The Mountain Story

by Lori Lansens

  We celebrated briefly before we began the next job, quickly gathering as many of the sterasote leaves and stems as we could stuff into our pockets for Nola’s poultice. I cautioned the women about the large, loose boulder that could break off at any moment—or cling for another thousand years—that’s how it is with rocks.

  Finally, there was the matter of order. “I’ll go first,” Vonn said, trembling. Without further ado she mounted the log, which teetered when she leaned over to grasp it, and threatened to roll when she dangled her legs on either side. Until we saw the first then the second green flip-flop drop away and float down to the unseen bottom of the dark crevice, no one had considered that she should take them off first.

  “Don’t look down!” Nola called.

  Vonn did look down, and my stomach turned watching her teeter and flail. I closed my eyes, expecting any moment to hear the sound of her body splashing against the rocks below. When I opened my eyes I was shocked to see that she was moving forward, chanting, “Please. Please. Please.”

  I joined in, whispering, “Please.” Nola joined in and Bridget too, until our prayer was a song. Even the crows shut the hell up to hear it.

  When Vonn reached the other end she heaved herself up and flopped onto the slope like a drowning man on a beach. Chest heaving, too stunned to celebrate, she waved as I squeezed Nola’s good hand on one side of me and Bridget’s on the other. Vonn’s bravery inspired the hell out of me.

  Having watched her cling to the log as she bucked forward, I realized that Nola couldn’t possibly keep her balance with only one working arm. For no particular reason, I felt confident that the log would bear our joint weight.

  “Come on, Nola,” I called over the wind. “You and me.”

  She adjusted the yellow canteen on the strap around her neck as I climbed aboard the log, alarmed to find that the moss was slipperier than I’d bargained for. Once I was balanced, Nola marshalled her courage and mounted behind me, clinging to my waist with her good hand, as if we were riding a motorcycle, the yellow canteen a hard knot in my back.

  “Okay,” I said. “One, two, three.” But when we tried to move, our dual forces were too great and we succeeded only in almost dislodging the log from where it was anchored in the rocks.

  “I’ll move,” I told Nola. The wind had kicked up and I needed to shout to be heard. “Then you move.” And we did—in a graceless but effective fashion—until I stopped. I don’t know why the hell I did it but about halfway across that log I stopped and looked down, and I saw far below, on a black river of rock, one of Vonn’s green flip-flops, and attached to the green flip-flop, I was sure, the broken body of Vonn, or was that Byrd? It didn’t matter that I knew I was hallucinating.

  I lost my balance and swung this way and that, taking Nola with me. Gasping, I steadied our joined bodies. Paralysis came next, not literally of course, since I controlled my muscle groups sufficiently to keep my grip, but I couldn’t move forward, even when Nola nudged me. Even when she began to tremble and squeezed my torso so tightly I thought the canteen would fracture one of my ribs.

  Vonn shouted from the other side. “Move, Wolf! Go!” I locked eyes with her and in a moment gained control over my muscles again and started to inch forward, dragging Nola’s trembling weight on my back.

  “Keep going, Wolf! Good!” It was my mother’s voice now. Glory. I could smell her lemony hairspray. I stayed focused on Vonn’s face, and when my feet met the rigid granite on the other side, called over the wind, “Help me pull Nola up.”

  I turned my head to tell Nola, “Hold on for one second. Okay? Balance for one second so that Vonn and I can get you off the log!”

  But Nola wobbled the second I stepped off and I had to spin around to catch her, grabbing her by the closest limb—her broken wrist. She screamed like hell but I didn’t let go. Vonn caught her by her other arm and we pulled her to the safety of the slope.

  Nola tried to catch her breath as Vonn calmly tugged her wrist bones back into place, then tightened the makeshift bandage and splints.

  For all the pain she must have endured Nola didn’t even look down at her wrist. She couldn’t take her eyes off her daughter, standing alone and terrified on the other side.

  Bridget.

  We all turned to look at her alone on the other side. I’ve hardly pitied a person more than I pitied her in that moment. “Your turn, Bridget,” I called into the wind.

