Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

George wanted to cool the wine down a little, so he undid one of his bootlaces and made a sort of noose around the neck of the bottle, tying the other end to a branch that had fallen by the bank. While they waited for the wine to cool, he and Sara strolled barefoot through the stream, letting the freezing water soothe their blisters. Light danced down through the leaves. It was like something out of a fairy tale — for the first time, George felt good about their choice for Irene’s final resting place. It had that same quality as the shores of Shelter Island. What had she called them? Mythic.

“We never do things like this,” Sara said.

“Back in Ithaca we used to go hiking all the time,” he replied.

She remembered going hiking exactly once, for about fifteen minutes, before Jacob ran into a spiderweb on the trail and refused to continue. The farther they got from those times, the less she idealized them and the more George seemed to. He didn’t remember how often they’d fought and argued.

“The wine should be cold enough by now,” he said. They’d walked a lot farther than he’d intended. “I say we drink half now and save the rest for the next stop.”

Sara agreed, and they turned to walk back to where they’d left the bottle cooling. After a few minutes she began to wonder how they’d gotten so far upstream, because they should be back at the pebble beach by now. George was sure it was just a little farther, so they kept going, but still there was no sign of it.

“That’s crazy. How could we have missed it?” she asked.

They decided to walk back a little ways and double-check. So they turned around, and now everything seemed different yet again from what they had seen before.

“Did you see any kind of fork in the stream?” George asked for the eighth time.

There was no sign of the beach, the wine bottle tied to the branch, or their backpacks, or Irene. Sara wasn’t especially worried, sure that if they didn’t find it soon, they were bound to find some other hikers who could point them on their way. But as the minutes ticked by, they saw no one and heard no one, and she became aware of something even more distressing.

“It’s getting kind of dark.”

“Kind of,” George agreed, just as they felt wet drops fall onto their faces. He looked up through the leaves above, thinking maybe this was just some mist or dew from the morning, dripping off of the treetops, but the powerful sound of rain in the distance was unmistakable, and soon it began to pour.

“Let’s get over by that cliff.” George tried not to sound worried. “This will pass by us pretty quickly. You get all kinds of weird weather patterns in canyons. Lots of very fast changes in air pressure when you have altitudes like this.”

Sara could hear thunder and tried to remember how to count the interval between thunder and lightning to see how far away it was. The trees were swaying wildly as the wind picked up. She couldn’t help but worry about their packs, and Irene, out there somewhere.

They got their boots back on, though George moved a bit awkwardly with only one of his laces, and they hurried over to a rocky ledge. In an indentation deep enough to slide into and out of the rain, they got out of what clothes they could, shivering, and tried to wring everything out, their wet bodies pressing clumsily against each other in the narrow space. They made jokes to pass the time; they thought back to the dinner of the night before and lying out on the Riviera beach; they imagined what Jacob would say if he were with them. George could just see him, shouting lines from The Tempest or something.

But the minutes worryingly ran into an hour, and one hour into two, and the rain only got more intense. They had no flashlights or phones, no blankets or shoes or food. George realized that his watch had stopped and he didn’t have his compass. He remembered Raif at the château assuring him that the bad weather wasn’t due until nighttime but was likely to last for a while. George prayed — that the rain would stop, that they would find their way back to the pebble beach where their things lay. He hadn’t prayed in a long time.

Terrifyingly fast and brilliant lightning sparked blue-white down a tree and out along the branches. At first George thought the incredible crackling sound was the earth itself coming apart underneath their feet. By the time he had realized what had happened, it was over — just a burned acid smell in the air and darkness. Sara was scared that it was getting darker, and they were pretty soaked, so finally George agreed that they should move out along the bank of the stream. They went carefully, looking out for bushes, rocks, tree roots, and other hikers as they walked through the storm.

The rain pounded around them like bullets; branches slammed their bodies from both sides; the wind twisted in all directions. At first George kept talking, trying to stay upbeat, but before long Sara couldn’t hear him. In fact, he couldn’t even hear himself, so they fell into a silence. It lasted a long time. Another hour, maybe more. They held hands so tightly that their knuckles began to ache, and their wet palms began wrinkling against each other, so that when they did have to briefly detach — to get a better grip on a rock or to push a branch out of the way — it felt like Velcro wrenching apart.

Finally, the rain softened and slowed to a drip. George guessed it was now maybe late afternoon, but the clouds above the trees were still black and heavy. Sara knew they ought to keep searching while they had the chance, but beyond exhausted, she lay down in the first clear area and wondered how they’d survived.

“We’re going to be fine,” George said. “The important thing is we’re not hurt.”

Sara tried to take comfort in this, but to her the important thing seemed more to be that they were still very lost. She couldn’t imagine getting up now and starting to look for the trail. If they were missing for a long time, she imagined, it might be in the news. At least locally, back home — which meant 7News Boston now, not NBC 4 New York. She looked over at George, lying on the wet ground beside her, staring up at the edge of the great, gauzy sun, now beginning to beat through the clouds. She could tell it was soon going to be brutally hot. George looked completely shot. And she was sure he hadn’t the faintest clue where they were now.

“For fuck’s sake,” she heard him saying. “Irene!”

Sara looked over, in the half-hope that Irene was actually there , that she had appeared in the midst of all this madness to lead them out. But George was pointing not to some ghost but to his backpack. It was up ahead, half sticking out of a bush, nowhere near where they had left it. There was no pebble beach or stream anywhere nearby. Someone had found it and tried to walk off with it, then realized it was much too heavy and tossed it into the bush. George’s dry clothes, the liquor bottles, and all his other supplies were gone, but Irene, or her urn at any rate, was still there. Sara dug around in the pack and found two granola bars that had fallen to the bottom. They ate them without speaking. The thief had also — thank God — left behind the guidebook, the little gift shop compass and the very soggy map from the chalet. As she shook these carefully to dry them out, George smacked at the compass, which had gotten water inside and was now cloudy. Inside, the needle seemed to spin freely. He paced around as if he were looking for cell reception, then gave up and began studying the map.

“Any idea where we’ve gotten to?” she asked.

George laid a finger down on a small bend in the river marked “Bettes,” a little ways off the marked path. “This was where we left our stuff. On the pebbly beach. Then we walked this way a little while and came back along here…” He traced the path with his thumbnail.