Still, Miranda tried to picture it: Kat, twelve years younger, stars for eyes, bouncing in her seat on dissection day, obsessively checking her answers against the textbooks.
Miranda stopped. The mental images of her mother were starting to look uncomfortably familiar.
“I wanted to work with animals,” Kat was saying. “A zoo technician, maybe, or a trainer — I don’t know. I didn’t get far enough into the program to get specific.”
Miranda leaned into the turn as Kat merged onto the freeway. “I’ve always known what I want to do.”
“Then you’re one of the lucky ones.” Kat put on her blinker and then forgot about it — Miranda listened to its click-click, click-click until it became incessant.
She didn’t feel lucky.
“But why not study real — I mean . . .” Miranda redirected. “Why not study animals that are easier to find?” Her mother could be tracking giraffes on safari, or studying the critters in the hills beyond their hometown — she’d let any kid in the school come over and be around her mother, if that was the case.
“I don’t know, Bean.” Kat pointed at a billboard directing interested tourists off the next exit to a museum of pioneer artifacts. “People will line up to stand six feet away from a roped-off wagon wheel, but they don’t care that there’s been over four hundred reports of a ghost in the museum basement. Or there —” She gestured to the other side of the freeway. “People will drive thirty miles off the main road to go see America’s largest string cheese, but if they’d go a few miles farther west, they’d be in the same place where someone spotted the Batsquatch last spring.”
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “The world is full of wonders, Bean,” she said, “but hardly anybody seems to see it except me.”
Out the window, Miranda’s eyes found a puffy cloud, fat and soft on one side, fading out to long, white sky-ice on the other. Kat would call it an elephant in the air; Miranda would call it what it was: concentrated water vapor.
Maybe Kat thought she was more perceptive than the rest of the world, but Miranda knew the truth — living with your head in the clouds was easy.
You could look at a cloud and see whatever you wanted to.
Miranda filled in the details of her mother’s résumé and considered it. It was pretty bleak — unfinished degree, limited work experience, and this giant gap between a real job and this — this thing Kat was doing now. But Miranda knew it wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it. For example, instead of saying her mother had dropped out of college, Miranda could write that Kat “left to pursue better opportunities.” Or here — instead of saying Kat worked as a dental receptionist, Miranda could call her a “patient/doctor coordinator.”
She stopped writing. There was a rare silence in the car, the murmur of the Critter Mobile’s tires on the road pulsing up and into the seats. Kat’s eyes were far-flung — something from the conversation had made her pensive.
“Except us, you mean.”
“What was that, Bean?”
“Nobody sees the wonder except us.”
This statement had the exact effect Miranda was hoping for — Kat burst into a smile, her teeth still tinged purple-blue from her Slushie. “That’s right, Bean. Just you and me against the world.”
Miranda leaned back into her seat and stared out at the rushing landscape. I will not let you fall. I will not let you fall. I will not let you fall.
She recited it over and over until the guilt stopped gnawing and the turnoff for the Batsquatch was only a memory behind them.
Miranda thought she knew forests — how large their trees could grow, how green their leaves could get, how heartbreaking the world could be.
She’d been wrong.
Her mother steered the Critter Mobile off the 101 and onto a bumpy side road, which had Miranda gritting her teeth — the asphalt seemed to be disintegrating beneath their wheels. Maybe we’ll be the last ones to ever drive this way, she thought. When we turn off our car, the forest will have eaten the road completely.
If there was ever a forest that was capable of doing so, it was this one.
She’d seen so many different ones, and in her memory they were all the same — but entering this forest was crossing a threshold, passing from this ordinary world into another, through a portal; she was surprised when there was not fanfare, or a shower of golden sparks, or a shawl thrown around her shoulders as if she was a crusader, returning home to the kingdom she swore to protect.
Something familiar, fidgeting in her fingertips — something awakening, after being asleep for so long.
“What do you think, Bean?”
