Joe starts and looks up.
“Time to hike, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, just a second” Joe readies himself.
Three men snowshoeing.
Brian leads. He sinks about a foot into the snow with every step. Joe follows, placing his yellow snowshoes carefully in the prints of Brian’s, so that he sinks hardly at all. Peter pays no attention to prints, and his snowshoes crash into and across the holes. His snowshoes slide left, downhill, and he slips frequently.
The slope steepens. The three men sweat. Brian slips left one time too often and stops to remove his snowshoes. They can no longer see the rock wall above them, the slope is so steep. Brian ties his snowshoes to his pack, puts the pack back on. He puts a glove on his right hand and walks canted over so he can punch into the slope with his fist.
Joe and Peter stop where Brian stops, to make the same changes. Joe points ahead to Brian, who is now crossing a section of slope steeper than forty-five degrees.
“Strange three-legged hill animal,” says Joe, and laughs. “Snoweater.”
Peter looks in his pack for his glove. “Why don’t we go down into the trees and avoid this damn traverse?”
“The view isn’t as good.”
Peter sighs. Joe waits, scuffs snow,, looks at Peter curiously. Pete has put suntan oil on his face, and the sweat has poured from his forehead, so that his stubbled cheeks shine with reflected light.
He says, “Am I imagining this, or are we working really hard?”
“We’re working very hard,” Joe says. “Traverses are difficult.”
They watch Brian, who is near the middle of the steepest section. “You guys do this snow stuff for fun?” Peter says.
After a moment Joe starts. “I’m sorry,” he says, “What were we talking about?”
Peter shrugs, examines Joe closely. “You O.K.?” he asks, putting his gloved hand to Joe’s arm.
“Yeah, yeah. I just… forgot. Again”
“Everyone forgets sometimes.”
“I know, I know.” With a discouraged sigh Joe steps off into Brian’s prints. Peter follows.
From above they appear little dots, the only moving objects in a sea of white and black. Snow blazes white and prisms flash from sunglasses. They wipe their foreheads, stop now and then to catch their breath. Brian pulls ahead, Pete falls behind. Joe steps out the traverse with care, talking to himself in undertones. Their gloves get wet, there are ice bracelets around their wrists. Below them solitary trees at treeline wave in a breeze, but on the slope it is windless and hot.
* * *
The slope lessens, and they are past the shoulder. Brian pulls off his pack and gets out his groundpad, sits on it. He roots in the pack. After a while Joe joins him. “Whew!” Joe says. “That was a hard traverse.”
“Not really hard,” Brian replies. “Just boring.” He eats some M and M’s, waves a handful up at the ridge above. “I’m tired of traversing, though, that’s for sure. I’m going up to the ridge so I can walk down it to the pass.”
Joe looks at the wall of snow leading up to the ridge. “Yeah, well, I think Pete and I will continue around the corner here and go past Lake Doris to the pass. It’s almost level from here on.”
“True. I’m going to go up there anyway.”
“All right. We’ll see you in the pass in a while.”
Brian looks at Joe. “You’ll be all right?”
“Sure.”
Brian gets his pack on, turns and begins walking up the slope, bending forward to take big slow strides. Watching him, Joe says to himself, “Humped splayfoot pack beast, yes. House-backed creature. Giant snow snail. Yo ho for the mountains. Rum de dum. Rum de dum de dum.”
Peter appears around the shoulder, walking slowly and carelessly. He spreads his groundpad, sits beside Joe. After a time his breathing slows. “Where’s Brian?”
“He went up there.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
“I thought we might go around to the pass the way the trail goes.”
“Thank God.”
“We’ll get to go by Lake Doris.”
“The renowned Lake Doris,” Peter scoffs.
Joe waves a finger to scold. “It is nice, you know.”
* * *
Joe and Peter walk. Soon their breathing hits a regular rhythm. They cross a meadow tucked into the side of the range like a terrace. It is covered with suncones, small melt depressions in the snow, and the walking is uneven.
“My feet are freezing,” Pete says from several yards behind Joe.
