy in the cabin, drinking tea and smiling for him when he arrived?
I walked back into the cabin, stamping the snow off my boots, ready at least to warm up for a bit while waiting. Matt had his feet up roasting by the stove, teacup in hand. He seemed unconcerned, urging me not to tie too much expectation to a strict timetable in mountainous terrain like this. I was willing to listen but it didn't help the unreasonable fear gnawing at my gut.
"Come on," he said when we'd finished our tea, "let's get up on some of this higher ground and have a real look around."
"Okay, sure," I agreed. It was part of why we were here.
We had only to climb a short distance up from the cabin to find excellent vantage points from which to scan the awesome mountain peaks that ranged everywhere around us. To the west loomed the blue-black, glacier-filled . . .
. . . scenic wonders that were imperative in a story of this sort. To the east, likewise.
"Faron and Suze" eventually did show up. Little Suze had gamely walked part of the way herself, but for the most part Faron had carried her on her shoulders - on top of a backpack loaded with extra clothes, food, Will's accumulated mail, and their down comforter.
After a restoring meal of lentils and vegetables, rice cakes, fruit and mixed nuts, we gathered around the cabin's logbook, while a light rain fell outside. We learned that the shelter had withstood thirteen years of the clashing of weather systems at the top of this mountain range, where moist air traveling from the coast drops its last load of rain and snow before reaching the Rockies. Entries made in every month of the year recounted blizzards. We felt snug enough so far, though we had some reason to be apprehensive as we closed the logbook and prepared for bed.
Matt chose one of the top bunks. I made Suze's bed under his, while Faron piled our comforter on the other bottom bunk. Outside, the wind was picking up. We put more wood in the fire for the night and dove shivering into our beds.
Love was never so lovely as this, so patiently earned, and now so wonderfully extended within our short time together, so as to blanket the weeks apart, and those yet to come, with its soothing balm. Our hands played over the rediscovered terrain of our skin, finding here the mountains and rivers and forests that lay all around us in the unseen night. The roar of our passion was muted by respect for Matt's close-by solitude, yet in the process it was transmuted into deeper frequencies, richer harmonies, more resounding exclamations of the heart.
The cabin walls shook with the buffeting of wind and rain from all directions, while thunder and lightning made a mounting attack on the darkness. Our bodies clung tightly together into the night, courting sleep. Somewhere in the realm between love and the void, we heard a crashing of wood outside. Faron's eyes popped open - I could feel the lashes against my cheek. Instantly I was alert to the arrival of a grizzly, come to claim some of the new food in its domain.
Or, I considered, maybe it was just the wind blowing some boards about. As the sounds subsided amid the general cracking of the elements, somehow we found our way into sleep, a long and dreamful sleep.
The morning light found Faron and me wrapped tightly in one another's arms. Suze still slept, as did Matt, in the bunks farther down on the cabin wall. As our thoughts awakened in the soft light and softening wind, our limbs came alive once again to the exquisite touch of each other's skin, so tender, so transparent with feeling. We breathed together, our blood coursing as one, our loins throbbing to a rapid, then a slowing tempo. We lay for a long time looking into each other's luminous eyes.
Suze finally stirred and came awake. Her little cooing noises rose up into the chill air and brought further stirring from Matt's bunk. Faron and I still lay in reverent silence together. Suze peeked her head around the partition between our bunks and then came crawling into bed with us. Our arms wrapped around each other in complete delight.
All too soon we plunged out of the covers and into cold clothes, amid cheery good mornings delivered with frosty breath. Matt and I briskly bustled about, making breakfast, while Faron dressed Suze and then started packing.
Breakfast was dried fruit, porridge, nuts, and leftover soup. We savored it as a feast. I knew from Faron's glowing silence that she still bathed with me in the wonder of our renewed connection. Matt and even Suze seemed also to be chewing in a reflective spirit, honoring the occasion.
Then there was time only to write our regards to the cabin and the mountains in the logbook, stuff our packs full once again and head off to our separate destinations. I accompanied Faron, with Suze on my shoulders, to the end of the top ridge where their descent would begin.
We stood there holding one another for many long, blissful moments in a gray, icy drizzle, saying good-bye, our wet cheeks pressed warmly together. With visibility no more than three feet, turning my family loose was like sending them off into the void. The final bliss of our parting now became painful. They vanished into the mists; and I trudged back to the cabin to begin my own descent on the other side of the mountain.
"Too romantic," Jan said with a sour expression. "Is this wishful thinking on your part, or just crass commercialism?"
All right, Charlie said to himself, I'll begin with the domestic scene at home then, as I intended all along.
Morning light drew our eyelids slowly open. I pulled Faron closer for one last kiss while we still had the chance.
"Nine weeks," she said in a forlorn whisper. "Nine weeks too long."
