Chapter 14
Steve and Jon took turns breaking trail through the new powder. Russ, red-faced and sweaty, took up the rear, Dave regularly giving his son a thumbs-up, shouting, “You got this, Russ! You’re doing awesome.”
Zach was grateful for Russ, because otherwise he’d be the slowest. Jon and the guide made the climb seem simple, the gap between them and the rest of the group ever wider as they tore through the untracked snow like paper.
Dave gave up on encouraging Russ in favor of trying to keep up with Jon and Steve.
Shane and Bram chatted some twenty feet ahead of Zach with little apparent interest in exerting themselves the way the other men were.
“It’s at least two feet, don’t you think?” Bram said. “And getting deeper as we climb!”
“Can’t pay for luck like this,” Shane replied affably.
“Right, right. Look, I don’t want to make this weird? But I’ve gotta tell you something, Shane. About Ginny.”
Zach, who had been focused on staring down at his own skis, lost in wondering who had first come up with the idea of attaching the stiff, angled hair of synthetic skins to the bottom of skis to prevent downhill sliding, shook himself out of his reverie to eavesdrop in earnest.
Shane’s smile vanished. He glanced downhill at Zach, then, seemingly reassured by the boy’s distance, by the way Zach immediately looked out at the view as if it had all his attention, asked, “What about her?”
“When I texted her yesterday, she told me about your—relationship. I would never’ve asked her up here if I’d known.”
This was a lie, wasn’t it? Because before going downhill to text Ginny, Bram had said something about Ginny liking Shane, how Shane would want to keep that crush secret from Arlo. And Bram had wanted her to come on the trip because of all that, not in spite of it.
“What’d she say exactly?” Shane’s voice was neutral, but his shoulders rose, tense.
“She texted she wasn’t coming because of your…
past. Said it ended badly, and recently.
What worries me, why I’m bringing it to you, is if she’s telling me, who else is she talking to?
I’m her boss. She knows how highly I think of you, that we’re friends, and she still told me.
In writing no less. You know she and Pike dated?
I told her that was unprofessional as hell.
I was gonna fire her. She said it wouldn’t happen again, that it was over.
But she still pursued you. I’m not sure, maybe it’s better I keep her close, keep an eye on her for you, if she’s acting that way.
Bit crazy and vindictive, I mean. Because if it got back to your wife?
I just—I hate being the messenger here. But I respect you too much not to bring this to you directly, and privately. ”
Shane turned to face Bram. “I appreciate that, man, you know how it goes. And yeah, absolutely, probably best you keep an eye on her, though I wouldn’t worry much—” He cut himself off, seeing how close Zach had gotten behind them, and Zach felt heat come to his face over the way he’d unconsciously drawn closer to hear better.
“Hey kiddo,” Bram called out with feigned sunniness, “wait here for your buddy Russ, huh? Make sure he’s doing okay?”
Zach stayed put, resentful over the way it hurt that Bram easily said Russ’s name given how long it had been since he’d uttered Zach’s. The drip-drip-drip of the unsaid felt like a kind of water torture slowly drilling an emptiness through him.
Shane and Bram skied all the way past the tree line before they paused and spoke animatedly, this time well out of earshot.
Shane threw his arms out. Bram shook his head as if it were heavy.
Yet the initial seriousness faded quickly into nodding agreement, and by the time Russ caught up to Zach with a “This sucks, bro,” Shane was chucking Bram affectionately on an arm, both men smiling.
With Russ at his heels now, Zach continued uphill, reassured that things were all right, that his dad had managed the strange weave of these adult relationships in a way that pleased both him and Shane.
Zach snuck a glance downhill at the fallen pine marking the spot where if they were to veer into the woods, continue straight for less than ten minutes, they would come to the abandoned miner’s cabin.
He quickly looked away, as if any attention might alert the others that something secret, something sacrosanct, hid there.
Seven people ahead and behind, not including him. Seven more people passing by the cabin unknowing. He felt the place tug at him.
There was much less snow the day Zach and his mother had discovered the small, squat cabin, but when Grace lifted the door’s wooden latch, pushed it open, they had still had to step down from the snowpack into the cabin’s single room.
The sunlight spilling in from the doorway illuminated a list of names on the wall opposite; some carved, some written in marker.