Joe looks back to reply. “It’s a cooling system. Most of my blood is hot—so hot I can hold snow in my hand and my hand won’t get cold. But my feet are chilled. It cools the blood. I figure there’s a spot around my knees that’s perfect. My knees feel great. I live there and everything’s comfortable.”
“My knees hurt.”
“Hmm,” Joe says. “Now that is a problem.”
After a silence filled by the squeak of snow and the crick of boot against snowshoe, Pete says, “I don’t understand why I’m getting so tired, I’ve been playing full-court basketball all winter.’
“Mountains aren’t as flat as basketball courts.”
Joe’s pace is a bit faster than Pete’s, and slowly he pulls ahead. He looks left, to the tree-filled valley, but slips a few times and turns his gaze back to the snow in front of him. His breaths rasp in his throat. He wipes sweat from an eyebrow. He hums unmusically, then starts a breath-chant, muttering a word for each step: animal, animal, animal, animal, animal. He watches his snowshoes crush patterns onto the points and ridges of the pocked, glaring snow. White light blasts around the sides of his sunglasses. He stops to tighten a binding, looks up when he is done. There is a tree a few score yards ahead—be adjusts his course for it, and walks again.
After a while he reaches the tree. He looks at it; a gnarled old Sierra juniper, thick and not very tall. Around it hundreds of black pine needles are scattered, each sunk in its own tiny pocket in the snow. Joe opens his mouth several times, says “Lugwump?” He shakes his head, walks up to the tree, puts a hand on it. “I don’t know who you are?” He leans in, his nose is inches from bark. The bark peels away from the tree like papery sheets of filo dough. He puts his arms out, hugs the trunk. “Tr-eeeee,” he says. “Tr-eeeeeeee.”
He is still saying it when Peter, puffing hard, joins him. Joe steps around the tree, gestures at a drop beyond the tree, a small bowl notched high in the side of the range.
“That’s Lake Doris,” he says, and laughs.
Blankly Peter looks at the small circle of flat snow in the center of the howl. “Mostly a summer phenomenon.” Joe says. Peter purses his lips and nods. “But not the pass,” Joe adds, and points west.
West of the lake bowl the range—a row of black peaks emerging from the snow—drops a bit, in a deep, symmetrical U, an almost perfect semicircle, a glacier road filled with blue sky. Joe smiles. “That’s Rockbound Pass. There’s no way you could forget a sight like that. I think I see Brian up there. I’m going to go up and join him.”
He takes off west, walking around the side of the lake until he can go straight up the slope rising from the lake to the pass. The snow thins on the slope, and his plastic snowshoes grate on stretches of exposed granite. He moves quickly, takes big steps and deep breaths. The slope levels and he can see the spine of the pass. Wind blows in his face, growing stronger with every stride. When he reaches the flat of the saddle in mid-pass it is a full gale. His shirt is blown cold against him, his eyes water. He can feel sweat drying on his face. Brian is higher in the pass, descending the north spine. His high shouts are blown past Joe. Joe takes off his pack and swings his arms around, stretches them out to the west. He is in the pass.
Below him to the west is the curving bowl of a cirque, one dug by the glacier that carved the pass. The cirque’s walk are nearly free of snow, and great tiers of granite gleam in the sun. A string of lakes—flat white spots.—mark th
e valley that extends westward out of the cirque. Lower ranges lie in rows out to the haze-fuzzed horizon.
Behind him Lake Doris’s bowl blocks the view of the deep valley they have left behind. Joe looks back to the west; wind slams his face again. Brian hops down the saddle to him, and Joe whoops. “It’s windy again,” he calls.
“It’s always windy in this pass,” Brian says. He strips off his pack, whoops himself. He approaches Joe, looks around. “Man, for a while there about a year ago I thought we’d never be here again.” He claps Joe on the back. “I’m sure glad you’re here,” he says, voice full.
Joe nods. “Me, too. Me, too.”
Peter joins them. “Look at this,” calls Brian, waving west. “Isn’t this amazing?” Peter looks at the cirque for a moment and nods. He takes off his pack and sits behind a rock, out of the wind.
“It’s cold,” he says. His hands quiver as he opens his pack.
“Put on a sweatshirt,” Brian says sharply. “Eat some food.”
