Heroes of the Frontier

XXIII

THEY HAD ONE APPLE, a bag of unpeeled carrots, a bottle of orange Gatorade, a bag of crackers, half a pack of Starburst candy and a bottle of water, two-thirds full. The kids were wearing jeans and T-shirts. The temperature was in the sixties. Josie felt good about their chances to make it to the lake and back to town in time for lunch.

“Paul,” she said, knowing she was about to delight him, “can you make a copy of that map?” His eyes took on the spark of duty as she handed him a pen and, from her wallet, the back of a grocery store receipt. His rendering was clear enough, and included most of the information on the sign’s map, which is to say not a great deal. There was a long winding trail, and an oval lake, and next to it a tiny rectangle, which Josie assumed was some kind of picnic area, maybe a shelter of some kind. It looked less like a modern Forest Service map and more like the sort of thing an illiterate bandit would have drawn while drunk on hard cider.

But when they got to the trail Josie saw that it was wide and well marked, and for all she knew there were souvenirs and snack shops along the way. They began. They walked into a copse of birches spaced in an orderly fashion, the light on the forest floor dappled and the air cool. Ahead they saw a yellow stripe, the size of a hand, on the trunk of a tree, and Josie laughed, knowing this trail would be easy; someone had marked it every hundred yards. They looked at Paul’s map and it told them nothing new. The lake was up ahead — still seeming no more than an hour’s walk.

“A bridge,” Paul said, and pointed to where a log, halved lengthwise, had been laid across a tiny ravine leading to the river. Covering a narrow creek of shallow water moving slowly, the bridge was rudimentary and slick with moss, but Paul and Ana insisted on walking across it without her help. It was only a few feet down, so even if they fell in they couldn’t possibly be hurt. Josie allowed them to cross, and then they wanted to do it again, so they went back and did it again.

They walked along the river for a time, an hour or more, the heat of the day peaking, Paul and Ana starting to wilt and then the path turned inward and toward the hills, and they walked in shadow. Ahead, the path seemed to run directly into a boulder the size of an ancient barn. They followed the path all the way to the boulder, which up close looked more like a granite wall. They looked left and right and saw no yellow markers.

“I think we’re supposed to go through it,” Paul said. He seemed utterly serious, until a tiny smirk overtook the left side of his mouth.

“Look. Yellow,” Ana said.

Josie and Paul turned to see that Ana had found a tiny yellow stripe on a tree high on the hill overlooking the river. There was a narrow thread of trail leading up to and around the boulder, and they took it, all three of them, Josie and Paul and Ana, having the distinct sense that without Ana they would not have seen what now seemed like an obvious path upward and over. In half an hour they climbed the path, using tree roots for footing, until they’d reached the top and they could see a clearing ahead.

“Might be the lake,” Paul said.

Josie looked at her watch. It was just after noon. If they were indeed at the lake, even if they made it there, turned around and walked quickly, they’d be back in town by two. They reached the top of the ridge, but there was no lake, only remnants of, or the origins of, a shallow stream pooling. Around them was a wide meadow dotted with wildflowers of violet and yellow.

“Is that the lake?” Ana asked.

“It’s not the lake,” Paul said, then turned to Josie. “Is it?”

“No,” Josie said.

This was the kind of setting, tucked into the curve of a mountain, where she expected to find it, and now they had walked so far and climbed over the ridge, and found something else, some swampy stream — it was a cruel thing.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s think.” And she contemplated the time, and their place on this trail, halfway up a mountain far larger than she’d imagined. It had taken them hours to get this far. There was time to go farther, reach the lake and turn back, she thought, though she had the tangible sensation she was making the wrong decision. She was afraid to look at Paul, for fear his eyes would judge her.

Ana pointed to the sky. “Look, Mom,” she said. A great dark cloud had come from behind the mountain. The moment they saw it, they heard thunder. It was a loud clearing of the throat that filled the valley, an introduction to calamity.

“Is that coming toward us?” Paul asked.

