"I know you guys are planning something," Zach said as he caught Mom and Dad exchanging poorly-hidden grins over dinner that evening. He took another bite of his oven-baked chicken. "You keep smiling at each other. What's going on?"
"Want to tell him?" Dad asked Mom. "It was your idea."
Mom cleared her mouth with a drink of water and turned to Zach. "What is the farthest you can remember ever being from Seattle?"
He thought back. "Bellevue? I think Grandfather took me there once to meet some guys from China. How far is that?"
"China? That's a long way," Mom teased.
"I mean Bellevue," he corrected her, rolling his eyes.
"Only a few miles," Dad said. "On the other side of Lake Washington."
Mom cocked her head to one side. "So you can't remember ever being out of the city?"
"No," Zach replied, scooping up some baked beans with his spoon.
"Well," she said, that sly grin returning, "we're taking you on a trip."
He sat up straight, forgetting his food. "Out of Seattle?"
"To Portland," she told him. "We're taking you to meet your real grandparents—your dad's parents."
Zach was speechless. All the way to Portland—all the way to Oregon, another state! In his mind, he might as well have been going all the way to Mexico or South America.
His eyes must have gone as wide as they felt, because Dad laughed and Mom grinned. "Is that okay?" she asked.
"Yeah, Mom!" he replied enthusiastically. "When do we leave?"
"Tomorrow morning," she said. "And then we'll stay there a couple of days and let you get to know them."
"Awesome," Zach said quietly, shaking his head in disbelief.
"We have a little stop we have to make on the way, though," Dad added.
"Where?" Zach asked.
Mom shook a finger at him as she chewed another bite of her food. "You'll have to wait and see."
It was hard to wait. He wanted to leave right away, but Mom and Dad insisted that they all get a good night's sleep first. In the morning, Mom roused him early with a gentle, "Wake up, Fish." Their supplies having been packed the previous night, they said goodbye to Paws—Marissa's older sister Jasmine, who could drive, would stop by to feed him—and hit the road. They headed out of Seattle on the freeway, Mom passing breakfast to Zach in the back seat. His library books were tucked inside his backpack beside him, but he wasn't interested in reading just yet. He had never seen the places they were passing—Seatac, where he spotted massive planes stationed at the international airport, then Federal Way, then Tacoma. He tried to take in everything at once—buildings, traffic, people—not wanting to miss any of it.
When they had passed through Tacoma, Dad took an exit onto another freeway that soon led to a smaller highway that, in turn, brought them into the countryside. Zach gaped in awe as the last neighborhoods disappeared behind them and they entered a wonderland full of nothing but farms. Vast, unbelievably open spaces stretched between the houses and barns. A tractor plowed dirt. Crops grew in rows in the fields. Zach spotted cows, horses, goats, and even a llama.
Mom turned and watched him; Dad, too, eyed him through the rear-view mirror. "Ever seen farms before, pal?" Dad inquired.
Speechless, Zach shook his head.
Dad and Mom began pointing out interesting things—a corn field, hay bales, a cow pasture, a dairy… They drove on past more fields and farms, then through a patch of forest to a large lake. Whatever scenery they passed, Zach couldn't pull his eyes away from it.
They drove on, and civilization faded into hills that grew larger until the flat areas between them disappeared altogether. After a long drive through endless forest, Dad slowed the car and stopped at a booth where a woman in a brown uniform stepped out to greet them. "Just staying for the day," Dad told her. He handed her some money and received a few papers in return.
He passed one of the papers back to Zach. It was a brochure entitled, "Mount Rainier National Park."
"Is this where we are, Dad?" Zach asked, astonished.
"Remember how your dad said we had to make a little stop on the way to Portland?" Mom replied, grinning.
The little stop was Mount Rainier, the massive volcano? Dad drove on, and the road began to climb steeply, winding back and forth along the sides of hills as they ascended into the Cascades Mountains.
