by Cai Emmons
When the birds awaken her before 5:00 a.m., Bronwyn takes measure of herself. A good sleep has swept away apprehension. She feels surprisingly rested, ready for adventure, and eager to kick the Reed chapter of her life into history. She stares at Lanny, still slack-jawed in sleep, and slathers her friend with love as if spreading her with a thick layer of honey. Lanny knows her better than anyone in the world and will always be her best friend.
It’s cold—high thirties, maybe forties—and geodes of frost still linger in the patches of shade. But it’s mostly clear, a few high clouds to the west that Bronwyn deems unthreatening. Once the temperature rises a little it will be a perfect day for hiking. She nudges Lanny awake, pulls on some clothes, and begins scrambling eggs. Within forty-five minutes they’re packing small backpacks with sandwiches and nuts and chocolate and two full quarts of water for each of them. They have rain gear, extra clothes, a first aid kit, compass, flashlight, and map. Though it’s been a while since Bronwyn has made an expedition like this, she knows the protocol: be prepared for all eventualities, and know, above all, that the weather can change.
“I won’t be able to keep up with you,” Bronwyn says. “You’re in much better shape than I am.”
“I’m not as fit as I look.”
“Last night I dreamed you were wearing those orange cargo pants and that paisley shirt.”
“Oh god, what was I thinking back then? I should have kept those pants as a souvenir of my youthful stupidity.”
Sunlight bristles over the picnic table and the day charges forward, calling them to action. At 6:03 a.m. they’re on the road in Lanny’s Subaru. The eastern sky is clear. A few stringy cirrus clouds, not of particular concern, laze high to the west. Temperatures are in the low fifties now and rising. Spectacular weather for the White Mountains, spectacular weather by any standards. Climbing a mountain seems like such a pure and uncomplicated thing to do, and it gives Bronwyn a satisfying sense of purpose.
Bronwyn squints through the windshield and holds her hand out the open window.
“What’re you doing?” Lanny asks.
“Sizing up the day.”
“Highly scientific, I see.”
“Actually, it is scientific. Observation is where science begins. You establish norms and departures from norms. But it all begins with looking and noticing.”
Lanny laughs. “Always calculating, aren’t you?”
They set out on the Jewell Trail at 7:20a.m., Lanny in the lead taking long, aggressive strides. The trail, ascending along Mount Washington’s western ridge, is the longest but most gradual trail to the summit. It will take them four to five hours to reach the top and another three or four hours to descend. Allowing an hour for lunch and rest breaks, they estimate they’ll be done by six p.m., safely back at the campsite before nightfall.
The first part of the trail slopes gently uphill through a deciduous forest, underfoot a soft bed of leaves and earth, moist from spring rain, muddy in some places. The air is still cool, but sunlight, yellow and sweet as butterscotch, speckles the forest floor.
Lanny swings her arms and sings “I’m Happy When I’m Hiking” with child-like abandon. She has a talent for sinking into the moment and plumbing it fully. Bronwyn herself speculates too much about the future, effacing the present. When you situate your mind in the future you do not feel the soft loam giving way as each boot hits the ground. You do not hear your knees creak, or feel the sweat slithering down the back of your neck, or see the garter snake making his quick getaway. You do not hear the birdcalls or revel in the sunrise. You scarcely hear yourself breathe.
When the trail crosses a brook they stop for a break and sit on rocks, snacking on walnuts and raisins, sipping their water. They do not speak, and the silence seals their bond.
“It feels like it’s going to rain.” Lanny peers up through the canopy to the few chips of visible sky.
“It won’t rain,” Bronwyn says.
“If you say so. You’d know, I guess.”
“I’m paid to know.” But in fact she hasn’t checked the National Weather Service. She has consulted only her own instinct today, reports from her pores.
They allow a foursome of twenty-something men to pass them, and Bronwyn feels a twinge of envy for their youth and fitness. Thirty isn’t old, but it’s getting there, and something about the springy, sinewy calves of those men brings this home acutely.
