Being Henry David

by Cal Armistead

  The moose lifts its big head and peers into the woods, weeds dripping water from his mouth. Voices approach our hiding place. The moose gives me one last glance, then sloshes out of the pond and gallops into the woods, crunching through the underbrush. He disappears within a few seconds.

  “I can’t believe we’re just turning around and going home,” says a girl’s voice. “Just like that. Giving up.”

  “Babe, it’s way too windy. No need to take the chance,” a guy answers. “Look, the mountain will still be there another day.”

  The two of them come into view, a couple probably in their early twenties, wearing hiking boots and daypacks. They kneel down near the edge of the water. The guy dips his hands in the pond and splashes cool water on the back of his neck.

  I wonder what to do. Should I clear my throat to let them know I’m here, maybe say hello? In truth, I don’t feel like talking to anybody. So I just stand here behind the tree, feeling like a creepy stalker, watching the girl scoop water onto her face and glare at her boyfriend. Just wanting them to leave.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” the girl murmurs. “We could’ve made it.”

  The guy pulls at his sweaty Red Sox T-shirt, takes a deep breath and starts back down the hill, with her close behind. Their voices grow fainter, then disappear into the woods.

  Glancing up at the sky through the spruce branches, everything looks clear and blue to me. No doubt things are windier farther up the mountain, but it’s going to take some serious weather to discourage me. I’m not sure what I hope to achieve by reaching the top of the mountain, only that I have to get there.

  Pulling my backpack up onto my shoulders, I continue hiking uphill. Destination: Baxter Peak, the summit of Mount Katahdin at 5,226 feet above sea level. I can’t take the exact route Henry traveled because he did a lot of canoeing and portaging once he got to the wild and I don’t have a canoe. But that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’m here, seeing the same landscape he saw, pretty much the way it looked back in the mid-1800s.

  And just like Henry, I have the same destination: the mountain’s summit. Except Henry never quite made it. He climbed to South Peak, the second highest peak, and even though that’s way impressive, let’s face it, it’s still not the top. My goal is to get there for both of us. Hiking up the side of the mountain, I get a good rhythm going, breathing hard but making good progress. The incline is sharp, a wooded path through trees and bushes and over random rock formations. So far, so good. Conditions are still great as far as I can tell, not a lot of clouds. That’s important when you’re climbing up to where the clouds live.

  Focused on steady walking and breathing, my brain clears and I’m able to relax and think like when I settle into the cadence of a good run. And as soon as I do, my thoughts fall into that last black hole of time I couldn’t recover, until now. Listening to the pace of my own feet crunching on rocks while climbing the mountain, I’m able in a semi-detached way to examine the missing moments and days right after the accident.

  When my forehead smashed into the windshield, I got a concussion. Brain sloshing against my skull knocked me out, but not for long. Not long enough.

  I was aware of people rushing to the car window, saying hang in there, that the ambulance was coming, that it was going to be okay. But it wasn’t. At first, Rosie wailed and whimpered like a baby animal caught in a trap, but then she went silent with her blue eyes wide and empty, and that was worse. My head hurt so bad and everything was blurry and I couldn’t get to her, couldn’t help get her free. Somebody outside the passenger window gasped and said, “Her leg. My God, her leg,” and I had to look. But after one quick glance at the place where her leg was supposed to be, I couldn’t grasp the sight of blood and bone. My brain locked into wondering, what happened to that other pink sneaker? Where did it go? As soon as I get out of this car, I have to find it.

  The ambulance arrived and I can still see the lights flashing, hear my sister screaming while they tried to free her from the wreck. I kept telling them I had to go out there in the road to find the sneaker, but they kept telling me hush, that I was going to be okay. They didn’t understand. The trip to the hospital is a blur, and for the next couple of days I guess I swam in and out of consciousness while my brain did its best to recover.

  Flashes of memory: bandage on my head, IV drip in my arm, my parents coming to see me, Mom crying. It runs together, those days in the hospital. Sleeping for hours and eating meals brought on a tray, watching TV shows with my eyes glazed over, barely registering what I saw. Then, about the third day after the accident, Mom came to see me and when the doctor came in, he told us I could go home.

