Life - Part Two
Chapter 5: Rendezvous Redux
From my first day of work I began to dream of the coming rendezvous. Packing fifty-pound treebags up and down the razed slopes and gnarly ravines, through logging slash and rockslides, fighting duff and sod and rock and flies, the body takes a beating and the mind seeks solace elsewhere. I filled the mindless dimension of the work with clear visions of Faron: her sparkling almond eyes, her sensuous full lips, her arousing body.
But the quality of my work suffered. Daydreams of the distant peaks turned to nightmares under my nose as I had to spend two days replanting whole sections of ground: digging up each of hundreds of seedlings and packing them back in the earth, firmer, straighter, deeper.
Somehow two weeks passed, and the hellish Cranbrook contract was finished. No one had made much money. A dozen planters had quit or been lamed. After days of blistering heat, it snowed the day we broke camp. I worried about my truck with no chains getting down the winding dirt roads, but made it with no trouble. A ragtag caravan of assorted vehicles carrying forty surviving planters and all our camp gear - kitchen and shower trailers, collapsible tent-shacks for drying clothes and for dining, all our treebags, tapered shovels, spiked boots, rainwear and so on - proceeded up the Columbia River valley to set up again for the more promising five-week Jumbo Creek contract.
I took the occasion of a supper stop in Invermere to phone Faron. Beyond the essential I-miss-you's and I-love-you's, she had some news to report. She'd taken an exploratory trip up the western route to the pass, accompanied by Karianne, a woman whose husband, David, was part of my crew. The idea was to make the hike a double-date. They took Karianne's small horse along in the back of the truck, as a means of carrying Suze and Karianne's two kids up the trail.
The Glacier Creek road was in such bad shape, Faron told me, that they had to stop and move rocks in several places along the way, from slides that half-covered the road. On the other side were steep dropoffs.
"I was terrified," Faron told me.
I asked her why they didn't turn around and go back home.
"Turn around! Are you kidding? That would have been worse, to try to back up far enough to find a wide spot for turning around. You know how it is for me to try to drive in reverse."
"Yeah, you're right. So what did you do?"
"Well, Karianne got out, with all the kids of course, and tried to guide me through. She seemed to think I had lots of room. But I couldn't see anything - except air on one side, and rock on the other. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely hang onto the steering wheel."
"I'm shaking," I told Faron, "just hearing about it."
"Me too," she confessed, taking an audible, deep breath. "Anyway, when we got to the trail we put the kids on the horse and started up. But that didn't work out very well. There were too many logs that the horse couldn't get over; we had to take the kids off while Karianne led the horse around the logs. We ended up just leaving the kids off and all walking up, hoping the trail would get better. But it didn't."
"What did you do then?"
"We kept going till we hit old snow, then decided we should turn around and go back. Maybe in another month the trail will be clear to the top."
Faron's sturdy five-foot-two frame would be have to be fit for the task of carrying Suze at least part of the way up, with the power supplied by her ambitious spirit. I promised to keep in touch as I found out more about the road and trail at my end.
The caravan turned west from Invermere into the mountains. Halfway along this last road we passed the plush Panorama Alpine Resort, and the pavement turned to dirt and gravel. This would be the closest outpost of civilization - if civilization is tennis courts, hot tubs, a telephone and a bar. The new campsite was located an hour's drive along Toby Creek, at the point where Jumbo Creek roared in.
At the confluence of the two major creeks, a flat clearing served as a base camp for a hunting guide, who had given advance permission for us to stay there. Of course, the very evening of our arrival, the guide showed up with his horses and clients; and so the brightly-colored tents that had just sprouted in his corral, like so many brightly-colored mushrooms, had to be moved to the woods. The hunters were after grizzly. Early the next morning they saddled up, with their rifles ready in their leather cases, and rode off in the direction of the pass.
