Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“Do we save wilderness so that humans can enjoy it, aesthetically or otherwise? This way of thinking leads to shallow, insincere, and manipulative forms of conservation. Trees left uncut by the highway while behind them denuded, clear-cut land extends for miles. Farmed salmon dyed pink to mimic the flesh of wild fish that have been harvested to extinction. These pretenses allow us to believe that we are not destroying the world in which we live. But we do not save wilderness for our own sakes; we save it for its own. Because ethics are real, and once they are acknowledged they must be pursued to their logical ends.”

I listened carefully to this speech. Earlier in the summer I’d seen Wylie and the rest as operating under the sway of irrational passions, but by now my feelings had changed. I even understood their dissatisfaction with the larger group. They were after something bigger than greeting cards and media coordination. Most activism seems crazy at the beginning; any position that imagines changing the status quo contains an element of the fantastic. I thought of what Irina had said, the first night I’d met her: “Just people who want to be living differently.”

“Ordinarily such an act of creation has been the province of the federal government but we see no reason why this power should be held in the hands of civil servants rather than ordinary and enlightened citizens. We see no reason why ‘refuge’ should be a bureaucratic label rather than a political act. Therefore as of today we are making the mountains into a wilderness refuge. The place itself is a refugee from humans; the place itself, not one endangered species or tree or habitat. The fact that this act will be temporary makes it no less meaningful. The wilderness needs a refuge.”

Heads bowed, coughing slightly, we waited to see if this was in fact the end of the paper.

“That’s it,” Wylie muttered.

Irina clapped madly and everyone else joined in, making Wylie blush. Blushing was epidemic among this crowd. The saying “his heart is in the right place” ran through my mind, as if I could picture it, visible through his chest, his young, still-beating heart.

Stan and Berto took off on bicycles, their muscled legs pumping. Wylie got the keys from me and drove the Caprice with Angus next to him up front and me and Irina in the back, with Psyche in the sling murmuring commentary. “Guala guala,” she said to the window. I spoke her name, and she turned to me and said the same thing. She had some kind of rash across her face, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Angus kept looking back over his freckled shoulder to check on me and smile, which I found nice at first and then kind of annoying. After a while I stared out the window at the rows of subdivisions, the bright hulks of shopping malls and cineplexes, the great arcs of overpasses. As we approached one, I saw two shadows moving beneath a light up there, a movement that for a second resolved itself: teenage boys staring down at traffic, holding rocks in their hands.

After twenty minutes or so, Wylie turned onto a road that was dark and wooded, lacking in neon and traffic. We passed a church with a bright white sign: THIS IS A C H C H. WHAT’S MISSING? U R. Psyche began to fuss, and Irina jiggled her on her knee and then nursed her until she quieted. Nobody was saying anything, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was there or because they were preparing themselves for what was about to happen.

The road started winding up the crest of the mountain, signs for picnic spots and fire-danger warnings posted alongside the asphalt. We hadn’t seen a single car since turning off. I wondered how Stan and Berto were supposed to ride their bikes all the way up here after drinking for hours, and began to doubt that the plan would come off. I felt sorry for Wylie, actually, all his philosophy and passion dissipated into this midnight drive. Then he pulled onto the shoulder and parked.

“Wylie and I are disabling the tram,” Angus said after we all got out. “Stan and Berto are working on it from the bottom. On the way down we’ll close the road. You guys are lookouts.”

“Lookouts?” I said. “That’s it?”

“Lynn,” Irina said softly, smiling her pretty, calming smile. “It’s okay.”

“But it seems so sexist. Men do the big stuff, and women just stand around.”

Angus winked at me. “Can you wrestle a steel cable? Or drag a log across a road?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Then you’re the lookout.”

I put my hands on my hips and watched as Angus and Wylie disappeared into the darkness.

Irina didn’t seem to feel slighted in the least and sat down on the Caprice’s massive hood while managing to keep the sling in place around her chest. Nothing fazed her, I realized, nothing would ever faze her, a fact that annoyed me very much. I set off walking after Angus and my brother. It was almost cold up here at the top of the mountain, and I crossed my arms against my chest. Pine branches were scraping against each other in the wind. I thought I heard an owl hoot, although given what I knew about owls, it could as easily have been a distant car horn. Beneath the trees it was very dark, but as I followed the trail that led to the tram, I heard a crash and scuffle that was almost certainly the sound of vandalism and moved in that direction.

The last time I’d ridden the tram was with my family, when I was a teenager, and an old college friend of my father’s was visiting. The only time anyone from Albuquerque takes the tram is with out-of-town friends. Mr. Dennison was tall, thin, and youthful, with curly black hair and a bizarre penchant for Adidas shorts and Hawaiian shirts. But it wasn’t his clothes that bothered me. I was convinced he was looking at me inappropriately. I was fifteen and had just figured out that men were capable of and even prone to such behavior. I slouched against the glass as the tram ascended and my father pointed out various features of the steeply inclined landscape, the hay-colored sprays of cactus and stark, strong blooms of century plants. My mother and Wylie stood on the other side of the car, both facing out the window: Wylie with his nose pressed up against the glass, leaving smudge marks, and my mother behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Mr. Dennison kept glancing over at me and smiling with a friendly zeal that I found highly suspicious. “This is spectacular!” he said to my father, still smiling at me. My father just nodded and kept on listing species of cactus; he’d memorized all their names when he moved to New Mexico and never missed a chance to demonstrate this feat of botanical knowledge. Once we got to the top I took off on a walk, abandoning everybody else, and soon was standing in the pine trees, alone — fists clenched in anger, disoriented, wanting to make some kind of gesture or point — and lost. I was filled with wordless rage toward my parents, and especially my father, for not noticing what was going on.

I wondered now what my father thought I was doing, tramping off like that. Maybe he saw it as just another blind, teenage rage — which in a way, I guessed, it was. Probably I was as strange to him as he was to me. Anyway, I would never know if it had even registered on him at all. I kept walking for a few minutes, feeling my way in the dark, thinking I was getting closer, until I realized that once again I was lost. I had no idea where Wylie or Angus or the tram might be. Then the owl hooted again, twice, insistently. It was a car horn.

I turned around and started back, climbing upward, and before long I saw the car’s headlights flash on and off, showing me where to go. By the time I got there, everybody was standing around, looking superior and amused.

“Don’t say a word,” I warned them, and they didn’t.