by Erin Bartels
When they finally got back to the junction, there was indeed a sign. In fact, it was embarrassingly obvious.
Olivia tried to put a smile on her face. “Well, here we are. Back on track.” She avoided looking at her watch, though she’d stolen glances at it over the past mile. “Let’s get as far as we can before we stop for lunch.”
Melanie merely nodded. She didn’t apologize. There was no reason for her to; Olivia had been leading the hike so far, so it was her responsibility to keep them on the right path, no matter how distracted her sister might have made her.
Thankfully, the ground was fairly level here, with only gentler rises and falls over ridges and small creeks that were probably dry during the summer but were flowing with rainwater now. There were soggy spots, but the hiking poles helped them navigate without too much trouble.
Still, they weren’t going quite as fast as Olivia would have liked. The underbrush leaned in close, scraping at their arms and packs and slowing them down. For nearly a mile, Olivia saw nothing but the ground in front of her feet as she watched for roots and rocks and focused on forward movement to the exclusion of all else.
They’d already gone nearly six miles that day, and Olivia was getting hungry. If Melanie felt the same way, she did not say. In fact, she said nothing at all for so long that Olivia began looking back over her shoulder every so often—hard to do with a pack—just to make sure she was still behind her. She was—right behind rather than lagging, as she had been before their unfortunate detour.
Just when Olivia was starting to feel her energy wane, the trail relaxed and came to a marshy area surrounding a lake. She paused and took out her map. “There,” she said, pointing to a little red triangle by the pond. “We can eat there if no one has set up camp yet. I don’t know about you, but I need to eat before I climb a mountain.”
“Yes!” Melanie proclaimed. “I’m so glad you said that. I’m starving.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
Melanie raised her eyebrows. “Seriously?”
Olivia shifted her footing and folded the map. “You can say when you’re hungry or thirsty or have to stop and pee, you know. This isn’t the army.” Melanie made a “yeah, sure” face that made Olivia equal parts angry and ashamed. “I’m just trying to get us where we need to go.”
“Okay, well, where I need to go right now is anywhere I can sit down and eat.”
“Right.”
Olivia led the way to the campsite, which was indeed empty at the moment, though the warmth coming off the fire ring suggested it had been occupied earlier. They dumped their packs against a couple tree trunks and stretched their shoulder muscles. Olivia cracked her neck. Melanie caught her ankles in turn behind her back and stretched the muscles on the front of her thighs, then she looked at her watch.
“No wonder I’m so hungry. It’s nearly two o’clock!”
“Yeah, I know,” Olivia said.
“How much further do we have to go from here?”
Olivia examined the map. “The peak is right here behind us. After that it’s about three and a half miles more.”
Melanie dug around in her pack. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Well, I don’t expect we’ll make great time climbing the mountain.”
“Oh, it’s barely a mountain,” she said, pulling out her food bag. “How hard can it be?”
“With packs? Plenty hard.” Olivia retrieved her own food bag and pulled out a stick of cheese and a stick of beef jerky, which she alternated eating bite by bite.
Melanie chomped off the end of a carrot stick. “Why don’t we just leave them behind and pick them back up when we come down?”
Olivia almost laughed out loud. “Melanie, the trail goes over the mountain. It’s not, like, a side excursion. When we come down, we’ll be on the other side.”
“Oh.”
“And I hope you’re eating more than just that.”
Melanie polished off the carrot stick and followed it up with another. “I told you, don’t worry about my food. I’ve got it covered.”
They both chewed quietly for a few minutes, the silence of the famished. Olivia savored the taste of the meat and cheese and followed it up with a few dried apricots. She watched her sister consume some nuts and dried cherries and another carrot stick and marveled that anyone could willingly give up meat and dairy products. And who in their right mind would give them up because they were worried that they might accidentally eat their own parents?
“How does reincarnation work?” she said before she could stop herself. “I mean, isn’t it, like, if you’re bad you come back as some lower life form, and if you’re good you come back as a higher one?”
“Sort of. It’s more like you accumulate good and bad karma throughout your life, and then what you have when you die would determine if you were going to be born into a higher or lower caste if you’re Hindu. Eventually the goal is to reach moksha, but you have to not want it in order to attain it. For Buddhists, you attain enlightenment through the eightfold path—correct view, correct intention, correct speech, correct action, correct livelihood, correct effort, correct mindfulness, and correct concentration. Until you get it right, you are continually reborn.”
“Sheesh.” Olivia took a drink of water. “So, you think that Mom and Dad accumulated enough bad karma to come back as subhuman? They always seemed like pretty good people to me.”
“Well, no. I wouldn’t think so.”
“Though, I guess if you have to get everything perfect, no one would make the cut.” Olivia regarded her sister. “Actually, you always seemed like you’d rather come back as an animal than a human.”
Melanie laughed and pushed the air out of her food bag. “Yeah, probably.”
Olivia chewed on an apricot. It made some sense that human beings had developed religious systems that had such high standards they were impossible to reach in practice. Scare people with the thought of eternal damnation or continual rebirth as a slug or a centipede and they’ll work hard to avoid it, which in turn would make for a more ordered society.
