Between Times-
Chapter Nine - Part Two...
In Part Two of Chapter Nine, Ben comes home battered, but not quite broken…
BETWEEN TIMES
CHAPTER NINE
PART TWO
They had lunch on a terrace brinking a high bluff overlooking the beach and the azure ocean. As they ate, they talked little, preferring to listen to the liquid surge and sigh of the sea below. The fish was tasty enough, the wine better than the food, the grapes grown just eighty miles away, the waiter told them. After lunch, they met with Jake Reagan, their guide from the Sierra Club. They had three weeks to do this, he said. In the morning, they would be off to Cone Peak, just three miles from the shore but nearly a mile high. On the ascent they would pass through the whole range of habitat and terrain they would encounter in the Santa Lucia. It would be a good place to start, accessible, and give them a proper feel for the country.
Jake took them to an outfitters and helped them select their gear, although most of the things on his list, they’d brought with them.
“We’ll give this one a day to start,” He said, spreading out his map before them, “We can camp near the summit if you need more time up there, but with summer bearing down, once you get above the fog, the black flies will carry you away. I’d advise to come back down for the night, and go up again next day, if you want. It’s only about a three hour walk.”
The rest of the afternoon they spent exploring caves and rock formations along the beach north of the Landing. The sunset came on like the end of the world and consumed three rolls of Drum’s precious Kodachrome. When they went in to supper, Tadahito was at the bar in animated conversation with two pretty young women dressed to maximize display of their tans. The women seemed anxious to make an impression on him, and Tadahito appeared confident that he was making his own. When he saw Polly and Drum, he disengaged from his admirers with much bowing and clasping of hands, walked over to their table and sat down.
“Those lovelies seemed to have fancied you considerably, Tadahito,” observed Polly.
Tadahito shrugged and smiled, “Gaijin with a camera, always a curiosity.” He winked at Drum as he said it.
Polly thought Tadahito would excite curiosity whenever he came among youthful females. Dark and small, he was fit and solid, he had what Polly thought of as presence. Quick and sure in his movements, he exuded purpose and mystery. He attracted.
He plied both Polly and Drum with a multitude of questions concerning what they were about and where they were from. When Polly described Asheton, Tadahito nodded enthusiastically, “Tadahito lives in a city among mountains, but there is also the sea. In Japan, like in this place, the sea is never far away, even on a mountain. There is a fine harbor there, also a famous church. In our Urakami District, most of the people have been Christians for hundreds of years. For a long time they were persecuted, but there is more liberty in these things now.”
Drum asked Tadahito if he were a Christian.
Tadahito shrugged, “Mother and sisters are Catholics. I observe their practice.”
“My parents were Baptists,” Drum said, but I observe a photographer’s practice.” He spoke with a straight face, but Tadahito appeared to think his response hilarious.
When Drum told him about their plans to climb up Cone Peak next day, Tadahito beamed. Looking at Polly, he said, “That is where I go. Perhaps we may encounter along the way.”
#
At the first hint of dawn, Jake met Drum and Polly outside the hotel. While the sky brightened above the mountains, they piled all their gear into his battered truck and drove away up the coast until the fog banked out over the ocean rolled in and devoured the sea and the beach below and all of the road more than fifty feet ahead of them. Jake set his headlights on dim, slowed and drove steadily onward into the murk. He seemed used to it.
When they reached the trailhead, Jake parked the truck in a small pull-off blasted out of the rocks. They could hear surf pounding and thumping at the foot of the cliff just beyond the road. The fog lifted only a little as they took up their packs and moved off up a steep, canyon-like valley, among firs and redwoods and ferns and flowers. A creek rioted alongside their path as they ascended. The mountain rose steeply to either side away up into the pervasive fog, her stony bones thrusting through her dripping green mantel, forcing them to scramble and detour continuously as they climbed. Unseen birds called to them, the songs familiar only to Jake. Once they crossed the tracks of a bear, and once heard the cry of a large cat from somewhere above them on the mountain.
They toiled upward through this rain forest a long time, it seemed, although it wasn’t more than a couple of miles. Suddenly they emerged from the fog which spread away behind and beneath like a steamy sea. Ahead rose a different world. The sun crested the mountains eastward and burned like the eye of judgment over stone strewn slopes dotted with scrubby pine, chaparral, and tenacious grasses already browning with the relentless June sun and a drought that would likely go unbroken until fall.