Joe removes his snowshoes, wanders around the pass away from Brian and Peter. The exposed rock is shattered tan granite, covered with splotches of lichen, red and black and green. Joe squats to inspect a crack, picks up a triangular plate of rock. He tosses it west. It falls in a long arc.
Brian and Peter eat lunch, leaning against a boulder that protects them from the wind. Where they are sitting it is fairly warm. Brian eats slices of cheese cut from a big block of it. Peter puts a tortilla in his lap, squeezes peanut butter out of a plastic tube onto it. He picks up a bottle of liquid butter and squirts a stream of it over the peanut butter.
Brian looks at the concoction and squints. “That looks like shit.”
“Hey,” Peter says. “Food is food. I thought you were the big pragmatist.”
“Yeah, but…“
Pete wolfs down the tortilla, Brian works on the block of cheese.
“So how did you like the morning’s hike?” Brian asks.
Pete says, “I read that snowshoes were invented by Plains Indians, for level places. In the mountains, those traverses”—he takes a bite—”those traverses were terrible.”
“You used to love it up here.”
“That was in the summers.”
“It’s better now, there’s no one else up here. And you can go anywhere you want over snow.”
“I’ve noticed you think so. But I don’t like the snow. Too much work.”
“Work,” Brian scoffs. “The old law office is warping your conception of work, Peter.”
Peter chomps irritably, looking offended. They continue to eat. One of Joe’s nonsense songs floats by.
“Speaking of warped brains,” Peter says.
“Yeah. You keeping an eye on him?”
“I guess so. I don’t know what to do when he loses it, though.”
Brian arches back and turns to look over the boulder. “Hey, Joe!” he shouts. “Come eat some lunch!” They both watch Joe jerk at the sound of Brian’s voice. But after a moment’s glance around, Joe returns to playing with the rocks.
“He’s out again,” says Brian.
“That,” Peter says, “is one sick boy. Those doctors really did it to him.”
“That crash did it to him. The doctors saved his life. You didn’t see him at the hospital like I did. Man, ten or twenty years ago an injury like that would have left him a vegetable for sure. When I saw him I thought he was a goner.”
“Yeah, I know, I know, The man who flew through his windshield.”
“But you don’t know what they did to him.”
“So what did they do to him?”
“Well, they stimulated what they call axonal sprouting in the areas where neuronal connections were busted up—which means, basically, that they grew his brain back!”
“Grew it?”
“Yeah! Well some parts of it—the broken connections, you know. Like the arm of a starfish. You know?”
“No. But I’ll take your word for it.” Peter looks over the boulder at Joe. “I hope they grew back everything, yuk yuk. He might have one of his forgetting spells and walk over the edge there.”
“Nah. He just forgets how to talk, as far as I can tell. Part of the reorganization, I think. It doesn’t matter much up here.” Brian arches up. “Hey, JOE! FOOD!”
“It does too matter,” Peter says. “Say he forgets the word cliff. He forgets the concept, he says to himself I’m just going to step down to that lake there, and whoops, over the edge he goes.”
“Nah,” Brian says. “It doesn’t work that way. Concepts don’t need language.”
“What?” Peter cries. “Concepts don’t need language? Are you kidding? Man I thought Joe was the crazy one around here.”
“No seriously,” Brian says, shifting rapidly from his usual reserve to interested animation. “Sensory input is already a thought, and the way we field it is conceptual. Enough to keep you from walking off cliffs anyway.” Despite this assertion he looks over his shoulder again. There stands Joe nodding as if in agreement with him.
“Yes, language is a contact lens,” Joe says.
Peter and Brian look at each other.
“A contact lens at the back of the eyeball. Color filters into this lens, which is made of nameglass, and its reflected to the correct corner of the brain, tree comer or rock corner.”
Peter and Brian chew that one over.
“So you lose your contact lenses?” Brian ventures.
“Yeah!” Joe looks at him with an appreciative glance. “Sort of.”
“So what’s in your mind then?”
Joe shrugs. “I wish I knew.” After a while, struggling for expression: “I feel things. I feel that something’s not right. Maybe I have another language then, but I’m not sure. Nothing looks right, it’s all just… color. The names are gone. You know?”
