I keep a steady place in the middle of the pack with the Israeli couple. We stop at an alpine face and climb single-file across a short distance using a pull rope, keeping our bodies flat as we move sideways across the rock. It is the hardest part of the hike, but we can see the end of the trail once we have crossed halfway: a giant white cross perched at the edge of the land, running its midday shadow dramatically down our path.
Later, we take photos in front of that cross and then behind its shadow, which stretches ten or fifteen feet at an angle from the ridge, widening to a peak. The Israelis like the spot. I use their camera to take thirty-two digital shots of them posing near it. It is hard to get the sense of scale right, and it is late in the day, so the angle drifts in each photograph, as though the shadow is following us, or we are approaching it from every direction. We have hiked all day to the top of the mountain, watching the shadow of the cross for the last part of the way.
A small snack stand waits where the path levels out onto the ridge, an old cabin in which someone has thought to prospect the fortunes of desperate, self-congratulating hikers. We buy candy bars and cold sodas. Katie and the Romanian arrive last, and after a while Katie asks me to walk with her a ways further, separate from the group.
I found a rock with the face of Jesus on it.
She smiles nervously and laughs. I laugh, too.
I hiked ahead and saw it on the ground.
Don’t worry, though. I rubbed the mud a little, and the face disappeared.
We walk back to the snack stand and open sodas. I shake out rocks from my shoes, put on a sweater, and lie down on one of the benches to catch my breath.
It is beautiful on the ridge. There is a pile of rocks down which snow melts into a small river across it. The sun is out and closer now to the horizon. It was warm in Bucharest, but here on the ridge it is windy and cold.
We decide we should keep moving, find food, and rent rooms for the night. There is a small hostel just to our right, but it does not have a kitchen. So we hike another mile or so across level terrain, to a larger hostel whose dining room, the guidebook says, looks out over a valley, toward the sunset.
The larger hostel where we eat dinner is crowded with summer tourists stuck at the top of the mountain, waiting all day for the cable cars. Of course, the tourists in the hotel cannot leave the mountain; they have been stranded in the hostel all night and day. They are keeping their rooms and staying at least until morning. The kitchen is nearly running on bare provisions. We eat pickled vegetables and a broth soup with stale bread and cold beer.
The Israelis keep insisting that we start back across the ridge toward the smaller hostel, to rent a room for the night. But the rest of the group isn’t worried, and we say as much. It is getting late, and soon it will be dark. The path is a little less than a mile across level terrain. We ask the Romanian to call ahead to the smaller hostel on the house phone. We are grateful that someone in our group speaks Romanian well enough to work out the details. There is one room left, the owner explains, and we can claim it if we arrive within the hour.
Back out on the trail, Katie sits down suddenly, grimaces, and begins to cry. She has turned her ankle on a rock. I sit a while with her, until she feels strong enough to keep walking. I offer to help, but she insists that the ankle is fine: she just wants to hang back from the rest of the group with Sara by the lake, under the stars. They will follow in time. We should go ahead and be sure to get the room.
Do you need an ice pack? Should I ask the hostel for a first-aid kit so that we can wrap it?
Katie hates doctors. She understands her injury. She first rolled her ankle six years earlier, while we were hiking in South Korea, at the trailhead coming down Mount Daegu. She insisted on walking on it to reach the bus back to the city and later refused medical attention, eating handfuls of ibuprofen for the next few days, until the swelling went down a little and the color came back. It was only a year later, after the ankle started to click and swell whenever we went running in Chicago, that a doctor diagnosed a fracture that had not healed correctly. The clicking was the sound of the joint rubbing against itself. The ankle would swell like that, the doctor explained, whenever she turned it.
I am mad at Katie for staying back, for turning her ankle, and for letting the injury persist when she knows she loves to run and hike. I think she is foolish to insist on resting by herself now, to not let me help her. It is only a sprained ankle, but we still have the mile to hike. And, it is late.
But I also know that part of me is relieved to do nothing, to be absolved of any obligation to help her, to keep going and leave her stubbornness behind. We have been hiking all day. I am tired. I do not want to pick the fight.