As Jake had predicted, an omnipresent swarm of black flies settled around the three humans. The humans slathered on repellent, which made tiny fly corpses stick to their bodies when swatted. Polly endured the onslaught with a minimum of complaint. Jake was stoic, pretending they didn’t exist. Drum seemed oblivious when he was manipulating his camera, which engaged more of his time than walking. They finally reached the summit past noon to find Tadahito there before them, sitting against a rock, eating a boiled egg, his gear piled at his feet.
He waved and smiled, as if waiting for them, “At last, we are all here.”
At the summit, steady up-slope breeze from the ocean discouraged the flies. Jake began to lay out their lunch. Polly walked over to talk to Tadahito. Drum set up his tripod, put a long lens on his camera and began compassing the horizon. Blue ocean appeared to west as the morning’s fog began to lift and fade. Thin shining tracery of surf writhed along the crests of waves just off the beaches. More rugged peaks and steep shadowed valleys ranged eastward, and far beyond those, higher mountains still, with white-tipped summits, sharp and precipitous.
Jake laid his hand on Drum’s shoulder and pointed north, “Yonder’s Pimkolam. Tomorrow we’ll start heading up that way.”
“Tell me about Pimkolam,” Drum said, shading his eyes with his hand and staring off in the direction Jake had pointed.
Jake handed him a pair of binoculars, “It’s the highest peak in the Santa Lucia. The First People, the Esselen , said it is where the world began.”
Drum peered through the binoculars, “I see it.” He said, and handed the binoculars to Tadahito, who had come up behind him and was looking over his shoulder.
Jake continued, “The First People were doing ritual up there two thousand years before the Brits put up Stonehenge.”
The three foreigners stared and pointed and marveled while Jake brought out sustenance. When he had their provisions arranged, he called, “Let’s eat.”
Tadahito said he’d already had his lunch, but joined them, “for the fine company.” He shared his tea from a thermos and some pickled plums he’d packed up the mountain. “The salt is good for the sun,” he told them with his ever-ready smile. He fired a constant barrage of questions at Jake concerning the Santa Lucia, the weather, the animals, the best way to walk from here to there and what was to be found here and what was waiting there. Although Tadahito wasn’t his paying client, Jake answered as readily as any Park Ranger.
After they packed away the remains of their lunch, Drum and Tadahito began making photographs of the surrounding ridges. A pair of hawks circled in courting dance high above and Drum removed his Leica from the tripod, changed the lens and began shooting at the pair one frame after another. When they plummeted down below the ridgeline and continued their play above a lake far below, Drum stepped out alongside a large boulder to catch the amorous raptors along with their shadows on the water.
“Careful, there,” Jake admonished. “Those stones are loose, not as stable as they look.”
Drum was careful, worked his way down the slope a bit for a clearer shot of the birds before they broke off their aerial ritual. Tadahito and Polly walked to the brink to get a better view. As Jake had advised, the stone was loose underfoot. Tadahito slipped, and would have fallen if Polly had not grabbed his arm to steady him. He managed to keep his feet, thanks to her, but unleashed a shower of shards down the slope toward Drum. Drum, his eye to his camera, heard the rattle above him, and looked up just in time to try to dance out of the way. His footing gave way and he toppled. Drum had a split second to toss his camera up to Tadahito, saw him catch it, and then was down, sliding along the steep slope amid a swarm of small stones and dust, first on his belly, then on his back, the sharp rock tearing and bruising as he went. He flailed about trying to grab something stationary to anchor himself, only succeeding in wounding his hands on jagged edges. Suddenly, he was airborne.
Drum landed on his back, heard an audible snap, and his right hip and leg exploded into consuming agony. Utterly winded, he gasped for breath and every breath wracked him. Maybe a dozen feet above, he could see the ledge he had fallen from, shimmering as if he were looking through water. Shards and pebbles peppered down upon him. A large rock came bounding over the edge and thunked about a foot from his head, and all was still. Polly and Jake and Tadahito were nowhere in sight. Somebody called his name.
Drum tried to shout, “I’m here!” It came out like a scream. The effort brought unbearable pain to his hip. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to move so much as a finger. Drum did not try to speak again. He lay very still and took shallow breaths. His right side was in flames. The whole world slid off into darkness.
#
A month later, Drum was getting around fairly well with a cane. He did not remember Jake and Tadahito carrying him down the mountain on an improvised litter. He had only the vaguest recollection of his time in the hospital. He did remember telling Polly a week after the accident that somebody needed to call The Sierra Club people and tell them he couldn’t finish the assignment.
“I’ve taken care of it,” she said, “I told them you’d been hurt, but we’d hired you an assistant, and that we would have the project done on time. We have the photographs you made, and Tadahito is shooting the rest.”