Any one of these spruces, she thought as they drove, could secretly be a wizard, turning his piney cloak around on himself to hide in plain sight, waiting for the Critter Mobile to pass by so he could attend to his arcane business of gathering lichens and starlight to knit into spells.
Or perhaps that cloister of gnarled hemlocks were witches, clothed in drippy moss, cursed into immobility by a thousand-year-old enchantment, and just as Miranda and her mother curved around the bend, the curse would be lifted, and they would move through the trees, where they could see her — but they would not let her see them. Miranda could try to spin her head around fast enough, but she would only ever catch them in the corners of her eyes.
Such a forest made her realize just how inadequate some words are.
Words like old.
The things that were here were beyond old; they were primordial. She could imagine the planet’s fish, shaking water off their scales as they emerged from these swamps, covered in algae as they took their first bold steps onto these loamy banks with tiny, capable fins.
She could imagine prehistoric beasts chewing the slender stems that swathed the branches, their leathery hides and long, arching necks camouflaged against the canopies — these trees were old; these trees were a marvel.
Their roots stretched beneath the road and she could almost feel them, their age and their life, crisscrossing beneath the Critter Mobile in a network like power lines — what would they say about her and her mother and the thousands of others who walked beneath their boughs? Would they say anything about them at all? Perhaps Miranda and her mother were too small for something so old to even care about. The notion made her feel wondrous and out of breath and terrified.
She hadn’t felt such smallness in a long, long time.
She was aware of the inadequacy of the word green, too — why divide the rainbow like this, into only six colors, when green itself deserved an entire spectrum of its own?
There was the dark green of the firs, the verdant green of the liverwort painted on the trunks, the true green of the feathery moss — a green with integrity. There was the murky black-green of the soil, which crumbled like a moist cake, so fae-like against the edge of the tar and the garish yellow lines of the manufactured road. There was the spring green of newborn leaves, the flat green of the maidenhair ferns, the sheer green of the air, the green that was the blending of all the greens . . .
No wonder the human pupil evolved to accept this hue as the most pleasing, the most peaceful, the most sumptuous of colors.
“Bean?” Kat broke through Miranda’s thoughts like they were still water. “You okay?”
“Yeah . . . it’s pretty.” The word was all she had, but she said it, knowing this, too, was another word that was utterly inadequate.
The forest was, all at once, Jurassic, and alien, and fairy-tale — it looked like it held a million stories, one for every fern, every mushroom. And there was room to hold at least one more.
The Critter Mobile stopped at the park ranger’s booth near the entrance, where Kat flashed her national parks annual pass.
“Staying overnight?” a short, redheaded ranger asked.
“Yes.” Miranda stretched across her mother’s lap to answer. “At Tallulah Flats.”
“Tallulah’s closed due to flooding,” the ranger said, checking her map. “Yo
u’ll have to go north of Quinault.”
“But we have to stay near Fable Falls!” Miranda had a plan, and a schedule, and a map — if they had to change campsites, everything would have to be replotted.
“The western access is open.” The ranger didn’t even blink. “Good elevation, gorgeous views. You have bear equipment?”
Miranda leaned back in her seat, “Yes,” she told the ranger, then pulled out her phone and immediately began adjusting her to-do list as Kat took the Critter Mobile into the forest and turned left, not right, at the fork.
Away from her plans and toward the unknown.
“Relax, Bean,” Kat said. “Things like this happen. We’ll wing it.”
Winging it is for birds, Miranda wanted to say, or for people too flighty to stay on the ground. But what else could she do? Cell reception was sluggish, but she located the next closest campsite to the falls, a destination called Moon Creek.
“It’ll be great!” Kat Cho, ever the optimist, even after half a decade of losing footprints to rain and losing shadows to sunrises. “Moon Creek’s supposed to be nice — oh, wow!”