But then, not everyone who broke the law meant to. Justin hadn’t. Even so, Olivia wished there were some kind of eternal consequences awaiting him. He ought to come back as a mosquito or a fly, something universally despised and likely to get swatted.
“So,” she continued, “for someone who’s not Hindu and not living where there’s a caste system, what’s the next step up? Being born into a richer family? That’s basically the higher class in America. But then that doesn’t seem like something the Buddhists would be real into. Kind of materialistic.”
“I don’t pretend to know how it all works,” Melanie said. “It’s just a nice philosophy to live your life by. It keeps you mindful of how your actions and attitudes affect others.”
Olivia stood up and stuffed her food bag back into her pack. “Fair enough. But if you’re doing good things so that you’ll be freed from the cycle of death and rebirth, aren’t you doing it for selfish reasons? Doesn’t that kind of negate your altruism?”
Melanie crossed her arms. “Why do you do good things? If it’s not because a spiritual belief system requires them or encourages you to do them, then why do them?”
Olivia had to think for a moment. “Because it’s good to help people.”
“Why?”
“Altruism makes for a kinder and more unified society, which is good for everyone.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t do good things for the sake of society. You do them because it makes you feel good to do them, doesn’t it?”
Olivia furrowed her brow. “I guess, ultimately, you could say that.”
“And what evolutionary purpose does that serve?” Melanie said. “If we’re all just a collection of atoms and molecules and chemical reactions concerned solely with our own survival—which is your view, right?”
Olivia nodded slowly, unsure of where Melanie was about to take this.
“Then what do we have to ga
in by, say, helping an old lady with her groceries? If she isn’t fit to carry them, she shouldn’t eat. She should be picked off by natural selection. Or what about people who train seeing-eye dogs? They’re training a natural predator to help the blind rather than eat them like they would in the wild. How does that make sense in your worldview? How do hospitals make sense? Or food banks? Wouldn’t you have a better chance to pass your genes on to the next generation if there were fewer people to compete with?” Melanie swung her pack onto her back. “When you can answer those questions, then you can criticize my beliefs.” She started walking.
Olivia snatched up her own pack and hustled to keep up. “I wasn’t criticizing.”
“Yes, you were.”
“I wasn’t, honest. I was just trying to—hang on a minute, would you? I have to get my straps snapped.”
Melanie stopped, hip out of joint. Olivia quickly buckled her straps, then reached out to grab Melanie’s arm.
“I didn’t mean for that to come off as combative. I just don’t get it, is all. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“It doesn’t need to. It just needs to make sense to me.”
Olivia put her hands up in a “you win” gesture, but she wasn’t really ready to let it drop entirely. “All right, I’m sorry.” She raised her eyebrows. “Friends?”
Melanie smiled thinly. “Of course.”
They started up the path with Melanie in the lead. The going was steep much of the way, and by the time they reached the top, Olivia was sweating. Up there the breeze off Lake Superior was no longer blocked by land or trees. It wicked the moisture from her neck and hairline, and she put her arms out. She turned slowly around, taking in the view: rolling hills as far as she could see, covered with orange, brown, red, yellow, and green. Above, the sky was blue with a few clouds drifting by. Below, the earth was a carpet of leaves. This was the best of what Earth had to offer. And it was plenty.
Melanie spoke up. “Hey, why don’t we just camp here tonight?”
“We can’t camp here.”
“I saw some of those triangles here on the map, so there must be campsites.”
“There are, but we didn’t reserve a campsite here. You can’t just pick any site you see. It’s not first come, first serve. I reserved our sites months ago.”
Melanie stepped off the stones. “But we could share with someone else if they came.”
“No, we can’t. Those are the rules. What if, when we got to the site we reserved, those people from the parking lot had already set up camp?”
“So?”
“And they took the flattest spot for their tent and left us only slopes with a bunch of roots for our tent. And they were loud and annoying. And they left a mess. And you came out in the woods so you could be alone, but instead you’re forced to spend the night with strangers. Anyway, if we camp anywhere closer than where I reserved for tonight, it will make tomorrow’s hike that much longer.”
“I don’t think any of that would bother me.”
“Well, it would bother me, so we’re not going to do it. Come on. We need to keep moving.”
Without waiting to see if Melanie was ready, Olivia started her descent.
“Race you to the top!” Olivia blew by, a flurry of swishing snow pants and trailing turquoise scarf, dragging the sled behind her.
Melanie trudged on, slower than she had to. You can’t rush climbing Mount Everest. She’d already been on the climb two days. Her Sherpa kept on, a few paces behind, but the rest of the team had fallen away, one by one, unable to take what the mountain threw at them. The blinding snow, the biting wind, the thin, cold air, the emptiness—ah, the horrible emptiness.
“Come on!” Olivia screamed from the top. “I’m not waiting for you much longer!”
