Above the river

Tenting in the rain with Erica was always the best part. We were all set up, which was a relief, because I was bad at that and other things; we were resting, going nowhere, and I could feel as though I were in the Arabian Nights, the tent covered with tapestries and furs, perhaps, with a brazier of incense between our sleeping bags, and a silver bowl of dates (actually, we ate them from one of Erica’s ziplock plastic bags), and when she slept she kept on smiling, which made me happy, too — the Land of Counterpane was not dangerous at all — we had hours left before I’d have to prove myself again, a good respite to tell each other fantastic stories (the rain being reliable that way); so Erica told me about being married and climbing the mountain in South America that later got named after her, Pico Erica; and being in the Peace Corps and snorting heroin and breaking into people’s houses solely to steal ice cream and living with the Navajos and all the other things she had done that left me wide-eyed and determined to do things like that (and at the very end of that year, when I was reading the Christmas newspapers in Switzerland, and there it was in black and white and French: Afghanistan had been invaded! I suddenly thought, “Someday I would like to go there, ” and it was not because Afghanistan was Afghanistan, but because Afghanistan was invaded); and my tentmate snuggled her sleeping bag up against me and asked me to rub her back and I said that I would and she laid her head on my knee and said, “Go ahead, scratch! Long, hard strokes, all the way down my back! Harder! ”—for she was from a military family.

“You really want me to scratch your back? ” I said.

“You got it! ”

“All right, ” I said dubiously.

“What do you mean, ‘all right’? My body is different from yours.”

“It must be.”

… “It’s getting monotonous now.”

“Sorry.”

… “Oh, that feels good.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s nice. Could you go just a little lower? And make your strokes harder. Oh, that’s wonderful. Oh, keep doing that.”

The rain thundered and thundered.

“Isn’t this exciting? ” said Erica sleepily.

It was. The tent shuddered and flapped. Water was leaking in. We had no idea whether or not the evening wind would rip it apart — a dessert of uncertainty which pleased Erica; Erica loved to climb mountains because they brought her so close to death. She’d seen another climber fall a thousand feet; she’d seen a frozen German couple in the Swiss Alps. Because danger fulfilled Erica so much, it also fulfilled me — or at least the thought of it did. Or at least I thought that the thought of it did. I had a crush on Erica.

We were up at McGonagall Pass. To the east were the stony cones of Ostler Mountain, and the trail that we had come up from the river. To the west below us was a plain crawling with the black rivers of glaciers, peaks dolloped with snow and ice everywhere we looked (or at least our maps told us that they were peaks; we could see only massive pillars, some blue, some white, some gravel-brown, that disappeared into the clouds). That plain was mainly gravel piles and raw earth so soggy with glacial melt that it swallowed our boots to the ankle. There were heaps of loose stones: white granite flecked with black, or rusty shale, or yellow-tinted crystals that Erica thought were sulphur. We had both become very quiet; I was almost frightened by everything. Stones trickled into pools of a strange pale green. The water tasted sweet and silty. Between the gravel country (“No-Man’s-Land, ” Erica called it) and the titanic black-earth mounds of the glaciers was a river with the same green pallor, too wide to cross, eating deeper and deeper into a sculpted channel of ice. Not even Erica dared to go very close to it. What I most remember now is the still steady trickling of water everywhere, a sound which seemed uncanny to me because in that vast nature-riddled place everything should have been roaring and booming, and I kept waiting for something to happen, for the black mountains to explode, for the ice to break, for thunder and lightning to come…

HAPPINESS [6]^*