Suit yourself.
Which is the last memory I have of Katie, alive and well: my saying goodbye with a great harrumph, leaving her on a hill with Sara and the Romanian.
There is a photo of Katie and me standing that evening under the kilometer marker next to the lake, with the rocks to the right and behind us. You can see water coming off the ridge, and if you look closely enough, you can just make out an outline of snow and ice where the white rocks darken under the clouds. I am wearing a Cubs hat, plaid shorts, and a black sweater. Katie is wearing blue jeans, her backpack, and a t-shirt from the 5K race in her hometown. We are leaning into each other and smiling. I have pursed my lips into the kind of pseudo-smile-and-smirk I once imagined demonstrated great thoughtfulness and consideration, perhaps poetic resignation.
We are standing on a tall mountain in Romania. Yes, we are.
Katie is exhausted, still in pain, and smiling through her teeth. She smiles this way when she is smiling against her better judgment. I remember thinking it was important to get this picture right. It would be a kind of evidence to friends and family of our ridiculous day of hiking.
Sara takes the photograph, then hands me the camera. I step closer and photograph the two of them facing in the opposite direction, across the ridge. They are surrounded by blue sky and green land. Katie is smiling naturally. You can see it especially around her eyes. Her face is centered in the photograph. Sara is standing to her right, and a sliver of her body and face is cropped out of the frame. Her head is tilted back, as though she is laughing at a joke; perhaps it is an ironic laugh. Katie, with her blue eyes and dark features. Sara, with her Irish ruddiness, hazel eyes, and spectacular long red hair. Katie has tied a dark blue bandanna in her hair. Sara has tied a light blue bandanna around her neck. To their left three or four valleys roll in succession away from the sunset.
We purchased the bandannas at the train station that morning, on a whim, as a gesture of solidarity.
We are beginning a vacation together. We have pennants!
I am exhausted from the hike and feeling short. I am eager for our wilderness adventure to end. I am not, by either birthright or practice, much of an outdoorsman. I have arthritic toes that surgery two years earlier only made worse. It hurts to step at an incline, duck and crouch under branches, jump across rocks. I wear sneakers constantly, with an orthotic, and neither does much to help with the pain or range of motion. The trail is unmarked where the hike becomes difficult. I am out of shape. We do not have much water. I am carrying a backpack packed for the week. I am scared and exhausted. I do not like wilderness adventures, and when we push ahead, up the mountain, toward an uncertain destination; when Katie stops to rest and tells me to go ahead, I want to keep going because I want to find the end. The peak, summit, ridge, and smaller hostel. Late afternoon, evening, nightfall, sleep.
Katie is smiling in her photograph with Sara, and I think it might be a kind of fuck you for the day. Or, perhaps, the smile is unchanged in both photographs. In our photograph my arm is draped across Katie’s shoulder. Her hair is sun-sweet. I can smell her powder-scented deodorant, shampoo, soap. I love these smells, and they are familiar. I stand there. I hear a voice telling me to look stoic. It is the end of a journey. We are victorious.
It is somethin
g that you don’t enjoy until you see it, but then you are very happy.
Later that week my friend Ben forwards me the email from Katie. His plan was to come to Romania from Egypt, where he lived and worked, to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. Katie had spent the last few weeks arranging his flights, accommodations, and pickup. Sara would meet him at the airport, and Katie would make some excuse to divert me to her apartment. Ben would arrive with Sara, followed by friends from the school where I taught.
So, it was a game. There would be a winner and a loser. Or, really, at the end we would both win.
I left Katie behind with Sara because I wanted her to plan my birthday surprise; I was being generous; I was exhausted, and my feet hurt; our journey was almost finished; I did not want to disagree with her; I was angry with her; I would not indulge her injury-denying heroics; she should let me help her; we needed to claim our rooms for the night.
