Becoming Chloe

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I pull on my boots and step out of the tent, and it’s still nearly dark. Nearly, but not quite. I breathe. The air is thin up here and yet there’s something superior about it. Maybe that was the problem with the air in the city. Maybe it was too damn thick.

  Chloe comes out to stand with me, and she has her boots on, and a look in her eyes that tells me she’s ready to go. I have misgivings about climbing a mountain in the snow. But then, part of the purpose of this trip is to help leave misgivings behind. Even if we can’t make the climb. What good were the advance misgivings? How did I improve things with my worry? I take a big deep breath of cold mountain air and throw them away. I won’t say throw them to the wind because fortunately there is no wind. But when I breathe out again they seem to be gone.

  I load up the backpack with snacks. Chocolate and string cheese and trail mix and dried fruit. And the disposable camera I bought. We zip most of the bottled water into our jackets to keep it warm. I tie the snowshoes to one strap of the pack, Randy’s sign to the other. I eat a double handful of trail mix. Hold some out for Chloe and she takes a small handful. But it’s so hard for her to eat when she’s excited. She works off a whole different source of energy.

  Then we hit the trailhead and climb.

  We still haven’t said a word to each other, or needed to.

  The sun gradually comes out to meet us. Gradually shows us where we really are. A kind of slow surprise. It takes us about an hour or an hour and a half to reach the first stopping point, which, according to my little trail map, is Bull-of-the-Woods pasture. I don’t wear a watch, though. I haven’t worn one in as long as I can remember. So I’m guessing about the time.

  So far it’s pretty easy going, though according to the brochure we’re now at about 10,800 feet. We’ve hit a lot of patches of snow, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to break out the snowshoes yet, and fortunately we’ve just barely managed to squeak by without them. The surface of the snow is frozen hard from the cold night temperatures, so we can take two or three gentle steps on it before breaking through, sometimes to our waists. But it worries me a little, using snowshoes. Especially since I’ve never used them before.

  There are two tents set up in the Bull-of-the-Woods pasture. People who, I suppose, climbed this far and then camped before going farther. But they’re either back on the trail now or still asleep, because nothing and no one stirs up here.

  We drink a little water. I eat some dried fruit and another handful of trail mix. Chloe makes a face and shakes her head. Then she looks at my face and whatever she sees there convinces her. She rummages around in the pack and finds a chocolate bar, and eats two squares. Eats them like they were medicine.

  Then we climb on. We still haven’t broken the silence of this morning.

  The sun is more or less up now, the sky a faded white-blue. We climb through the forest for what seems like a long time. The altitude is becoming more of a problem. For me. Chloe seems to be doing fine. I haven’t thought of it for years, but when I was a kid, my dad took us to the mountains and it made me throw up. Altitude sickness, which I haven’t heard mentioned since. But I remember it was one more in a long string of demerits I earned on my father’s list. One more incident he could file away to prove I wasn’t him.

  I’m breathing harder now, and my head is pounding, and my heart is pounding, and I pray I’m not about to throw up. After a steep mile of trying not to think about it, I drop to my knees in the snow, thinking it’s inevitable. Prepared to hurl my trail snacks into the perfect, untouched whiteness. Chloe gets down on her knees beside me and holds my forehead the way I always used to do for her. But nothing happens. My stomach steadies, and nothing happens, except for my knees getting wet and cold.

  “Poor Jordy,” she says. Breaks the stillness for the first time today. We hold still and listen to the words, the voice, settle into the air, slightly changing the mountain atmosphere.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

  I stumble to my feet and we walk on.

  After a while, the trail drops, which I was not prepared for. Drops nearly five hundred feet into an open basin. It’s heartbreaking, because when we cross that basin we just have to ascend the five hundred feet again on the other side. On the other hand, it feels good to pick our way downhill for a change. It’s a break I needed.

  When we drop down into the basin, I step out onto the snowpack and punch through to my chest. I’m standing in snow literally up to my chest.

  Chloe laughs. “Must be why Randy gave us snowshoes.”

