October 17, 2005

Tales From The Crib

Lost on Grizzly Peak and worried

Jennifer Margulis

“Did you call Search and Rescue yet?” My husband banged through the door, flushed and sweaty.

“Just a sec.” I was furiously revising an article and I barely looked up from my desk.

James peeled off his jacket and went to the fridge to get a beer.

“Weren’t you worried?” He was unusually animated. “Do you know what time it is?” I put down my pen.

I didn’t. As soon as I put the kids to bed I had run back to my work. James had gone off to hike up Grizzly Peak. He brought his shakuhachi (a Japanese bamboo flute) and a sketchpad with him in a small backpack. No water. No flashlight. No cell phone.

“Ten p.m.!” James cried. “I got lost. I was hurrying back because I was sure you’d have called Search and Rescue by now.”

I started listening for real then, and James told me the story. When he pulled into the parking lot there were two other cars there. The sun was almost on the horizon, but he figured he would have enough daylight left to make the climb. On his run up the mountain path, he passed the two couples coming down. At the top of Grizzly Peak was a glorious sunset. The valley turned violet with only the mountain peaks illuminated by the last of the light. He sat on a rock, looked out over the vale that had recently become our new home, and blew the shakuhachi—the eerie wails of the flute disappearing over the mountain.

The sun was down now, but James pulled out his sketchpad anyway. By the time he finished the last stroke of a watercolor of Mount Shasta, his fingers were stiff from cold. He started trail running briskly down the mountain.

The darkness deepened. James quickened his pace, leaping over roots and rocks.

Then he lost his footing and fell, scraping his hands and knees on the bramble on the ground. It was so dark then, the night on the north side so unrelieved by any light, that his hands in front of him were barely visible.

Slowing his pace to a tentative walk, James suddenly found brush and trees blocking his way. He didn’t remember bushwhacking up the mountain so he knew he made a wrong turn. But where?

Upwind of him he smelled an animal smell—the warm musky scent of something mammalian, not human, and not far away.

At this point in the story my husband paused and took a long gulp of beer. It was already frosting at night in Ashland. Four thousand feet higher at the top of Grizzly Peak, it was much colder and James was clad in shorts and a lightweight T-shirt. “I kept thinking about hugging the baby,’” he said. “I just wanted to see the kids again.”

So he got on his hands and knees and patted the ground, feeling his way back to the path by the texture of the earth. But he couldn’t feel where it turned, and crawled along the same stretch, back and forth.

Widening his search, he felt the sharp drop where the path takes an acute turn. He took it and it led him back to the parking lot, where he could barely pick his car out of the blackness of the moonless night.

The next day James bought a flashlight to be better prepared for the next twilight hike. He also purchased an air horn at the hardware store. The air horn is to scare mountain lions.

Jennifer Margulis lives in Ashland with her three fickle children, one safety-conscious husband, and four wild deer. Come hear her speak on Thursday, Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m. at Bloomsbury Books about her new book, “Why Babies Do That” (Willow Creek Press).