by Spencer Hyde
3.Deviation, about-face.
4.Ask Wyatt if I could borrow a hatchet for a minute.
5.Tell Skye my swimsuit was lodged in places where it was difficult to un-lodge and wait for his face to change color.
6.Ask Shelby if she could teach me how to use a selfie stick.
Not great options, and I chose to go with my favorite anyway: number 3.
“It’s true what they say about teenagers. That’s all.”
“That they hate river guides? Or that they hide their luscious locks in ponytails to avoid a constant barrage of admirers?”
“Is this how you win over all the girls?” said Wyatt. “Cheap comments and that patented smile of yours? If it wasn’t so fake, I might believe you.”
“I wasn’t talking about your ponytail, Wyatt,” said Skye.
“I can’t believe I’m on a river with this guy,” said Wyatt.
I waited because Wyatt looked like he had more to say. Skye’s grin became a grimace in short order, but he didn’t respond. He then rested against the boulder that curved up against his back.
“I wasn’t talking to you anyway, cowboy,” said Skye.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” said Skye.
“Don’t say that,” Wyatt said, shaking his head.
His quads tensed, and I realized he was half-standing, waiting for Skye to say something else. I don’t know why “cowboy” did the trick when the ponytail comment hadn’t, but maybe a fight would get them to cool off a little. I thought of standing back and letting the emotions rise, but Nash came back over.
“Everything okay here?”
“We’re good,” said Skye. “Right, Wyatt?”
“Right,” Wyatt said. “We’re good, man.” He stood and walked to the river with what looked like a sketchbook in his hand.
Skye moved around the fire to sit next to me. His gait was hitched a bit, because of the prosthetic, and I noticed he kept touching it, almost like a mindless tic, checking if it was still there or something.
“I know, according to gender roles, I’m supposed to be more stoic and all. But I can’t. It’s just not me.”
“Right,” I said. I tried to hide my flushed face, and coughed as the smoke drifted past me. I exaggerated the cough and waved my hand in front of my face to sell it. “What happened to your leg? Can I ask?”
“Nice deflection.”
“Thanks.”
Nash was at the Dutch ovens, plating dinner. Shelby was helping with the coals as Wyatt stepped from the river and closed his book. He trudged over just as Skye started to describe how he lost his leg. Nash and Shelby joined us and set plates on a makeshift table—a sunbaked log split in half and spread over two rocks.
Skye said that the whole thing started eight months earlier in southern Utah. He and his buddy Lewis had taken their climbing gear to Moab to ascend a series of elite routes: Like a Prayer, From Switzerland with Love, Prosthetics (ironically), and Death of a Cowboy, among other intense climbs. They packed up after their last climb of the week—a two-pitched climb called Hot Pork Sundae—finishing just as the stars began showing off above them in all their patterned light. Skye and Lewis cruised home through the crumbling rock of the Utah desert that looked more like Mars than Earth.
Lewis began flagging but didn’t say anything to Skye, who was already asleep, preparing to drive the last leg of the trip. Well, that’s how Skye told it—he really didn’t know because he was asleep. He only woke when the car flipped. It came to a stop right-side up in a drainage ditch off the highway in Price Canyon, smoke rising from the twisted metal.
The car sat next to the railroad tracks, and the ambulance was there before Skye realized that, while he was able to freely move his legs, one was significantly lighter. He passed out shortly after the ambulance arrived, and almost bled out on that roadside, but a helicopter from the nearby Provo hospital flew over the mountain, dipped into the canyon, and got Skye to a surgical team.
“When the car flipped, it split the metal into a perfect scythe, exactly where my left knee rested. It sheared off my leg below the knee like it was cutting through butter.”
Skye turned his leg in the firelight and showed us the prosthetic.
“I was flown to the hospital, but they weren’t prepared to deal with this kind of savagery. I suspect few hospitals would be. I’d lost so much blood that they had to focus on me before the leg. The doctors worked on me for two days straight, attempting to reattach the limb, and I watched as my toes went black during recovery. They said they only see that kind of amputation every couple years or so, and it sometimes takes, though the nerves never fully recover. But none of that worked for me. No bone, no nerves, no nothing. As you can see.”