With a jerk, Kat pulled the Critter Mobile to the side of the road and stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Miranda searched the shoulder for the deer they had almost hit, the rabbit that had scampered between their tires, the thing that had made her mother stop — but it was all green, green, green.
“Over there.” Kat unbuckled her seat belt. “Look at it, Bean. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Miranda followed her mother’s sightline to a massive red cedar, trunk braided and twisted, creating little pockets and cavities that housed animals — red-breasted sapsuckers were neighbors with Pacific tree frogs and carpenter ants.
A lovely thing, but still . . .
“It’s a tree,” she said. The world is full of wonders, Kat had told Miranda on the drive to the park — was her mother going to pull over and point out every interesting tree in the forest?
“I know,” Kat said. “And doesn’t it look friendly?”
She jumped out of the still-running car and ran toward the cedar; Miranda grabbed the keys and scrambled after her.
Kat bypassed the moss that grew in rosettes over the knotholes and instead climbed the face of the tree, up and up, twelve, fourteen, twenty feet high, until her baby blue hiking boots vanished in the leaves.
“Mom!” What was Kat doing? Trying to set up a Bigfoot watchtower? Miranda circled the trunk; she could feel how damp the ground was by how much it deepened with every step, like she was walking on a mattress.
“Hello, down there!” Kat shifted so she could peer at her daughter through a break in the branches. “Come up here, Bean — it’s an easy climb.”
Did I fall asleep in the car? Miranda wondered. Is this some bizarre stress dream I’m having? “You come down!” she called up to Kat. “We have a schedule to keep!”
“This view is incredible!” The leaves and the altitude did nothing to muffle the earnestness in Kat’s voice. “We’re not going anywhere until you come and see it for yourself!”
Miranda could either begin a game of “who’s more stubborn?” with a Bigfoot believer . . . or she could climb. With a groan, she secured the car keys in the breast pocket of her vest and ascended the tree.
Even though the trunk was twisted into a natural ladder, Miranda’s hands shook as she went higher and higher. When her eyes were level with the soles of Kat’s hiking boots, she stopped.
“It’s magical.” Kat stood as tall as she could, inhaling through her nose.
She wasn’t lying. Every rock; every tree branch; every fallen log, petrified bark made frizzy — everything, covered in moss. It was almost alarming — like everything was sleeping, tucked in for an eternal rest and covered in a blanket of softest green. What about when she and Kat went to sleep tonight? Would the moss creep over them, dusting their cheeks, planting colonies on their eyelids, growing down into their throats?
Her hands itched. “Can we go now?” She had the sudden urge to yank out hairs — not just for the delicious bite, but because she was certain now she was crawling with forest pathogens.
A coat of moss, thickening, stretching, growing over everything in sight . . .
“All right, Bean.” Kat finally started back to the ground, helping her daughter make the climb down and out of the drooping green branches. “We couldn’t come all this way and not climb a tree,” she explained, as if this was sound, scientific logic.
“Now that that’s taken care of,” Miranda said sternly, equilibrium returning now that she was no longer being held up by the forest, “let’s go find Bigfoot.”
Miranda had been worried that Moon Creek Campground would be full, and they’d be forced to find yet another site even farther away from the falls — but it was empty. And as soon as she saw it, Miranda understood why.
Algae slimed out of a creek bed and across the dirt campsite, making green-tinted mud; the creek itself was too weak to flush itself clean, but babbling too loudly to be peaceful white noise.
Kat immediately schlepped the tent to the only clearing flat enough to sleep on. “Mud’s supposed to be orthopedic, right?” she joked.
Her mother started to shake out the tent, but Miranda cried, “Wait!”
“What?” Kat scanned the ground as if it were covered in snakes.
“We can’t set up here — it’s going to get so muddy!” Miranda went through the inventory in her mind — how many wet wipes and paper towels had she brought, and how long would those supplies last if they had to wipe this gunk off their boots and gear every time they went into the tent?
