Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“Ten pounds, easily,” she said.

“Ten pounds!” Paul said to Ana, who was duly impressed.

Ana removed a rock from Josie’s thigh and put it in her hand. “How much is this?”

This one was lighter than Paul’s, and Paul knew this, but he and Josie exchanged a look. “This one’s about the same,” she said. “Ten pounds. Maybe more.”

Ana’s eyes sparkled, and Josie assumed Ana would keep the rock in some coveted place, but instead Ana turned and threw it into the river in a reckless diagonal. “See ya, sucker!” she roared.

They continued to remove the stones, and each time, they asked Josie how much she thought each weighed, before dispatching that stone into the river. Ana threw hers with cruel send-offs, usually repeating Josie’s measurements before casting them at violent trajectories. Each time a stone was removed, Josie felt closer to levitation. They were just stones, and she was only sitting by a lake shushing the jagged shore, but each time her children lifted one she let out a tiny gasp, and her body felt closer to release.

—

“Look, Mom,” Ana said, and finally Josie stood up. Ana was pointing to a spot in the woods behind them. It seemed to be a simple trailhead sign, a standing map, but on it were colorful sagging orbs.

“Balloons!” Ana said, and ran to the sign.

“Trailhead,” Paul said, following her.

The sign, decades-old, depicted a path that wound through a valley, along a narrow river, on a steady upward trajectory until it reached a mountain lake. If there had ever been any indication of distance or scale on the map, it had been worn away by weather, but Josie figured it couldn’t be more than a mile or two, and the elevation no more than three thousand feet.

“I’ve always wanted to see a mountain lake,” she said.

“Me too,” Paul said, staring with great seriousness at the map.

Paul had never said anything to Josie about a mountain lake, about knowing what one was, or wanting to see one. But Paul did not, could not, lie, and Josie had no choice but to believe that this, along with his knowing he could marry a girl named Helena, was a secret and real desire, and that from him there would be far more unspoken wants and needs in the future, and that she would be privy to so few of them, and she would have to accept this.

“So should we go?” he asked.

“What’s a mountain lake?” Ana asked.

THEY HAD ONE APPLE, a bag of unpeeled carrots, a bottle of orange Gatorade, a bag of crackers, half a pack of Starburst candy and a bottle of water, two-thirds full. The kids were wearing jeans and T-shirts. The temperature was in the sixties. Josie felt good about their chances to make it to the lake and back to town in time for lunch.

“Paul,” she said, knowing she was about to delight him, “can you make a copy of that map?” His eyes took on the spark of duty as she handed him a pen and, from her wallet, the back of a grocery store receipt. His rendering was clear enough, and included most of the information on the sign’s map, which is to say not a great deal. There was a long winding trail, and an oval lake, and next to it a tiny rectangle, which Josie assumed was some kind of picnic area, maybe a shelter of some kind. It looked less like a modern Forest Service map and more like the sort of thing an illiterate bandit would have drawn while drunk on hard cider.

But when they got to the trail Josie saw that it was wide and well marked, and for all she knew there were souvenirs and snack shops along the way. They began. They walked into a copse of birches spaced in an orderly fashion, the light on the forest floor dappled and the air cool. Ahead they saw a yellow stripe, the size of a hand, on the trunk of a tree, and Josie laughed, knowing this trail would be easy; someone had marked it every hundred yards. They looked at Paul’s map and it told them nothing new. The lake was up ahead — still seeming no more than an hour’s walk.

“A bridge,” Paul said, and pointed to where a log, halved lengthwise, had been laid across a tiny ravine leading to the river. Covering a narrow creek of shallow water moving slowly, the bridge was rudimentary and slick with moss, but Paul and Ana insisted on walking across it without her help. It was only a few feet down, so even if they fell in they couldn’t possibly be hurt. Josie allowed them to cross, and then they wanted to do it again, so they went back and did it again.

They walked along the river for a time, an hour or more, the heat of the day peaking, Paul and Ana starting to wilt and then the path turned inward and toward the hills, and they walked in shadow. Ahead, the path seemed to run directly into a boulder the size of an ancient barn. They followed the path all the way to the boulder, which up close looked more like a granite wall. They looked left and right and saw no yellow markers.

“I think we’re supposed to go through it,” Paul said. He seemed utterly serious, until a tiny smirk overtook the left side of his mouth.

“Look. Yellow,” Ana said.

Josie and Paul turned to see that Ana had found a tiny yellow stripe on a tree high on the hill overlooking the river. There was a narrow thread of trail leading up to and around the boulder, and they took it, all three of them, Josie and Paul and Ana, having the distinct sense that without Ana they would not have seen what now seemed like an obvious path upward and over. In half an hour they climbed the path, using tree roots for footing, until they’d reached the top and they could see a clearing ahead.

“Might be the lake,” Paul said.

Josie looked at her watch. It was just after noon. If they were indeed at the lake, even if they made it there, turned around and walked quickly, they’d be back in town by two. They reached the top of the ridge, but there was no lake, only remnants of, or the origins of, a shallow stream pooling. Around them was a wide meadow dotted with wildflowers of violet and yellow.

“Is that the lake?” Ana asked.

“It’s not the lake,” Paul said, then turned to Josie. “Is it?”

“No,” Josie said.

This was the kind of setting, tucked into the curve of a mountain, where she expected to find it, and now they had walked so far and climbed over the ridge, and found something else, some swampy stream — it was a cruel thing.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s think.” And she contemplated the time, and their place on this trail, halfway up a mountain far larger than she’d imagined. It had taken them hours to get this far. There was time to go farther, reach the lake and turn back, she thought, though she had the tangible sensation she was making the wrong decision. She was afraid to look at Paul, for fear his eyes would judge her.

Ana pointed to the sky. “Look, Mom,” she said. A great dark cloud had come from behind the mountain. The moment they saw it, they heard thunder. It was a loud clearing of the throat that filled the valley, an introduction to calamity.

“Is that coming toward us?” Paul asked.

“Will there be lightning?” Ana asked.

The thunder came again, this time louder. Josie looked up to find that the cloud had moved closer, casting half the mountainside in grim shadow. And they were standing near the shallow stream.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. Realizing they were standing by a stream, she tried to remember the workings of lightning and water. Was the water a conductor or a deterrent? There seemed to be no good choices around her. Lightning was coming. Likely rain, too. If they stayed out in the open, they would get soaked.

“Should we go there?” Ana asked, pointing to a forest ahead. It seemed to be about an eighth of a mile across the upward-sloping meadow, a distance not daunting, but then again all distances so far had been warped. Everything that had seemed within reach was in fact twice as far and took three times as long.