“Will there be lightning?” Ana asked.

The thunder came again, this time louder. Josie looked up to find that the cloud had moved closer, casting half the mountainside in grim shadow. And they were standing near the shallow stream.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. Realizing they were standing by a stream, she tried to remember the workings of lightning and water. Was the water a conductor or a deterrent? There seemed to be no good choices around her. Lightning was coming. Likely rain, too. If they stayed out in the open, they would get soaked.

“Should we go there?” Ana asked, pointing to a forest ahead. It seemed to be about an eighth of a mile across the upward-sloping meadow, a distance not daunting, but then again all distances so far had been warped. Everything that had seemed within reach was in fact twice as far and took three times as long.

“The lightning goes after the trees, right?” Paul asked.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. How could she not know? Stay away from water or go toward water? Into the trees or away from the trees?

Then again, they hadn’t seen lightning yet, so she held out hope that they could make it to the forest before the real storm came, if it came at all. The forest seemed the safest option. They could rest there, stay dry.

“Let’s run,” Josie said.

Paul and Ana’s eyes spoke of their exhaustion, but this was quickly replaced by the spark of a necessary task.

“We’re going to run to that bunch of trees, okay?” Josie said.

They nodded. Ana positioned herself in a sprinter’s start.

“Ready?” Josie asked. “Let’s go.”

They took off, away from the water and across the flowered meadow, not caring what colors they crushed underfoot.

“Yes!” Ana roared behind her.

Josie turned and saw Ana’s tiny feet fly over rocks and bramble, her big orange head leaping like a candle carried by a rabbit. She watched Paul’s face, set with purpose. The trees were only a few hundred yards away now. They would make it. When they were near the first great pines, Josie felt silly, having made this more dramatic than it needed to be. After all, they were simply outside, running in a developing storm. She didn’t want her children to be afraid of the rain, or the thunder, or lightning, even if, given their altitude, the storm might be coming from a perilously close distance. Before the forest there was an array of small jagged boulders, and among them Josie stopped, allowing Paul and Ana to pass her, smiling as she watched them fly by her, pumping their arms, both of them grinning wildly.

“Good, good!” Josie roared, almost jubilant.

A screaming crack ripped open the sky above. The world went white and Josie’s back seized as if whipped. In front of her, Paul and Ana were frozen in the white light for a few long seconds, photographed in mid-stride. She had the momentary thought that they had been struck, that this was what it was to be struck by lightning, that her children were being eliminated from the world. But the light turned off, the world returned to color, and her children continued moving, continued living, and the flash was followed by a thunderclap so loud she stopped and threw herself to the ground.

“Get down!” she yelled to Paul and Ana. “And come here.”

Paul and Ana crawled to her, and she draped herself over the two of them. They stayed low for a minute as the sky growled and panted, as if impatiently looking for Josie and her children.

“I’m scared,” Ana said. “Will the lightning hit us?”

“No,” Paul said firmly. “Not while we’re low like this. Make yourself small,” he said, and Ana shrunk, holding her knees with her arms.

“Good,” he said.

“Okay. We’re going to run again,” Josie said. “Just to the trees.” She looked up, seeing they were no more than a hundred yards away from the next forest.

“Ready?” she asked.

Paul and Ana nodded, ready to push off and run. Josie paused a moment longer than she had planned, and she had no reason why. For a fleeting moment she looked into the forest, and ran her eyes up the length of the tallest tree, wondering briefly if it was true that the lightning would strike the tallest object in any field.

“Are we going?” Paul asked.

And then the world tore open. A sickening light filled the forest and a blue-white bolt split the tree, the one she’d just been contemplating, a quick ax driven down its spine.

“Shit,” Josie said.

“Mom, will it get us now?” Ana asked.

Josie said no, it wouldn’t get them. That last strike was the closest the lightning would come, she told them, though she had no reason to believe this was true. If anything, the lightning was getting closer each time. It seemed to be acting with intent.

