Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Forever?

“Until a solar flare burns away its atmosphere.”

His face made me kick myself for telling him this one too soon. It’s cool , he said, faking bravery. Kind of .

Dvau ran barren all the way to the horizon. He shook his head, trying to decide whether the place was a tragedy or a triumph. He looked at me. When he spoke, it was the first question of life, everywhere in the universe.

What else, Dad? Where else? Show me another one .

THE NEXT DAY, WE TOOK to the woods. Robin was wired. Nine, Dad. I get to ride in front! The law finally freed him from his safety seat in back. He’d waited for the front-seat view his whole life. Geez. Tons nicer, up here .

Fog clotted in the mountain folds. We drove through the little town that spread two buildings deep along both sides of the parkway: hardware store, grocery, three barbeque pits, inner tube rentals, outfitters. Then we entered half a million acres of recovering forest.

Before us, the remnant of a range once much higher than the Himalayas endured as rounded foothills. Lemon, amber, and cinnamon—the whole run of deciduous colors—flowed down the watersheds. Sourwoods and sweet gums covered the ridge in crimson. We rounded the bend into the park. Robin breathed out a long, astonished vowel.

We left the car at the trailhead. I carried a frame pack with our tent, sleeping bags, and stove. Slender Robin humped a day pack full of bread, bean soup, utensils, and marshmallows. He hunched forward under its weight. We headed over a ridge and back down toward a backcountry campsite that would be all ours tonight, a spot by the side of a stream that had once been all the planet I needed.

Fall’s extravagance ran through the Southern Appalachians. Rhododendrons plunged down ravines and crowded up rises in thickets that made Robin claustrophobic. Above that manic shrub layer rose a canopy of hickories, hemlocks, and tulip poplars just as lush.

Robin stopped every hundred yards to sketch a patch of moss or swarming ant nest. That was fine by me. He found an eastern box turtle feeding on a mass of ocher-colored pulp. It stood defiant, neck stretched, as we bent near. Fleeing wasn’t an option. Only when Robin dropped to his knees alongside it did the creature retract. Robin traced the Martian cuneiform letters spelling out unreadable messages on the dome of the creature’s shell.

We climbed up into the cove hardwood along a CCC path laid by unemployed boys not much older than Robin, back in the days before communal enterprise became the enemy. I crushed the star-shaped leaf of a sweet gum, half August jade, half October brick, and told him to sniff. He shouted in surprise. The scratched husk of a hickory nut shocked him even more. I let him chew the tip of a burgundy leaf and taste how sourwood got its name.

Humus tainted the air. For more than a mile, the trail ascended as steeply as a set of stairs. Spectral shadows followed us as we passed through the shedding broadleaves. We rounded an outcrop of mossy boulders, and the world changed from damp cove hardwood into drier pine and oak. It was a mast year. Acorns piled up across the trail. With each step, we scattered them.

Rising from the leaf duff in a bowl-shaped opening off the path was the most elaborate mushroom I’d ever seen. It mounded up in a cream-colored hemisphere bigger than my two hands. A fluted ribbon of fungus rippled through itself to form a surface as convoluted as an Elizabethan ruff.

Whoa! Whaaat…?

I had no answer.

Farther down the trail he almost stepped on a black and yellow millipede. The animal writhed into a ball in my hand. I fanned the air above it toward Robin’s nose.

Holy crow!

“What does it smell like?”

Like Mom!

I laughed. “Well, yes. Almond extract. Which Mom sometimes smelled like when she was baking.”

He pressed my palm to his nose, traveling. That is so wild .

“That’s the word for it.”

He wanted more, but I laid the creature back in a patch of sedge and we carried on down the trail. I didn’t tell my son that the delicious smell was a cyanide, toxic in large doses. I should have. Honesty was very important to him.

A MILE OF DESCENDING TRAIL DROPPED US into a clearing by a rocky stream. Patches of white cascade gave way to deeper, open pools. Mountain laurel and stands of mottled sycamore flanked both banks. The site was more beautiful than I remembered.

Our tent was an engineering marvel, lighter than a liter of water and not much larger than a roll of paper towels. Robin pitched it himself. He fitted the thin poles, bent them into the tent’s eyelets, snapped the fabric clips onto the tensed-up exoskeleton, and hey presto: our home for the night.

Do we need the fly?

“How lucky do you feel?”

He felt pretty lucky. I did, too. Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God’s sake. Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.

Above us, a raven the size of an Oz winged monkey flew up into a white pine. “He’s here for the opening of Camp Byrne.”

We cheered, and the bird flew away. Then the two of us, after a stiff climb with packs on a day that had broken yet another all-time heat record by five degrees, opted for a swim.

A footbridge cut from a girthy tulip poplar crossed a chute in the cascades. Rocks on both sides were splattered with an action painting of lichen, moss, and algae. The creek was clear down to its stony bottom. We bushwhacked upstream and found a flat boulder. I steeled myself and eased into the rush. My doubtful son watched, wanting to believe.

The water shocked my chest and shoved me toward a tumble of rocks. What looked level from the shore was a whole rolling range of submerged micro-mountains. I plunged into the turbulence. My foot slid on a slick stone worn smooth by centuries of falling water. Then I remembered how to do this. I sat down in the torrent and let the chill river crash over me.

At his first touch of frigid current, Robin screamed. But the pain lasted only half a minute and his shrieks turned to laughter. “Keep low,” I called. “Crawl. Channel your inner amphibian.” Robbie surrendered to the ecstatic churn.

I’d never let him do anything so dangerous. He fought the current on all fours. Once he found his cascade legs, we worked our way to a spot in the middle of the surge. There we wedged ourselves into a rocky bowl and braced in the pummeling Jacuzzi. It felt like surfing in reverse: leaning back, balancing by constant adjustment of a hundred muscles. The film of water over the stones, the light that etched its rippled surface, and the weird fixed flow of the standing waves roaring over us where we lay in the frothy rapids mesmerized Robin.

The stream felt almost tepid now, warmed by the force of the current and our own adrenaline. But the water coiled like something wild. Downstream, the rapids dropped under orange trees that arched in from both banks. From behind us, upstream, the future flowed over our backs into the sun-spattered past.

Robin gazed at his submerged arms and legs. He fought against the warping, twisting water. It’s like a planet where the gravity keeps changing .

Black-striped fish the length of my pinkie swam up to kiss our limbs. It took me a moment to see they were feeding on the flakes of our sloughed skin. Robin couldn’t get enough. He was the main exhibit of his own aquarium.

We crab-walked upstream, legs splayed, arms patting for underwater handholds. Robin scuttled sideways from one cascade to another, playing at being a crustacean. Wedged into a new scoop of rocks, I inhaled the percolating foam—all the negative ions broken by the churn of air and water. The play of sensations elated me: the frothed-up air, the biting current, the free-falling water, a last swim together at the end of the year. And like some surge in the rocky stream, I lifted for a moment before crashing.