Kat shrugged. “It’s a rain forest, Bean. Everything’s going to get muddy eventually.” She set down the tent gently, as if doing so would prevent a meltdown from her daughter, then seized a clod of mud and threw it at Miranda. “Catch!”
“Don’t!” Miranda tried to dodge it, but there it clung, wet and gooey, splattered on her shorts. She gave her mother a look of absolute fury, but Kat just grinned.
“Mom!”
“What? Just getting us properly camouflaged.”
Miranda wiped away the mud and shrieked again — something fat and yellow fell onto the ground at her feet. “What is that thing?”
Kat squatted and poked it. “Banana slug.” She showed it to Miranda, who flinched. “Gross!”
“Not gross,” her mother assured the slug, “cute. I’m calling you Littlefoot and you’re going to be the guardian of the camp.”
A flame danced inside Miranda, and its intensity frightened her. The sight of Kat introducing herself to the banana slug, lifting it up, trying to feed it a mushroom — it frightened her, too, and not just because this forest, this strange, green place seemed to be bringing out the little girl in Kat.
It frightened her how much she wished she could join in.
But someone had to be the grown-up.
Stay focused. Stay in control. For your leadership camp, she told herself, and felt a little stronger. For the bills. To save the house, to save their entire lives —
No, she corrected. To build a new one.
A new life.
She could do this.
“All right,” she said, rubbing the banana slug slime onto her shorts. “Let’s unpack.”
Now that she was here, seeing the trees from deep inside the park . . . it wasn’t magical at all. It was only mountains and mist and rain and trees — trees, why did anyone think they had to drive so far to see trees, trees just like any other trees? The only thing remarkable about these trees — which were, she guessed, a little bit tall — was there were so many, bunched together. If you put anything together in large enough numbers, it would be impressive. A thousand cakes, a thousand cats, a thousand banana slugs.
The next hour was spent setting up a base for the big search — the tent, pitched at last in the mud; the firewood, wrapped in a blanket to keep it dry until it was cold enough to light; a tarp strung in a circle of spruces, to
keep at least some part of their camp dry when the rain began. “That’s not an if, Bean. That’s a when,” Kat said and peered at Miranda over her glasses.
When everything was set up with a reasonable sense of organization, Kat collapsed into a chair with a fresh orange soda from the cooler. “All right, Bean. Let’s get a fire going and break out the dogs.”
Miranda had just shaken the pebbles out of her boots and retied them. “It’s only four o’clock. We still have time to get to the falls before dark.”
“We’ll have enough light to get there, but not to get back,” Kat said. “We’ll go first thing tomorrow morning.” She put her hands in her capelette pockets. “I like hearing you so excited, though.” Out of a pocket she pulled a melted wad of Junior Mints and popped it into her mouth whole.
“You didn’t even check for lint!” Miranda said, a gag on the back of her tongue.
Kat shrugged. “Fiber.” She went to fetch the firewood.
Mist gathered thick around Miranda’s ankles, curling through the campsite. She looked up, and she heard it — the faint, barely there sound of a song, tinkling like crystal chimes through the green.
She paused. It was a familiar sound — the sound of a music box singing — but she couldn’t make out the exact melody.
A shiver dashed up Miranda’s spine.
She looked around, and saw the old trees lining the creek bed. These were particularly old grandfathers, some of them bearing scars from previous campers who’d tied ropes around their torsos; the wounds had mostly healed over, giving the trees a gnarled, graffitied effect.
She studied them, as if hidden within their branches were the eyes she would have seen if they were real; she studied the moss hanging off them like beards, the knots that would have been their ears and long, crooked noses . . .
For a moment, Miranda listened to the music box; the song did not end, even when she shook herself, even when she blinked. Another camper, she decided. A little girl who couldn’t bear to leave her favorite trinket behind at home.
Nearby, something moved; she caught the motion with the corner of her eye. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
The Bigfoot Files Page 8