Shelby visibly cringed and then stuck her tongue out, giving a face to the things we were all feeling inside.
“I told them to take the thing before I had to see the rest of my leg die and blacken like a scorched log.”
The fire popped right then, and sparks floated into the air almost on cue, as if dramatizing the image of the leg, the loss of soccer and rock climbing and, well, everything Skye once knew.
“That’s pretty gnarly,” said Wyatt, waving smoke away from his face.
“Yeah,” said Skye. “Pretty much.”
Skye gave Wyatt a quick nod, and I felt the tension drop between them. I imagined myself shouting: We’re back to DEFCON 5—normal peacetime status. Keep up the good work, team!
I inched closer and let my shoulder rest against Skye’s. It was a bold move, but it felt right, and he didn’t budge.
Shelby was staring at Skye’s leg, still in shock from the story, her perfect hair falling over her perfect shoulders, the rest of her body continuing that statuesque, refined look right down to her perfect feet. It made me wonder why Skye was flirting with me and not her.
“You know, weirdly, when I think back on it, it reminds me of one of your mom’s physics lectures,” Skye said to me.
“That is weird,” said Wyatt. “I’d be thinking of robot legs, and then the robot army that will ultimately be our demise.”
“I thought it would be zombies,” I said.
“No. That’s just for fun. The robot army thing is real,” said Wyatt. “Just ask Elon Musk.”
“Who?”
“The SpaceX guy. He’s going to get us to Mars and make it livable and help us escape from Earth before the apocalypse—which will totally happen. Trust me.”
“Why did it make you think of school?” asked Shelby.
“Not school,” said Skye. “Just that one class. I’ve had plenty of time to think about stuff, being homeschooled and all.”
“You knew my mom?” I said.
“Everyone at school knows your mom,” said Shelby. “She’s, like, the best teacher at Teton High. Everybody knows that.”
“Was.”
“What?” said Shelby.
“She was the best teacher. Not is.”
I had a slight feeling I’d end up liking Shelby, even if she did always tell me that I should know things I didn’t know. I knew there was a lot I had been missing because I’d been stuck in the strainer of my own life, caught between a rock and, well, another rock.
“Why did you think about my mom’s class?” I asked Skye.
I eagerly anticipated this memory of my mother that I didn’t yet have access to, as if each memory were a coin I could roll through my hands and flip over my knuckles and then cash it in for one moment of pure joy when everything would stop and she’d be alive again.
But hearing about her also felt like each memory, each coin, was being spent and I’d never get it back. As if by storing those memories in my bank, I could preserve her, keep her safe inside my head like she was the day I saw her last.
“‘And yet, it moves,’” said Skye.
“I remember that class,” said Wyatt.
“You two had a class together?” said Shelby.
“It’s not a big school,” said Skye.
“Yeah,” said Wyatt, “and even guys like Skye need grades in order to graduate.”
“Ha ha,” said Skye.
“Granted, they’re usually not good grades, right, Skye? But that’s why the athletes are lucky their coaches pull double duty and teach so many of their classes. Otherwise, Skye might end up like me: poor trailer trash, canning my own food.”
“I don’t think of you that way,” said Shelby.
“You sure?” asked Wyatt.
Shelby was silent.
“That’s what I thought,” said Wyatt, quietly.
“‘And yet, it moves’ was something Galileo said,” said Skye, trying to change the conversation back to my mom’s physics class. “Your mom said people argue over the truthfulness of the account, but she still tells it because of what it teaches.”
“It’s bunk,” said Wyatt. “Sorry, but there’s no way he said that. I looked up a bunch of theories, and I’m pretty sure it’s false. Almost certain.”
“Why does it matter if he said it or not?” said Shelby.
