Jesse Goolsby - I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

Kristen searches amid her building frustration for preconceived images of this place, but there’s only a residue of expected wonderment. Whatever it was, what she hoped this moment would bring, it was never this tourist trap, this huge redwood practically on the highway, these two teenagers posing in front of her. It wasn’t Dennis or a crying baby or a glass-of-milk-and-potato-chip breakfast or two days in the same clothes. It wasn’t alone.

She doesn’t want to curse herself for driving here. What if she’d driven home and handed Wintric Dead Rising? She leans her head back on the headrest and watches the young men move around the tree to the back of their car and snap more photos. One jumps up on the trunk of the car and gives two thumbs-up to the other. After several more photos, their show is over and they pull away, circling back the way they came in, waving to Kristen, who ignores them.

Kristen eases forward, and by the time the nose of the car enters the tree she’s almost numb. The car fits comfortably, engulfed in the redwood. The tree’s darkened innards sport horizontal scratches and carvings from side mirrors and knives. Scattered graffiti dot the upper reaches of the cutout. Kristen looks to her left and reads some of the inked messages: “Amy and Brett 98,” “alien tree,” “Calvin Hobbes Me.” She wonders if the other drive-through trees are marked up like this, and she lets herself think they are in fact worse — spray-painted inside, with long lines of cars and a ten-dollar entrance fee. Outside the tree a light rain begins, and she stares right and reads “CA sucks.” Suddenly she understands she’ll learn nothing here.

She reaches for her bottled water in the front cup holder and drinks. In her rearview mirror a truck with a thick deer guard pulls in behind her. She peeks at the windshield and thinks she sees Dennis at the wheel. She squeezes the water bottle and turns around to get a better view, but the rain beading on the truck’s windshield distorts the man’s image. Blood rushing, Kristen waits for the wipers to wipe, but they don’t move. She presses the lock button, but the doors are already locked and all she gets is a weak reminder click. She’s kept the car in drive, and she lets off the brake. The car moves, slowly at first, emerging from the tree into the rain. She circles around and tells herself not to look, to drive away from this place, back to somewhere she knows. Still, she glances at the truck, hoping for a view of the driver, but the truck has already entered the tree, so all she sees as she exits is the bed and rear tires and the illuminated brake lights.

Kristen isn’t sure what caused her to swerve off 101 only an hour into the trip home — maybe the funny name on the sign, Lady Bird; maybe the lure of a final choice and the hope of not walking through her front door in Chester empty-handed — but here she stands in a dripping redwood forest halfway into the 1.3-mile Lady Bird Johnson Grove Trail outside Orick.

Alone on the dirt path, she hugs herself and takes in this other world: the trees monstrous and time-warped, the lichen fluorescent and the moss dark green, the forest floor covered in flattened ferns, billions of needles and insects seeping into the dark soil. She’s lived within Lassen National Forest her entire life, but it’s nothing like this, this place where there’s no medium growth, only the world-aged giant redwoods, a few pines, and the ground cover.

Her shirt is soaked through along her shoulder line, and she closes her eyes and inhales the thick air. All around her the light impact of things falling — water, leaves, feathers. She opens her eyes and the immensity of the woods rushes at her, but there’s no fear, only a sense that she’s finally discovered a place worth finding.

Kristen walks the trail, and the spreading wetness trickles down her shoulders to her arms. She considers what she’ll tell Wintric when she gets home. The lines she rehearses all have redwoods and I needed in them, and these words, so absurd and amazing, repeat in her mind. She moves down this trail, and then, without warning, off to her right she spots an enormous mound, a circular darkness just past the first line of forest. Surprised, she stops and raises her hands and focuses on this mass. She takes a couple more steps and studies it, this felled redwood. The tree exposes its huge base, a twenty-foot tentacled wall of roots and dark earth. The stunning displacement has cratered the ground.

Moving off the trail and ducking under a few damp branches, she stands on the edge of the bowled-out earth. She checks the area, but there’s no sign of violence: no other felled trees, no signs of wind or fire. And before her, on this tree, no lightning or chainsaw marks. Up the trunk green needles flare from the branches and she knows this is recent, that this tree is not dead but dying.

Kristen looks up to the circle of sky that was once blotted out by this tree, then reaches out and touches one of the gnarly roots. She closes her eyes and smells the damp soil. This place is real. She is here. Everything seems so slow around her, the scattered and patient dripping, the turning earth.

When she opens her eyes, she’s leaning on the tree, unaware how long she’s been gone. Above her the gray sky, and somewhere down the trail voices calling out and, closer, the low bark of a dog. Kristen hurries back to the trail and glances around her. In the next moment she finds herself running, striding out long and fast, unable to recognize the force that propels her forward. Her heart pounds in her ears and her arms swing wildly; she runs and leans into turns, now outside herself, beside herself; the forest speeds by, the straining legs and heartbeat someone else’s.

She arrives back at her car and the deserted parking lot faster than she guessed she would, and she bends over, hands on her knees, gasping. She waits for her mind to return to this body.

Inside the car she removes her sandals and leans back and feels her drenched shirt on her skin. She takes it off, drapes it over the passenger seat, and starts the car. Her right quad starts to twist and she rubs at the pain. The insteps of her right and left feet are rubbed raw, and she knows that she’ll suffer blisters. Breathing through her nose and out of her mouth, she waits until she can no longer hear her heartbeat.

She turns on the stereo, puts on Modest Mouse, softly at first, then cranks the volume and sings. It’s then, among the thrashing thoughts of driving home, of this mad dash, of her wet and blistering body, as she breathes in to attack the chorus of track two, that she realizes she’s not nauseated.

Inside the idling car Kristen turns off the stereo, reclines her seat, and slides her drying hands inside her shorts and over her lower belly. She pushes her belly out and feels the pressure against her hands. She wishes now that she hadn’t told her parents so soon, at least not until she figures out what she wants. If she has the child, it’ll have a March birthday. It seems so far away: 2007. Spring. There’s still snow in March.

Kristen sits up and levers the seat upright. She punches the stereo button and track two comes alive. She runs her fingers through her hair and looks up past the nick in the windshield and sees the way home.

NICHOLLE, DAX’S NEWLY MINTED serious girlfriend, hails from southern Alabama. The first time he meets her family, her brother, Sim, chauffeurs him to his swimming hole. They hike on a narrow path from the car through a blanket of kudzu and pockets of honeysuckle, dodging large bees. Moments before they splash in the muddy stream, Sim slaps Dax’s back and says, “Watch for moccasins and snappers.” Soon they’re neck-deep under the hazy summer sky, and just as Dax’s body relaxes he spots a black snake slithering down the bank and entering the water. Dax isn’t sure what a moccasin looks like, and he throws up his arms and calls to Sim, who appears unfazed.