The earliest were dated 1881, presumably the four men who had erected the memorial to the fallen Swede after finding him “past rescue.” Above the list an etched admonition:
Keep This Ground
From Further Mortal Greed and Peril
Including the 1881 visitors, there were twelve names on the list. Some had returned, adding a new date for each trip.
In large block letters between “Jim Gerbaz 1956, 1968, 1972” and “P. Popish 1981, 1985” someone had carved “DON’T TELL OR ELSE.
” Drawn next to this warning in the same black marker used to write “M. Cerise, 1998,” was a cartoon ghost, its word bubble reading, “OoooOOOooh!”
“Kidding on the square,” his mother said.
“Huh?”
“It’s when you pretend you’re joking, but really mean it. You’d have to be thinking about a ghost to draw one, you know?”
He understood. Kidding on the square, like when he and his mother and Bonnie would say, “Let’s stay up here forever.”
The cabin’s wood plank floor was intact, though Zach felt some softness under his feet here and there. Despite the creak of the potbelly stove’s hinges, his mother easily opened its door. She assessed the stove’s tidy interior, its flue.
“Probably still usable. Incredible! Someone, maybe a couple of someones, did a lot of work here, keeping this up. Look at the walls! They filled in all those gaps. Hardly even feel the wind.”
The narrow bed lay half collapsed, its mattress askew to reveal the remains of the strapping that had once held it up.
The ticking of the lumpy mattress had largely been spirited away by mice.
There was only one window in the place, its glass whole.
A chair listed in a corner with a pair of boots underneath it, leather a crackle of dry rot.
On a small table next to the stove, a fork and knife rested in a tin cup with a rusted-through bottom that had left a misshapen blotch of burnt orange on the wood top.
Although the cabin’s single room, about ten feet by ten feet, was remarkably dustless, it nevertheless exhaled a smell unique to things untouched and old, the fused scent of rotting fabric, crisp metal, rodent activity, and turned mushrooms.
As though they were archaeologists investigating a dig, Zach and his mother circled inside, then around the building’s perimeter, noting repairs by later visitors.
Corrugated sheeting patchworked the roof’s exterior—clearly a more modern addition.
The spaces between the outside logs had been filled with a muddy-looking mortar.
Inside, part of a floorboard had been cut and replaced, shiny Phillips-head screws securing it.
Bits of faded beans, peaches, and corn printed on wood—old fruit and vegetable crates, they agreed—had been used to patch chinks along the doorframe, brown streaks of rust dripping dry from the nails that secured these makeshift fixes to the walls.
Yes, these were probably older repairs than the metal of the roof, the screws in the floor.
It all gave the cabin a potency, a magic, as if it had slipped through a crack in time.
Such a contrast to the mortal, fall-down remnants of the mining days on Independence Pass, where cabins visible from the road were chewed nearly to oblivion by the elements and the souvenir taking of those passing through, or else had been restored into new things altogether.
Mysteries seeped from the miner’s cabin walls to fill Zach and his mother with a kind of reverence. A sense of responsibility.
They took turns scratching their names with the small folding knife from Zach’s survival kit, the fresh cut of “Zach + Grace, 2021” looking oddly at home on the wall.
They counted it out and realized they were the thirteenth set of visitors, an inauspicious number that made them exchange nervous glances.
Each promised the other to obey the cabin’s orders not to tell, to keep it theirs, this new membership in a secret order.
Who would want to tempt fate by taking a memento?
Who wanted to risk disturbing a ghost? Such an action, such blasphemy, might cling to them the way the cabin’s smell had after they left it.
This feeling was redoubled by the discovery of the mine just downhill from the cabin in the clearing by the cliffs. Zach and Grace paid their silent respects to whatever parts of himself the miner might have left behind at the bottom of that pit.
Climbing up toward Mariah’s peak behind the men, Zach wondered if he’d ever understand why the world folded over some things, some lives, while inexplicably preserving others.
Halfway up the wide ridge that made up the edge of Mariah Bowl, the group stopped for a break. Tiny ice crystals spun in the wind, set alight by sunbeams. Everyone breathed deep, drank water, and took in the view.
Zach oriented himself among the layers of mountains that sawtoothed the horizon, his internal map pinpointing the angles of things, the knowns and unknowns.