A series of switchbacks takes them up the side of the ridge, and by mid-morning they emerge above the tree-line. The air is noticeably cooler and windy, and though blue sky still predominates, a posse of dark-bellied nimbus clouds rolls in from the west. After so much time under the trees, the massive stretch of sky is disquieting. Light but dark. At once revealing and undisclosing. They’ve lost their protection. Lanny was right, rain is all but certain now. Bronwyn should have known better than to think they could reach the summit without some weather to contend with. Nevertheless, the clouds are still high enough to permit an impressive view of the Presidential Range: Mount Jefferson, Mount Adams, and Mount Madison preside like a receiving line to the north. We’re here, we’re always reliably here, they seem to be saying. Ahead, along a ridge directly in front of them, stands the peak of Mount Washington, still a fair hike away. A sudden gust of wind kicks up from the west-northwest and careens into Lanny so she teeters, almost falls.
“Jeez, that was rude!”
“You should put on your rain gear to break the wind,” Bronwyn says.
“Yes, Mom.”
“I know, I’m sorry—” Bronwyn can’t stand this cautionary role of hers, but she plays it well, as she always has. They both take out their jackets and put them on without speaking.
“Good to go,” Lanny shouts over the wind.
The trail now requires extra caution as it ascends over boulders. Ahead of them hikers dot the mountainside like a herd of colorfully jacketed goats. Bronwyn is highly alert, highly focused, shifting her attention between monitoring Lanny’s uncertain progress over the rocks and scrutinizing the advancing front which is clotted with black pannus clouds, a sure sign of precipitation to come. She tries to estimate the speed of the front’s approach and surmise what it will deliver. The winds are gusting at thirty to forty miles per hour, she guesses, which makes talking almost impossible. Worse, it makes the mountain unfriendly, even sinister. She hates this job of trying to forecast with incomplete data. There is so much about which she cannot be sure. Ahead of her Lanny marches on, apparently unperturbed. Is Bronwyn crazy to think they should quit? Yes, the summit is in sight, but it will take them at least another hour to get there.
“Maybe we should turn around,” Bronwyn suggests, yelling over the wind.
“You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not giving up now. Not when we’re so close to the top.”
“It’s farther than it looks.”
Lanny makes a face. Bronwyn vacillates. It isn’t clear who’s in charge. But Bronwyn feels Lanny’s intransigence, and it would be foolish to separate. Bronwyn gives a slight nod and they continue.
Because Bronwyn is who she is—because her body is earth-sentient and she has spent her life thinking about weather—she feels the up-draft before it manifests, warm air rising, smashing into the cooler air above. She pictures the fracas of colliding molecules overhead, imagines she hears them.
“I don’t like this,” she says.
Lanny either doesn’t hear, or chooses not to respond.
The clouds have assumed the steely look of military tanks; they knock against the sky’s boundaries. The cog railway, chugging uphill, emits noxious black smoke that rises like a feisty runt to test itself against the storm clouds. Sheet lightning explodes, whitening the sky, as if to erase all memories, making a clean palette for itself. It pixelates everything, illuminating Lanny and making of her a hallucination. One one-thousand, two one-thousand. Thunder detonates. They both jump. Rain follows, sudden, hard, cold, slicing the air at a sharp angle, obscuring everything.
�
�Stay there,” Bronwyn shouts to Lanny, leaning into the wind, bent at the waist, eyes slitted. She reaches Lanny, grabs her arm, tugs. Lanny, taller than Bronwyn and much heavier, resists. Then, without warning she yields, allowing herself to be guided to the nearest boulder where they both crouch under a ledge. Lanny says something made unintelligible by the tumult. She leans closer. “We’re going to die,” she says directly into Bronwyn’s ear.
Bronwyn shakes her head, an emphatic no. They aren’t safe here, but it’s better than venturing into the open in such low visibility to make grounding rods of themselves. She thinks briefly of Reed, how he would react to hearing she had died in an electrical storm on Mount Washington. Would he feel remorse? Would he think his rejection drove her to recklessness?
