“You’re just saying what I’ve been saying,” said Dad. “Word for word. And I’m glad you’ve been listening to your dad, but what about you?”
This was tougher than any test I took at school.
Mom stepped in: “What are your feelings on 9/11? Why doesn’t the song seem right to you?”
“My feelings … Okay. I think about what I saw on TV: firefighters going up the stairs, flight after flight, while people were coming down—” This was one of the images that kept coming back to me. “And then the towers just going down.”
Dad reached over and put his hand over mine. Mom got up and rubbed my shoulders, stroked my hair back away from my neck. I shrugged her off.
“And then we go over there and just start bombing Afghanistan. I mean, the Taliban was terrible, but what about all those kids,” I choked, “those innocent little kids who got blown up? And everybody here is all fired up and proud to be an American, but why does everybody have to kill each other?”
I was about to lose it.
“Okay, honey, okay.” This time I leaned back into her as she stood behind me, hands on my shoulder, bending to kiss the top of my head.
“But why?” I pulled away again.
“We don’t have any answers, Cass,” said Dad, “but you’re asking the right questions.”
“You give us hope, honey,” said Mom.
“How can I? I’m so pathetic.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I don’t have any hope. There is none.”
“You are wrong, daughter,” said Dad. “You’re right about everything else—but about that one thing, you’re mistaken.”
I wiped the tears I’d been trying to hold back and blew my nose. Common sense told me not to argue with him on this point, but he’s the one who is wrong. He’s right about everything else, but about this one thing, he’s mistaken.
5 September
Not too bad today. I was so nervous that I wasn’t really stretching the truth when I told Mr. Kimble that I felt a little sick and asked if I could sit down. I felt better after they rehearsed the hated song, which was coming together marvelously, probably due to the quality of the karaoke soundtrack they were singing with. Now that’s what I call music.
Dad said tonight that he would call my teacher, get me excused from the song. Usually, he said, he would have me fight my own battles, but this was clearly too upsetting. And what good was it to have parents, especially one who’s a lawyer, if they didn’t argue your case for you? I said no, told him if he made so much as one call to the school I’d try out for a solo on the hated song, just for spite.
6 September
Instead of being sick today, I just stood there and didn’t sing. When Mr. Kimble started looking at me, I mouthed the words a little bit. I probably shouldn’t have, but I haven’t decided what to do. For sure I don’t want Dad to call. But what’s the alternative? I’ve always been taught to stand up for what I believe. Not that it does any good.
Back in fifth grade, I stood up for my beliefs by trying to convert my family to veganism, mostly by spoiling the meal with information about what they were eating.
“Enjoying your dead, skinned, charred bird, Mother?”
“Father, did you know that cheese is made with the lining of a baby cow’s stomach?”
The trouble is, he did.
“Yes, daughter, I know what rennet is, and so did you, even before the Persons for Eatable Table Animals got ahold of your mind with their online brainwashing. In fact, we sat at this very table and read about rennet when you were five. Have you forgotten your Laura Ingalls Wilder?”
“Actually, Gale,” said Mom, “I think you’re forgetting too. Your Cassandra was pretty upset by the pig and calf butchering.”
“And after Charlotte’s Web,” said Sean, “she was a vegetarian for a couple of weeks. And that was when she only ate five things.”
“You’re right,” said Dad. “Removing hot dogs and bacon from her diet limited her to milk, bread, and fruit.”
“Which is really—” I began, only to be interrupted by Mom.
“And candy—anything sweet was always the fifth food group. I blame it on that nurse who put sugar-water on my nipple to try to get you to latch on. You were even fussy on the breast. Anything I ate, you could taste.”
“Do I have to hear another conversation about Cassie the Picky Eater?”
“Do we have to listen to another sermon,” said Dad, “about poor animals and the barbarisms of food production?”
Discouraged by the futility of talking, I tried direct action and had my own little Boston Meat Party. On trash pickup day, I threw away every animal product in the kitchen. Cans of tuna, frozen steaks, eggs, macaroni and cheese—all of it in the trash. The milk and cream I poured out into the sink, leaving the empty jugs in the fridge for dramatic effect.
Mom and Dad were stunned.
“Cassie, I can’t believe you would waste all that food,” Mom said.
“I don’t consider carrion to be food.”
“But think of all the people in the world who don’t have enough of any kind of food? It’s an insult to them—and to the animals who produced it.”
“If you took all the grain that goes to feed livestock, and used it for people instead, then people wouldn’t have to starve,” I replied.
“This is insufferable,” said Dad. “To be tyrannized by an eleven-year-old! I’m going to the store to get some steaks, a rack of lamb, twenty pounds of veal cutlet, a wheel of extra-rennet Brie, and probably a fur coat. And you, little girl, will get no allowance until you’ve paid restitution.”
I wasn’t really taking him seriously because he was going off like he always did. So I pushed it a little more. “The tyranny is us over the animals, Dad. I’m just being the voice of the voiceless—”
When I saw how he was looking at me, I stopped. I looked at Mom. She was really mad, too.
“Cassie,” she said. “What are you trying to do here? Exactly what do you hope to accomplish?”