Brian shakes his head, involuntarily grinning.
“Hmm,” Peter says. “It sounds like you might have some trouble getting your driver’s license renewed.” All three of them laugh.
Brian stands, stuffs plastic bags into his pack. “Ready for some ridge running?” he says to the other two.
“Wait a second,” Peter says. “we just got here. Why don’t you kick back for a while? This pass is supposed to be the high point of the trip, and we’ve only been here half an hour.”
“Longer than that,” says Brian.
“Not tong enough. I’m tired!”
“We’ve only hiked about four miles today,” Brian replies impatiently. “All of us worked equally hard. Now we can walk down a ridge all afternoon, it’ll be great!”
Peter sucks air between his teeth, holds it in, decides not to speak. He begins jamming bags into his pack.
They stand ready to leave the pass, packs and snowshoes on their backs. Brian makes a final adjustment to his belt—Pete looks up the spine they are about to ascend—Joe stares down at the huge bowl of rock and snow to the west. Afternoon sun glares. The shadow of a cloud hurries across the cirque toward them, jumps up the west side of the pass and they are in it, for a moment.
“Look!” Joe cries. He points at the south wall of the pass. Brian and Pete look—A flush of brown. A pair of horns, blur of legs, the distant clacks of rock falling.
“Mountain goat!” says Brian. “Wow!” He hurries across the saddle of the pass to the south spine, looking up frequently. “There it is again! Come on!”
Joe and Pete hurry alter him. “You guys will never catch that thing,” says Peter.
The south wall is faulted and boulderish, and they zig and zag from one small shelf of snow to the next. They grab outcroppings and stick fists in cracks, and strain to push themselves up steps that are waist-high. The wind peels across the spine of the wall and keeps them cool. They breathe in gasps, stop frequently. Brian pulls ahead, Peter falls behind. Brian and Joe call to each other about the goat.
Brian and Joe top the spine, scramble up the decreasing slope. The ridge edge—a hump of shattered rock, twenty or twenty-five
feet wide, like a high road—is nearly level, but still rises enough to block their view south. They hurry up to the point where the ridge levels, and suddenly they can see south for miles.
They stop to look. The range rises and falls in even swoops to a tall peak. Beyond the peak it drops abruptly and rises again, up and down and up, culminating in a huge knot of black peaks. To the east the steep snowy slope drops to the valley paralleling the range. To the west a series of spurs and cirques alternate, making a broken desert of rock and snow.
The range cuts down the middle of it all, high above everything else that can be seen. Joe taps his boot on solid rock. “Fossil backbone, primeval earth being,” he says.
“I think I still see that goat,” says Brian, pointing. “Where’s Peter?”
Peter appears, face haggard. He stumbles on a rock, steps quickly to keep his balance. When he reaches Brian and Joe he lets his pack thump to the ground.
“This is ridiculous,” he says. “I have to rest.”
“We can’t exactly camp here,” Brian says sarcastically, and gestures at the jumble of rock they are sitting on.
“I don’t care,” Peter says, and sits down.
“We’ve only been hiking an hour since lunch,” Brian objects. “and we’re trying to close in on that goat!”
“Tired,” Peter says. “I have to rest.”
“You get tired pretty fast these days!”
An angry silence.
Joe says in a mild voice. “You guys sure are bitching at each other a lot.”
A long silence. Brian and Peter look in different directions.
Joe points down at the first dip in the ridge, where there is a small flat of granite slabs and corners filled with sand. “Why don’t we camp there? Brian and I can drop our packs and go on up the ridge for a walk, Pete can rest and maybe start a fire later. If you can find wood.”
Brian and Pete both agree to the plan, and they descend to the saddle campsite.
Two men ridge running. They make swift progress up the smooth rise, along the jumbled road at the top of the range. The bare rock they cross is smashed into fragments, splintered by ice and lightning. Breaking out of the blackish granite are knobs of tan rock, crushed into concentric rings of shards. They marvel at boulders which look like they have sat on the range since it began to rise. They jump from rock to rock, flexing freed shoulders. Brian points ahead and calls out when he sees the goat. “Do you see it?”
The Planet on the Table Page 8