The novelty and rugged beauty of the new setting helped stave off the inevitable pangs of separation I felt in being so far from my family, in distance measured by the highway. The mountains surrounding the new camp rose with spectacular grandeur into ice- and wind-carved peaks; and I was comforted by the knowledge that my home was situated directly to the west, on the far edge of forty kilometers of such mountains.
Beyond camp, the dirt road narrowed and stretched up the Jumbo Creek valley for twelve more kilometers. The planting blocks rose up the east slopes from the road. Jumbo Pass beckoned invisibly, tantalizingly from around the last mountain in sight.
As we traveled each day in the crew trucks that took us to work, I began to plan in earnest for the day I would drive my own truck to the end of the road, where the trail to the pass began. When I broached the idea to Harris, my towering, intimidating boss, he told me that the road was reportedly washed out somewhere past the last planting blocks. There was a possibility, he said, that it had been patched since.
"But if not," I was happy to hear him say, "you could take one of the boony bikes. I'll check out the situation one day when I'm up that way." He enjoyed bouncing around on the balloon-tired, all-terrain, motorized "trikes" and I was glad to have the big man's support for my little adventure.
Weeks went by. On the better ground here I became preoccupied with trees, time, and money. Never mind the dazzling vistas of glaciated peaks from the higher slopes. I could take in glimpses during lunch. On and on I pushed myself. Faster, faster, stride, stride - tree; stride, stride - tree: my shovel and I made a hybrid machine. Up and down the mountainsides, all day long in a race against time, I pounded in the seedlings, up to a thousand a day. At twenty cents a crack, I couldn't afford to think about Faron.
Back in camp at the end of a day, when my stomach was filled and the conversation became sparse and stale, my thoughts would return to her. As time wore on, past the third week, into the fourth week, and fifth, I ached with a visceral emptiness, that all the good camp food couldn't touch. I'd plod over to my plywood box, brush my teeth reflectively, and crawl into my bed of foam pads and sleeping bags, diverting my mind until dark with a good mystery or Stephen King horror. But it was the dimly-formed vision of Faron's face, the disembodied love behind her ever cheerful smile, that would haunt me into sleep.
Faron and I still had a plan, of sorts. We just had to wait until the end of the contract, it seemed, before Harris would give the crew more than one day off at a time. With constant pressure from the contracting company to keep production up, Harris wasn't about to let planters take extra days for fanciful honeymoons.
As that magical last day approached, I finally got some useful information from Harris. The road was indeed washed out beyond repair, he'd found, not far past the last blocks. The boony bike "might" make it, Harris told me, if the right place to cross were found. There were other complications, however.
In fact, the details, as the time approached, were maddening. I was too close, had waited too long, for our golden opportunity to fold because of some small hitch. To begin with, the actual days off at the end of contract were unknown until the last minute, due to an indeterminate number of remaining trees. There was some pressure on Harris to move right on to the next contract; so the days off might be needed for breaking camp, traveling, and setting up again.
Related to the problem of timing was the problem of access. The farther down the road I could get before starting to walk, the more time I'd have for the hike to the cabin. But even if I could wrangle a couple of days free, with the camp gone I'd no longer have the option of using a boony bike. That left me with my truck. But there were numerous minor washouts on the way, that we crossed daily in the crew trucks only with a good deal of scraping, bouncing, churning, and plain dumb luck. And these freshets were increasing in volume every day, I'd noticed, in the sweltering June sun.
I needed a backup plan. So after work one evening, with less than a week to go in the contract, I looked into mountain bike rentals from Panorama.
Summer was off-season at what was primarily a ski resort. I wandered through the deserted buildings until I found someone who could tell me about the bikes. They were available only on Sundays and Tuesdays, cost twenty-five dollars a day, and had no panniers. I took this information to the bar terrace and sat for half and hour over a watery draft, scribbling out a bewildering matrix of dates, distances, risks and benefits, pros and cons.