  As soon as the gauzy haze in my head started to lift, it was all too clear what had happened to Rosie. Her leg was so badly mangled in the wreckage, they couldn’t save it. One legged, broken ballerina. Even after I was better, I stayed in my bed all day, every day, refusing to go to school, pretending my head still hurt more than it actually did. Couldn’t face the idea of what happened to my baby sister. What I did to her.

  Finally, I couldn’t stand living inside my own body, couldn’t deal with the guilt. I knew I either had to run or I would end up hanging myself in the garage. It was that simple.

  So I threw some stuff in a gym bag, emptied my savings account, and got ready to run to New York City, the biggest, baddest place I could think of. I was prepared to vanish into the crowds and somehow cease to exist. Disappear off the grid.

  Before I left, I stopped at the hospital to see Rosie. She was out of ICU now, in a private room. Slowly, like I was walking into a cathedral or something, I stepped into her room and stood by her bed. She looked so little in that hospital bed, with one leg and foot molded by the sheets. The other side was flat from the thigh down. Nothing there.

  “Rosie,” I whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at me, my blond sister with pink cheeks and blue eyes like a little china doll. She smiled. I couldn’t believe it. She actually smiled at me. “Danny,” she said. Her voice was all sleepy and dreamy, and I’m sure they’d been giving her a ton of drugs, so she wasn’t fully aware of her situation. Or whose fault it was.

  “I’m so sorry, Rosie,” I said. And in that moment, I wanted so badly for her to say something typically Rosie-ish like, hey Danny, bet you didn’t know that the magnolia is both the state flower and the state tree of Mississippi, did you? But she was asleep.

  I left the hospital with my gym bag slung over my shoulder and caught the train in downtown Naperville that took me to Chicago. From Chicago, all the way to New York City.

  My head was pounding the whole way on the train. Not fully recovered from the accident, the concussion, the shock of everything, I slept most of the way, sometimes not even remembering where I was or why I was there. It was dark when I got off the train in New York and sometime within the first few hours of my arrival, I got mugged. All I remember is tripping in a mud puddle as some guy on the street hit me, stole my gym bag and all my money except for a ten dollar bill stuffed in my front pocket. The blow, plus the concussion, added to the trauma of the accident. It all worked together to shut off access to my past. It was self-preservation, guarded by a snarling beast that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For a while, anyway.

  After about an hour, the path becomes steeper, and it’s harder to catch my breath. My thigh muscles burn and the backpack, stuffed with my gear, feels heavier with every step. Sitting on a rock, I pull sweaty arms out of the pack and stretch my muscles. The wind is picking up, so I pull out a windbreaker and slip it over my head. There’s no way I’m going to be able to carry the pack to the summit. So I pull out a few things and stuff them into my pockets: water bottle, trail mix, flashlight. My book. Then I find a nook under a ledge of granite, and stuff the pack into it, camouflaging it with leaves and pine branches. To make sure I remember where I left it, I tie a white sock on a branch near the path.

  It’s around noon when a park ranger heading
downhill meets me on the trail. I register a gray-beige shirt and brown shorts, a straw-colored hat. “The wind is getting fierce up there,” he tells me. “We haven’t closed down the summit yet, but we probably will. You might want to turn around and try this another day.”

  He’s a nondescript looking guy. Hair the color of his shirt. Eyes the color of his shorts. It all blends together into a gray-brown blur. “Thanks,” I say, “for letting me know.”

  The ranger considers this, taking in the fact that I’m still standing there and have made no move to retreat. But there’s not much he can do. “Just…respect the mountain,” he says.

  “I will,” I tell him. “I do.”

  He nods at me and continues down the mountain. His job is done. The burden of risk is on me. And that’s exactly how I want it.

  As I climb higher, the wind moans like a live thing in the pine and oak trees, throws my hair in my eyes. The landscape changes from trees, bushes, and other leafy plants to thin tufts of grass and carpets of moss. The only trees now are small and stumpy, holding on to the windswept ground for dear life.

