by Nowick Gray
Matt
and I were shortly hotfooting it down the east slope, leaving most of the foul
weather behind. I felt, with some smug yet curious comfort, the truck keys in
my pocket as we headed down. And with each step onto rock, mud, ice or heather,
I was careful to aim for a stable footing, aware that one false step and a twisted
ankle could leave me stranded. Yet my leaps and bounds all managed to fall into
place; and it took only an hour for us to reach the bottom.
Once on the road, we had another hour's walk to the truck, during which I began to recall in more detail the succession of nightmares, and so nursed with more and more regret, second thoughts about my headstrong decision to let Faron and Suze go unguided down the western slope. I told Matt about the soul-wrenching dreams (omitting the one about him and Faron starting something between them).
Matt said, "Well, I guess it's out of our hands now, buddy."
"Is that meant to console me?"
Matt didn't answer.
"Do you think we should have let them go like that?" I wondered as I asked this how my hiking partner would take the implication of joint responsibility. He took it without flinching.
"I had my doubts, but I did go along with it. Now that I hear those nightmares of yours, though, I must admit--I'm not so sure any more."
"But how much do they matter? Do you believe in prophecies? Those unhappy endings can't all happen."
"That's a point. Maybe they were just warnings of what could happen."
"Yeah, no matter what we do. Damned if we let them go, damned if we stay up there."
"I see what you mean about that," Matt said. "At some point you just have to do the best you can."
Having given ourselves this measure of philosophical assurance, we went on to marvel at the psychic potency of the night's electrical storm; and then our conversation turned to lofty theories about the world ecumenical movement.
Matt felt that a person born to a given tradition was really in the same position as a person coming to it from the outside: it was up to that person to embrace a particular faith with the full power of individual choice. Without such devotion, their creed would be an empty shell. I agreed, with the additional observation that all the world's religions seemed, in their esoteric teachings, to advance similar values, moral codes, and revelations of cosmic unity.
Amidst such speculations we paused to greet a Stellar's jay, who perched beside us on a snag that leaned out over a precipitous drop to the gorge below. Matt said it was a good omen.
The truck, we knew, was parked just around the next bend in the road, across the last washout. But the runoff had swollen to a considerably greater depth and force after the overnight rain. This, according to my cosmology, was a bad omen. We chose to cross with the aid of a rope sling which we set up to ferry our packs across.
With dry clothes waiting in the truck, we decided to keep our boots and pants on as we waded into the waist-deep, icy current. Luckily our poplar bannister was still there for us to hang onto as we fought the turbulence on the way across.
We came to the truck with final sighs of relief, briskly changed and jumped in the cab. But around the next bend in the road, Matt was moved to wonder if we'd taken a wrong turn. Because there was a major washout where the previous day, harmless inches of water had trickled over the road. It was nearly as wide and deep as the one we'd just waded through. Could we have somehow bypassed the real road? No, the truth remained: this was brand-new (except that it had a certain grim familiarity for me), created overnight by the combined deluge of the storm and the melting snows. Logs that had formed a foundation for the roadbed were strewn about in the water, among the large rocks downstream, like so many pick-up sticks.
We got out of the truck, gaping at the extent of the destruction. The creek that roared in front of us was a good ten feet across and two feet deep, and full of boulders in such irregular array that, except for the old logs, and the road which plunged abruptly into the torrent on either side, one would never know that a road had ever crossed there.
There was little chance of making it across; that much was clear to both of us. We paced back and forth along the rocky bank, our minds racing from one unreasonable solution to another.
We could go for the crossing, Matt suggested anyway--hoping for freakish luck to bounce us from boulder to boulder and over to the other side. If we didn't make it, well . . . the truck could sit there in the creek until we got a tow truck up here.
But it would be a thirty-kilometer walk to Columbiana, I pointed out, and it was already mid-afternoon. If we phoned from there for a tow truck, it might not make it past the other swollen washouts farther along the road; it would, however, coming all the way from Inverness, be sure to cost plenty--maybe close to the value of my stranded truck.
"Hey," Matt said, backing off a little, "it's your truck. Whatever you want to do."
Back in the box, was I? Unfortunately, no. The choice was staring me in the face. In whatever box this was, I rebelled by sitting down crosslegged on the slanting hallway floor: on strike. Maybe, I thought petulantly, all the doors were locked now, anyway. But I won't give them the satisfaction. Let them wait, now, and see what happens. Not that they, the stupid doors care . . .
As if reading my challenge, one of the doors immediately responded, or seemed to--opening just a crack, letting light in. It immediately hit me: go for it.
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