Autumn Imago

by Bryan Wiggins

  I stayed up a long time, listening to the storm and chasing thoughts of my past with my brother. I’d built a wall so thick between us I thought nothing could ever bring it down. I was still angry with him for every wrong step he’d taken. But tomorrow we’d be on the trail together for the first time in years, and I had a choice to make. I could follow Tommy from a distance as he stumbled through the woods, or I could take point—and show him the way home.

  30

  Hamlin Ridge

  I opened my eyes to an empty lean-to. Tommy’s sleeping bag and possessions were gone, my neatly rolled sleeping pad the only thing resting in their place. I shot up, threw on my pants, stepped into my unlaced boots—and let out a breath. His pack was still there, stuffed and zipped, resting by the side of the lean-to.

  I sat down and laced my boots up slowly, trying to discover how I felt. I was relieved to see he hadn’t bolted, but by the time I stood up, I had to admit I would have been more relieved if he had.

  I found him down by the pond. He was sitting cross-legged, facing the water with his hands resting on his knees, palms up. The top of the curved granite wall around the pond’s south rim disappeared into a thick, white blanket. The stand of distant pines across the water burned bright green against the gray, jumbled rocks of the moraine. The only sound was the soft roar of the small falls at the far end of the pond, lost behind the low clouds. I’d always wanted to hike to them. I’d started out to do it one day, picking my way gingerly over the steep, loose scree I had to cover to reach them. But halfway there I stopped, took a last look at my destination, and turned around. I recognized that there were places best left unexplored. It was a matter of respect, really—the belief that there is a special power to be honored in those pockets of wilderness never touched by the foot of a man.

  After a few minutes, Tommy’s hands reached into the sky. He rolled his head around his neck, stood up, and gave a final stretch before turning around.

  “Morning,” he said, with a grin so wide and open I found it hard not to mirror it. Part of me wanted to return my brother’s warm greeting in the private pocket of wilderness we shared, but I couldn’t forget everything that had brought us here.

  He reached into his jacket and took out a cigarette, cupping his hand around the end to light it.

  “That doesn’t really go with the whole clean-living vibe, does it?” I asked.

  He grinned at me through the thin stream of smoke. “One addiction at a time is about all I can manage, brother.”

  “We better eat,” I said, turning to walk back to the lean-to. “It’s a long hike down.”

  ***

  We had our packs on our backs in less than an hour. I had taken the few steps from the lean-to to the trail, turned right, and started hiking when Tommy called behind me.

  “Paul?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s go up.”

  I turned around to see him standing in the middle of the path, his eyebrows raised above a wide smile.

  “Hey, Tommy, this isn’t a vacation.”

  “Really? I thought that’s exactly what it was. Isn’t that why you brought the whole family up here?”

  I bought myself a few seconds to think of a reply by adjusting the straps on my shoulders. So far, I’d been pumping Tommy for information, but I could see now that I’d have to share a bit of my own story.

  “We’re here,” I began slowly, “because our crazy mother wanted to come. It was the only way Kim and I could get her to agree to start looking at memory care facilities.”

  Tommy’s mouth popped open. “You’re putting her in a nursing home?”

  “I’m not putting her anywhere. But eventually, yes, she’s going to need some sort of assisted living.”

  “You mean a nursing home.”

  “I don’t care what you call it.”

  “Why can’t she stay at Kim’s?”

  “Tommy, she’s losing it. And it’s only going to get worse.”

  “How bad is she?”

  “I don’t really know. She’s slipping. A lot. But she’s still pretty good at hiding it. You can judge for yourself when you see her.”

  “Jesus,” he said softly, “I’m not ready for that yet.” He turned around to glance at the trail rising behind him before he spoke again. “So how ’bout it? Let’s go up.”

  “Tommy, you can’t keep hiding from everyone.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing up here, Paul?”

  I squeezed the handle of my trekking pole and stabbed it into the dirt.