  “Must be,” I say.

  I wrestle and climb my way back out again, and we strap on the snowshoes and step out tentatively and just stand there looking at each other. I think we’re both expecting to fall through, but of course we don’t. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought. What did I think? I can’t remember. Then Chloe takes a step. Then I take a step. It’s weird. They’re weird steps because you have to keep your feet so far apart. Chloe takes about three more test steps, then laughs out loud and takes off running. Well, maybe running is the wrong word. It’s more of a wild, awkward dance, a spraddle-legged waddle. I’m infected by her joy, so I try it, too, but after ten paces or so the lack of oxygen gets me. I clump slowly along, watching Chloe dance and then stop and wait for me to catch up. Then dance. Then stop and wait for me to catch up.

  At the far side of the basin she breaks the still again. She says, “Even if this was the only thing I ever did in my whole life, it would be worth having a life just to do this.”

  We zigzag up a series of switchbacks to reach the summit. Marmots scurry back and forth across the trail, and when we stop for a snack, they come close, begging for a handout. Our only real clue, so far, that this road has been traveled by many others. Of course, I only know they’re marmots because the brochure tells me so. I might have called them groundhogs or prairie dogs, but based on the list of mammals we might expect to see, this has got to be them. Now, weirdly, the brochure said marmots hibernate in the winter. But it also said that if you feed wild animals, they stop acting naturally. Maybe you don’t hibernate when there are trail snacks to be gained. Or maybe we’re just not that deep into winter. Chloe throws them bits of trail mix to avoid eating it herself, and they plow through the snow to claim it.

  By the time we reach what I think is the summit, I confess I’m in bad shape. We’ve been walking this ridge for what seems like hours. I feel like I can’t breathe. I’m stopping to rest every few minutes. My feet ache and my hips ache. The sun is nearly overhead. I think if I have to walk one more yard, I’ll just fall over and die. Or wish I could.

  Then we reach the plaque mounted on the peak and it announces that we are actually on Mount Walter. Named for a guy named H. D. Walter, who loved these mountains. Just for a split second I find myself wondering why anybody would.

  “There’s the summit up there,” Chloe says.

  And she’s right of course. This is a kind of false summit, about twenty feet lower and half a mile short of the real thing. I sit down hard on the rocky ground, fortunately free of snow.

  “Want me to go on ahead and put the sign up?” she asks.

  “I have to take pictures of you doing it,” I say, barely able to breathe enough to say it.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “If this is so close to heaven, how come there’s hardly any air?”

  “Well, the closer you get to heaven,” Chloe says, “the less air there is, because when you get to heaven for real you don’t need to breathe anymore.”

  I have to admit that makes sense. A strange kind of sense, but sense nonetheless.

  “You know,” she says, “you’re getting really good at finding beautiful things.”

  “Did I find this?”

  “Sure. It was your idea to sell the truck and hitchhike. So you got us to Randy. So you got us here.”

  “I think I’m glad,” I say, because I still can’t really breathe.

  “You know you are, Jordy.
Just because there’s no air doesn’t mean you’re not glad.”

  We sit for a few minutes, then walk the ridge to the real Wheeler. I push all thoughts out of my head and do it. And, you know, it’s worth it. It nearly kills me, but it’s worth it.

  The view is spectacular, and there’s something about standing on the top of a mountain you personally climbed at great sacrifice. It means something. The sky is brilliant blue. In every direction we see snowy mountain after snowy mountain after snowy mountain.

  Chloe stands with her eyes closed, her head thrown back, as if having a silent conversation with heaven. “Randy is happy,” she says.

  “Good.”

  “You can’t point to this joy, Jordy. You’d have to point everywhere at once. And if you point everywhere at once, then you’re not really pointing anywhere at all.”

  I look around, breathe, close my eyes. See Randy’s face and experience this briefly for him. Then I look around at the view again. And I realize that for all the joy we’ve seen so far, I’ve allowed it all to remain outside of me. It’s always been over there. Look, over there. Some joy just went by. A little more just flew by. And when I realize that, I let it into me. And I become the joy. Just for a split second, I think I do.