They waited, watching the charred remains of the split tree smolder, a narrow plume of grey smoke spreading upward. The thunder roared again, sounding like a tank moving across the roof of the sky. Josie ran all available options through her mind. They could stay where they were, but they’d get soaked. The rain would come soon, she was sure, and the sun would set, and the dark would be absolute. They would be wet and cold and unable to find their way back. They had to continue, now. She could see the trail winding up the next mile or so, interrupted by small stands of trees. They would have to sprint between them between lightning strikes.

“We’re going to that next forest,” she told her children. “It’s just a few hundred yards.” But the path there was wide open, unprotected, and while they ran across the expanse they would be easy targets for whatever malevolent force was patrolling their progress.

“No, Mama,” Ana said. “No, please.”

Paul explained that the lightning had just struck the trees, so why would they go where the lightning had just struck?

“It won’t strike there again,” she said, not believing herself. “And it’s going to rain soon, okay? We have to move.” She had some irrational hope that there was something, some human structure, even a discarded tent, at the lake. “One, two, three,” she said, and they ran again, their shoulders hunched, their heads fearing reprisal from above.

The first raindrops fell on their sprinting forms as they found the shelter of the trees. They passed the tree that had been struck, smelling its charred wood, the scent strangely clean, and continued until the forest thickened, dark with low boughs. Josie stopped and Paul and Ana gathered around her, and the three of them, out of breath, sat down against the wide trunk of an ancient pine.

“Can’t we just stay here?” Ana asked, and Josie thought it very possible they could stay there, at least for a spell, in hopes the storm might pass. As she was contemplating this, though, the rain came heavier and a gust of cold wind shot through the trees. The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees, and the rain drenched them in seconds. She looked down at Ana, who was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Her eyes were wide and her teeth began chattering. No, Josie thought. No. Only one option. She took off her own shirt. “Let me put this on you,” she told Ana, and Ana gave her a horrified look.

“Put it on,” Josie said firmly.

Ana threw the shirt over her head and it draped awkwardly over her torso and rested across her knees.

“You’re going in just that?” Paul asked, nodding toward Josie’s white bra, a utilitarian style with a tiny fringe of lace.

“I’m fine,” Josie said, mistaking his statement for one of concern. He was embarrassed for her, she realized. He didn’t want his mother running across a mountain trail in a bra.

“Let me see that map,” Josie said, asking Paul for the hand-drawn rendering he’d made when they’d begun. Josie wasn’t sure what she expected to find on it, but she had begun to think their forward push was ill-advised. They were heading further into the storm, into territory they knew nothing about, but if they turned back, no matter how long it took or how wet and cold they got, they could be sure to find the town. Paul hesitated for a moment, then a grave look overtook his face. He pulled the paper from his pocket, unfolded it and hovered over it, protecting it from the rain.

Above, two jets collided. There could be no other explanation. Josie had never heard thunder so loud. The raindrops grew still bigger. Her children, already soaked, somehow grew wetter, colder. Josie estimated the temperature was in the high fifties and would drop ten degrees in the next hour.

Now she looked at the map, and though it was as rudimentary as the one he’d copied it from, showing only a meandering trail leading to an oval lake, there was that tidy rectangle next to the oval. It had to be some kind of structure, she thought. Even an outhouse would be life-saving.

“You’re sure about this?” she asked, pointing to his drawing.

“What?” Paul said. “That? It was on the original map.”

“Okay,” she said. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said.

She knew her son would have taken the task of map-drawing with the utmost seriousness, and now, if he was right, the box on the hand-drawn map might save them. It was far closer than going back to the trailhead — miles closer. It was just around a wide bend in the trail.

“You guys rested?” she asked.

Neither child answered.

“We have to run again,” she said. “We have to run until we get to the lake and the shelter. Do you understand? We’ll go in stages. We’ll run from point to point and we’ll rest when you need to rest. Okay?”

Above, a planet popped like a balloon.

“Can you guys be brave?” Josie asked.