  “We’re going down,” I told him. “You’re not the only one who has to face the music. Do you realize your little stunt could cost me my job? Did you think of that?”

  “Listen,” he said, “it’s shorter going over the ridge. You can slap me into irons quicker if we go this way.”

  “It’s a lot harder too,” I replied. “The hike out of this basin is the toughest mile in the park. With everything you’ve done to your body, I doubt you could drag it up there, even if you are clean. And descending Hamlin Ridge isn’t much easier. It’s a long, sharp drop along a spine of boulders till you get to the easy stuff.”

  “I’m having a good day, Paul. I can make it. But it’s your call.”

  I stood and considered. I was so tired of battling my family. Every time I’d locked horns with my mother, sister, or brother-in-law, it had only made it easier to do the same the next time we met. But there wasn’t a battle now. Tommy had simply made his pitch, and he was ready to let it go.

  I walked past him and headed toward the steep wall of the Northwest Basin. “I hope your meditation at the pond charged your batteries,” I said. “You’re gonna need all the juice you can get.”

  ***

  The trail wasn’t under my foot—it was under my face. When you’ve got 1,300 feet to climb in a mile, your path’s not going to be horizontal. Tommy and I were moving through a cloud, the trail visible only a few feet above us as we zeroed in on each stone or tree trunk we could grasp while our feet felt their way up the rock wall. It wasn’t quite technical climbing, but if the slope had been a few degrees steeper, we would have needed gear to haul ourselves up its unforgiving face.

  I was moving in bursts, hiking for ten minutes before stopping to rest for two or three. Just as I caught my breath, I’d see Tommy’s blond head bob into view as he followed me up the short, steep switchbacks.

  After a half hour, I stopped, took out my water bottle, and rested until Tommy finally arrived to collapse on the boulder below. He was panting, a thin sheen of sweat covering his red face.

  “How’s your water?” I asked.

  He stuck up a thumb, breathing too hard for words. I handed him my bottle, and he shook his head, digging into his backpack to withdraw his own. He took a couple of big glugs, capped it, and belched, his breathing finally slowing down.

  “I pumped a liter and a half at Davis this morning,” he said, putting the bottle back in his pack.

  “Might need closer to three today,” I said.

  “There’s Caribou Spring,” he panted, “only about a mile.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We’ve been here before,” he said. His face was still flushed, but it tipped up to me in a smile.

  “You were, what, seven years old? You can’t remember that.”

  “Oh, I remember everything about that trip,” he said. “Dad made sure of that.”

  ***

  It was another hard push before we finally broke tree line, the world suddenly tipping ninety degrees from the vertical basin wall to the broad, flat plain of the Northwest Plateau. We sat again, and I split my last energy bar with Tommy while I spun to take in the view.

  The plateau is part of Katahdin’s alpine zone, a broad plain hovering in the clouds with one of the rarest communities of plants in the Northeast. I looked across the sea of red and brown sedges studded with green lichen-covered boulders and tried to reconcile it with the world I knew below. I’d ent
ered this place a score of times, and every time it felt the same—like I was floating through a waking dream.

  I looked down and saw Tommy bent over the ground.

  “You okay?” I asked quickly.

  He looked up with a smile and held out a closed fist. When I put my hand under it, he filled my palm with a mound of dark blue and oblong white berries.

  “Blueberries and Indian tea,” he said. I put my hand to my mouth and savored the dark, syrupy sweetness of the small wild blueberries and the bright, pepperminty fire of the Indian tea.

  For the next hour, we walked slowly across the wide open land while the wind tore blue strips from the cottony cover overhead. Tommy kept up with me, and by the time we reached the plateau’s eastern edge, there were holes large enough in the clouds on the horizon to reveal the dark purple rampart of Katahdin’s north face. The tip of Pamola Peak was just visible on the mountain’s eastern flank. My eyes traveled from it to follow the Knife Edge—the thin, serrated ridge that connects it to Baxter Peak.