  Chloe says, “What’s that thing?”

  She’s pointing to a heavy metal cylinder shaped like a miniature cannon. It’s on the stone under the Wheeler Peak plaque. I open it and find it’s a registry. A guest book of sorts.

  “It’s a thing that lets you sign your name so everybody knows you were here.”

  “Oh, good,” she says. “Do that, Jordy, okay?”

  So I write the date, and then the names in our party.

  I write, “Chloe, Jordy the Cellar King, and Randy Banyan were here, with joy.”

  I take a picture of Chloe holding the sign and she takes one of me holding it. Then I stamp it into the ground with the heel of my boot, and Chloe takes pictures while I do. It’s hard because the ground is frozen. But the stake is sharp, because Randy knew the ground would be frozen. It goes in because Randy designed it to.

  “I wish we could have a picture of us on the mountain,” Chloe says. “That would be a good thing to have. Not that I won’t remember this anyway. But still, it would be nice.”

  I’m thinking of maybe holding the camera at arm’s length and taking a chance on what we’d get. Just as I’m about to try it, we see the first people we’ve seen since yesterday. Two young guys. They’re just there suddenly, sharing the peak with us, out of nowhere. There was nobody on the trail behind us, I know there wasn’t. One of them shouts triumphantly and throws his hands in the air and leaves them there a long time.

  The other says, “Hey. Take a picture of me and my brother?”

  “If you’ll return the favor,” I say.

  “You bet, man. No problem.”

  “Where did you guys come from? We didn’t see you on the trail.”

  “Oh, we took the other trail. The one that comes up from Williams Lake. It’s steep, man. Two thousand feet nearly straight up. Scree slopes all the way. It was great. We haven’t seen anybody else all morning, till we saw you guys. You see anybody?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Yes,” Chloe says. When I look at her questioningly she says, “We saw those marmots.”

  “Oh. I wasn’t counting the marmots.”

  “How can you not count the marmots?” Chloe says.

  The following morning we’re back in our base camp. I lie awake a long time thinking Chloe will wake up. But she doesn’t, and I need to pee.

  I unzip my bag and struggle into my boots and out of the tent, realizing with each step of the way how much pain I’m in. How stiff I am. My hips ache and feel tight, and there’s a saddle of muscles between them that feels like it’s contracted and then locked into place. I try to stretch a little, but it’s no real use. It’s just going to be a tough day. There are a few other tents within sight, so I have to walk a good ways to find a private spot to pee.

  When I get back, Chloe is still sleeping. I lie down behind her and bump her gently with my whole body at once. “Hey, sleepyhead. All ready to bike back to Angel Fire?”

  “No,” she says. “Not today. Please? I want to stay here another day.”

  “Are you okay? Are you tired?”

  “I’m fine. I just want to be not done climbing a mountain. I don’t want it to be over.”

  “I’m not sure we have enough food and water for that. Unless I bike out and get more.”

  “Could you do that, Jordy? I sure would appreciate it. And could you go out and find some firewood, too? A fire would be nice, so we could warm up a little.”

  When I come back to camp with food in the backpack and an armload of firewood, it’s nearly noon. The sun is straight up over our heads. Chloe has been joined by two large horned animals. Something in the deer family. Based on my reading, I’d have to say they’re either antelope, mule deer, or elk, but I’ll be damned if I know which.

  Chloe is holding out a handful of trail mix and they’re trying to decide if they’re willing to take it from her hand. Then their heads come up and they see me and bound away.

  “I’m sorry I chased off your friends,” I say.

  “Wasn’t your fault,” she says. “It was their choice to make.”

  I build a small fire, and we sit on both pads and both sleeping bags and warm ourselves by it. Every hour or so I go off and find a few more sticks of deadfall to feed into the flames.

  Around dusk it begins to snow, but gently. Small, light flakes. I expect them to hit the fire and sizzle, but instead the heat makes them curl away or rise again, and they evaporate in the air, as far as I can tell. Chloe tells me she’s sorry she’s not ready to go back.

