Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

He wanted to get away from a multitude that was as dense now as the summer crowds in Oxford Street. To somewhere remote from the hundreds of cars parked nose to tail or drifting round the one-way system endlessly looking for that precious space. Away from the listless columns of day trippers shuffling towards the next photographic opportunity.

  There was some thinning out as he left the central valley. At Mirror Lake a bus load of foreign tourists decanted onto the approach path. He decided to carry on up the narrowing canyon towards the relative solitude of the forest.

  He continued past a notice warning of a recent rockfall and earth tremor, up a rough path overlooking the thundering torrent of the Merced River, until he arrived at a kind of crossroads. The main route curved away to the right, while a narrow left-hand track pointed straight up the face of the mountain.

  There was not a tourist to be seen. This would sort the sheep from the goats.

  The track did not take long to reveal why it was so deserted. At first it wound its way steeply through forest, over rocks and under fallen trees. By the time it emerged into the sunlight, it had become a sequence of hair-pin chicanes tighter than the terraces of a paddy field. After an hour or so of hard labour, he calculated that he had covered a mile by foot and barely a hundred yards by elevation.

  He sat on a boulder in the shade of a stunted pine tree, sipped his water and sucked at one of the melted Hershey bars. Two young people with bedrolls and backpacks passed on their way down, eyes fixed on the path ahead of them. ‘Halfway there,’ gasped Bryn, as much in hope as encouragement. The girl saluted him with a cheerful flourish of her fist.

  Only stubbornness and the fear of failure kept him going. Whenever he passed a waterfall, he bathed his head to cool the blood surging at his temples. Every fifteen minutes, then ten and five, then every time he found a shaded corner, he crumpled back on a rock to recharge his drained batteries. His knees and lungs and head ached…

  He was at his lowest ebb when two tanned young men in hardcore hiking uniform (boots and ankle socks, shorts, check shirts, huge backpacks, hatless) came up the track from below, chatting to each other. They passed Bryn’s sanctuary without breaking stride. ‘How’s it going?’ asked one, in a Middle-Eastern accent. As they disappeared into the trees above him, he could hear them both laughing.

  But he made it. He reached the top.

  And there was nothing to be seen.

  Though the summit was as flat as he’d expected, it was all pine forest. Cooler and sweeter smelling, even muddy underfoot from little streams carrying away the last of the snow melt. But the trees that had blanketed the upper slopes of the precipice were now so densely packed that there was no view of the valley to be had at all.

  He wandered on despondently in search of the vista that might – just might – vindicate the whole mad exercise.

  And, two or three miles further on, he found it. A break in the trees and a breathtaking, bird’s eye view of the valley below. Clear and brilliant in the sunshine, and so distant that he could imagine it empty of tourists, cars, hotels, any trace of humankind. The moment needed to be celebrated and he pulled out his iPhone. But when he attempted to take a photograph there was no response. The iPhone’s battery, for no reason that he could understand, was – like its owner – quite exhausted.

  He settled down under the Douglas firs and slept a while.

  He awoke to the sound of a voice talking in a language he did not understand. Two hikers – perhaps the young men he’d seen earlier – were standing together among the trees with their backs towards him. One was talking into a cellphone. He was lucky to get a signal in such a remote area.

  It was time to move on.

  After the agonies of the ascent, the way back was a carpet ride. He passed two or three upward toiling couples, gasping and red-faced, and made it his duty to encourage them all. ‘Not far to go’ he piped, regardless of distance. But as he neared the bottom, his energy began to flag again. An overweight Texan in stetson and embroidered jeans asked him if it was far to the top. ‘Hours to go,’ he said bleakly. ‘It’s a brutal climb.’

  When he got back to Mirror Lake, flat and featureless as polished glass, the occupying army had grown to hundreds. He settled behind a family group at the water’s edge for a rest. On the other side of the water, down on his haunches photographing the reflected Douglas firs and mountains, was his breakfast acquaintance, Jack Wilson. Bryn edged back into the shadow of the trees and watched him.

