squirrel? What if I needed antibiotics or an appendectomy?), I still daydream about getting away. “How about you?”
“Yeah, all the time. You know, we could do it. Fish and hunt and harvest wild plants. Sleep on pine needles, and only get up when we feel like it.”
Trust Nick to name the lack of an alarm clock as a chief perk. But I can’t deny it’s a great daydream. If we were slightly crazier, we could probably talk each other into it. For a few days, at least.
But the reality is, it rains and snows out here. And there are certain things I’d rather not live without, like hot showers. “You’d miss basketball, though,” I say. “And coffee.”
“True.” He grins. “Guess I’ll stay in civilization after all.”
As Nick and I climb upward, the sky darkens and the air thickens. Everything smells of mushrooms now, the forest getting damper and cooler by the minute. The cloud ceiling presses down on us.
“You bring your rain gear?” Nick asks.
“Of course.” Perry drilled that into us. Nick and I would no more forget our rain gear than we would forget our hands and feet. But I keep remembering that line in the guidebook: Several areas of smooth rock are exceptionally steep and should not be attempted in wet weather . I picture us skidding down a wet rock slope, bones cracking along the way. We’ve hiked through rain before, but that was on flat ground with plenty of traction. Rain must turn the slanted, featureless rock of Eagle’s higher slopes into a water slide.
We sniff the air, gauging the closeness of the storm. This is the decision point, our last chance to turn back. If we go up this next section, it will be better to keep on and go over the top, descending the White Arrow trail, rather than come back down this side.
“What do you think?” I ask Nick as we inspect the pieces of blank white sky between tree branches.
“I say we go up. There’s no thunder, and it’s not raining yet.” He scratches his jaw. “But it’s up to you.”
Sweat collects under my shirt, slimy on my skin. I cup my hands, as if I can feel the weight of our choices: Go on. Turn around .
It’s hard to break this upward momentum, hard not to feel like a failure for doing it. When I think about descending now, the part of my mind that still speaks in Raleigh Barringer’s voice says, Why leave so early, Maggie? Can’t handle it? I hate the vision of myself that her voice conjures up: weak and cringing and awkward, as if I deserve everything she ever said.
But it’s more than that. I think of Perry’s blissful grin in his summit picture, and I want to know what that feels like. I want to reach the top.
I catch Nick’s eye. He says nothing, only waits for my decision. “Yes, let’s keep going,” I say, and he smiles.
Here the mountain gets steeper, the rocks bigger. We’re using our hands most of the time now, scaling boulders. Sometimes we hit stretches of bare stone, and we inch upward, finding the ripples and cracks and knobs that form footholds. In a couple of places, where the slant is near vertical, wooden ladders have been bolted into the rock.
The trees around us get shorter as we near the bald top of the mountain. A breeze lifts the hair away from my neck and hisses in my ear. A wet drop splats against my cheek. When five minutes go by without another, I start to relax. And then the second drop hits me.
“It’s raining,” I tell Nick.
“I k now.”
We stop to pull on our rain suits. The fabric is supposed to breathe, but with my skin already sweaty and the air turning liquid, there’s no escaping the moisture. I make sure the pit zips and the front zipper are open, and continue to claw my way up the cold, wet rock. It’s different from the flat-ground hiking we’ve done before, because there’s this whole new dimension to deal with: the vertical. Often the span of a step seems impossible, a gap my legs can’t possibly cover, but I reach and I stretch and I cover it somehow. Other times, I’ll
Matt Christopher, William Ogden