The truth is I left Katie behind on the trail because I imagined our life was very ordinary, invulnerable to trauma and tragedy. I understood the situation well enough to trust it. There was the predictable aspect and, always just lagging behind it, calamity. We would keep ahead of calamity because we always did. The Israelis and I would walk ahead until Sara and Katie and the fat, slow Romanian closed the gap and caught up. I would wait for them at the river crossing, where I could afford to sulk and feel petty. There was a range of ordinary possibilities, I told myself, to what would happen next.
2. Arête
The bear that killed Katie had white fur on its paws and muzzle, and for a little less than an hour it flashed white across the path of my flashlight, making a deliberate measure of her body and slowly, without pretense, pressing her chest into the ground until it made no sound and did not return the force.
This is how Katie died: gross thoracic trauma. Her body, mauled. The body, when we recovered it, bloodless and blank. It did not appear to be mangled. We stood together over her and thought she might have had a shock. She lay at an angle on the grass, and her body was intact, her clothes were not torn, there was not so much blood as we might have expected. To look at Katie’s body, we thought she had survived the attack, or perhaps the attack had only happened in our imaginations, or to someone else, or someplace else.
An hour earlier my group had left Katie’s group at the lake and walked a few hundred yards ahead down the path. We reached the river, where the Israeli doctor said we should wait to cross as a group. Or, her husband said, I could wait for Katie, Sara, and the Romanian while they went ahead to the smaller hostel. I watched them disappear into the darkness. I wound the mechanical charger on my flashlight, thinking that when Katie arrived I would need to show the way across. After a while, I became impatient, and then, after a longer while, concerned. What was taking them so long? I called Katie, then Sara on their cell phones. I left long, insistent messages to which they never listened, encouraging them to pick up the pace.
Perhaps, I thought much later, the ringing of her cell phone angered the bear and inspired it to take a second pass across the ridge.
I turned back to the path and after several false starts found my way to the lake. They were not there. I screamed Katie’s name, then Sara’s into the night wind; I could not remember the Romanian’s name. It was still louder now, but there were gaps in the wind when I could make my voice distinct.
Just across the path I saw what looked like clumps of feathers on the gravel. I reached down and picked up the pages from our guidebook, ripped from the spine and torn in half. I turned the crank and shined my light down into the brook. Had someone from Katie’s group fallen into the water? Had they all slipped on the rocks? The rocks sloped down to the river at an angle. If a person fell sideways toward the stream, I thought, they might lose consciousness, bleed, even drown. I tried to move faster and climb down to the stream, but I could make very little progress in the dark.
I turned the flashlight crank and tried to make broad sweeps of the water. I climbed back to the trail and yelled Katie’s name again. Somehow I had turned myself around, because now I was facing out opposite both the smaller and the larger hostel, toward the ridge we had kept to our right as we crossed. It was then that I heard Katie’s voice and swung my flashlight around. I saw nothing, but I heard her:
Don’t come closer. Find a gun. Get back quickly.
Perhaps my screaming voice and Katie’s response, after so much silence, made the bear curious, even irritated to understand what he had happened upon, at being unable to synchronize his poor eyesight with the urgent noise.
In a moment, in the ten minutes it took me to reach the smaller hostel and plead with the hostel owner to take his rifle, Katie would be alone on the ridge. First, the Romanian would sit up and punch at the bear, wildly, shrieking and screaming, and when the bear turned away, he would run toward the hostel’s porch light. The bear would not follow him. Sara would later say she did not know why she also sat up and screamed and ran. She had no memory of leaving Katie, only of seeing the lamp swinging from the porch of the smaller hostel, and then it getting larger as she, too, ran, screaming and crying, toward it.
I remember all of this in the reverse order. Sara coming down the path, out of the darkness, distraught. The Romanian, already inside of the smaller hostel when I arrived, rocking under a blanket, saying only that he had managed to get away. I remember thinking, Katie cannot be far behind, because if Sara—urban, neurotic, slight—could survive the attack, then surely, so too would Katie. I remember thinking, with some hope, If the fat Romanian survived, then Katie must already be here. I had only to wait a little longer on the porch.
