by Nowick Gray
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, my body
took a beating and my mind sought 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 that hellish first 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 valley to set up again for the more promising five-week Grand Creek contract.
I took the occasion of a supper stop in Inverness 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 our old Dodge half-ton truck, as a means of carrying Suze and Karianne's two kids up the trail.
The Tumbler 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 creek 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." She could only reach the pedals in a normal driving position with the help of two pillows propped behind her back. "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."
It basically didn't work out very well, for all that. There were too many logs that the horse couldn't get over; and even after continuing on foot, they were turned back by old unmelted snow on the upper reaches of the trail.
So Faron's sturdy five-foot-two frame would have to be fit for the task of carrying Suze at least part of the way up. She still sounded determined to make a go of it. I promised to keep in touch as I found out more about the road and trail at my end.
The caravan turned west from Inverness into the mountains. Halfway along this last road we passed the plush Columbiana 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 Grizzly Creek, at the point where Grand Creek roars 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 Mirror Pass.
Beyond camp, the dirt road narrowed and stretched up the Grand Creek valley for twelve more kilometers. The planting blocks rose up the east slopes from the road. Mirror 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.
More 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 look at them 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 begin to fill. I'd plod over to my plywood box (the Ford's homemade camper/canopy), 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, because until then Harris was unwilling to give the crew more than one day off at a time. That magical date was impossible to pin down, meanwhile, because of inconsistent daily planting totals and a mysteriously indeterminate number of remaining seedlings.
Related to the problem of timing was the problem of access. The road was indeed washed out beyond repair, Harris had found, not far past the last cutblocks. The boony bike "might" make it, he told me, if the right place to cross were found. There were other complications, however.
Pressure was mounting on Harris to finish this contract and move to the next one. That meant the off-days coming up would be needed to break and move the camp. I could probably wrangle out of that obligation; but the boony bikes would have to go with the camp. That left me with my truck. 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. 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 the Columbiana resort.
Go to the next phase of work, or