  Though Wilson clearly possessed a top of the range camera, he did not appear to be a skilled photographer. He spent as much time fiddling with the settings and peering into the lens, as he did composing an image. Clouds passed across the sun while he puzzled at some baffling detail of functionality. Even the process of taking a picture was a pantomime of uncertainty: he shuffled up and down the edge of the lake, still on his haunches, searching for an angle; or experimented with lying flat on his stomach, zooming in and out, twiddling the focussing ring.

  In the end, his infinitely complex task seemed to defeat him and he stood up, and put his camera to his eye like a telescope, and started scanning the scenic backdrop to the lake. It was time for Bryn to leave. A crowd of hikers were coming down the valley trail; he slipped in amongst them and strolled back to the Village.

  That evening, as he trimmed his rather straggly academic beard and gazed at his tired reflection in the bathroom mirror, a plan settled in his mind. He would retrieve his hire car first thing in the morning and drive east out of Yosemite through the Tioga Pass. A few miles beyond the Park exit, his map showed a track which would take him to the unvisited wilderness of Twenty Lakes Basin. After he had explored that, he would travel on north into the deep solitude of the Cascades. It was pretty well in every detail what Udell Strange had advised at their dinner a month ago.

  Braced by a resolution well made, he settled down in front of the bedroom television with a can of huckleberry-flavoured beer. It would have been two or three cans had not the cleaner – he assumed it was her – removed them from his fridge and – insult upon injury – deposited the drained, squashed cans in the waste bin.

  When he turned on the set it came up with the last channel he would have chosen: he was just in time for ‘America’s Newsroom – your Fox News on the hour’. He lingered long enough to get the gist. The first item was about a shocking government plan to fund a new health service for the poor from a ‘robber’ tax on all forms of bank trading.

  The coverage majored on Wall Street’s reaction. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America representatives queued up to voice their outrage. Bryn remembered a line from an Edward Albee play: ‘We’re not a communal nation. Giving but not sharing, outgoing but not friendly.’ No spokesman was invited to give the other side of the argument.

  He went off in search of something, anything, more balanced than Fox; and landed on CNN. More millionaires’ television, but at least reporters were allowed a view of their own. Mad-eyed veteran anchor Richard Quest had been released from his London base for a special report on alarming developments in the Middle East. Something about a regime change in one of the Gulf states, with serious implications for the peace of the region. A ninety year old westward-leaning Sheikh overthrown by his Wahhabist, al-Qaida supporting son. Sabre rattling by the Israelis and an emergency session of the Knesset. A special United Nations envoy on her way to mediate between the alarmed parties.

  A bit too depressing.

  He flicked back to Fox and a story about yet another baseball player on the verge of beating Babe Ruth’s iconic home run record.

  This was followed by an item reporting an attempt by a group of senators to tack a wrecking amendment onto what the newscaster described as ‘another of the White House’s controversial liberal initiatives’. It was Bryn’s old friend: the Bill to renew the Fairness Doctrine for news and current affairs. The wrecking amendment characteristically had nothing to do with the Bill’s main business and sought to deregulate some National Parks s
o that their mineral rights could be exploited. A spokeswoman appeared for a new grassroots movement calling itself ‘The Friends of the Right’, supporting the proposal and inveighing against the President.

  This was cut short by an outburst of excitement as a new headline-busting story came in. A Hollywood starlet had been arrested for drunk-driving.

  His attention wandered. As he drained the last of his beer, he noticed with some irritation that the clock-radio by his bed was out by several hours. He knew it had been correct when it awoke him that morning. He leaned over to reset it. As he did so, it occurred to him that, bizarrely, it had been showing British Summer Time.

  Chapter 5

  The track, alternately tarmac and rutted dirt, ran north up a valley creek, with the dark shadow of Tioga Peak lying across its eastern side. After two or three miles it swerved abruptly right into a small parking lot which was where he left the car. Saddlebag Lake stretched away below, flat and silent. It was so early in the morning the mountain air still carried a sharp bite.

