Range of Light (24 page)

“A friend?” I leaned against the wall, suddenly aware of my backpack's weight.

“Yes.” Her patience was wearing thin. “We sent word through to the ranger. Several messages.”

“And the friend's name was?” I hesitated. The little room was hot, stuffy. I wiped sweat from my nose with the back of my hand.

“Kathleen, I think.” She looked puzzled. “Kathy? Is that you? Didn't you get the message?”

“I got the message.” I nodded, approaching the door. “Thanks.” I grinned foolishly.

“Well, your friend seems OK,” she called after me. “But I'd keep a watch on her. Don't let her overdo it. She promised to check back with us before she left the park tomorrow.”

“I'll make sure she does.”

Buoyantly, I walked toward Tuolumne Lodge Campground, looking forward to seeing Adele as I hadn't in years, maybe since our first summer in college. Certainly I hadn't looked forward to that painful twenty-fifth high school bash. I'd dreaded it for months. And I'd been terrified about this week's journey, had cursed Michael Bagley for dragging me to the reunion. But this afternoon, I was eager to find Adele, to see how she was, to know how she passed the night, to tell her of my own fears and the search.

Light wind swept low across the ground, stirring the grass. There was at least another hour of sunlight, but the squirrels and voles and quail scurried around as if the curtain was about to fall. These neatly ordered white canvas tents with their concrete floors weren't my idea of camping. Who cared? Inside one of the tent cabins, complete with potbellied stove, firewood, towels and metal cots, was Adele.

Number 46 was in the
back row,
by the woods. My breath came in short, nervous huffs as I rapped on the green wooden doorframe.

Adele appeared. Intact. Healthy. Tired. Wearing an oversized black T-shirt and borrowed pants that her long legs had translated into pedal pushers. Still freshly showered, she looked like a TV soap commercial.

I felt hot, filthy, a hobo intruder. Stinking of sweat and dust, my hair hung down in strings.

We exchanged cautious stares, two prodigal sisters taking the other in. We stood there, relieved, and in our reprieve, experiencing the true terror of the last two days. At the same time, we broke down crying.

She drew me inside the cool, dark tent. “Oh, Kath. I love you. I was so scared. I'm sorry. You must have been frantic.” She hugged me.

“All of the above.” I beamed at my friend. “Scared. Sorry. Frantic.” I was looking into a mirror, into the future, into a clear, bottomless lake.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Adele

Tuesday / Tuolumne Area

WE SLEPT VERY LATE
that
morning. The comforting beds with their springs, mattresses, pillows, clean, white sheets and blankets felt luxurious after the last night in the open and our week in the pup tent. When I woke, I immediately checked Kath's evenly breathing form. This was not a dream: we were both
safe
,
sound and back together. Shocked that my watch read 10:00, I raised it to my ear to make sure it was still ticking. My arm ached from this small movement.

I closed my eyes again. Of course Kath would be tired. She probably had a rougher time worrying than I did being lost. At least I knew I was safe. I wished we didn't have to leave the mountains. Belligerently, I wanted our whole week in the woods together, and we had been cheated out of a day. Still, the main reason for my coming to California was the conference. My brain began calculating our schedule, clicking ahead at professional pace: as soon as the mule team arrived with my backpack, we would be off. We could easily make it by 6:00 P.M., and I wasn't slotted to give my paper until 8:00. Damn, I hated to leave. Since our first day here, I had been counting the minutes left, like a death-row prisoner. This vacation had made me realize how much I missed Kath, how much I wanted her back in my life and, on balance, that understanding was a blessing.

Sun seeped through the white canvas, warming my back. I found myself reaching for the water bottle. I was so thirsty. Where had I put the damn thing? Better be still or I would wake Kath. I picked up her book and leafed through it quietly. She knew so much more about this place; I would never catch up.

“So are you planning to lie here for hours or are we going to see some country?” Kath sat up, pretending to be wide awake.

“Sleep well?” I asked.

“Fine. How about you, Annie Oakley?”

“Been waiting around for you to get your beauty sleep. In fact, I was bored about 6:00 A.M. and ran a couple of laps around the Meadows, then sneaked back in here.” I smirked, swinging rubbery legs over the side of the bed. “Oh.” I grabbed my lower back. “Guess my little vision quest has left some damage.”

“You have to take it easy after an experience like that.” Kath was frowning. “Sometimes I do think you live entirely in your head.”

“I'll be fine,” I declared, slowly pulling on my jeans. “But I could use a cup of strong coffee.”

“They have a pot brewing at the lodge all day. I'm sure breakfast is over, but we can find some packaged cookies. Or drive over to the grill for eggs and pancakes.”

“No, cookies are fine. I think reentry into the late twentieth century should be a gentle one. Gradual. Simple.”