They came around a sharp bend, and a view opened up in front of them. "Mom, look!" Zach exclaimed. It was suddenly there—Mount Rainier, more massive than he had ever imagined, so huge it seemed to fill the entire sky. It looked different from this side—from the south, he figured, since the morning sun was shining from their right, in the east. The mountain seemed somehow shorter and far, far larger at the same time. They must have been very close to the bottom of the mountain, it loomed so near.
Dad drove a few more miles until they reached a parking lot. They stepped outside into cool air; Mom immediately fetched Zach's jacket for him.
"It's okay, Mom, I'm not cold," he assured her.
"You will be in a minute," she responded. "We're five thousand feet up in the mountains. Up here, winter is just ending."
Winter? He looked around. Snow still lay on the ground in patches. Between the white places, small bushes had put out new leaves and bright green grass had sprouted. Evergreen trees not nearly as tall as the ones they had passed in the forest grew out of both snowy and green spaces.
"Let's go, Zach!" Dad called, already striding away along a sidewalk that accompanied the main road further uphill. He had put his own jacket on and swung a backpack over his shoulder. Zach grabbed his hat and hurried alongside Mom to catch up with him.
The sidewalk took them to a large visitor center. Dad went inside to ask about hiking conditions, but Zach remained outside with Mom, staring in every direction at once. "Pretty impressive, huh, kiddo?" Mom asked.
It was the most amazing place he had ever seen, even more than the Space Needle or the zoo. "Mom, there's so much…outside here!" he said in a low voice. "You can see for miles!" He turned slowly in a complete circle, surveying the terrain both near and far. Close to the visitor center were three other buildings—a little spot of civilization dwarfed by a vast wilderness. He had read about places like this, but had scarcely been able to imagine them until now.
Was it always like this in families—one amazing day after another? He couldn't believe Mom and Dad had brought him here. It was too incredible. He wanted to run and run through this monstrous back yard and just stay out here forever. He wished he had found his parents years ago.
Dad rejoined them a minute later and reported that his favorite trail was passable, but that they would have to hike across some snow fields. Zach practically shook with excitement. Mom, however, insisted that they observe certain preparatory rituals before embarking on the hike: filling the water bottles in Dad's backpack, using the restroom, and putting on sunblock. Zach had never used sunblock before—he had never been out in the sun enough to need it before.
"Really, Mom?" he complained, pulling away when she smeared some on his face and neck. He didn't like the oily feel of it, or the pungent smell, either.
"You're at high altitude, Zach, on a sunny day. The sun is extra-bright up here, and the snow reflects it back up at you, so you get twice as much of it as in Seattle. I don't want you to get sunburned." Her explanation didn't satisfy him, so she added, "Look—you let me put this on you, and we can hike all day, okay?"
"All the way until dinner time," Dad affirmed.
"We can stay out here until dinner?" Zach was wowed by the thought. That "little stop" Dad had mentioned was turning into a huge adventure of its own. He let Mom finish the job.
A minute later they were off, discovering new wonders everywhere they turned. They stopped to view a waterfall just off the main trail, continued on through alpine shrubs beginning to awaken after their long dormant season, found bright yellow and white flowers blossoming low
to the ground, and passed stands of trees and fields of huckleberry bushes where small birds flittered to and fro. A chipmunk ran across the trail ahead of them and scampered up a decaying stump to study them as they hiked by.
For over an hour they hiked higher and higher until they came to a broad patch of snow that hid the trail from view; thankfully, other hikers before them had left a clear trail to follow. Dad stopped to look around for a moment; Mom leaned over and whispered in Zach's ear, "Quick, put these on." He replied with a questioning look as she stuffed his new gloves into his hands; with all this hiking, his hands weren't cold at all.
Suddenly something struck him in the side, leaving a spot of snow on his jacket. He looked up just in time to spin away as another snowball flew from Dad's hand. He gaped. What had gotten into Dad?
Mom crossed her arms. "Zach, I'm not going to defend you. You have to stand up for yourself."