  He crossed a small dam and headed up the lake shoreline. The path led to the northern end of the lake and through a meadow of daisies and goldenrod, and upwards into a scrubby landscape of brown earth, scattered rocks and stunted pine trees. There were smaller lakes on the right hand side, their shorelines shrunk back by the summer drought. He passed a tinkling stream, and noticed for the first time a whiff of sulphur in the air. The same kind of smell, though less offensive, as he remembered from a visit to Yellowstone many years before.

  The going became harder. Falls of small stones and rocks littered the path and threatened his footing. Then the way turned downhill towards another silent lake, flatter and even more mirror-like than Saddleback. He crabbed his way towards it, sometimes on hands and feet with stones and small boulders tumbling away in little landslides of scree, until he reached the security of a rocky promontory overlooking the water. He sat down and unzipped a bag of chocolate bars and bananas and composed himself to enjoy the beauty of his surroundings.

  On the other side of the lake, a canyon wall rose towards the sky. Its rock face shone in the morning light like blue steel, a burnished memory of some mighty eruption millions of years ago. The landscape had the brilliant precision of a newly finished oil painting. The lake was so translucent he could see small fish feeding on the bottom twenty feet below. The silence was absolute and he revelled in it.

  Then from somewhere far away – or deep underground – there came a faint rumbling sound, like a distant motorway or an aircraft. It lasted for perhaps two minutes before the silence returned. A tiny ripple spread in concentric circles from the centre of the lake, until it lapped at the water’s edge, and died. A jumble of rocks and stones rolled down the far mountainside into the valley.

  He followed the path round the head of the water and crossed a stream by a pine log bridge. The way curved south past a series of ravishingly china blue lakes. Mountains began to crowd in from the north, with patches of snow still on their highest slopes. The granite rock face changed from blue through red to an almost porcelain white.

  Apart from a couple of backpackers far away on the skyline behind him, he saw no one else that morning. But around midday he reached a campsite where a group of young men had not yet begun to fold up their tents. He settled on a bench for a water break; and a friendly Australian offered him a can of beer, which he did not refuse. He asked them if anyone else had heard the strange rumble earlier in the morning. No one had.

  ‘It’s probably what you thought it was,’ said a hiker with a West Coast accent. ‘This is still earthquake country after all. I’ve been in Yosemite when the windows rattled. It’s no big deal. The last real quake was in ’89 but you still get micros around 2.4 Richter. Nothing to worry about.’

  The Australian chortled into his beer.

  ‘No big deal, matey? Isn’t that what you guys said before Mount St Helens?’

  ‘Yeah. Well,’ said the Californian, ‘you can always be wrong once. But I ain’t gonna panic till the frogs start migrating.’

  ‘The poor bastard lives in San Francisco,’ said the Australian, derisively.

  ‘It’s what you call a sense of perspective, kangaroo boy,’ retorted his mate.

  He left them happily breaking open a second six-pack, evidently settled in for a period. Not a bad way to see the wilderness. But Bryn was already beginning to feel tired – he wondered if he’d quite recovered from the previous day’s exertions – so he made his way back to the head of Saddlebag Lake where a water taxi was now ferrying less robust hikers to and from the parking lot. At five dollars it was a snip.

  At first he could not find his car. The once empty lot had completely filled up with vehicles and he supposed that was what had disoriented him. When he located it, it was away to the side, badly parked and facing the entrance. He checked the keys: they were still there, safe in his pocket. But when he went to open the driver’s door, it was unlocked. He sat behind the wheel, trying to puzzle it out. He poked around the back seat and in the boot: everything was normal enough. He tried to recall his behaviour earlier that morning. Was he so absentminded that he’d done this himself and simply forgotten? That way surely madness lay…

  He drove east out of the Pass and took the highway north towards the Cascades.

  The journey was more fatiguing than he had anticipated. Not for the first time he was reminded that distances in the American West, which on the map might look like a taxi ride, can roll on for hours. The steep mountain highways were as packed with switchbacks as an Olympic grand slalom. He had intended to keep going until he reached Lassen National Park. But late in the afternoon, after Lake Tahoe had drifted by on the right, he decided instead to look for somewhere to eat and spend the night.