I waited for Kath
at
a picnic table by Miller Cascade. The morning sun relaxed me, made me realize further how tired I was. The campground was almost deserted now; most people had long since gone off hiking. Only a few mothers and small children remained. And an assembly of birds scavenging what the humans had left behind.

I laid out my arms on the table before me, letting sun penetrate the skin, muscles, bones. I had always dreamed about having a study that faced north, warmed by indirect morning sun. Funny, the things you put on your list of necessities when you're young: northern light, view over the garden, a lemon tree. And the last item impossible in the Northeast. Lately I had been thinking a lot about fragrant lemon blossoms: about shining yellow globes, miniature suns; the sweetness of soft, thin Meyer lemon rind and the smooth, erect bubbles of moist flavor inside. Iced tea. Lemonade. You could eat a Meyer lemon on its own, it was that sweet.

My arms were thoroughly warmed now. My skin changed this week, not so much tanned as exploded in tiny freckles. I inspected a few scratches, mementos of my wilderness overnight. And a good bruise in the soft flesh just beneath the right elbow. The arms were fairly firm. Hands were growing lined. Still, my long piano fingers remained kind of distinctive. Maybe I had thirty to thirty-five years left if I were lucky and ate well. I was definitely over the halfway point according to anyone's demographics. It was hard to fathom, really. In academia, you were always alert about what you hadn't accomplished, who had published better or received more grants. Still, there was so far to go that I cultivated an image of youthful potential, of almost having arrived. Likewise, with my family, I was less aware of what I did have than conscious of what we didn't own, how much we would have to save for the boys' college, how many years we'd have to wait to remodel the kitchen. These concerns also reminded me that I was almost there, almost satisfied. And that, in turn, caused me to invent new needs.

Perhaps I feared satisfaction as a kind of death. Too busy perfecting the art of wanting, I had never acquired a talent for appreciation. This was a serious character flaw. Still, I
wanted
my next book discussed in
The New York Review of Books.
Still, I hoped to get a Guggenheim and spend a year researching in London. Still, I ached for the room with northern light. And the lemon tree.

Kath set down
the cardboard
box of coffees and cookies. Regarding my arms, splayed on the table, she inquired, “Little early for a séance?”

I laughed, then accepted a cup, inhaling the strong, dark aroma. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” She pulled a road map from her parka pocket.

My heart sank. Sucking on a cookie, Kath began plotting with as much energy as she could summon. “They expect the mule train down from Vogelsang within an hour. So we should have our pack by 11:30. If we take off then, we can be—”

“I was hoping we could take a short walk to Lyell Fork, at least.”

“Well, I guess.” Kath unfolded the map. “I guess if we could turn off 880 at Hayward and take the Dunbarton Bridge, we could still do Lyell Fork and get to Palo Alto by six.”

“Let's skip Palo Alto.” It just came out.

“But isn't your paper tonight?” Kath asked cautiously.

“Don't worry, I haven't gone bonkers.” I concentrated on not laughing, because I did feel giddy. “No conference is a fair trade for these mountains. I cheated us out of Sunday and Monday, so …”

“Adele, don't talk like that. I'm just grateful you're safe. I can come back here any time I want. It's only five hours from Oakland. I know how important that conference is to you. Don't make sacrifices for me.”

I sipped my coffee thinking about sacrifice. I was beginning to understand which were the sacrifices, to honestly weigh certain gains and losses. While it's true I'd never failed to show up for a paper in my life, missing this one wouldn't be a grave sin. I had paid my own airfare, and there were three other people on the panel, who would probably feel delighted to have a few more minutes to speak. And getting stuck in the mountains was an excuse anyone could understand.

Closing my eyes and stretching my head back, I felt grateful for the caffeine, for the brilliant August day, for my beloved friend. “Well, we can talk about why sacrifices should be made for you later. Meanwhile, I'm doing this for me. For us. That is”—I was abashed by my insensitivity—“Unless
you
have something you need to get right back to.”

Kath snickered and took another cookie. “Only the unemployment check.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then, I can spend the extra day. Well, let me see if we can stay one more night here and I'll explain to the chair that I had a minor accident. No, that would get back to Lou. I'll tell them we have car trouble.”

“Say it's the fan belt.” Kath laughed. “Fan belts are always breaking on this model.”

From a distance
the meadow
seemed a tranquil pool. But as we stepped into it and moved a dozen feet from the road, Kath and I were surrounded by life—by butterflies and dragonflies and salamanders, by the yawning creak of a branch about to crack and the soft, swirling blades of grass. She walked several paces ahead and I was happy to follow today. I thought about the two of us on the high school bus to the Asilomar Conference for Human Rights. Going down to the Monterey Peninsula to discuss poverty and racism and international politics with the visiting sages, William Sloan Coffin and Jay Rockefeller. All of us standing in that pretty Julia Morgan hall, holding hands, singing, “We Shall Overcome.” Kath and I taking long strolls on the cold, foggy beach early in the mornings before the panels started, talking about how we were going to change the world.

