David Palmer - Emergence

A fire trail enabled us to haul the trailer within about two miles of the point where Adam’s RDF line and Candy’s compass bearings all intersect, so we’re base-camped right in the middle of the search area. We’ve got a lot of supplies; we’ll be able to stay for weeks before having to go back to restock.

The sequoia forest is absolutely magnificent. Just being here in the heart of it should be wonderfully, spiritually fulfilling. It’s very quiet: The only sounds are a blend of the breeze sighing through the treetops so far above, and bird calls, insect noises, and small animals rustling in the underbrush. Natural lighting way down here on the ground, almost shut off from the sky and direct sunlight, is diffuse and soothing. The trees are so immense that you tend to forget that they are trees; the trunks extend upward out of sight like vast pillars supporting a green ceiling, and lend an almost cathedrallike quality to the scene. It’s so very peaceful; and if it were not for the constant awareness of what brings us here, I would love every second of it.

As it is, I see it only through Candy’s eyes: envisioning what it must be like for her, probably injured, with only a few pounds of dried rations, a canteen of water, and no shelter — it gets cold up here at night. It’s hard not to feel guilty, sleeping in a warm, comfortable bed, eating solid meals, while she’s lost out there.

There’s ample room to get the van between the sequoias, but often that space is clogged by smaller trees of various descriptions and underbrush. Adam is confident that he can get through to pick her up when we find her, if she’s too badly injured to ride out behind one of us on a trail bike. But until then he prefers not to risk the van unnecessarily; if we cripple it, we would have to abandon the trailer when we leave, and come back for it if we can. That would be inconvenient.

For that reason we’ve been using the bikes to search. They’re Hondas, lightweight and easy to ride. They have eight forward speeds, automatic clutches, and big, high-traction, off-road knobby tires. Adam brought along five bikes, providing double redundancy in case one or more should fail under the pounding. So far none have, and they’ve been given every excuse. We search from sunup to dark, covering probably seventy-five miles a day or better, under conditions which range from smooth going on firm, dry, level, leaf-covered soil, to scrambling and bouncing over logs and boulders.

Adam wrapped a thick towel around the handlebars of Lisa’s bike to provide secure footing, and Terry spends the day riding with her. His presence is quite helpful: I always can tell when Lisa starts getting too enthusiastic by Terry’s sound level. He loves jumps, wheelies, and going fast; the more fun he’s having, the louder he gets. When he becomes audible over my bike’s exhaust, I point the bullhorn in that direction and speak sternly.

Lisa had an uneasy relationship with her bike in the beginning. She couldn’t reach the ground from the seat; and because it outweighed her by at least four to one, she had great difficulty bracing it upright with one leg. So she has learned not to need to: She stands or sits, depending on how rough the terrain is, feet always on the pegs, never quite stopping, and never touching foot to ground. Her effortless progress through or over virtually anything Nature puts in her path is simply amazing to behold.

It’s even more amazing from my perspective: I often drag one or both feet for stability and usually have to maintain my balance, when going very slowly over rough ground, by pushing with one foot or the other. Not uncommonly, I simply get off and walk it over the very worst conditions. Adam is better at it than I am but is in awe of Lisa.

We conduct the search by riding through the forest on a compass course, three abreast, Lisa and Terry in the middle, Adam and I keeping her barely in sight, all three of us studying the ground in front and on both sides, and trying to remember to keep an eye above us as well, in case Candy might be trapped in a tree. Periodically we stop altogether, shut off the engines, call through the bullhorns, and listen for a reply. We’ve been keeping track of the areas we’ve searched by chopping blazes on tree trunks as we proceed and marking our progress on the sectional map.

Because the bikes provide such speed and mobility, Adam reasoned that one of us might find him- or herself out of even bullhorn range in only a few minutes. So when shopping for the bullhorns, he picked up several sets of police personal radios, with belt-mounted battery packs and speakerphones designed to be clipped to the wearer’s collar. We carry two each; one worn, one in reserve on the bike. They’re a great comfort when I look in Lisa’s direction and can’t see her for minutes at a time.

An odd thing happened the day before yesterday, by the way, unrelated to the search: We had an earthquake. It wasn’t much of one; we probably wouldn’t have noticed if we hadn’t been stopped for lunch, sitting on a log, watching Terry chin himself upside down from a creeper. For the briefest instant the log and ground both trembled, and we heard, or perhaps felt, a faint, distant, rumbling sort of boom.

Adam says trucks passing his parents’ home in Baltimore were more noticeable. I guess that means he wasn’t impressed.

But I was: This isn’t really “earthquake country” up here. For us to have felt it this far from The Fault, it must have been a fairly respectable tremor.

Which means we could be cut off up here. We came up the only open road in a hundred-mile radius; if it’s blocked now, we’ll never get the trailer out, and probably the van as well. Both are replaceable, of course, but we’d have to replace so much equipment, as well. I haven’t mentioned this to Adam; he has quite enough on his mind.

Incidentally, I wonder if I might have discovered an unsuspected partial explanation for the amount of time and effort Candy spends on these journals: Sitting down, reviewing a day’s or week’s events, and composing a clear, concise summary provides an unequaled opportunity to see things in perspective. Details which seemed trivial at the time often acquire significance upon reflection, or vice versa.

For instance: Years ago I had an Aunt Becky who had a charming Panama parrot named Ellery Green. They were very close. And when she died, they almost lost Ellery, too. He refused to eat or drink or take an interest in anything; he just sat in his cage and pined. They force-fed him for weeks. He probably would have died anyway had not one of my cousins overcome his grief through sheer intensity of love.

Now, Terry and Candy are much closer than Aunt Becky and Ellery were, and at first I worried that Terry might react similarly. But he hasn’t. The only hint of change in his behavior is that he’s reverted to his original vocabulary; he’s stopped using those long, convoluted, totally inexplicable sentences. In fact, apart from that, if it is significant, I can’t see that he’s even noticed that she’s gone! He’s entirely content, and I don’t understand why.

True, Terry likes both Adam and me. He lets us feed and water him and clean his stand, and he’s obviously grateful when one of us offers him a head-rub. But his attitude toward us remains more a matter of courtesy and friendliness than love.

Lisa falls into a different category, of course. Before we lost Candy, Lisa was his second-favorite playmate: If she was around and Candy wasn’t, he wasn’t happy unless he was either on her shoulder or close enough for frequent, mutually reassuring physical contact. That’s still the case; they play riotous games, laugh uproariously, and “converse” for hours.

But Lisa isn’t Candy, and his relationship with her is very different from that which he shares with his “twin.” For instance, only with Candy has Terry ever participated in hours-long Rapt Silences, snuggling quietly in her arms, both content just to be together.