Melanie sighed behind her bright pink scarf. Imagining was so much easier without Olivia around. She focused back on the task at hand, digging one spiked boot and then another into the icy path, stepping over the frozen body of some poor soul who didn’t make it up and now wouldn’t make it down.
“I’m going!” Olivia shouted. She knelt on the two-person sled and heaved herself off the top of the hill.
Melanie watched her sister shoot down, narrowly missing two other kids on saucer sleds, then faced the looming summit with renewed determination. The mountain would not defeat her. Not this time.
“You really are the slowest person alive,” Olivia said, coming up from behind her and matching her pace. “It does not take this long to climb a hill. Do you want to go home?”
“No,” Melanie said.
“Are you too cold?”
“No,” she said again.
“Then what is taking you so long?”
“I’m climbing Everest.”
Olivia threw back her head. “Ugh. Just walk up the stupid hill and get it over with. At this rate you’re only going to get to go down it a couple times before we have to go.”
“Mountains are hard to climb.”
Olivia huffed out a sigh and started running up the hill. At the top she yelled down, “I scaled Mount Everest before you did!”
But to Melanie the sound was just some strange groaning on the wind. She pushed on through the storm, finally reaching the summit on the third day. After that triumphant moment, Everest seemed to shrink. The rocky ground smoothed into slick snow packed down into ice. And she joined her sister on a two-person sled, careening down to where her father sat on top of a picnic table, sipping hot cocoa out of a Styrofoam cup.
“Three more times and then we’re done,” he said. “Mom’s got chili on the stove and it’s starting to get dark.”
eight
THE LIGHT WAS JUST BEGINNING to falter when Melanie caught the first sight of Mirror Lake. Seeing it ahead, she felt her spirits rise for the first time since Trap Falls. She was more than ready to stop walking. The trail from Government Peak was muddy much of the way, and the close underbrush made a constant scraping sound on their nylon packs. And though she took walks on most days, rain or shine, Melanie hadn’t realized just how different it would feel to walk all day, up and down many inclines, with fifty pounds of gear on her back.
“We made it!” she said, quickening her flagging pace a little. “Where’s our site?”
“It’s not too far. Maybe just another half a mile or so.”
Melanie stopped. “Half a mile?”
“It’s on the other side of the lake.”
Melanie groaned. Of course Olivia had chosen one on the other side. She always had to make things more difficult than they needed to be.
“I just figured that it would give us a leg up tomorrow morning if we were already a little further along the trail.”
“I’m not going to be able to even lift my legs if I don’t get this thing off my back soon.”
“Then I guess we better keep walking.”
They passed a cabin. And then another. And, cruelly, another. Why couldn’t they have stayed in the cabins? The forest around them dimmed as the sun slipped down the other side of the modest mountains. Melanie struggled to keep up with her sister’s pace. Finally, they came to a little wooden bridge across a river that drained slowly out of the lake.
“It’s just on the other side,” Olivia said.
But just on the other side, the first site they came upon was already occupied. Had someone done what Melanie had wanted to do and just picked a site? Olivia kept walking right on by. Where was this stupid campsite?
Thankfully, she stopped at the next numbered spot and unbuckled her pack straps. “Let’s get the tent up quick.”
The moment Melanie got her pack off she realized how badly she needed to pee. “Where should I go to the bathroom?”
“Wherever you want.” Olivia looked around and pointed. “I suggest that way, away from our neighbors. The toilet paper and the shovel are in the front pocket of my pack, and there’s hand sanitizer in there too.”
Melanie hurriedly retrieved the items and started picking her way t
hrough the trees. But no matter how far she went, she could still see Olivia unrolling the tent. Using a large tree trunk as a shield, she bent down and started to dig a hole. The ground was thick with fibrous roots, and it took her a moment to realize that she had to stab the plastic trowel straight down to cut through. She had dug little more than a depression in the dirt when she just couldn’t hold it any longer.
She piled leaves over the spot, used the hand sanitizer, and then tucked everything back into the plastic bag. When she got back, Olivia already had the tent up and was unrolling the fly.
“Okay, what do you want me to do?” Melanie said.
“I’m almost done with this. Why don’t you go gather firewood and I’ll get the sleeping pads inflated and the bags laid out.”
“Don’t you need to go to the bathroom?”
“It can wait.”
Melanie dutifully walked back into the trees in search of firewood. But coming as they had at the end of a long summer season full of hikers, the pickings around the campsite were slim. She managed several handfuls of sticks for kindling, but larger branches were nonexistent. She dumped her meager offerings into the fire ring and said to Olivia inside the tent, “I’m going to have to go a little further afield for wood.”
“There’s a flashlight in the bottom left pocket of your pack.”
Melanie looked around at the darkening woods. “I shouldn’t be that long.”
She walked out past the pee tree, as she decided to refer to it, and up a small rise, marking her path by taking note of particular saplings and bushes. She found a long stick next to a rotting log, another caught in the branches of a bush covered in clusters of tiny blue-black berries. One here, one there. Steadily the bunch grew until it took two hands to hold them. She’d have to go drop them off, then come back out for more.