Kath turned around to check on me. I waved cheerfully. Since my solitary outdoor slumber party, I found my mind darting into these odd, ruminative states, and now I let it run on again … . If we were naive in those youthful days, we were also right. Problem was—the ground shifted; the horizon kept moving; personal responsibilities escalated. Deaths of friends and family created fissures in your willpower. The gods of social change were revealed as human, and we lost our beacons. As our bodies aged, we grew more weary. As we learned to compromise, we made material gains, and those incrementally accumulated comforts eroded social commitment. Perhaps the remaining question was how to honor that young idealism, in fact how to recover some of it, while understanding the people we had become in the meantime. What would the Adele on that bus home from Asilomar have thought of me now? Would she be appalled at the accommodations I'd made? Would she be amazed I lived this long?

My attention returned to Kath, in the present. The grass had disassembled into a thousand jigsaw shades of green and yellow at this hectic site of insect reproduction and commerce.

I pointed to a young fir, its ends tipped a fragile, almost chartreuse, shade of green. “Looks as if it's holding painted fingernails out to dry in the sun.”

“Nancy.”

We both said her name at once.

“Yes,” Kath declared. “We've got to call her tonight.”

“Oh, I feel so bad.”

“I think getting lost overnight at 10,000 feet is a good excuse.”

“I guess you're right,” I answered, unconvinced.

We ate lunch
near Parsons
Lodge, where rusty water had bubbled forth from Soda Springs for hundreds of years. As we stretched in the sun, Kath propped herself on an elbow and studied my face. “You know, you're really the same person.”

“What do you mean?” I looked at her crossly.

“You haven't changed.” She shrugged. “You're the same Adele I've always known.”

“I hate it when people say that to me.” I sat up and regarded her nervously. “I've worked so hard to change.”

She looked startled.

“To develop myself, to learn new things, to recover from my family”—my voice strained—“and after all this you tell me I haven't changed!”

“Well.” She shrugged helplessly.

I felt terrible. I knew she meant it as some kind of compliment. “Lou always tells me I'm an earnest little self-improver. But improvement isn't the point. Maybe all these years in therapy were just invested in keeping me alive, in developing strategies for surviving.”

“Maybe. Hey, lighten up.”

“In surviving without too much self-destructiveness,” I continued, as if she were my shrink, as if the point of this exchange were for me to achieve epiphany.

“And maybe when someone says you haven't changed, she just means she still recognizes a familiar light.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“I didn't mean it as criticism,” she tried.

“No, of course not.”

“How about going back to camp for a rest now?” Kath suggested.

“I'm fine,” I said, “really. Let's walk to Lyell Fork, instead.”

“Actually, I'm feeling kind of wiped out, myself.”

“Katherine Peterson!” I watched her face burn. “Don't patronize me. I know when I'm tired, when I've had enough.” I wasn't sure whether I was more afraid of being fragile like Mother or being the object of concern for people who were afraid I was as fragile as Mother.

“OK,” Kath said. “You win.”

As we hiked out to the fork, I thought how much I missed California seasons. I loved the warm days of January that opened cherry and almond blossoms. Although I resisted the chilly spring storms, there was something mystical about swimming outdoors at the local pool in the March rain—the warmth of the pool beneath you, steam rising to the sky. I savored the dry passage of May into summer, the cloud-covered July mornings, the hot, arid wrap of August and September and the lingering warmth of October afternoons. In leaving California, in crossing these graceful mountains east and going so far from the valleys and the cold Pacific whitecaps, I felt as if I had diminished my capacity to imagine.

This midafternoon,
Lyell Fork was
also pulsing green and yellow, the rich heat of the day rising from earth. We passed several anglers, and a marmot played peekaboo for fifty yards. Sun ripened the day.

“How about a swim?” I suggested. The water in most of the fork was too rapid, but here near the sheets of granite, the current was gentle, almost still. And the afternoon sun would have warmed it enough for swimming.

“Be serious!”

“No, really. Forget your Nordic formality; really, our underwear is more modest than a lot of bathing suits.”

Kath rolled her eyes. “It's one thing up at Vogelsang. But more people walk along Lyell Fork.”

“And we could dry off here on the rocks.” I patted a particularly smooth boulder.

“I don't think so.”

“Spoilsport.”

“No, I don't want to ruin your fun.” Kath considered me carefully. “Go ahead, I'll sit right here.”

“My lifeguard. No you don't. Come for a dip. What do you have to lose?”

“My clothes.” Kath laughed.