North Cascades Chronicles, Part Two

I like hiking with my niece Elizabeth. We’re temperamentally suited to each other. We both possess a certain distinct, peculiar, and nearly useless sort of intelligence, threaded through a matrix of such profound dottiness it is a wonder our cells haven’t lit out for safer ground. We probably owe our survival to our ability to attract competent people who keep us alive just to see what the hell nutball thing we’ll come up with next. We can spend ten minutes wrangling third-grade arithmetic and conclude, apparently without surprise, that we were walking at an average pace of 35 mph. Or coming up with a reason the moon rises in the west in Massachusetts and toilets won’t flush at the equator. Even now I can feel the ghost of Dave shaking his head, slowly, and muttering “Brewster girls.”

Without a doubt we should not be hiking in the wilderness without supervision.

“Did you pack the Ten Essentials?” I ask her. Ha ha! That old chestnut. Together we couldn’t name five of the ten essentials. Some of them haven’t been relevant for a century. Water, food, a sextant, rain gear, matches, whale oil? We once amused ourselves trying to come up with the Ten Essentials on a beautiful sunny day on Mt. St. Helens only to fetch up five miles and 3000 feet of elevation away from our car in a freezing downpour. Where we discovered we had not brought any extra clothes, let alone rain gear. We decided to wolf our lunch on the run and hurry back. Lunch was, we were certain, one of the Ten Essentials.

Ours, as it happened, was all packed up and still on the kitchen counter back at home.

But this day we were on a moderate trail with plenty of company. If our fellow travelers were carrying any of the Ten Essentials, they could only have stashed them in their cleavage, front or rear. Apparently appropriate hiking attire these days is minimalist. One woman was climbing away in a lavender Spandex number she could have packed in an Altoids tin. I’ve never seen that much hanging mosquito territory on display in all my days. I didn’t even check to see how much Vibram sole you can get on a stiletto, and can only guess what she planned to do with her hiking pole.

But this was an easy two-mile trek to a beautiful green lake called Blue Lake and we heard a marmot and we heard a grouse and we took hundreds of photos of various parts of a distant mountain goat obscured by shrubbery. And then we damn near stepped on a family of goats on the trail on the way back down. A splendid day. Still freakin’ hot, though. We congratulated ourselves on our successful outing and our unbroken if unlikely record of survival. We’d been right about our muscles. Neither of us felt even a twinge of soreness from the day before.

Hopefully it would get cooler overnight. It did. In fact, inside the tent at 2am, I heard a few unpredicted raindrops. Then a few more. I considered. A tiny drop hit my face. I was in something of a haze of contemplation by the time I noticed the drops had bunched up enough to be considered rain inside the tent. And a while after that Elizabeth woke up and said “MARY! IT’S RAINING!” and my first thought was: Did she say “Mary?”

But what I said was “Yeah. It’s been raining for about forty-five minutes.” Possibly an ill-advised comment. She sprang up and out of the tent and returned a few minutes later with a noisy swath of painter’s plastic, and I decided I should probably try to be of assistance. Goodness! There were standing puddles in that tent. Huh.

I couldn’t find my flashlight. But by the light of her headlamp I found my way to an opposite corner and held onto the plastic. “Bring it around back!” she yelled. Back? Which way is “back?” I couldn’t even see that she had it over the tent already. I was completely at sea. She came over to find me basically motionless at one corner with my glasses completely fogged over and she managed to complete the installation on her own. We were back inside when she made a delicate inquiry.

“Why didn’t you say something if it had been raining for 45 minutes?”

Hm. Well, let’s take a retroactive ride on this thread of my peculiar intelligence. (A) I thought it would probably stop soon. (B) I wasn’t all that wet in my corner. (C) I didn’t think there was anything she could do about it. (D) She doesn’t sleep well. I’d hate to wake her up.

Yeah, that’s about it.

“I was asleep. I was up for a long time around midnight because I heard shouting and noises and branches breaking and I was sure there was a grizzly bear in the campground. It was really scary. I was working on this whole plan to race to the car for the bear spray.”

How long was she awake worrying? Yeah? Uh-huh.

“So. You spent an hour thinking there was a bear in the campground and you didn’t wake me up?” I felt like I was gaining a little edge.

“I didn’t think there was anything you could do about it,” she said.

Point taken.