Getting nowhere, I phoned Faron. Her plans were complicated by trying to arrange days off from babysitting, and to find someone to come along on the hike. The basic idea was to have help carrying Suze. The so-called "double-date" idea had fallen through; David had decided he'd had enough of Harris's whip cracking, and had left this morning to drive home. Faron had guessed as much from talking to Karianne. Her best bet at this point was a mutual friend, Ron; but he hadn't made a final commitment as yet. I told Faron that a fellow planter named Matt had expressed interest in accompanying me.
"Oh?" she said. "What's he like?"
"Why do you want to know?"
Faron laughed. "Just kidding, silly."
"Well," I said, playing along, "he's tall, dark and handsome, and a helluva planter. He flails away at the slash and duff like some six-foot-five bear. Let's see, what else? He has black hair and a beard, and a strong-featured face - gentle yet with a certain thoughtful intensity. He's a theology student. And he's just broken up with his girlfriend Janet, who's - "
"Woman, you mean."
"Right. She's pretty attractive herself. She's been planting, and tenting, with him all season. But now it looks like that's finished. Matt says he's ready for a break, something more challenging than the usual days off hanging around camp or town."
Faron said, "It won't be quite the same as just us, up there together."
"It wouldn't be just us, anyway, with Suze there."
"That's true . . ."
"Anyway, it still makes sense for both of us to go with someone."
"I know. Ron was telling me that it's the grizzly capital of the world up there."
"Oh, great. Well, I hope he decides to come along. Bears or no bears, anything could happen."
"We'll be all right."
"Yeah, I think so." I was impressed as always with her level of confidence; in the case of this upcoming trip, I was infected by it.
By the end of the call, Faron's voice was shaky with emotion. "Will you call me again as soon as you find out more about your days off?"
"For sure. I can't wait!"
"Yeah, me too . . ." A long, palpable silence. "I guess we should hang up. We're spending all the money you're making."
"Yeah, isn't it terrrible? But it's worth it. Bye - I love you, Faron."
"I love you, too, Will."
The last full day of work, a Saturday, was a long one. The hope of finishing that day spurred everyone on. I was driven as well by anticipation of the coming rendezvous. Thus inspired, I started highballing, and in the process lost the line of planted trees I was supposed to be following. I said the hell with it and ended up planting a single line of trees on a beeline into nowhere. When the run of four hundred was done I tried to get my bearings, bushwhacked over ridges while calling out for some sign of humanity (watching out meanwhile for a rumored rogue moose) until I finally stumbled into a tree cache. Alex, my graybearded supervisor, calmly looked up from his cup of coffee and said (as I knew he would), in his best Texas drawl: "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?"
Despite the crew's collective best efforts, a few dozen boxes of trees still remained in the caches at the end of the day. That was just as well, because there was a large unplanted hole to fill between my errant line and the main block of planted trees.
Sunday was a short day with a partial crew. I chose not to work, but to rest and prepare for the hike, as Monday the camp would come down and be moved on toward Cranbrook, and Tuesday would be another full day off before the next contract began. Finally my opportunity had come.
I hopped in the crew truck with the radiophone and drove it down the road to the point where radio waves could find a hole in the wall of mountains. When I reached Faron our voices and breathful silences pulsed wondrously in the crackling airwaves. I discovered that our timing was perfect: she'd already arranged to be free on Monday and Tuesday, and today she was preparing for the trip.
I spent the rest of the day packing and helping out with the initial stages of breaking camp. I also finalized plans with Matt. He was an experienced mountaineer, whose judgment I was inclined to trust. When I'd tossed the various options around with him earlier, he'd felt that the mountain bikes would be a needless expense, a hassle to get, and difficult to ride with full-frame packs rigidly strapped to our backs. He thought, and I was willing to agree, that the big truck would probably do fine over the washouts. We would try to take the truck as far as the major washout, eight kilometers up the road. From there we could easily walk the last four kilometers to the trail. As for coming back, we figured that we'd have to aim for a return before four-thirty on Tuesday, so we could phone the forest company office for directions to the new camp location. Then it would be touch and go to make it to Invermere, because my truck only had a quarter-tank of gas.