  “I know!” she said.

  “Sit down at the edge!” Vonn shouted.

  “I can’t do it!” Bridget shouted, backing away.

  “You can, Bridget! You’re in the best shape of anyone!”

  I was fully prepared to shimmy back across the crevice to bring Bridget with me the way I had Nola, but I have to admit I was relieved when she started bravely toward the log.

  “Don’t look down!” Nola called.

  “You can do it, Bridget!” I shouted.

  She was trembling. We could see it, even at fifteen feet.

  Vonn shouted, “Put your legs on either side!”

  Bridget crouched down, focusing on Vonn’s instructions.

  The wind blew hard and mean, invading the spaces between trees and rocks and us and courage.

  “Swing your left leg over,” Vonn called. “And now your right. Shift your weight.”

  “Like you’re riding a horse!” I called.

  “She’s scared of horses,” Vonn and Nola said together.

  “Like you’re riding a bike!” Vonn called.

  Bridget swung her legs and shifted her weight and finally managed to straddle the log. The wind pushed and pulled her but she held fast.

  “Slow. Start slow!” Vonn called. “The wind’s picked up!”

  Surprising us all Bridget shook off the gale and began to inch forward, strong and steady, her eyes on Vonn just as mine had been.

  The wind whipped us from every direction. On the slope side, Nola gripped a pine trunk with her good hand.

  We held our breath watching Bridget fight the wind and maintain her balance on that moss-covered log strung out over the abyss. I had the terrible feeling that she was going to look down and see Vonn’s green flip-flops like I had.

  She stopped.

  Vonn and I shared a look.

  “What is it, Bridge?” Nola shouted.

  “Ants,” she called back, staring down at the log.

  Then she looked up at us, and we could see a family of them scattering over her neck and cheek and into her hair.

  One hand flew to her face. The other hand slipped on the velvety moss, and she teetered, only to be further undone by a stray wind that tore through the pass and almost blew her off the log altogether. She managed to regain her balance, but just barely, and we watched her panic about what to do next, aware that the ants were travelling over her back and shoulders.

  “This way!” we shouted, but Bridget started shimmying backwards, which must have felt safer, peeling her legs off the log and throwing herself into the brush away from the cliff’s edge on the other side to swat at the ants until they were dead.

  The wind tore through the canyon and careened around the trees and raced toward us with alarming strength and speed. Couldn’t help but take it personally.

  Bridget turned toward the smoke-grey sky as we stood on the other side of the Devine Divide, swerving our heads to look too—because we all heard it—the unmistakable sound of a helicopter.

  I was sure I saw the outline of the blades pushing through the clouds. I remember that I pointed. Vonn and Nola scanned the sky as the wind pummelled us from the rear and nearly pushed us over the ledge. Bridget opened her mouth to the heavens and screamed, a primitive sound, like nothing I’d heard before or since, a wail that drew from the depths of her fear and grief and rage and regret. It was one of the saddest sounds I’ve ever heard. I held my breath waiting for the rock slide but it didn’t come.

  Instead, the heavens opened up and rained down upon us. Finally. A deluge with no warning—well o
f course there were many warnings but they’d all seemed like false alarms. The rain seemed to come in answer to Bridget’s scream, and it was torrential, a blessing and curse. We held our tongues out to catch the fat wet drops and slurped the cold fluid that collected in our cupped palms. I showed the women how to lap at the rainwater that quickly gathered in the hollows of the rocks.

  On the other side of the divide Bridget quenched her thirst while the storm raged on, thunder crashing around us and jagged bolts of lightning ripping across the sky. “Keep low!” I called, sending Nola and Vonn to crouch in the brush away from the cliff’s edge. All we needed was to be struck by lightning.

  Everyone knows not to stand beneath a tree during a thunderstorm but our instinct to find shelter must be superior to our fear of lightning because it’s the first thing many people do. When the sky lit up with jagged bolts Bridget went directly for the shelter of a tall pine.

  “NO!” I yelled.

