Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He grinned in the darkness as he headed out on, apparently, the Palisades Parkway through New Jersey. When he passed a service station at Ramapo, he thought: The next place I see, I’ll turn around.

He saw a sign for Route 17. He was half an hour up the Palisades Parkway, driving slowly and being steadily passed. He thought he remembered something about 17, that a lot of people he knew had driven it. He wasn’t sure it went to New England, he probably should turn around if he could. He didn’t. He followed a sign, after a while, that took him onto a long, subtle curve, and he had taken a ticket at a booth, and he was driving upstate on the Thruway. You can always, he thought, get off the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway and go back in the opposite direction. They can tell you how to do that. But he didn’t ask. He knew he was headed upstate. You could, he figured, get to New Hampshire from there, or you could always turn around.

His mother had left them. He didn’t know it at the time, of course, because he was eight. You don’t tell an eight-year-old with chubby legs and prominent teeth and an affection for books and games about war that his mother every once in a while takes off. Later, he understood that she had left before that summer and would leave again. She didn’t leave permanently until he’d been in college for almost a semester. She kept in touch, thinking he’d need it. And he hadn’t the courage, then, to tell her she was distracting him from the two great recently discovered programs of his life — falling in love with the historical narrative of anyplace in any age as told by almost anyone at all and succumbing to lust with what he later thought of as sagacity.

So Hank’s father, in the summer of his boy’s ninth year, left alone with the child by his wife, reread pertinent sections of the Boy Scout handbook, sought the advice of an outdoorsy friend, and took Hank by train to New Hampshire. In the motel room that smelled of wax and heat, this man — who had not camped out since basic training — showed Hank every piece of borrowed equipment in each of the borrowed rucksacks.

“We have to be careful up there,” his father said. “I don’t mean there’s anything to be scared of. I mean we have to take precautions. It’s what I do in business. It’s what you should do in your life. Things are the same, di dum di dum di dum, nothing to worry about”—here, he lit a cigarette—“then all of a sudden they’re different. Really changed. Understand? Weather on the mountain changes very suddenly. You feel how hot it is?”

“It’s very hot,” Hank had answered, eager to be right. This was an important trip, he knew. He didn’t know why. “ Very hot.”

“But it still could snow on us once we get up there.” His father pointed. “Above timberline. Do you know what that is?”

His father smoked Camels, one after another. His fingers were stained yellow, and Hank loved the harsh, dark smell of the stubby little cigarettes. He heard his father pull the smoke in. Seeing that Hank watched him, he blew a thick, steady smoke ring onto the air. He winked. Hank winked back. His father’s gray-brown widow’s peak was encircled, after a while, by smoke. It looked the way Mount Washington looked from the front of the motel, hidden at its top by clouds.

That night, on the metal beds with their thin mattress pads, they turned and coughed and slept to waken — Hank because of his father, his father because of one among all the secrets, Hank suspected later, that rose up around him like the smoke of his cigarettes. Early light made his father appear pale and, from the side, vulnerable as he looked through the window. A path that led to the road that would take them to the first of their trails was outside that window. His father, without his wire-rimmed glasses and with his hair pulled up by friction against his pillow, stood at the window and smoked. Seeing his father without glasses felt like seeing him naked. Hank had shut his eyes and, hearing his father taking in smoke and letting it out, he had fallen back to sleep.

They ate what to Hank was an exciting meal because it was composed of food their mother never cooked: sausages and eggs so greasy the oils soaked through the rye bread his father showed him how to fold for sunnyside-up sandwiches.

“You want coffee this morning, Hank?” His father turned a cup of coffee beige with milk and sugar. Hank half expected to be offered a Camel with it and was disappointed when, winking, his thin, sad-faced father frowned around a cigarette and lit it up, but didn’t shake the pack to release the tips of one or two and offer it as Hank had seen him do for others at restaurants and parties.

When their waitress brought the check, his father, counting change and squinting against smoke from the cigarette that wobbled between his lips, said, “This man opposite me here is climbing up to Mizpah Springs Hut.”

Hank remembered looking into his coffee and blushing, both because of the attention and because he disliked the taste of the coffee which his father had offered with so much sudden good cheer.

“Which one’s that again?” she’d asked, taking the money.

“Well, it’s just up there . It’s our first stage. Kind of base camp, on the way to Lakes of the Clouds.”

“I know where that is,” she said, walking away.

“Hurray for you,” his father said.

“Hurray for you,” Hank said, passing a rest stop and reading the sign that told him he would have to wait for thirty-seven miles before the next. “A man will turn around when he’s ready to,” he said. “He will.”

Hank remembered timberline. He remembered their slow, laborious, thirsty climb up a track of dirt and rocks through dense bushes and trees. He remembered the clouds of gnats and blackflies, the stink of citronella and its greasy weight on the skin of his arms and neck and face. His father’s lungs made squeaking sounds as he panted, Hank remembered. And he remembered that his father forced a fast, unhappy pace, as if they were driven through discomfort and poor conditioning and the oppressive heat by an obligation that was urgent, undeniable.

When they rested, his father showed him how to sit in the harness of his rucksack with his legs pointing downhill. “Let gravity do the work,” his father said. “When you get back up, it’ll be easier. The pack’ll fall onto your back as you stand. It’s an old Boy Scout trick.” He smiled as he lit his cigarette and blew the smoke up, at the gnats that hovered about them. “Isn’t it great? You show ’em you can take it. You show you . I always wanted to do this, Hank. And you. Aren’t you something? You’re climbing to Mizpah Springs, you’re climbing Mount Washington , and you’re only eight years old. It might be a record. You might be posting a national record.”

Hank remembered drinking too much water, and his father’s gentle, breathless rebuke when they stood, facing downhill, about an hour later. “The White Mountains make emergencies. That’s what I’ve heard. So you need to make sure there’s plenty of water until we get to the Springs.”

As they continued to climb, breaking free of the confines of the trail to see the widening white glare of sky unencumbered by brush, his father, struggling for breath, instructed him to note how the trees were lower, the winds steadier. Hank saw, at last, when they made the ridge that would take them to the hut, how entire evergreens, mostly bare of needles (but not dead, his father said), were no higher than his knee.

“It’s the cold does it,” his father said, “and the winds. They look like miniature trees, but it’s all in them — they’re just stunted. It’s like when you, I don’t know, when you just run out of it. This is what it’s like.” He shielded his face with cupped hands to light a cigarette. “I believe that life is a bivouac, Hank,” he said as the wind took his smoke and some of the sound of his words away. “You know what a bivouac is?”