“Because if he said it, and it was heard, and it was recorded, then he was basically telling the people who wanted him jailed that he’d lied to the pope or whatever. He wouldn’t risk putting himself out there like that. Doesn’t make sense. He gives some big speech about how he’s sorry he lied and that the earth really doesn’t move around the sun and that the pope is right and the church is correct, and then he walks outside and says, ‘And yet, it moves’? I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t have to buy it,” said Skye. “I just like the idea of it. Can I at least have that?”
Wyatt was silent, waiting for Skye to continue.
Nash got up from the log and checked on the Dutch ovens. I’d forgotten he was there.
“And what was the deal with Galileo?” Shelby said.
“So, hundreds of years ago the pope got upset with all the scientists who were looking into the big bang,” said Skye. “He said that researching that was basically attempting to look into the work of God, so he put the kibosh on it. Well, rumor is that Galileo presented the idea of the heliocentric solar system, got totally chewed out for it, and then made that comment afterwards. I know Wyatt doesn’t think he said it, but I like to think he did. I think he confessed to being wrong, even though he wasn’t, to save his life. I think he said it to himself, later, even if nobody else heard it.”
“Then there wouldn’t be a record of it,” said Wyatt.
“Doesn’t matter, man. Mrs. Lutz likes the story, and I like it too—the idea of Galileo saying to himself, ‘And yet, it moves.’ Like, sure, I’ll let you keep your worldview, but just know I’ve seen the thing move and I know life isn’t what you think it is—or thought it was—and it won’t ever be because I looked off into space and figured some big things out and the world will never be small again like it once was. It can’t be. I love that.”
“Liked,” I said.
“What?”
“She liked to believe the idea. You said likes.”
I was suddenly angry I hadn’t been there, that I hadn’t taken my mother’s physics class. I’d taken another general education course because it felt weird being in a class with my mother, but I’d regretted it every day since she died.
I figured I had time to take the class later, but I didn’t. That’s how time works. It’s a river that flows right past you. It doesn’t wait for you. You’re lucky if you manage to dip your hand in it and feel the cool currents as it passes.
Skye shrugged. “I thought it was a good lesson in how we can be wrong. Sure, everyone in heaven and earth can believe a theory, but in the end, it’s what we see. And Galileo saw something that proved the earth moves around the sun.”
“The worst part about that is how long it took the church to apologize,” said Wyatt. “Even if the whole story isn’t true, we know Galileo was, like, shafted big-time. He’d been right the whole time.”
“How long did it take?” said Shelby.
“They apologized, like, twenty years ago. Only, what, four hundred years too late,” Wyatt said.
“Sounds about right,” I said.
“Dinner is ready,” said Nash, waving us over. “Nice work on the Dutch ovens, guys. This is how God intended us to eat, I believe. Even in a canyon.”
“Even in hell,” said Shelby.
“C’mon, Shelby, it’s not that bad,” said Skye.
“Wait till you get to the cobbler,” said Nash.
We all stood to plate our chicken and sides and cobbler. I sat by the fire with my food and thought about what Skye had said. Was I putting too much weight behind my version of how Mom died, or was Nash holding fast to an outdated idea of how the sun orbited around the world—how he was at fault for my loss and how my orbit was now much smaller and with fewer planets?
I was planet-less but for Grandpa and Bury. And how was I to confront that? Confront Nash? Anger twisted in my gut. What was I doing on this sandy beach in a canyon miles away from any sense of home or, in my condition, any sense of sense? It was senseless. I was incensed.
After dinner, I walked to my tent and grabbed the crossword puzzle book off the top of my duffel. I clicked on my headlamp as night descended, the darkness moving into the canyon and settling like silt at the bottom of the river. I heard Shelby and Skye cleaning up the gear and moving their tents closer to the fire. It seemed we’d formed alliances without really trying: Shelby and Skye, Wyatt and Indie.