  After a while we came to our own narrow arête, Hamlin Ridge, its granite lip dividing the glacial basins that fell away on either side of the trail. I looked left to see the North Basin’s mix of green pine and gray stone sparkling in the afternoon sun. Turning my head a few degrees to the right brought the charcoal shadows of Katahdin’s Great Basin into view, the small speck of Chimney Pond at its base no more than a tiny black tear.

  “You ready for this?” I asked, looking back at Tommy. The slower pace he’d adopted for the last few minutes gave me some cause for concern. Though we wouldn’t be pulling against gravity on our way down the ridge, we’d be fighting it just the same. Tommy’s mouth hung open while he caught his breath, but he gave a nod, and we began to pick our way across the boulder-strewn spine toward the valley below.

  The sky continued to clear during our descent. Soon we could see the twin pair of Depot and Basin Ponds to the east. A moment later, the bright blue plane of Katahdin Lake shimmered into view.

  I stopped for a break by a pair of boulders that stood by the side of the trail. I watched the cloud shadows spill into the bright bowl of North Basin until Tommy came to claim the seat across from me. I watched his face scan the dark depression of the Great Basin behind me before he sat down. When he shrugged off his pack, I could see that he needed a longer rest, so I did the same.

  “What did you mean back there on the plateau?” I asked him as I uncapped my water bottle. “When you said Dad made sure you’d remember the trip we took up here.”

  He looked at me for a moment before his eyes drifted away. “I meant the hike was one of his screwed-up life lessons.”

  I set my water bottle down carefully on the rock beside me. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “We never should have been up on the mountain that day. Do you remember the weather? It was snowing, for Chrissake. We could barely see one another on the trail.”

  “We made it down okay.”

  “That’s not the point,” Tommy said, shifting to face me directly. “The weather started when we were still at Davis. I asked Dad if we could go back down. A sane man would have headed to Russell right away. But the great Norman Strand thought that scaring his seven-year-old son shitless in a snowstorm would make a man out of him.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I said, but I remembered that day. I’d been scared too. “Don’t you recall stopping in that stand of trees in the middle of the plateau?” I asked. “Dad was laughing while we scarfed down gorp in the storm. He was confident about what he was doing. He knew we’d be okay.”

  “He wasn’t confident, he was crazy,” Tommy said. “We didn’t get down because Dad had things in hand. We got down because we were lucky.”

  “Dad always knew what was best for us,” I said quietly. “Even after Jordan died and everything went to shit, he was the only one with a plan. I never understood why the rest of you couldn’t see that. We just needed to trust in his strength to get us through.”

  “Is that what you think?” Tommy asked, his eyebrows arching. “That Dad was the strong one who held everything together?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well,” said Tommy with a short laugh, “he was certainly the loud one. But he wasn’t the one who anchored us. That was Mom.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” I said. “Mara depended on Dad more than any of us. She let him run the entire show.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t stronger,” Tommy said quietly.

  I shook my head and spun away from him on my rock, chewing the edge of my lip while I watched the ridge beneath us. A couple of dark birds flew in circles above it, the smaller one chasing after the larger. The small bird darted again and again until the big bird finally floated away.

  “Do you remember the time we hit the deer?” Tommy asked.

  I turned back to answer him. “On our way home from the park?”

  “Yeah. What do you remember about that night?”

  I thought for a moment. “We were all beat because we’d hiked all day. I can’t remember which mountain. It was raining.”

  “Yeah, we were passed out in the backseat of the Subaru till we heard that bang,” Tommy said.

  I picked up the story.

  “Mom and Dad got out, and Dad told me to look after you and Jordan. Kim was crying, and I was trying to calm her down.”

  “Dad came back for the shovel,” Tommy continued.

  “Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “Then, after he finished the poor thing off, Mom came back and had me help them drag it off the road. It was a buck with a full rack. It was huge.”