Paul and Ana did not hesitate. They nodded vigorously, wanting to be brave, knowing there was no choice but to be brave, that there was nothing greater than being brave. Josie knew, then, that better than searching for a person of courage — she’d been on this search for years, dear god — better and possibly easier than searching for such people in the extant world was to create them. She didn’t need to find humans of integrity and courage. She needed to make them.

A private smile had overtaken Ana’s face.

“What?” Josie asked.

“I can’t say it,” Ana said.

“Say it. Doesn’t matter.”

“It’s a bad word I think,” Ana said.

“It’s okay.”

“Shitstorm,” Ana said, and Paul laughed, his ice-priest eyes smiling, lit from within.

“It is a shitstorm,” Josie said. “This is a shitstorm. Are you ready to run through this shitstorm?”

They grinned and took off again. They ran through the stand of trees and when the trees ended and the trail was exposed for another hundred yards, they saw another yellow marker and scrambled to it. The rocks on the path were wet now, and Ana slipped on one, and went down, gashing her leg against the scree. Lightning lit the world in slashing blue light but Josie didn’t pause. She picked up Ana in mid-stride and carried her chest to chest until they reached the next small forest.

By the time she was able to put Ana down, Josie’s back had shifted. Something was very wrong. She couldn’t breathe. She set Ana down and lay on her side, trying to find a workable way to bring air into her body. A slipped disc. A punctured lung. Broken rib. Anything was possible.

“What happened?” Paul asked.

Josie couldn’t speak. She raised a finger to ask for time. Now both children were staring at her, Ana with her mother’s wet shirt draped over her like a smock. Josie looked up into the treetops, the black fir silhouettes against the sky, angry and grey like an ocean storm.

Josie slowly regained her breath and when she was able to sit up again, she found that Paul had torn a strip from the bottom of her shirt, the shirt now worn by Ana, and had used the strip to tie Ana’s leg with a makeshift bandage. It looked like something you’d find on a WWI battlefield, but Ana was caressing it, humbled by its grandeur. An oval of blood emerged from within and Ana’s eyes widened.

Josie looked up the trail and thought she could see, just beyond one more stripe of trees and over a low ridge, the clearing where the lake and shelter might be. She stood, very much afraid she might not have the strength, or that the act of standing would make whatever had happened to her far worse. Though she was wrecked, and now noticed that her legs were bleeding in a dozen places, she could breathe and was reasonably sure she could run again.

“She can’t run,” Paul said, indicating Ana.

“Is that true?” Josie asked her. Ana’s eyes welled up and her chin quivered. Josie looked down to see that Ana couldn’t put weight on her right foot. Josie examined the leg up and down and felt no fracture, but when she put the lightest pressure on the bandage Ana wailed. “You twisted it. Nothing broken,” Josie said, and now Ana’s eyes flooded. “Okay. Wrap yourself around me,” Josie told her, “like a monkey.”

Ana threw her arms around her, burying her tiny shoulder in Josie’s neck. When Josie stood again, now carrying forty extra pounds, her back roared in protest.

“Ready, Paul?” she said.

“Just to the next trees?” he asked.

Ahead lay a few hundred yards of dirt and scree cutting across open valley, utterly vulnerable.

“Exactly,” she said. “You run and I’ll be right behind you. Don’t stop until you get there.”

“Now?” Paul asked.

“Now,” Josie said.

They ran, and Josie ran with one arm draped around Ana’s bottom, her other arm feeling her way forward, ready to break their fall. She expected to fall. She’d never run carrying Ana like this, on a wet path strewn with loose rocks like this, with pain like this. Every step sent a sharp stab of steely light through Josie’s spine and down her leg. Ana’s weight was exacerbating whatever it was Josie had done to her back, but she couldn’t slow down on the open ground. She had to catch up with Paul, who was suddenly moving with effortless speed and agility. Josie watched him leap and land, thrilling in his agility and courage.