I couldn’t see anything outside because of the rain-fly, so I figured I’d stick to the words and doze off. I didn’t care to be by the fire roasting marshmallows, even if it was what Nash called “part of the evening river experience.” I’d had enough of “the experience.” In fact, I’d grilled Nash about my exit options at dinner. Apparently, we didn’t have any options until day three, and even then it would be tricky.
I flipped to a Sunday puzzle and stared at the clue: “Good name for a dyslexic hibernator?” I cruised through options. Bear. Not a name. Plus, the answer was only three letters long. What else hibernated? Then I realized it wasn’t the animal, but the place. Ned. Got it. After five more clues, my eyes got heavy.
Several hours later, I woke up to a noise. I was cold, and my bag wasn’t zipped up. The puzzle book was on my pillow, my pen next to it, and my face probably had clues imprinted on it because I’d been sleeping on the pages. My headlamp was still on—not good for the batteries.
At first, the noise was just a soft rustle in the pines outside the tent. Wyatt must have been a heavy sleeper, because I didn’t hear any movement in his tent, which was just five feet from mine. Then the noise grew louder. Everything slowed down, it seemed, and I felt the beat in my chest rise to my throat. It sounded more and more like a hog snorting, but the size of it was too large for that.
Whatever-it-was brushed up against my tent. I didn’t know what to do. The snorting continued, and then turned into a growl, but deeper than what I was expecting, like a wet bark. My hands started shaking. Adrenaline was coming off me in waves.
Options:
1.Try to think of large words and play an anagram game—rearrange letters to distract myself.
2.Shout for Wyatt to wake up, then ask if he heard anything.
3.Look up at the tent fly and worry for three (or four, or five) more hours until the sun comes up, while biting my nails and pulling my hair out and losing my mind.
I didn’t have time to make a decision because Wyatt shouted, “It’s a bear! Stay in your tent!” Then I heard Wyatt’s tent flap unzip as he shouted “Hey bear!” over and over, nearly screaming each word.
I turned my headlamp off and coiled my body into a small ball. I heard the bear lumber away
after Wyatt shouted again. I wanted to unzip my tent and walk over to Wyatt, but I also didn’t want to leave my tent, and I definitely didn’t want to be left alone.
Decision made, I unzipped my tent and peeked out. With the starlight overhead, I could see surprisingly well.
I darted to Wyatt’s tent, where he was sitting down, tying his shoes. He had a hatchet next to his feet. He stepped out of the tent and stood next to me.
“What the hell, Wyatt? Hatchets are small. Bears are large. It’d be like throwing a rock at a T-Rex.”
“I just want to scare it before it gets to the food. Trust me, I don’t plan on killing it with these things.”
“Better than a stick, I guess. At least let me help,” I said. “Give me the other one.”
He hesitated. I couldn’t see his eyes well, but I imagined he was surprised at my request. Even I was surprised at my request, at my willingness to confront something so formidable. Then I felt the cool metal of the handle in my palm.
“You know how to throw?”
“We’re from Tetonia, man. It’s like, you get teething toys, then you learn to fly-fish, then you learn to shoot, then you learn to throw sharp objects at people. I mean animals. I mean logs.”
“Right. Fair enough. I should be able to come up on him from upstream and scare him with some shouting. Just don’t throw the hatchet unless you have to—adrenaline can do strange things to people.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like make them throw hatchets.”
“I’m pretty good with this thing,” he said, hefting the hatchet in his right hand.
“I don’t doubt it.”
I was bouncing on my toes without realizing it. Wyatt put his hand on my arm and whispered, “Relax. I still hear it.”
I didn’t, which was not good news, although didn’t some part of me want to confront the thing? It was foolish to put myself in that kind of danger, but wasn’t some small part of me hoping the bear would maul me so I could take a helicopter ride out of the canyon, away from the river and Nash and all thoughts of my dead mother? Maybe I just wanted to be hundreds of miles from the center of gravity, from the place my grief was born? Wasn’t the bear-mauling kind of pain easier to deal with, anyway? I walked behind Wyatt in the odd half-light of the pine-covered campsite.