  Panting, panicked, she looked around and saw the sterasote bush, thinking to shelter herself on the rock beneath its expansive branches. That rain came fast and hard, and nothing, with the exception of earthquakes and rock slides, frees a loose rock like driving rain. It wasn’t the boulder with the massive fissure that broke free though. It was the large boulder above it that bounced down the incline and hit the rock beside the rock that held the boulder that anchored the log that crossed the crevice. I counted four seconds before I heard the crash of timber down below. It made me sick to do the math.

  Bridget. Oh Bridget. She stood across the yawning distance. It was fifteen or so feet across but it might as well have been a mile.

  Vonn cried out to her mother, “We’ll find another log, Bridge! Don’t worry.”

  The look on Bridget’s face—it hurts to remember it.

  Nola couldn’t speak. She locked eyes with her daughter.

  “We’ll figure it out!” I shouted.

  That’s when I remembered that while Nola was wearing the canteen on the strap around her neck, we’d left her oxblood poncho, our vessel for collecting the rainwater, on the bush by the cave.

  “The poncho!” I called to Bridget. “It’s at the cave!” I held the yellow canteen in the air. “I’m gonna throw this over so you can fill it up.”

  Sheet lightning captured snapshot images of Vonn and Nola, sodden, shivering, clinging to each other and to the rock. I crouched, inching closer to the edge, preparing to throw the yellow canteen across the chasm.

  Maybe I should have waited until the storm was over but we didn’t know how long it would last and we needed to collect the rainwater. I held the canteen in my throwing arm, waiting for a break in the wind.

  “Don’t try to catch this,” I called to Bridget over the rain.

  Bridget nodded but still got her catching hands ready.

  “Don’t catch it, Bridge!” Nola called.

  Bridget nodded once more, and raised her hands again when I went to throw.

  “Put your hands in your pockets, Bridge,” Nola yelled.

  Bridget stuffed her hands into her pockets.

  “I’m going to throw it toward the bushes,” I shouted. “Okay? Let it land nice and easy!”

  Bridget took hold of a nearby tree branch so the wind wouldn’t blow her away.

  “Back way away from the edge, Bridget!” I called over the storm.

  “Back away!” Nola shouted.

  “You’re freaking her out!” Vonn hissed.

  There was a blinding flash of lightning, followed by a butt-clenching crack of thunder. It was blowing sixty miles an hour, easy. I’ve seen wind like that bounce the screws out of sheet metal and fold it like origami. I’ve seen wind like that pick up an aluminum shed and throw it on its ass. I didn’t want to see what that wind would do with the slightness of Bridget Devine.

  I hurled the canteen. Bridget, as instructed, did not attempt to catch the vessel—not even when it was swept off course from the bushes and landed within her grasp, then was blown astray toward the ridge.

  We drew a sharp collective breath as the canteen dropped into the crevice and erupted with relief when its strap caught on a fluke-shaped rock jutting out below the jagged edge.

  “You have to get the canteen, Bridge!” Nola shouted.

  “You’re going to have to reach, Bridget! You’re going to have to reach pretty far!” I called over the crashing thunder.

  The rain lashed Bridget’s face as she stood back from the ledge, shaking her head dramatically.

  “On your stomach, Bridge!” Nola called. “Don’t look down! Just don’t look down!”

  “You can do it, Bridget!” Vonn called over the freezing rain.

  The wind spun the canteen this way and that, easing the strap away from the wet rock hook. “Please, Bridget! We need that canteen!” I shouted.

  I didn’t have to imagine the terror Bridget felt. I felt it myself watching her drop to her knees in the little patch of mud on the other side of the crevice and crawl over the rocks toward the terrifying edge. Finally she reached it, and closed her eyes, groping blindly for the strap.

  “Lower!” I called above the rain.

  “To the left!” Nola shouted over the thunder.

  “Your left!” Vonn cried over the wind.

  Bridget reached down, her fingers straining, and finally caught the wet leather strap of the yellow canteen between her thumb and forefinger. But as soon as she had a grip on the strap she lost it again. It went on like that for a painfully long time with Bridget almost, then not, saving the canteen. “You’re going to have to open your eyes, Bridget!” I called. “You’re going to have to look down!”