  I tell her I’m not one bit sorry, and I mean it.

  We’ve just come through Gallup, and we’re bearing down on the Grand Canyon. A couple of days will do it. Chloe is pedaling faster, like she can smell it.

  Things are better than they’ve ever been, we’re both feeling happy, it’s a beautiful day, and then all of a sudden a car comes by and runs us off the road.

  I don’t think he does it on purpose. But he does it. Swerves over, and doesn’t hit us, but forces us to plow off the road to avoid the collision. I smack up against a barbed-wire fence, which rips my jeans and part of my leg, and then I fall over the handlebars onto my hands. I look up just as I’m falling and I get a flash of the car, the driver reaching down, his head down, like he’s digging for something on the passenger-side floor.

  I get up and run to Chloe, who missed the fence. She landed in a place where the fence line breaks for a driveway. So she came down on asphalt, and she somehow managed to get her foot caught in the spokes of the bike. She’s also holding her wrist, like she hurt it when she landed on it, and the heels of her hands are bloody.

  I look up, expecting the car to stop, but it never does. The guy apparently never sees what he’s done. He just drives on like nothing ever happened.

  “You okay, Chlo?”

  “Ow. Ow, my foot, Jordy. Help me get my foot out.”

  I try to free it but the bike wheel turns slightly and Chloe screams. That’s when I realize her foot isn’t just sore. It’s injured.

  Then there’s a man standing behind us, and he wants to know if we’re okay.

  “Not really,” I say. “Her foot is caught, and she’s hurt.”

  We work together, and I hold the bike wheel so it can’t turn and he grabs the spokes and bends them out so her foot slips free. It really doesn’t matter what happens with the bike, anyway. Chloe is hurt, and besides, the wheel is all bent and screwed up from the fall.

  Chloe puts one arm over each of our shoulders and we carry her back to this guy’s car. He’s got a really nice Mercedes-Benz. He’s got a cell phone. He makes calls to find out where there’s a hospital. A general hospital. The kind of place that won’t tell you to buzz off if you have no insurance. Meanwhile, I take the trailers a
part from the bikes and load everything into this guy’s trunk. It doesn’t close and we don’t have rope, so we just drive away with it open.

  “I don’t believe that guy,” he says. “He never even saw what he did. He wasn’t even looking at the road. People drive like idiots. People can be such assholes.”

  I say nothing, because I appreciate his help so much, but I was just making some headway getting Chloe to think people are mostly decent.

  “Jordy is trying to show me that people are okay,” Chloe says. It comes out with a long breath, kind of tight and strained, and I can tell she’s in a lot of pain.

  “Well, that asshole certainly didn’t help,” he says.

  We sit in the hospital cafeteria for a long time. Chloe has a big, clunky cast on her left foot and a brace on her right wrist. I have five stitches in my right thigh and a series of bandages on the smaller cuts and tears. The bikes are locked up out front, and I can only hope that all of our stuff is still with them. That our saddlebags and trailers are still full.

  Chloe is staring at a bottle of Vicodin that I know she won’t take.

  “I guess we’ll have to rethink our travel plans,” I say.

  “Oh, please, Jordy. I want to see the Grand Canyon so much.”

  “We’ll see it, Chlo, I don’t mean we shouldn’t go, but we obviously can’t bike there now.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I guess I’ll sell the bikes and we’ll go back to hitchhiking.”

  “We’ll have an awful lot of stuff to carry.”

  And Chloe will be on crutches, so I’ll pretty much have to carry it. Maybe we can wheel one or both of those bike trailers by hand.

  “Well, we’ll ditch the cold-weather gear. It’s almost spring and we’re headed to Arizona.”

  “It gets cold at night in the desert. Didn’t you tell me that? We might need the jackets.”

  “Maybe. I’m thinking the snowshoes can go.”

  Chloe laughs, which I know is hard for her. I can see she’s in an awful lot of pain.

  “Why did that guy do that, Jordy? We weren’t doing anything to him.”