Rendezvous: a hypertext adventure

by Nowick Gray

The last full day of work, a Saturday, was a long one. The hope of finishing that day spurred everyone on. I started highballing, and in the process lost the line of planted trees I was supposed to be following. The hell with it, I said to myself--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, a mother separated from her calf) 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 now there was a large unplanted hole to fill between my errant line and the main section of planted trees.

Sunday was an optional short day with a partial crew. I chose not to work, but to rest and prepare for the hike. Monday the camp would come down and be moved; and Tuesday, Harris announced, would be a full day off before the next contract began.

I hopped in the crew truck with the radiophone and drove it down the road to the one 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. 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. Harris didn't have a definite location for the new camp yet, so we'd have to phone the forest company office from Columbiana in order to know where to go that night. Then it would be touch and go to make it to Inverness, because my truck only had a quarter-tank of gas, and Harris couldn't spare any from his marginal supplies.

Monday morning the washouts were definitely deeper. We barreled through fine on the first one, wide spray and all. But just out of the second one the Ford's engine 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 once more if maybe this romantic adventure just wasn't meant to be. If perhaps all these minor obstacles had been placed in our path by a higher authority. Couldn't I take a hint? Then I thought of Faron, pushing on with her end of the journey from the west, and I was determined to find a way through to join her as we'd planned.

But the truck wouldn't start again. Matt and I tried everything: gas pedal, air cleaner, choke, spark plugs, and just 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 Ford's tank.

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, still trying to fill in that infamous hole I'd unwittingly, but now fortunately, created. Maybe someone was looking after us after all; maybe I hadn't picked a theology student for nothing. The question remained, however, whether the crew truck's gas tank was full enough to tap with the short length of hose I had.

I got on my knees and sucked until a 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, more carefully, 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 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 but pocketed the key.

A slender poplar had been good enough to fall neatly across the torrent of runoff. 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 Inverness, to get our proper bearings. The map proved not to match exactly 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 it 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, until 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. Mirror Pass, 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, was stunningly beautiful. Regrettably, I had to admire this grand view with the foul taste of gasoline burping up in my mouth.

Near the top was the toughest going of the trip, up 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 Christmas-card cabin nestled some two hundred meters away beside a half-frozen pond.

Next...