The Middle of Somewhere(37)

CHAPTER TWELVE





The day after the hailstorm, the Root brothers made camp first, as Liz had secretly hoped. She spied them setting up their tarp fifty yards off the trail at the edge of a broad meadow and pointed them out to Dante with her pole. Giddy with relief, she put her finger to her lips and tiptoed down the trail in an exaggerated fashion, lifting her knees high like a cartoon burglar. Dante squeezed his lips together to stop from laughing out loud, and followed her into the woods where the trail wound toward Bear Creek.

The bank of the river was lined with clusters of slender quaking aspen with silver-green bark and pale, shimmering leaves mimicking the movement of the water. Away from the river, red fir and lodgepole pine stood next to mountain hemlock, a graceful tree with a nodding top, resembling the peak of a wizard’s hat.

Liz and Dante emerged from the forest onto an exposed rocky slope. There, and upon the windswept ridges above, were giant Sierra junipers, the largest sixty feet tall with trunks five feet wide. They were colossal beasts, with thick branches straining out of their trunks and covered in shaggy reddish brown bark. Liz noticed a cinnamon scent as she approached one towering over the trail. She stopped to pet it and leaned closer to inhale more deeply its rich scent.

“It reminds me of Chewbacca,” she told Dante. “If we had the space and a couple hundred years, I’d want to grow one of these.”

They chose a campsite next to Bear Creek, halfway between the creek and the trail, where a row of pines gave way to a granite shelf extending to the water. The creek was a dozen feet wide, cascading down the narrow ravine in a series of steps, with deep pools in between. The sun had fallen low in the sky, and the rocks surrounding the campsite struggled to hold on to the heat of the day.

As they made camp, ate dinner and cleaned up, they talked about what they’d seen that day and what tomorrow’s hike might bring. Liz sensed Dante was waiting for an opportunity to turn the conversation to Gabriel again; there were pauses into which he might drive that wedge. She squeezed the gaps shut with easier words, and he went along with it.

Later, they sat side by side on an anvil-shaped boulder, facing the river and the setting sun. He took her hand, and she kissed him to stop him from talking. She pulled back and saw in his eyes the pity she had known had been lurking there all day. As before, she neither wanted it nor felt she deserved it.

At the edge of her vision, something moved. She turned to see a doe on the opposite bank, staring at them, tail twitching. Trailing a distance behind were two fawns with faded spots on their tawny coats.

She nudged Dante and slowly lifted her hand to point at the deer. The doe glanced over her shoulder at her fawns. One ran toward her, and the other gave chase. Every few steps, one would skip, kicking out its front foot like a dressage horse. She thought if they weren’t deer, they’d be giggling.

Dante whispered, “The definition of a child: one who runs for no reason.”

The fawns had caught up to their mother, who bent to nibble among the grasses. They copied her, but soon raised their heads and skipped away again.

Liz and Dante watched until the deer became vague shadows.

“Animal Planet programming is over for the evening,” she said, getting up. “Bedtime.”

He stood and encircled her in his arms. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

From then until she fell asleep in the dark rectangle of the tent, Dante beside her, she forgot about Gabriel, and the many things that made her doubt she could love at all. And in the middle of the night, as the nearly full moon made the river run silver, she dreamt she was a deer, and the dewdrops upon her slender hooves were diamonds.

? ? ?

All the next day they hiked through a wonderland. Lakes with crenellated shores and jetties of smooth, gray rock jutting into indigo pools, their surfaces a perfect reflective plane, broken intermittently by a ring left behind by a feeding trout. Stunted, ancient pines with white bark and dark green branches seemed arranged to balance the varied expanses of stone: honed sheets the size of playing fields, undulating granite waves, chunks of rock of every size. The mountains were everywhere today, appearing around corners, hiding behind one another, standing over the lakes as if they owned them. And above it all was the sky, painted the deepest blue. Liz and Dante tried different words for it, but nothing did it justice. They settled for That Color.

She finally felt they were not on a hike now, but in it. Her feet understood the trail without studying it, each footfall landing in a sensible place without conscious attention. She could tell from the rhythm of Dante’s steps the same was true for him. When she climbed a steep pitch, the work in her legs was a feeling of strength, not pain. When she drank water she had taken from a stream, she realized it was the only drink she ever needed. Until now, her pack had been a very large albatross worn on the back instead of the front. Now she had made friends with it. Dante called his “my sleeping child,” which touched her and made her profoundly sad.