  By now he was passing through the little town of Truckee. Too hungry to bother about refinement, he pulled up at a roadside takeaway and ordered the ‘pint-sized’ version of the Mountain High Big Hoss Meathouse Pie with gluten-free crust (gluten not being an option); and took a bottle of Arrowhead water from the walk-in cooler. But when it arrived, the pint-sized portion – as he should perhaps have anticipated – looked sufficient to feed a troop of ravenous boy scouts.

  He sat in the car with the open carton beside him. Even one slice (one of six) was a challenge. He took a diversionary slurp from the water bottle.

  Truckee. He had assumed this to be a typical quaintly-named small American town that nobody ever hears of and no stranger visits. But the word had triggered some inaccessible memory that troubled him. He had that same prickling sense of foreboding that had assailed him when he’d stepped out on the balcony in Bayreuth. He pushed the pie box across to the passenger seat and drove on.

  A street sign gave him the answer. He was on the Donner Pass Road; and travelling through the site of the most terrible event in the history of nineteenth century American migration. He recalled a wagon train of pioneers, trekking thousands of miles from the east, arriving exhausted and out of supplies in these same mountains, after a disastrous short cut which had added weeks to their schedule. Here they were stranded through a terrible winter, succumbing progressively to starvation, exposure, sickness and – most notoriously – cannibalism.

  Something he might explore tomorrow, if time permitted…

  He continued on across a motorway and followed the shoreline of a lake until he found a motel. A ski-lodge in the winter season, it was now making the best it could out of the local boating and fishing. There was no difficulty getting a room and he settled down in front of the television with his Brobdingnagian feast on the table beside him.

  He was in a low mood and the news channels were a vision of dystopia. Politics and yet more politics. Corporate fury at the government’s plan to fund its health service directly from a tax on Wall Street. Two major banks threatening to move their centres of operation to a country more amenable to unregulated independence. Not Switzerland or Liechtenstein or any of the usual suspects, but – and hardly astoni
shing any more – post-Soviet Russia.

  It was an open secret that the old Cold War enemy, looking to become more capitalist than Wall Street, had its ambitions set on a global financial role. Excellent terms were on offer to any enterprise that might wish to relocate to Moscow. A spokesman for the American Bankers Association signally failed to deny that an overseas move was an option for its members. The channel’s political pundit predicted a new Russian hegemony by stealth, gathering more international influence than was ever achieved by Stalin. But was it ‘merely bluff and bluster’ to force the President to abandon her plans? Would she be able to hold out against the mounting pressures?

  He put down the unsubdued slice of pizza pie and reached for his glass of water. The surface of the liquid was vibrating. Not radiating in a concentric pattern as on the Yosemite lake – more a faint all-over shivering of the meniscus. And just for a few seconds. It had faded away before his fingers reached the glass.

  The guestbook lay on the table, open on the first page: the usual instructions about what to do in case of fire. Bryn flipped to the second page.

  ‘EARTHQUAKE

  Most earthquakes last only a few seconds, doing little, if any damage. In the event of an earthquake please remain calm. Avoid all glass such as windows and mirrors. Get to your knees, bend down and cover the back of your neck and ride the quake out. After the quake has stopped, safely exit your room, walk to the nearest accessible exit and leave the building. Go to the Central Checkpoint in the back parking lot (see map on back of this page)… ’

  In the background the news agenda moved on to the unfortunate starlet picked up for drunk driving, who had now also been charged with racist abuse of the arresting officer.

  The vibration did not return.

  In the morning, when he went to the welcome desk to pay the bill, a single distracted young woman was on duty. While he waited for her to come off the phone, he browsed through the Visitors’ Book. The entries were relentlessly cheerful, as frequently from children as adults. He flicked back a week or two in case anyone had been bold enough to slip in a criticism, until he came across one heavily underlined comment (‘Preevius persons pizza still in bin’) by a guest signing himself – with a gothic flourish – as ‘Richard Wagner’.