Then, I was arguing with the hostel owner. He had a rifle, he explained, but he could not let me take it. He would be fined forty thousand Romanian lire for discharging a gun without a state permit to do so. All of the guests were witnesses. His business would be ruined. Two strangers—his sons? other tourists?—held my arms back, and a third stood between us. I thought, It is important that I try to get the gun, and I knew I would not get it. I offered him American dollars, my passport, my pack. I thought, All of this is taking too long. Someone else said to wait in the hostel until we knew there was no bear and I thought, This is when I should be heroic and go save Katie. I staggered out the door and toward the path. Time was slowing down now. It took forever to hike back up the trail and find Katie again. I thought, There will be a funeral at the church and a newspaper report and I will have to give a speech and I will need to bring the body home to Katie’s mother and someone else will have to ship the cats, and I hated myself for thinking it through so thoroughly.
I could not run and keep my footing. When I found the place again, Katie had been alone there for twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes. Now, she was dying. I was sure of it from the sound of her voice and the manner of the bear: deliberate, certain, indifferent to my arrival. It was doing something. It had a sense of purpose. It did not retreat, even when the rocks I threw struck its fur and hindquarters.
I thought, The bear will turn toward me because I am provoking it, and when it charges, I will run down the path, and it will follow me away from Katie.
Before that night we had never seen a bear. Which does not matter now, except to say that no one, especially Katie, whom we all imagined knew exactly what to do if attacked by a bear, had an idea of encounter or survival beyond the hypothetical situation. Play dead. Wait for the bear to lose interest. Leave.
I watched the attack, trying to close the distance: fifteen, maybe twenty yards. Every time I thought to approach and intervene, I could not move my body forward. I panicked, but I also had a sense to fear for my own life. It was as though I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tall building, leaning my head to look over the side, imagining I was about to fall, while my feet remained at a distance from the ledge.
In the moment I was ashamed of myself. The shame alternated a clear-headed practicality about survival with an untested capacity for heroism that would not come forward. It felt like cowardic
e. I threw rocks, yelled, and waved my arms at the bear.
I thought, The bear will lose interest if I land a large enough rock near its head, and then it will scatter.
I had no perspective on Katie’s body, except to watch the bear’s muzzle dip and lift over it. It seemed to move in and out of focus, as though spot-lit for a stage performance or caught in headlights. The white fur was thickest at the paws, or perhaps I was most comfortable watching the space just in front of its body. The scene was revealed partially with what I could manage to shine and how steadily I held the light. But the sound was constant; it invited speculation. The wind, the tearing of clothes, the snorting and grunting bear, all combined like woodcuts to assemble those parts of the scene I was constantly not seeing. I could fill in the gaps only as I imagined them.
Katie screamed, at first words, then only the sound of her making noise, no longer a voice but something deep, rasped, and loud that seemed to continue out of habit, long after it might have stopped. I could not see Katie’s face or the entire length of the bear. I remember imagining for a moment the cartoon shape of a bear from a children’s book, overlaid on bright paper, filling the darkness with unmeasured angles.
I thought, Why is no one coming to help me? I moved my limbs through molasses, at the darkness.
When Katie saw the bear that would kill her, she stopped walking, threw her pack across the field, and laid flat on the ground. Sara and the Romanian explained much later that they had all made themselves small at first and spoke only in hushed tones. Katie had led this progression to the ground. Sara had also thrown her pack in the opposite direction. At first, it seemed, they acted together, certain of a survival they coordinated in hushed tones—Stay down. Don’t move—even as the bear moved closer, taking its time, measuring the stillness around each body.
Bears in the wild are revealed, rather than seen. They are territorial by nature. They move in clans. They do not share open spaces. Rabid, startled, drunk, or hungry bears, and also cub mothers, violate these patterns. Brown bears weigh up to fifteen hundred pounds, have three-inch claws, and can run thirty miles per hour. Unlike a black bear, a brown bear on the attack rarely loses interest or spooks. Black bears lose interest when its prey plays dead; brown bears move closer.
Young Widower Page 6