When we said our good-byes and set out Monday morning, the washouts were definitely deeper. It felt as if we were fording rivers, in the lumbering, three-quarter-ton Ford. We barreled through fine on the first one, wide spray and all. But just out of the second one the big V-8 stalled. It seemed a bad sign, to start the trip like that - if indeed the trip could continue at all. I had to stop and wonder if maybe this romantic adventure just wasn't meant to be. Maybe I should take note of the obstacles placed in our path by a higher authority, and admit the foolhardiness of the plan. But then I thought of Faron, with her determination to push on with her end of the journey from the west, and I was inspired to find a way through - if not hell, then at least a little high water.
The truck wouldn't start again. Matt and I tried everything: gas pedal, air cleaner, choke, spark plugs, waiting . . . Finally I thought of priming the carburetor with a little gasoline poured down its throat. But I didn't have a spare gas can. Nor did I have a hose long enough to reach the low level of fuel in the tank.
But we had passed a crew truck parked on the side of the road, not far back. There was a small crew working again that morning to fill in that infamous hole I'd unwittingly, but now fortunately, created. The question remained whether the crew truck's gas tank was full enough to tap with the short length of hose I had.
The hose reached gas. I got on my knees and sucked until a horrid rush of gasoline came spurting into my mouth; I couldn't help swallowing some of it. Somehow I was able to repeat the odious rite until enough gas had dribbled through to fill a small bottle.
The priming worked; the truck started. We managed to drive on through several more minor washouts to the eight kilometer mark. There, sure enough, we were stopped by a raging river cutting completely through the road. On the other side was an old shed lying on its side, a victim of some previous spring flood.
It was time to get out and walk. Or swim. I hesitated, weighing what to do with the truck key. Leave it in so someone else could drive, in case something happened to us? Or so someone could steal it? Who? As a compromise I left the doors unlocked and pocketed the key. My hypothetical thief might hotwire the starter, I reasoned, but without the key the steering wheel would still be locked. Then I turned back to the roaring torrent before us.
A slender poplar had been good enough to fall neatly across the creek. So Matt and I stripped off our boots and pants, heaved them across the creek, put our backpacks on, and waded across, using the poplar as a handy bannister to brace ourselves against the frigid current. Then we dressed and walked on in high spirits down the last stretch of road, vast mountains towering up on both sides of the narrow valley.
Where the trail was supposed to start, there was an old cutblock, partially logged, with a few old skid roads crisscrossing it and disappearing into the remaining growth of trees at the edges. I pulled out the dogeared map that I'd drawn with directions from the Forestry office in Invermere, to get our proper bearings. The map proved not to match exactly with the actual layout of skid roads on the site. In fact, after three-quarters of an hour of fruitless trial and error, we gave up and decided to follow our noses uphill in the general direction of the pass, which we could see from the clearing.
The dense alder was wet from an overnight rain, but offered plenty of handholds. Matt and I put on our raingear and managed the ascent without much difficulty, in a couple of hours of climbing, jumping creeks, crossing boulder fields and snowslides. Then we had to pick our way along a precipitous rockface, and at last we stood beneath the final, broad, steep approach to the pass itself.
Our destination hovered before us like some distant dream coming true, which it was. In its summer color, its profusion of alpine flowers and moss and sparkling rivulets, its mantle of shifting cloud and patches of ice and snow, it was stunningly, grandly beautiful.
Regrettably, I had to admire this view with the foul taste of gasoline burping up in my mouth. We headed up. Near the top was the toughest going of the trip so far, with a slick bank of compact mud and shale above the flowers. We crawled like snails along that final bank, our boots balanced at the tips of the toes on the slimmest of notches kicked into the hard surface, our fingers grasping at ephemeral stone chips that went skittering away at our touch.