I wanted a “cruelty-free zone.” I wanted nobody to eat animal foods or use products made from dead animals or tested on live ones. What I got was months of no allowance and extra chores until I had paid for everything that I ditched. They might have eaten a little less meat and looked at their labels a little more carefully afterwards, but they weren’t big carnivores to begin with.
And I guess I didn’t learn my lesson, because that year I ruined an old tradition in the cause of animal rights. Every year on New Year’s Day, no matter what the weather, we went fishing in the Canyon. Some years it’s been miserably cold, and we’ve spent more time warming up with coffee and hot chocolate than standing in the freezing river fighting the wind. But this year, fifth grade, it was sunny and warm when we started on the trail to the bottom of the reservoir dam.
In previous years I had come along as a fisher-girl, but this year, I was giving it up. Despite the fact that in our family we rarely kill fish, I thought it was cruel. Catch and release is worse than fishing for food. What’s the point of fooling the poor things just so you can make them fight for their lives and then, godlike, release them?
We had a lot of discussions, with me asking things like, “How would you like it if your steak had a big metal hook in it, and you got dragged by your lip to the top of the sky?” But their fly-fishing was the only thing that connected them to their primitive roots, the mystery of the hunt or some such nonsense, according to Mom. So I pretended to be resigned to it, just coming along for the ride.
But as soon as they rigged up and were ready to try out the pool below the dam, I let fly with a big rock that splashed, gloriously, just where Sean was about to cast.
Sean and Dad looked at the river as a big, ringed wave raced outwards, lapping the bank and dispersin
g into the fast current of the channel. They just stood there, and I almost regretted it, seeing their high spirits decline along with the waves from my rock.
Dad gave me a hurt look. Sean carefully put down his fishing rod. And then he came after me, lumbering up the hill in his waders and big felt-bottomed boots. Before I thought to run, he was on me, pushing me down on the gravel scree.
“You little brat! You’re such a brat!”
“Go ahead, beat up your little sister, just like you beat up the poor fishies.”
Since my down jacket had me cushioned, he wasn’t really hurting me, but he was scaring me a lot, sitting on me and practically spitting into my face.
“I should, you brat, you stupid little brat!”
“Go ahead, tough guy!”
“You’ve ruined it! Ruined it.”
Dad strolled up, and instead of pulling Sean off, he put a hand on his shoulder.
Sean stopped yelling and grinding my arms into the ground. He got up.
It’s the only time we ever had a physical fight—if you can call it that. And I gotta say that it doesn’t feel great to bring your sixteen-year-old brother to violence. It might if he were a mean brother, picking on me and ditching me when his friends were around. But Sean was always the sweetest brother in the world. I guess I reduced him and Dad to enemies in my crusade to, as they saw it, keep a few trout from getting sore lips.
I know there are cruel fathers in the world—dads who would have given us both a couple of cuffs and maybe devised something really bad for me, like making me wade into the icy river and retrieve the stone I had thrown. But all mine did was stand looking at me, using his silence to tell me how far over the line I had strayed.
“Let’s go home, kids,” he said, finally. “No fish will bleed this day.”
7 September
Great news, Di—I’m surrounded by the freshness of morning in the mountains, with the sunshine streaming in my tipi door. When Dad came home last night, he said he’d gotten a plea bargain on what was going to be a mother of a trial on Monday. So we came up here after all. He and Mom were for going this morning, but I talked them into coming up last night. We hit the Tex-Mex in Woodland Park for dinner and went to bed in the mountains.
I got my tipi the summer after the terrible New Year’s, and we all spent a lot of time at the cabin that year. I had given up soccer, and Sean spent almost the whole summer up here by himself. He was doing a lot of guiding, taking tourists out fishing. Most parents might not want their seventeen-year-old kids at their cabins alone, but Sean is not the party-boy type.
I loved the tipi because it was my own private place, and because it was just one step closer to being outside. On rainy days, I would stay out here reading and listening to the drops on the canvas. On sunny days, I would open the smoke-hole and roll up the sides, feeling the cool breeze as I lay around in the shade.
I read up a storm that summer, mostly novels I brought with me but also some of the cabin books. I admit that I was exaggerating when I said before, all cool, about natural history, “Call me a freak—I like the stuff.” I’m not some Thomas Jefferson, devouring scientific and philosophical texts for hours on end. The only books I devour are novels, but I started to enjoy a sampling of nature writing that summer.
As I read about the land, I began to read the land itself, exploring with Mom, sometimes with Sean or Dad. Mostly I hiked alone, carrying a notebook to record my “observations.” I was almost twelve then and was allowed on solo walks as long as I didn’t climb any rocks taller than I was or steeper than 45 degrees. I also had to leave a route and return time.
I’ve known this place my whole life, but I really began to know it that year. I came to see how all the little valleys and meadows and high ridges connected, what the easy ways around were, and what climbs led to dead-end rock walls or sheer drop-offs. Toward the end of the summer, I had the comforting sensation of coming by new routes to familiar places, then returning home by the old paths.