  Bridget inched closer to the edge, so close that from our angle it looked like she might pitch forward and fall into the depths. We held our breath as Bridget’s fingers inched toward the leather strap. Finally, finally, she got hold of it.

  When Nola and Vonn and I saw that Bridget had saved the yellow canteen we whooped in celebration, jumping up and down in the pouring rain, and we couldn’t believe our eyes when we looked across the crevice a second later and witnessed Bridget drop the thing.

  The strap was slick. Bridget’s hand was wet. She thought she had a grip on it but she did not. A basic miscalculation. Life and death consequences. She lost her grasp on the strap and she dropped the yellow canteen, and we could only watch helplessly, hopelessly as the greedy wind rushed up from the canyon floor to fling the vessel against the rock and then out of our sight forever.

  Bridget backed away from the ridge and stood up, and we all looked at each other for a slow-motion minute, shocked, and maybe a little frightened, by her calm. The rain stopped then. The deluge didn’t peter out or taper off, it stopped.

  The steely clouds still threatened but we were thankful for the reprieve from the hard driving rain. “Bridget!” I called. “You have to go and get the poncho before the wind takes it! Drink whatever’s in the hood!”

  We paused a moment, Bridget and me, to look at each other across the distance before she turned and disappeared into the brush. We had an understanding. I just didn’t know what it was.

  Vonn was sodden, teeth chattering. “I’m still so thirsty.”

  “Look in the rocks, here and here.” I pointed out the water in the granite grooves and gullies. Nola needed help to get to her feet and support from both Vonn and me as she bent to drink. “Drink as much as you can. We don’t know when we’ll have water again.”

  We went about like that for some time, lapping water from the rocks, like animals, I remember thinking, a herd of Devines, maybe it was a pride of Devines. A blessing of Devines? My gut began to contract from too much of the gritty water and I stopped drinking, begging God to let me keep the fluid even while I felt it rise.

  Nola was shivering vigorously so I helped her down to a spot on a rock then took off my parka and put it over her shoulders. Next stop—hypothermia.

  Vonn was still focused on the other side of the crevice. “Where is she?”

 
; “Bridget!” I shouted. “BRIDGET!” No answer.

  I motioned Vonn out of Nola’s earshot. “We don’t have a lot of time, Vonn,” I whispered. “We need to get Nola to a doctor.”

  “I know,” Vonn said.

  “She has to come with us,” I asserted, rubbing warmth into my arms.

  “We can’t leave Bridget here alone!” Vonn cried.

  “She’ll be okay. The Mountain Rescue guys’ll come back for her.” I believed that.

  “How long will it take?”

  “A few hours. Depends on where the ridges connect. From over there it looked easy enough. A couple of hours to get back to the Mountain Station, I’d guess, but I’ll run into a hiker long before that.”

  I started up the slope.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I’m just going up there to look. To see where the ridges connect. I’ll come right back.”

  “She hates being alone,” Vonn said, turning back to wait for Bridget’s return. “I can’t leave her alone.”

  “I’ll need you to help with Nola,” I said. “What if she passes out? Vonn, I can’t do it by myself.”

  Dark clouds raced above us as I took a quick look around, concerned that there was no shelter from the rain should it return. “I’m going up there to scout. That’s all. I’ll come right back.” I was slurring, which put me in mind of my father. “You have to tell Nola to be ready to go. And tell Bridget to gather rocks.”

  “Why?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Vonn joined Nola to wait, falling into her grandmother’s embrace, careful of her broken wrist. “Bridget!” Vonn shouted across the divide.

  “Bridget!” Nola called. “Bridge!”

  Leaving them I ascended the slope, feeling a rush of endorphins. We were only a couple of miles from the Mountain Station and this whole ordeal was nearly over. In minutes I’d have a clear view of our path over the ridge and back to where we’d started the rock slide. Maybe it was a gentle hike. Maybe we’d find a marked path.