Chapter 12: Gavin
My little sister is fun.
We’ve decided on Cooke’s Peak. She didn’t have anything resembling hiking boots, but she’s only one size smaller than our mother. And Mom had an ancient pair, probably from her youth, but in decent shape. With two pairs of socks, they work.
So we’re off.
I’ve loaded a string bag with water and lunch. We have hats shading our faces, and I was the responsible brother, making June put on sunscreen.
It’s weird, seeing her as a real person and not a little girl. She was only eight when I left. The last thing I remember was how she clung to Corabelle’s mom, asking if she was still an aunt now that Finn was dead.
She looks nothing like that now, tall and lanky in her jeans and pink T-shirt with a kitten on it. Her long brown hair is in a ponytail.
“You doing all right?” I ask as the trail moves from dirt to rock.
“Totally. This is fun!” She picks her way across a bigger cluster and we settle onto dirt again. “Mom and Dad never take me anywhere.”
“What about your friends?” I won’t admit it, but I worry about her, isolated in that house with my surly father and a mother who believes in obeying her husband.
“They’re okay, but it’s more about texting and hanging out at home. They’re not very outdoorsy.”
I’m glad to hear she has other places to go. “You have a phone already?”
“Duh! I’m fourteen!” Her eyes roll.
It makes me laugh. “I didn’t have a phone at fourteen,” I say.
“You didn’t need one. You lived at Corabelle’s and never talked to anybody else.”
She pushes ahead of me on the narrow trail. Around us, scrub brush and rocks start their rise toward the summit. Beyond that, dry dead grasses lie listlessly against the earth.
We can make it about two-thirds of the way before we’ll get to the hard scrabble. But the part we’re tackling is a fine hike anyway, a good-enough challenge to make you feel like you’re really doing something.
We trudge along in silence a while, hearing little but the sound of the ground crunching beneath our feet. As the incline begins and the rocks get larger, something you have to hold on to and climb, we see a couple other hikers ahead. They’re more experienced, though, and take off for a tall face you have to climb with ropes. We head the other direction for rocks you can pick your way through without equipment.
After about an hour, I ask her, “How far you want to climb?”
“I can keep going.”
“Remember we have to go back down.”
She looks behind us. “Way easier going down than up!”
True, although it can be tricky on the rocks.
We keep going.
Cooke’s Peak is six miles each way, and I figure we’ve covered maybe two of them. But it’s cathartic, the decisions simple, one path or the other, this rock or that. It’s like a puzzle laid out by nature, asking us to unlock its secrets and see the magic of the whole view once it’s put together.
After a second hour, we stop and eat. It’s hot now, the sun beating down.
“Glad you got these hats,” June says, gulping down her PB&J.
“Yeah, it’s brutal.” I’m glad Corabelle didn’t come. She’s already anxious enough about the pregnancy. This would definitely be too much.
When we’ve put everything away, I ask her, “Still up or head back?”
She turns her face to the sun. “Let’s keep going.”
I point out the upper face. “If we head that way, we might be able to get to the top of the short side. It’s not the highest peak, but it’s something.”
“A top is a top,” she says.
We move forward, the terrain growing increasingly difficult. We should’ve worn gloves. My palms and fingertips get rough and sore. But June doesn’t complain.
Up and up we scale the side. Sometimes I have to jump on a large rock and turn to pull June up. We don’t talk about anything more than the immediate situation — left or right? Is that rock too big? Watch out for that hole.
I learn more about her than if I had talked to her at home. She’s tough. She’s smart. She analyzes situations well. She plans ahead. And most of all, she sticks with something even when it’s hard.
The wind starts rushing at us. The air feels different.
“We’re getting close!” I say.
And we are. It’s a fight to make it up the last part, as scrub brush and crumbling rocks threaten most every path. But then we clamor over a particularly tricky spot and there it is.
The top.
Even my meager hair gets tossed every direction. June’s ponytail whips away from her head.
It’s perfectly warm and perfectly cool, all at the same time. It feels as though we’re in the vortex of a storm, the air spinning as if it doesn’t know which way to blow.
“Wow,” June says. It’s hard to come up with words to describe how it feels.
The desert stretches out far beyond the foothills. The roads are tiny ribbons eventually disappearing into the dust.
We sit down, and once again, we don’t need to talk about anything at all. Everything we might want to say is all laid out in front of us. How hard a road we’ve traveled. How terrible a place we just left behind, Dad in the hospital and finding it hard to care one way or the other.
But the flip side is just as clear. The unbroken beauty of the sky. The wildness of the wind, unchanneled and blowing free.
For this moment, we see exactly how beautiful it can be to push through the hardship and reach the top.