“But he’s doing practically the whole thing, then,” Drum protested, “How much is our assistant going to cost us?”
“He doesn’t want pay. He’s working on his own assignment at the same time. Says he’s doing this for friendship.”
Drum did not feel reassured, “It must be for your friendship, then; I hardly know the man.”
When he began to see the photographs they brought in from their forays, Drum grudgingly admitted they were as good or better than anything he could have done himself. Polly’s text was poetry. When he read the words, he was there in the mountains with them. But it rankled him that he was getting credit for being a bystander. He was surly and testy with them, and Tadahito’s unfailing good humor and generous spirit whenever they met only made him feel worse about himself.
Eventually, Drum’s work had been done for him and it was time to go home. He packed, knocked on Polly’s door on the way to breakfast. There was no answer, so he went down to the dining room, found Polly sitting at a table waiting for him. Tadahito wasn’t there.
“I can’t believe this is done,” Drum said, “I’m ready to see the Cove again.”
Polly looked him in the eye as she said, “I’m staying here.”
Drum couldn’t say exactly why, but he wasn’t surprised, “Tadahito?”
“I can’t close the door on this Drum. He’s shown me a world I never thought I’d see.” Drum tried to swallow the sickness he felt, but his face betrayed him.
Polly reacted almost angrily, “Don’t look so hurt, Drum. You’ve had your chance to engage the larger world. This is mine.”
Drum gazed at her in silence for a moment, until he believed what she was telling him. He gave her his tourist smile, “Enjoy it while you can, Polly.”
He went back to his room, leaving his breakfast untouched, called a cab. Although it made his leg hurt fiercely, carried his bags out himself to wait in the fog for deliverance.
#
When Drum stepped out onto the rail platform at Asheton, his leg ached from the ceaseless jostle of the train. He took a cab to High Country Photography, where he had left his pickup under Henry Thurston’s watchful eye.
“How was the trip?” the old man asked over his glasses when Drum dragged his bags through the front door.
“About as interesting as I could stand,” Drum answered with a wry grin, “You still want to sell this place?”
Thurston didn’t sound surprised, “I want to sell it to you. What happened to your leg?”
“Fell off a mountain. Busted my hip. I’m mending, but hurt like hell right now. You got a chair?”
Thurston rolled a desk chair from behind the counter, and Drum eased himself down into it with an utterance more than a sigh but not quite a moan.
“Where’s your lady friend?” Thurston asked.
“She found herself a man who wasn’t broken. If I buy this place, will you stick around until I get the hang of the business?”
Thurston laughed, “Long as you need me. Maybe longer than you want me. After all these years, it will be hard to keep away.”
“You won’t wear out your welcome,” Drum assured him, “I’m going to stay in town tonight. My stiff leg needs some rest before I wrestle that pickup home. Come over to Millie’s this evening, and we’ll talk out our deal over supper.”
“I’ll get out of here around six, Drum. I’ll come straight on over. I have a bottle of something in back that might make your leg feel better. I’ll bring it along.”
“Don’t tell Miss Millie,” Drum laughed, “We’ll slip it into our coffee.”
“Hell, Drum, We’ll just tell her it is coffee.”
#
The locals claimed Millicent Robbins’ inn had been in Asheton forever. Her mother, who had named her after a character in an English novel, started the business after Mister Robbins disappeared with the Methodist minister’s wife. Millie remembered Horace Kellett as one of the boarders when she was a girl, and Mura had been a regular at the table. Whenever he was in town, Drum liked to eat there, as much for Millie’s tales as for her edifying and comforting cuisine, which James Coggins affirmed was “pure mountain.” She was about Drum’s age, had married young, to a logger who died underneath a spilled load of timber a few months after their wedding. Millicent was an amateur historian of the area and had stories aplenty for anyone with inclination to listen.
Intensely religious, Millie, was not prone to judge any who weren’t. Actually, her personal theology was decidedly unorthodox by local standards. She took a spiritual view of almost everything, and when Drum let slip that his grandfather had been a Baptist preacher, Millie pegged him as a kindred spirit. Whenever he ate alone in her establishment, Millie would, if she had time, pull up a chair to his table and engage him in conversations which required he mainly be an attentive listener. Still, Drum liked Mad Millie, as even her friends called her behind her back. She was funny, smart, possessed of a quirky sort of beauty. Drum thought if she had ever learned to stop talking occasionally, she would have found another husband by now.
To be continued…
Next week, a mysterious disappearance and Drum talks with a ghost…
Walk in hope-
-henry