Dad accused me of becoming a Taoist hermit and called me “Cassandra Wannabe Pocahontas”—or was that the next summer, when I read Lao Tzu, Black Elk, and the biography of Crazy Horse? I guess that summer it was “tree-hugger” and “Abbey’s Acolyte,” though the gist of it was the same: he teased me for not hanging out at the mall with my friends because he was proud that I was different, but maybe a little worried as well.
Mom encouraged me to share my interests, to find friends who would dig the mountains the way I did. Right.
And I suppose it’s no wonder that I was in for it when school started in sixth grade. My head was still in a cloud wrapped around the summit of the Goat-horn, and I was suddenly tall enough to tower over everyone else in the hall. Among the other barbs flung at me by former friends, I forgot to mention “Mountain Girl,” which seemed to be some sort of double- or triple- entendre.
I have since wondered what I’d done wrong. Was I acting stuck-up? I don’t think so, but I have to admit it: I thought there were more important things than shopping, boy bands, and whatever else they obsessed on. Mostly I was oblivious to them, which must have made me a target, right? I didn’t notice things like the fact that my jeans were floating four inches above the ground until I was being teased about it.
Fortunately, Mom had given up on dragging me to the mall. She took my measurements, gave me a stack of catalogs, and made me circle at least fifteen things I would wear. That has become the tradition, twice a year, whether I need it or not.
And with the way I was growing, Mom became obsessed with my nutrition, reminding me that my health was more important than my ideals. I wasn’t convinced this was the case, but I knew better than to argue.
“Two glasses of soy milk only give you half the calcium a normal person needs. With the bone mass you’re adding, you need four times that. Your genes have programmed you to be tall—you can be tall with strong bones, or brittle and stooped.”
“Okay, don’t get hysterical.”
“Well, your calcium is still sitting here and so is last night’s iron.”
“But iron makes me sick.”
“Take it with food. A young woman needs iron.”
Since I had done plenty of research on veganism, I didn’t think she needed to be so obsessive about it. But it did look like I was going to shoot up to about six feet in six months, which is what happened, and thanks to all the soy milk and fossilized seashells she jammed down my gob, I think my bones are solid.
School that year doesn’t warrant more than another paragraph. I did my work and kept to myself. My teachers were pretty nice if they weren’t in bad moods. By mid-year Sophia and Gwen had invited me to eat with them, so at least I didn’t have to pick my way aimlessly through the hostile lunch tables. Then Hannah found us, and we had the safety of numbers.
It’s just starting to rain, after half an hour of rumbling thunder and wind gusting around outside. I’m going to make a dash for the cabin before it gets too bad. Must be about dinnertime too.
“Did you know that Mr. Griffin sponsors two clubs?” Mom said as she poured herself some wine and topped off Dad’s.
“I don’t wish to belong,” I said.
“He does a writing club and also has a Tolkien group. Sean loved him. I was so upset when he went down to seventh grade and you couldn’t have him.”
“So here’s your chance,” said Dad, “to hang out with the coolest teacher ever.”
“Just go to one meeting of each. See if you like it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“A little belonging wouldn’t be such a bad … ”
“I said okay, Mom. I’ll try it.”
It was still raining when I went back out to my tipi, and I had a little leak dripping down one of the poles. I shifted my cot over to the other side, put on my rain parka, left the obligatory note, and went out
to the Carrock.
The scent of willows rose in the misty air along with the sound of water trickling in the meadow wash. The rain stopped, but since the Carrock was slick and too wet for sitting, I stood beside it watching the clouds blowing free of the stars.
A coyote gave a series of barks, rising into a thin, yipping howl.
I waited to hear an answer, but none came. Then a breeze swept past me, upslope, and the clouds blew off the moon. Little coyote got himself going again, and the Goat-horn shone with new snow under the half-moon, as answering howls drifted from the sunset rocks and ridges in the east where the city light glowed. All else was still as the land and the plants absorbed the rain, and the clouds again covered the moon.
8 September
Though I was afraid we’d have to leave early, Mom and Dad wanted to linger, too, and Mom and I took a long hike up to the saddle beneath the Goat-horn.
We followed the creek until it veered west under the Goat-horn ridge. The trail ends there, and we angled our way through the worst part: a steep section under the trees where fallen timber lies all over the place and big boulders stand in every gap. Traversing back and forth, climbing over, under, and around logs and squeezing between trees and rocks, it was impossible to judge distance or direction. The grade of the mountainside was our only guide—so we just went up.
When the trees thinned into scattered limber pines and bristlecones, we emerged right beneath the saddle. Today’s new snow lay unmelted and undisturbed all over the north-facing bowl like brilliant and slippery icing. We made our way slowly up, and on the ridge-top we found a snug, south-facing niche where we stopped for lunch.
The view was glorious—high peaks distant and near. To the west, the Collegiates, to the south, the Sangres, and to the east—across and above us—the Peak stood huge and snow-dusted, one giant piece of granite. Below us, two little reservoirs reflected the blue.
I remembered a trip to the reservoirs with Sean the summer before last. He’d hauled all his fishing gear up there, and while he fished the upper lake, Mom and I looked for wildflowers, then settled in on the rocks like lizards in the sun. It was mid-July and—unusual for that altitude—windless and hot.
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