  Every few feet I stop to take in the view, feeling like I’m climbing up into the sky. Far below, trees, lakes, and streams spread out below me like a topographical map from geography class. But the higher I climb, the more the world I know falls away around me, along with the security of trees and foliage, and it’s like I’m on some strange alien planet.

  Step by step by step, the air gets thinner and there are fewer trees, even the stumpy ones. There’s not even much in the way of moss. Just lichen growing like mold on the rocks, green, black, and gray. They’re the only living things that won’t get blown off the mountain by the wind, surviving because they pretend to be part of the rock.

  My windbreaker snaps in the wind like a flag on the mast of a ship. This feels like hurricane wind, tornado wind. An angry wind strong enough to shove me off a mountain.

  Just ahead of me lies Knife Edge, which connects Pamola Peak—named after the Native American storm god who supposedly lives on this mountain—with Baxter Peak, the true summit. This is the most dangerous part of this trek. For about a mile, there’s this narrow band of rocks, barely two feet wide. I’ve read about this place. People have fallen off Knife Edge and plummeted 2,000 feet to their deaths. Probably on windy days just like this one.

  If I stay low, close to the rocks, I bet I can make it in spite of the wind. My first step falls on loose rocks and I slip, grabbing onto a boulder to steady myself. Adrenaline surges through my body as I hunker down low. On one side, there’s a sheer drop. The other side is the same. All that is holding me up on this planet is a narrow strip of rock that I’ll have to climb across on all fours in a heavy wind. Yes, I could turn around and try tomorrow. But the summit is there within sight, so close. I’m going to do this.

  Halfway across Knife Edge, a crowd of dark clouds drifts in from the other side of the mountain. Instantly, the sun is hidden by clouds and the entire world turns gray. The first drops of rain fall, huge and dense, and the wind begins a low howl.

  Stuck in the middle of this precarious strip of land, I cling to a flat boulder like a tiny barnacle in a raging sea. Pressing my head to my chest, I ignore the rock scraping skin off my nose, the dirt and lichen lodged under my fingernails. Can’t move forward, can’t move back. Stuck, in limbo, within sight of the summit of Mount Katahdin.

  So this is it. I’ve run as far as I can go. Ran away from the flat prairie land of Illinois to New York City and to Concord, Massachusetts. Ran away from my parents and away from Magpie. Mostly, I’ve tried to run away from what I did. But it follows me wherever I go, even followed me to the top of this mountain. The rain comes harder now, pelting my skin like buckshot.

  My sister will never dance again. Hell, she’ll never walk again. Not without a fake leg taking the place of the one she lost. How can I climb back down this mountain and go on living with that forever at the core of me? Such a coward, all I could do was run away on my two good legs. God, I can’t think about this. But I can’t run either. Not this time. I’m trapped here with myself and my thoughts.

  Wind and rain slap my face, whip across my back, my arms, my legs. The shrieking could be the howling of the wind, or it could be me. Salt tears and fresh rainwater stream down my face, into my mouth. How can I ever go home again?

  A new realization breaks over me. Truth is, I don’t have to go home. Don’t have to face my parents. Don’t have to feel pain anymore. All I have to do is let go of this rock. Stand up, throw my arms out to the sky, and let the wind take me. This, here and now, could be my fate. This would be a clean ending to my useless life. A good way to die. Slowly, I peel shaking fingers off the rock, imagine the release as I let the wind shove me off the mountain, imagine falling like flying, sweet relief. I tense the burning muscles of my legs, ready to stand. To surrender.

  No, Danny.

  A voice rides the wind.

  I lift my head up and squint against the wind and rain, somehow expecting Rosie to be here next to me, clinging to this rock, blond angel in pink. The voice is that clear, that familiar. But nobody is here. I duck my head back down.

  No, boy, don’t do it.

  This time it’s Henry’s voice, carried by a fresh gust of wind.

  “Where are you?” I cry out. Can’t see Rosie, can’t see Thoreau. I’m alone, peeling myself off a rock on a mountain, about to die. But the voices come again, inside my head.

  Danny, hold on. You have to hold on. This time it’s Cole, or at least the essence of the little brother who died too soon.