Then we were there, in the snowy pass, with the cabin nestled some two hundred meters away beside a half-frozen pond, as in some old-fashioned Christmas card . . .
"Do you have to have all those details?" Jan wanted to know when she read the first draft.
"Yes," Charlie maintained, with the defensive posture of the first-drafter. "It's part of the point: how it could have gone any number of ways. We were lucky it happened at all."
"Lucky to have a story," she countered. "I didn't feel very lucky at the time."
"But look: it could have turned out a lot worse."
"You're right. It certainly could have. You would have had a real tragedy to write about, instead of the story of a hike. I would have been the heroine, I guess."
"I don't know. You didn't have to go off into the fog like that."
"Let's not get into it again, okay?"
"All right. But it could have been just as tragic on my side, too, you know."
"I doubt it. What could have happened?"
Matt and I stood not five minutes down the mud-and-shale bank just below the pass, looking at the ground. The bearshit steamed in the cold morning mist, just at the point where the flowers began.
Our progress had come to a chilly halt at the fresh sign. Our eyes swept the landscape, near and far. No bears. I wondered what this grizz had eaten, and how recently. It likely owned this mountain ridge, sniffing and browsing every inch of it, in time.
Which would be worse? was my paranoid query as I followed Matt's lead, creeping down the slope. For a bear to kill Faron and Suze, leaving me without them? Or for the bear to snap me in half like so much dry spaghetti - leaving them to grieve? Maybe, I dared to hope, our love so fresh and strong would keep the bear away . .
But no. The sound was just below us. In the boulder slide, large rocks knocking together - with upwards of a thousand pounds of grizzly tipping the balance. We saw the animal at the same time as it turned its head up to us; it snorted with a loud HWMFF.
Sweat broke out on my neck. Matt gaped up at me with an instantaneous look of fright. It was the first time I'd seen anything but experienced confidence in him. He was experienced, all right; and something about that bear's behavior . . . but then Matt's eyes softened with what I perceived as the gentle acceptance of the saint.
The bear charged. It leaped up the hill, practically flying with its enormous bulk over the boulders and onto the adjoining mud-and-shale slide. Matt was closest. He knew, I say, about bears. He instantly fell to the ground, clutching his head in his curled arms and squeezing his knees up against his vulnerable belly.
Ursus horribilis pounced on him in an instant, growling and whoofing, cuffing him back and forth with its huge paws. The stiletto-like claws tore Matt's vest to ribbons. The escaping down floated around them both like a cloud of angels (I thought as I stood watching, paralyzed, transfixed) - or fairies, or mosquitoes . . .
This flurry seemed to amuse, then to infuriate the bear. It first sat back on its haunches, waiting for the feather storm to subside (and while doing so, stealing a quick look at me, frozen up the bank twenty human paces away). Then with the quickness of a cat, or a rattlesnake, the bear's muzzle clamped shut on Matt's neck. The severed jugular spouted all over the cursed place; Matt's poor waste of a body was left to flop about like a beached fish.
The bear stepped back until the death throes were complete; then it nosed forward to lap up a taste of the blood. Faint from the shock of what I had just witnessed, and what I feared was in store for me, I lay on the ground still immobilized, knowing there was nothing I could do. No more choices, no more plans. Nothing more to worry about going wrong, on this so-called adventure. No more rendezvous with Faron and Suze, nor Harris and the gang, nor anyone but Dr. D.
Then the beast, already bored with its lifeless prey, turned its glittering eyes and red mouth my way.
"Too gory," Sharon said. "I'd leave that part out."
She had no problem with the humdrum details of the trip, or with the love scene. "I guess it's just the thought of that happening to you." She got up and stood beside me, stroking my shoulders. "I like your concept of different things happening at the top. Or maybe different points of view. How about what it was like for Suze?"
I decided to keep the bear scene, but treat it as a dream. Then, having recovered from the nightmare, I could get into the actual - or maybe another hypothetical - descent through the child's eyes.