As if to punish her for her moment of pride, the sky ripped open, end to end. Paul fell to the ground, and Josie dropped to her knee. No earthquake, no tornado could be that loud. Josie had lived almost four decades and had never heard a storm like this, had never known a sky this punitive.

They rose and ran again and made it to the next forest. Josie followed Paul to a spot against a dead pine trunk. They sat side by side like soldiers in a foxhole, heaving. Ana was still attached to Josie’s torso, her matted head in Josie’s neck.

“You cold?” Paul asked her, nodding at Josie’s bra, her mottled skin.

“I’m fine,” Josie said. She was soaked with cold rain, and the cold wind was cutting through her as they rested, but she had felt warm while running. The pain, though, overwhelmed her senses.

“We’re beating this,” Josie said. “You see that, right?”

Paul nodded, serious in his acknowledgment, as if his mother was confirming something he’d begun to suspect and had hoped was true. They were moving, fully inhabiting the beautiful machinery of their physical selves, and they were outwitting the unthinking brute power of the storm.

“We just have to get around that bend, I think,” Josie said, pointing ahead. Paul took out his map, and pointed to a wide arc his pen-drawn path made just before it reached the lake.

“I think we’re close,” he said.

A different kind of thunder overtook the air. It was as loud as the sky-cracking they’d heard before but this was coming from up the trail. It was more gradual, a growing roar, sounding like rocks, a thousand rocks moving together.

Josie stood and looked up the bend of the trail. She saw nothing. Then a wave of dust came from behind a bulge in the cliffside. She had never heard or seen an avalanche but she knew this was an avalanche, not a thousand feet ahead. After the strangely orderly roar of it ended, the valley was quiet, as if resting after its exertion. Josie had no idea what to do. To retreat was impossible for all the reasons she’d arrived at earlier — the kids would suffer, it was too cold, they’d be soaked and frozen. But to go toward the avalanche?

“Was it, Mom?” Paul asked.

“What?” Josie asked.

Paul gave Josie a wide-eyed look, indicating that he didn’t want to say the word “avalanche” in front of Ana.

“I think so,” Josie said.

In a rush, the rain seemed to double in volume. Each drop was heavy, distinct. Josie knew they had to move. She made a plan to make their way to the blind bend of the trail and at least peer around the corner, to see what had happened, if there was still a path to follow. Again she picked up Ana, whose grip around her neck was somehow tighter than before, painful but necessary, and she set off. She led this time, with Paul just behind.

Far before the bend, they could see the evidence of the avalanche. A rough grey diagonal of rocks and scree obliterated the trail and had settled onto the valley floor hundreds of feet below. Josie looked up to the cliff face, looking for some clue about its intentions. Beyond the fallen rocks she could see the path as it continued to what seemed like a clearing. Somehow she and Paul and Ana would have to climb over the fallen rock for fifty yards or so and join the trail again, all the while facing the possibility that the rock would move again, that their traversing it would send it all downhill.

Some impulse in her told her to do this quickly, to avoid rumination. “Let’s go,” she said. Her back wailed again, but she crawled up on the settled rocks, finding it almost impossible to gain traction. She raised a foot, put her body’s weight over it, and immediately her foot slipped, and she went down. Ana flew off and onto the dusty stones. Josie’s hands braced her fall but her forehead had struck a high-standing stone. The pain was quick and severe but Josie knew the injury was not great.

“You okay?” Paul asked. He had appeared next to Josie and Ana, and given his light weight, he was able to move quickly atop the scree without sinking into it.

Ana nodded and Josie said she was fine.

“There’s some blood on your face,” Paul said to Josie. “Not that much.”

Josie had no hands free to wipe it. And she knew that to make it across Ana would have to crawl on her own.

“Follow Paul,” she said, and Ana made no protest.

Favoring her unbandaged leg, Ana moved nimbly over the mass of loose rock, and Josie did her best to follow. She tried to make herself lighter, more agile.

“Wait!” she yelled. The children were far ahead of her, finding this too easy.

Josie was crawling, slipping, her limbs dropping through the surface as they would through newly fallen snow.