As soon as our lips touched, Suze awoke from her bed beside us, right on cue. There was no turning back.
Never had I been away from Faron for longer than a week, in our four years together. Now we would have to last at least four or five weeks at a stretch, until I could arrange a quick trip back home on a couple of days between shifts. The treeplanting camp would be a full day's drive away, in the next valley.
But when John Harris had called me, a job offer out of the blue, I'd told him I'd do it; because with a half-finished house and a three-year-old, we needed the money.
The house was a full forty feet long but only fourteen feet wide: like an overgrown trailer, it was, or a glorified railway shed - with the exposed hallway, serving as a temporary outer wall, showing not one but a row of doors to the back rooms.
We got up and dressed; then Faron made breakfast while I finished packing. It was all happening so fast. Over breakfast and a road map we tried to figure how many round-trips our budget could bear, with me putting the big, gas-guzzling Ford back on the road.
I wasn't too concerned about using some of the big bucks I'd be making, for the odd trip home. At a hundred and fifty a day . . .
Faron was more prudent: "But Will, remember all the other things we need that money for; those planting days have to cover us for the whole year."
"Yeah, you're right. Still - " Then it hit me.
"Hey, Faron - you know, we're going to be up near Ranbury in a couple of weeks. Look at it on the map: I'll be directly across the mountains from here."
"That will be nice."
"More than nice. Look. That's Mirror Pass, right up the valley from where I'll be planting. If there's a trail on the east side, I could hike over the pass on my days off and meet you on the Tibbet Creek side."
"That's true . . . I could drive up to the trail on this side - if the road's open - and pick you up. It would take a whole day each way, though, wouldn't it?"
"Hmm, yeah, I guess it would. Still, look at the map. It's so close . . ."
"But Will - be realistic. You're not going to feel like climbing a mountain on your day off, are you? After packing trees up and down the slopes all week?"
"I don't understand your hesitation, Faron. Is there some other reason you're opposed to the idea?"
I had no concrete reason for suspicion; and she glared at me for suggesting there might be one.
"Look, if I'm the one volunteering this ordeal, as you see it, in order to get together with you - won't you want to see me after weeks apart?"
"Of course," she snapped. "But . . . hey: how about this: you hike up your side, and I'll come up the trail from the west, and we'll meet at the pass. I've heard there's a cabin there, where we can stay the night. We'll have more time together that way."
"Wow, that's a great idea!" She had surprised me. Now I felt a little sheepish for misjudging her motives. She just wanted an equal share of the challenge.
Now it was sounding pretty good. I pictured our bed, not in the cabin but out under the millions of stars wheeling around amid the frosted peaks . . .
Suze had stopped stuffing pancake in her mouth long enough to attempt speech. The result was something of a strangled whimper, muted but nonetheless effective.
It brought me back to earth. I spoke for her before she choked: "Faron, what do we do about Suze?"
Faron looked at our daughter with loving eyes. "Oh, I'm sure she'd love to come, too."
Now suddenly it was sounding like too much. "I'm sure she would," I said, looking at our bright-eyed, nodding youngster, with her cheeks still bulging. "But how's she going to get there? It's what - a three-hour hike for an adult, in shape?"
"She could walk up part of the way . . ."
"And have you carry her the rest? Wouldn't it be easier to find someone she could stay with?"
"Oh, she'd rather come - wouldn't you, Suze?"
When Suze hesitated, perhaps trying to swallow first, Faron added, "We'll bring lots of food along; and your bluey quilt . . ."
"Yessee, yessee, I wanna come."
That settled that. And so our plan was hatched - at least in principle.
Saying good-bye was difficult - though less so for me than for Faron. I had the excitement of a trip and new experiences to look forward to. Faron would be at home with Suze and the big garden to look after; and as if that weren't enough, she'd also taken on the job of babysitting two other kids.
"Are you sure you can manage all that?" I'd wondered.
"Oh, no problem." And for Faron, it probably didn't seem like much. Backpacking around Europe at seventeen, running a printing press at nineteen, roaming the mountains for a week in her twentieth year, and having our child at twenty-one: these are all manageable-enough undertakings. With Faron it was a matter of style, pace, the set in her jaw and the gleam in her eye, the determined clomp of her heavy boots that she wouldn't have had time to remove before starting a whirlwind in the kitchen that produced in a morning's time a batch of bread, a couple of dozen quarts of canned fruit, and several steaming pies - with a cord of firewood split and stacked, between infrequent peeks in the oven. One or two burned pies, no big deal. It's the cost of accomplishment.
But now as we held each other one last time by the brown truck door, Faron cried for her coming loneliness. I smoothed the wet strands of hair to the sides of her cheeks, encircled her arching back to pull her closer, and took her mouth to mine.
Then I got into the truck, tried to smile for her, and rumbled down the driveway.