I awoke with a start, my throat constricted with a strangled cry from deep within the darkness. It was just getting light in the room.
All right, I thought to myself. It's all right; the day hasn't even begun yet.
Faron may have been still asleep, but I hugged her so tightly she woke up, turned to face me and smiled. Then I leaned out of bed to peek at Suze. She lay neatly tucked in her bed, peaceful as an angel . . . her rosebud mouth relaxed, her eyelashes so delicate as they lightly lay on her downy, cream-colored cheeks. Then quite suddenly her eyes opened, and blinked several times.
"I have a bad dream."
"Oh," I said. I'm sorry to hear that. Do you want to tell me about it?"
"No-ey. Was too scary. Will, we are gonna go home, today?"
"Yes. Except, Suze, you know what?"
"What?"
"You and Faron are going down one side of the mountain, and Matt and I are going down the other."
"Oh, but . . . then I want to go treepranting wif you."
"That would be nice, Suze, but you can't. I need to make lots of money so we can buy things we need, like food for you, and gas for the truck."
"Oh . . ."
"Besides, you'll be with Faron."
"Yeah," she said, with a strange little darkness crossing her brow. "But Will, Faron might miss you, too."
"Yes, I said. "And I'll miss Faron, and you too."
Then we had breakfast to fix, and backpacks to stuff; jobs to return to. Before I knew it our little vacation had come to an end, and I was following Faron and poor little Suze out the cabin door . . .
* * *
The night was long and wild. The wind carried me along in the clouds. There were deer dancing in the stars, that I couldn't see. They peeked their heads down through the clouds to say hello, then went back to their dancing.
Bears were everywhere, looking for food, but also hiding behind corners, rocks, low clumps of trees. I thought this was where, in the wintertime, Santa Claus lived.
When it got light in the morning the deer rode away on the stars and the bears all disappeared and I woke up. Faron and Will woke up, too. And Matt. They got me dressed and we ate porridge and soup and nuts. Soup for breakfast! Leftovers, goo-guk. They let me have figs to eat when we started to walk down the mountain. I was cold. There was snow on the ground. I was wearing my purple snowsuit but it was raining in the sky and my snowsuit got all wet. My face was wet like tears all over it - but I didn't cry.
Faron carried me a long, long way. She said we were walking in the clouds. Just like an airplane, or geese. But an airplane doesn't walk, silly. That's what I told her. Just people. And geese do, too. But in the clouds, they fly, she said.
I flapped my arms. We flew down the mountain. I was cold and wanted to go to sleep in the black truck. Faron was tired and wanted me to walk. I was too tired. I cried when she put me down. We rested and ate some nuts, that I held in my hand. But I dropped some, my fingers were so cold.
The bears could eat them, I thought.
Do bears eat people?
Faron said not usually. I wanted to go back up on her shoulders.
We finally got to the black truck. I woke up when Faron strapped me in my kid-seat. I looked out the window and the bears and the deer were saying good-bye. But I didn't wave. I didn't want them to see my eyes.
Then we drove away, down the bumpy road. Va, va; ya, ya, ya. I was hungry again, but Faron said I would have to wait. I started to complain, and Faron said stop complaining, she had to drive; but I was so hungry, and still cold, and I started to cry. Then we were going so slow, I thought we would stop and she would feed me.
Faron said she was just trying to be careful; I had to wait. I stopped crying and said blow my nose, Faron.
Just wait, she said, mad at me. I don't know why she got so mad at me. Then -
Then the truck fell over. And over, and over and over, down the hill we fell off the road, down the hill and the truck was flying, like an airplane but upside down, and it was quiet like in the clouds.
Then we bumped down so hard! And the roof was all crunched in, and I could crying see that Faron's head was broken and I screamed -
"God," Sharon complained. "I don't like that version either. Couldn't you just make it into a nice romance?"