An idea occurred to her and she acted on it, knowing she had no choice but to try anything. She turned onto her back and pushed herself with her feet, like a mechanic under a car. The scree scraped her back, her exposed neck and the back of her head, but it worked. Her hands and legs had been concentrating too much weight on the loose rock and causing her to fall through it. But her back, acting like a snowshoe, was spreading her weight, and she moved this way across the expanse of fallen rock, as her children watched and eventually encouraged her.

“Almost there,” Paul said.

“Almost there,” Ana repeated.

Josie had a strong sense that this image would stay with them, the picture of their mother backstroking across an avalanche in the middle of an Alaskan electrical storm. Josie snorted, and she laughed a loud laugh as the rain fell heavily upon her.

When she was across, her children were waiting, Ana standing on one leg, holding her brother’s shoulder for support. Paul’s legs were raw and bleeding, his hands white with torn skin and the dust of the stones he’d crawled across. Ana’s legs and hands were similarly aggrieved, and at some point she’d acquired a cut on her temple, a finger-sized red slash. Above, the thunder cracked again, as loud as any thunder had ever been since the birth of creation, and Josie laughed out loud again. “It never ends, right?” she said. “One thing after another.” Ana and Paul smiled but seemed unsure exactly what their mother was talking about, and Josie was happy that the subtext of her statement had been lost on them.

“Okay, ready?” she asked. She turned, expecting nothing, but now, on the other side of the avalanche she could see it, the bright blue lake, no bigger than a swimming pool. Josie laughed again. “Oh god,” she said, “look at it. It’s so small. All this way for that!”

“But it’s so blue,” Paul said. “And look.”

Josie had been searching for the shelter the map had promised but Paul had found it first. It was more than a shelter. It was a sturdy cabin made of logs and bricks, the straight line of its chimney standing like a beacon. On its door there was the same sagging trio of balloons they’d seen on the trailhead sign.

Josie didn’t need to tell her children what to do. They had already begun running, Ana somehow strong again, and Paul sprinting ahead, knowing his sister would be fine, and Josie walked behind them, her shoulders shuddering with cold and a kind of tearless weeping.

When she made it to the cabin she saw the sign over the porch. “Welcome Stromberg Family Reunion,” it said. She opened the door to find Paul and Ana, soaked by rain and streaked in blood, standing amid what seemed to be a surprise party. There were balloons, streamers, a table overflowing with juices and sodas, chips, fruit and a glorious chocolate cake under a plastic canopy. All around the cabin were framed photos from every era, most in black and white, all neatly labeled. The Strombergs through time. Josie could only assume that some intrepid member of the family had been to this cabin days ago, had set all this up for the family reunion, and then, for whatever reason, fire or unrelated tragedies, had canceled it all, leaving the cabin and all its bounty to another, smaller, family: Josie, Paul and Ana, so tired.

“Who are the Strombergs?” Paul asked.

“Today we are the Strombergs,” Josie said.

There was enough firewood for three winters, and there was plenty of water, so Josie started a fire, and they took off their clothes and cleaned themselves and sat naked under a vast wool blanket as their filthy clothes dried before the fire. They ate and drank whatever they wanted in no particular order, and were soon sated and though their muscles ached and wounds roared for attention, they would not sleep for many hours. Every part of their being was awake. Their minds were screaming in triumph, their arms and legs wanted more challenge, more conquest, more glory.

“That was good, right?” Paul said.

He didn’t wait for an answer. He stared into the fire, his face aglow and seeming far younger than it was — perhaps reborn. His ice-priest eyes had found a new and untroubled happiness. He knew it was good.

Josie found herself smiling, knowing they had done what they could with what they had, and they had found joy and purpose in every footstep. They had made hysterical music and they had faced formidable obstacles in this world and had laughed and had triumphed and had bled freely but were now naked together and warm, and the fire before them would not die. Josie looked at the bright flaming faces of her children and knew this was exactly who and where they were supposed to be.