Rain is everywhere, petulant, soaking her waterproof jacket, running in full-blown rivers down her torso. Lanny, famously al ways-warm Lanny, shivers. Bronwyn pulls her close to help them both preserve heat. What fools they are. Bronwyn should have steered them away from this mountain whose weather lore she knows so well. There are plenty of other mountains they could have climbed with far less fickle weather. They should have turned back at the first sighting of storm clouds. She shouldn’t have relied on her own instinct, should have investigated the weather reports before they set out.
An aura surrounds them, cool and merciless, the beckoning arm of Death. It is so senseless to die this way, accidentally, beneath nature’s fist. She is overcome with fury, with a wish for things to be different than they are, furious for all the things she cannot change, beginning with this moment and bleeding back into everything else: Reed’s disinterest, Stuart’s stupidity, her mother’s negativity. Another flash blanches the sky, stealing all dimensions but two. Scarcely a second passes before thunder cracks.
Rain turns to hail, vitriolic and personal, each pellet big as a Barbie head. Her rage spikes. Her brain seems to pucker and roll inside her skull. Her head is on fire. Her vision wavers. She sloughs her backpack and pushes herself to standing.
“What’re you doing?” Lanny shouts.
Entangled in something, Bronwyn can hardly speak. “Stay there,” she croaks.
Gripped by the storm, enshrined in its clamor, she turns west to its source and folds herself into the symphonic chaos. Her chest throbs. She strains to keep her eyelids apart. Hail batters her cheeks. Red fills her vision. Clouds swirl around her, malevolent evaporating tongues. She summons all her will, heaving with the effort, with rage and need. She hurls forth the volcanic heat in her brain, her eyes like rapiers jousting with the crazed molecules. She slides through a portal and is sundered from any sense of self she has known, wholly devoted to some other entity, hearing only her own strained breath, life at its limit.
The mountaintop is still. Hailstones litter the rocks. The sun glistens. The sky is blue, the air gilded. There isn’t a breath of wind. Bronwyn scans the Presidentials, etched in perfect clarity against the guileless, cloudless blue. Where exactly is she? Who is she? A warm presence at her side. A human body. A woman. Her old friend Lanny, churning out sound that could be laughter.
“My god. What just happened?”
Bronwyn pants. The laughter comes at her like a raucous Greenland piteraq. She shakes her head, sits on a rock, cradles her head, sniffs the post-rain ozone and petrichor.
“Bronwyn, talk to me. That was wild. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you did something to call off that storm.”
Bronwyn reaches for words, but they’re sealed in a remote part of her body. Even if she could find them, they could not touch or express her experience of what has happened.
More laughter rolls from Lanny, then stops abruptly. “I do know better and I still think you did something. You made that storm go away. I watched you. I swear to god you cast some spell.”
Bronwyn remains motionless, depleted, baffled.
7
Lanny has taken charge, driven them back to the campsite, made a fire and dinner, all the while exhaling amazement and attending to Bronwyn as if she’s an invalid. Now night has descended fully, and they relax in their low camp chairs, drinking hot chocolate, mesmerized by the flames which swell and shrink and twirl around one another. Grottos, tabernacles, entire cities grow and tumble, like human civilization itself, rising and falling and rising yet again from embers.
Lanny has theories, lots of them. It could be telekinesis, she says, like the movie Carrie. “Or did you ever see that George Clooney movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats? They just looked at the goats and, boom, the goats keeled over. Or Chronicle, that was awesome. These boys get telekinetic powers, and they end up using them to do horrible things. I know you’ve seen Carrie—we saw it together.”
Bronwyn laughs quietly. “Those are just movies.” She remembers Carrie vividly, the anger and humiliation that were the underpinnings of Carrie’s retaliatory acts.
“But why would people make movies about this shit if there weren’t some truth to it? Do you think you can do it again?”
Bronwyn cannot weigh in. The day has decimated her. Like a mass extinction. Which of her faculties will come back first, if any? But despite her exhaustion, something glows at her core as if she has swallowed one of the fire’s embers. And while her vision seems to be dimmed by a furry grating, her hearing is unusually acute. Even over the river’s noisy tumbling she is quite sure she hears the scrabbling legs in a nearby ant colony, a garter snake sucking up an earthworm.