  “I don’t know how to do this, Cole,” I yell into the storm. “I couldn’t save you, couldn’t protect Rosie. I can’t do this anymore.”

  Choosing life means facing pain and I’m just not strong enough. Death is the final, ultimate escape for those of us who run. So it has come to this: hold on to the rock and live. Or let go and die.

  Think of Mom and Dad. It would kill them, and they’ve been through enough. Don’t you see? It’s both Rosie and Cole now, arguing in my head together, double-teaming. You’re no coward, Danny.

  Yes, I am. I’m the one who runs away.

  The wind slaps at me like a heavy hand. It hurts and I want it to hurt. I deserve it. It tears my wailing voice away. It would be easy, so easy to let go.

  I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to put to rout all that was not life…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry’s voice in my head, so real I almost expect to see his face floating in front of me.

  No, Henry, I haven’t lived. Not really. But I’m done, don’t you see? Can’t suck out the marrow of life when I’m too afraid to live. Too broken.

  Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

  Another Henry-ism. Damn you, Henry.

  If I decide to live, all I have waiting for me is a broken family and no idea of what to do with the rest of my life. What do I do with that?

  Clinging to a rock in a violent rainstorm, there’s nowhere left for me to run, nothing left to do. The thing I want most is to hurl myself into permanent forgetfulness. But for the sake of the voices in my head, I hesitate. I force myself to imagine a life past this moment.

  Finishing high school. I could do that. Can’t see myself going to college, not now anyway, but maybe I’d work at a music shop for a while. Learn how to repair guitars. Maybe I could even go back to Concord. Be with Hailey and work with Thomas.

  But what about my family? Can’t keep my parents from splitting up, but maybe we could finally talk about Cole. That would be a start.

  The wind is just beginning to quiet down when I force myself at last to think of Rosie. Make myself imagine Rosie in a wheelchair, Rosie learning to walk with an artificial leg. Maybe if she forgave me for the accident, I could help her. Be there for her like we always were when things in our family came apart. />
  Whether it’s the essence of Rosie, Cole, Henry, or something wise beyond understanding inside myself, I don’t know. But finally, it gets through to me. I can’t die leaving behind the mess that Danny created. And as long as I have life, there’s hope I can live better, find a way to be the best of Danny, plus Hank. For Rosie, for my parents. For myself.

  I don’t know how long I lie there holding on to the rock, letting the rain drench my hair, my clothes, my skin, but finally the clouds drift off toward the horizon, and the storm retreats.

  Hands cramping, knees clutching, everything hurts, but I start crawling forward again. Keep going, listening to the voices in my head that insist I live. Closer and closer to the other side of Knife Edge. When it’s safe, I stand up, stretch sore limbs, take a few steps. Walk toward Baxter Peak, the summit of Mount Katahdin.

  Nobody is here but me to see the world cracked open, to look out on the world and see hundreds of miles into the distance, to smell the rain-cleansed air. Somehow, I feel clean too.

  I stumble over to the weathered brown sign that reads KATAHDIN and under that in smaller letters, BAXTER PEAK, NORTHERN TERMINUS OF THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL. After reading this, I shake my head, thinking of my dad, not sure if I should laugh or cry. Look at me, Dad. I reached the end of the Appalachian Trail before you and I never saw the beginning.

  Touching the rough wood with both hands, I gather strength from its solidness. Then I reach into the back waistband of my jeans and pull out the book.

  You know where to find me, Henry had said. And it’s true, I do. He’s at Walden Pond. He’s here in Maine. He’s anywhere nature has the power to make me stop and think. And most of all, he’s in this book.

  Walden is in worse shape than when I found it on the floor at Penn Station those long weeks ago. Now it’s drenched by the mountain storm. Pages are bent over and torn, and some are missing—the ones Frankie ate and the ones that fell out because I carried it around and thumbed through it so often. I don’t know for sure if it was always mine or if some traveler left it at the train station, but that doesn’t matter now. Thoreau brought me here. I may not be Thoreau reincarnated, but I bet I could live the rest of my life as if I were. Living an authentic, simple life makes a whole lot of sense to me.