  “It wasn’t Dad,” said Tommy.

  “What wasn’t Dad?”

  “He came back for the shovel, but he didn’t use it. Like you said, Kim was freaking out, and you were trying to calm her down. But I was looking out the back window though the rain. Dad was just holding the shovel, staring at the deer. He stood there for a long time. Finally, Mom reached over and put her hand on the handle. Dad said something to her, but he finally let her take it out of his hands.”

  “It was raining,” I said, “and you were what, five years old? You’re not remembering it right.”

  “Oh, I remember,” said Tommy. “I can see it in my head now. Dad stepped back and our mother raised that shovel high over her head with both hands. I can still hear the crack it made when that thing came down.”

  31

  The Fatted Fish

  By the time we got off the ridge and reached the Chimney Pond trailhead, Tommy was spent. Instead of starting the three-mile hike down to my truck, I led him on the short detour to the pond to rest before our final push.

  I marched him quickly past the ranger cabin sitting by the trail near the water. I had no idea if word had spread about who the Davis trespasser was—and no desire to find out. When we reached the pond, I was happy to see we had it to ourselves.

  Tommy barely glanced at the water or the mountain behind it. He found a patch of grass, lay down, and closed his eyes. I dropped my pack next to a boulder, sat on it, and took in the show.

  The Great Basin, which embraces Chimney, is a glacial cirque that lives up to its name. The massive wall of sheer granite curves almost 180 degrees, forming a grand amphitheater a mile and a half wide and rising more than two thousand feet in the air. From my perch before it, its features filled my field of vision. I followed the points of the pines on the opposite shore to slopes of green that gave way to purple and gray stone above. I had to tip my head back to take in the ragged crescent cut into the brilliant blue sky by the basin wall. The early afternoon sun cast a shadow on the western side of the broad bowl. It shaded the wide, broken flanks of rocks and the ravines that angled sharply down to the flat plane of the pond. I stared at the small silver pool and felt the weight of the day rise, watching ripples flow across the water under the breath of a silent breeze.

  I raised my eyes again, but the drifting didn’t stop. The granite shield that circ
led me began to slide apart, separating into moving, interlaced bands—transforming the rigid stone wall into rivers of moving rock. After a moment they grew still to resolve into their solid state.

  I knew I was seeing an optical illusion: my brain shifting the rock ribbons to compensate for the long seconds I had stared at the moving water below. But I let my eyes rest and travel between rock and water again, with the feeling that the movement of the eons-old monolith before me was something more than a mirage.

  The bedrock beliefs I’d held about my family for so many years were slipping. I believed the foundation of Kim’s faith was her need for answers that would never come. I believed Mara’s silence was a sign of her surrender to life—a defeat she’d conceded long before the advent of the disease that was slowly eating her mind. I believed Tommy had stuck a needle in his arm as an antidote to his weakness, and that the drug would never be stronger than the poison it fought. I’d recited the reasons for my family’s actions to myself for so long that they’d become hard facts for me. Now I wondered what truths hid behind that wall.

  ***

  I let Tommy lead for the final leg of the hike out, but he kept stumbling off the trail and into the woods. After the third time, I called him back and took point, slowing my pace to keep close to him. He had a headache by the time we got to the truck, so I made him drain his water bottle before he curled up on the front seat. During the ninety-minute drive back to camp, he barely moved.

  I stopped the truck on the bridge over the Nesowadnehunk on the way to Kidney. Tommy roused, and I pointed downriver. “There’s Aaron,” I said. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “Years,” said Tommy softly. “He was just a little kid.”

  I’d left my fly rod and gear for Aaron along with the note I’d tacked to Sentinel’s door, and I was happy to see him giving it a go. But as I watched from the bank, he struggled with the tangled nest of line in his hands, the rod on the ground beside him. I gave the horn a light tap, and he looked upriver, then put the mess down and made his way up the bank to the truck.