“You were kind of like doing telepathy with that storm, right?” Lanny says. “It reminds me of A Wrinkle in Time where they do that kything thing. Remember? Or have you heard of those people who randomly turn out streetlights just by looking at them—it was kind of like that.”
Bronwyn has not heard of people putting out streetlights. Why would someone want to put out a streetlight? She lays down her hot chocolate and feeds another log onto the fire. The lower logs slump and fracture under the weight. What exactly is it? It felt almost involuntary and then she was in the midst of it. Why has Lanny been so quick to conclude that Bronwyn stopped the storm? Humans, by nature, look for causality and see causal connections where none exist. Think of the Greeks who attributed weather phenomena to a slew of gods, each with its own province. But wouldn’t most modern people regard the storm’s retreat as coincidence? Yet, Lanny is not just anyone. She knows Bronwyn exceedingly well. She observed Bronwyn today and perhaps felt vicariously Bronwyn’s own sense that she was linked somehow to those clouds, the wind, that lightning.
“You think I did something, but I didn’t do anything. Something happened. And it could have been coincidence—we were hoping the storm would stop, but it actually stopped randomly.”
“Uh-uh. You caused it. You stood up there and did something—I don’t know what, but something. Maybe you could do it again.”
How could she possibly do again what she was never aware of doing in the first place? “Maybe I couldn’t.”
Lanny clucks. “Such a pessimist.”
They stare into the fire, sinking into their different habits of mind. Am I a pessimist? Bronwyn wonders. No, only a realist. She isn’t comfortable being scrutinized like this, even by Lanny. She has never been to a shrink and she never will. Her mind is her own affair, and it doesn’t need to be pawed and probed by some pseudo-scientist.
She pulls herself together enough to find her phone and check the Mount Washington Observatory’s weather report. The severe electrical storm is reported with winds that gusted up to 120 mph. The storm subsided abruptly, the report says, and a high pressure front moved in. She reads the report aloud to Lanny, shivering, unsettled.
“That’s not telling us anything we don’t already know,” Lanny says.
Just because events are sequential does not make them causally related, Bronwyn reminds herself. Her intent to stop the storm and her sensation of enormous energy output could have had nothing to do with the weather changing dramatically. Could she repeat what happened under controlled circumstances, the gold standar
d for solid proof? It is nearly impossible to imagine. There is no controlled laboratory for weather.
What a relief it is to be alone in her small homely place by the river. But her mind is untethered, drifting from one thing to another, not perching on anything for long. The density of her brain feels different. Her head floats, balloon-like. She goes to her bedroom and forgets why she’s there. She makes a grocery list, sets it down, then can’t find it. Has she lost her ability to concentrate and think rigorously? Is this how dementia starts? One does not expect to discover new emotions at age thirty, but what she feels now is undeniably new; the incredulity and confusion, muddled with the recent rejection, have combined alchemically into a glowing feeling of newness. She has the sensation of looking at herself from a vantage point outside her own skin, ten or twenty feet away.
Maybe she and Lanny are both wrong. Maybe nothing happened and nothing will happen again. But she knows as well as she ever knows anything that something about her life is different. Questions abound. How can she learn what really happened when everyone knows that using oneself as an object of study makes objectivity impossible?
A prick of fear. A sheen of wonder. An urge to explore. Sharp images appear before her, like faces desperate for breath bursting up from under water. Amoeboid gray shapes. Flashes of light. Something shiny and red fills her vision. Memories from Mount Washington, she thinks. The shapes of the clouds, the lightning. As for the red, she cannot say. A by-product of overstimulation, perhaps.
The problem with analyzing what happened is that her memory of it is sketchy. First, she was filled with heat and feeling, facing the storm with hell-bent rage, but then what—? Then she lost track. It was as if her self, the self through which she sees and hears and organizes the events of the world, vanished, and she was subsumed into another entity, and for a while she was only that other thing, not Bronwyn at all. How do you remember an event if it happened to someone other than the person you currently are?