Above and ahead loomed Mount Mariah. The ridge they stood on ringed its bowl in a gentle ruffle.
The only break in the snow was the rocky outcropping at the top that marked the mountain’s summit.
The untouched white of Mariah Bowl’s skirt funneled below.
Groups of pines appeared about halfway down, clustered in designs like those made by water flowing through sand, each grove spaced and shaped by old avalanches.
As though he was exhaling a prayer, Dave whispered, “Gorgeous.”
“Perfect,” Jon agreed.
Bram pointed toward town. “See all the jets circling? Everyone trying to land for a powder day.”
“Too many people can fly private these days,” Shane said. He lifted his chin toward Mariah Bowl with a smile. “But we’ve got something they don’t.”
A muffled blast. Another. The group flinched as one. Ski patrol was bombing at the resort.
Back in second grade, Zach’s friend Alex had told him that the bombs made to safely trigger avalanches looked like soup cans with a string out of one end.
Alex said the ski patrol duct-taped one of these bomb cans to a cafeteria tray, held on to the end of the detonator string, slid the tray down the mountain like a tiny sled, string whip-whip-whipping out until it hit its maximum distance and then—BOOM! —an explosion that caused an avalanche.
Zach didn’t know if any of this was accurate—in fact, he was sure it couldn’t be, because wouldn’t cafeteria trays veer off course into trees or rocky ledges?
—but he didn’t care. He liked thinking of Alex’s soup can taped to a bright red lunch tray rushing bravely down the steepest, most dangerous parts of the mountain.
Liked imagining the little can’s hidden power, the ka-boom!
of can and string and plastic, the fragments exploding ever outward, fracturing snow until woosh, down came the avalanche, tearing away all the loose and dangerous layers to leave behind safe terrain.
If there was any other idea that so indulged Zach’s need for the thrill of explosive destruction and his conflicting desire to heroically protect, he’d yet to find it.
But standing at the foot of the powder-laden Mariah Bowl, the faraway hawumph of the controlled explosions had a gnawing insidiousness.
Pike asked aloud what they were all thinking. “Do you think it’s safe? If ski patrol’s bombing, I mean.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.” Bram turned to Steve. “Right?”
The guide shrugged and opened his mouth to speak, but Jon preempted him. “It’s a totally different area. You never know if they have a wind slab, say, which doesn’t look like it has here. And conditions can vary peak to peak. We won’t know until we summit.”
“Right,” Bram said seriously. “That’s right. But it looks great so far, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Shane huffed.
“We’ll get to the top and assess,” Steve said, causing them all to tip their eyes toward the summit.
At the sight of the untouched purity of those slopes, Zach felt something blaze in his chest. A deep-rooted longing to make a mark. To mar that beauty. To cut through that whiteness, look back, and be able to say, “That was me, I did that.”
“Who’s gonna get first tracks?” Shane asked, as if he, too, was thinking of the satisfaction of being first, that plunge of possession.
“Everyone gets first tracks today,” Bram said. “Plenty to go around.”
A pained flicker crossed each face. Because the point was first. The point was the joy of ruin. Ownership of something unownable.
Zach returned his water to his backpack, sliding it below the specialized airbag pocket.
Even with the greed he felt at picturing the snow sliced open behind him, his airbag folded and tucked there, ready for deployment in an avalanche emergency, unsettled him.
He pushed the airbag from his mind as though dwelling on it might summon disaster.
Shouldering his pack, Zach realized they were stopped right about where the figure had vanished the night before.
From this spot it was easy to see the hut below them; its windows unnatural and obvious.
Yes, anyone hiking here in the dark would have seen firelight. Which meant it couldn’t have been a lost person. Just an animal, its tracks covered by wind and snowfall. Nothing intelligent or cruel, which would have known to seek out their shelter.
The sunshine further blotted out any dark ideas, the mountains radiant with a sublime eternity. In Zach’s head his mother sang, “Oh what a beautiful morning!” the way she always did in the outdoors, off-key, beaming, eyes bright at being free, free, free. “Oh what a beautiful day…”
Ascending, he hummed along with her. His father always complained she didn’t smile enough, wasn’t cheerful enough.
But she was nearly always smiling. Almost always cheerful. Up here.