Still he gaped at Dad, who grinned and packed two handfuls of snow together into one supersized ball.
"He's coming for you, Zach!" Mom whispered urgently.
The gloves—he got it. Mom and Dad brought me all the way here for a snowball fight?
Dad's next, great snowball whizzed within inches of Zach's ear as he dropped to his knees and quickly pulled the gloves on. He squeezed together some snow like Dad had, shaped three snowballs at once, and chased Dad, launching his ammunition in a rush before reloading. Dad roared his approval and sent another snowball his way. They exchanged volleys for several minutes. Even Mom joined in the fray before Dad finally wore out and surrendered, laughing so much he could hardly breathe. Zach's ribs ached from laughter, too, and from exertion.
There was a large, bare rock nearby, and they sat down on it to rest. Its red-gray surface was warm from the sunlight and offered a pleasant contrast to the cool mountain air and the icy snow.
Zach gazed out across the surrounding peaks, many of which were lower than where he, Mom, and Dad were resting, seeing how far he could see. "I wish I could live up here," he told Mom. "With you and Dad, I mean."
Mom drew in a deep breath of the crisp mountain air. "We like to come here once or twice a year, to get away from the city. Seattle's great, but sometimes it's good to get out where there's no noise."
Zach listened; Mom was right—it was eerily silent up here. If she and Dad hadn't been here, it would have been scary. The chirping of a bird in some nearby tree was the only sound.
"There's so much outside here," Zach marveled. "What if we got lost? We'd never find our way back."
"Actually," Dad said, "from here we could just head downhill until we came across a trail or a road. Or water. Follow water far enough and you eventually find people."
"But if we really got lost, like in the forest, we'd leave signs behind us," Mom added.
"Right," Dad concurred, "to mark where we'd been—rock piles, sticks, messages in the snow—anything to tell people who were searching for us, 'We were here, and we went that way.' And we'd want to watch out for bears."
"Bears?"
Mom slapped Dad in the side and Zach knew Dad was teasing—though, he realized, there probably were bears up here in the mountains.
He let his eyes wander again across the mountainsides surrounding them. "This place is so big. And there are no houses or anything."
A second later, he grinned mischievously at Dad, then jumped to the ground and scooped up some snow. This time it was he who attacked Dad with snowballs, and they played a while longer in the snow, chasing each other across the icy crust, slipping on spots where the snow had turned solid and slick.
Eventually they continued on. They came to an overlook where other hikers had stopped to eat, and Mom pulled out some snacks for the family to munch on. Zach ate gratefully; he was getting hungry.
"Zach, look!" Mom exclaimed suddenly, pointing. On the rocky ridge above them stood a mountain goat, its shaggy hair a somewhat dirtier white than the nearby snow, sporting a white beard and short horns.
"Awesome!" Zach declared.
The goat bent its neck and nibbled at a spot of new, bright green growth, eyeing them warily as it chewed. For just a moment, Zach wished he could be the goat—wild, free to roam across this fabulous landscape, never having to stay inside in the rain or, in the goat's case, snow. But I don't have to stay inside either, not anymore, he reminded himself. At least not all the time. And the goat, he realized, probably never got to eat tacos or play baseball—so maybe they were even.
At last the goat sauntered off over the ridge and out of sight, and Zach, Mom, and Dad finished their snack and hiked the rest of the trail. When their path eventually brought them back to the visitor center, Dad supplied lunch from his backpack and they ate and rested their feet before launching out again. They hiked all afternoon, returning to the visitor center just in time to buy dinner in the diner there before it closed. Zach requested French fries, of course; Mom granted his request on the condition that he eat a burger, as well. Fries alone were not nutritious enough for a growing boy, she said.
After dinner, they headed back to the car, and though Zach was eager to meet Dad's parents, he hated to leave. He waved a silent goodbye to Mount Rainier as Dad drove back into the surrounding hills. The mountain had been a great friend today.
*****
The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain Page 52