I came, I thawed, I conquered

The last time we were here, we only made it to the shoulder of the mountain before Mom gave up. The white dirt had been up to my chest, hiding everything under a blinding blanket so that neither the eye nor the imagination could guess what route the trail must take to the top. Today, we were determined to find out.

The trail sure knew how to build suspense. Mom walked with her nose in the air as her imagination ran wild, trying to figure out what trick of the eye might explain how the trail could land on top of that mountain. The peak above us looked impossible for anyone but a bird to stand on. 

Some views are too big to see all at once. The only way to enjoy them properly is to move through them so the different parts can dance together. The higher we climbed, the more the scenery grew around us until there was nowhere for Mom’s eyes to rest that didn’t tempt her into a picture. A bakery case of iced mountains shaped like cupcakes, croissants, bear claws, and churros were arranged around the valley, competing to steal Mom’s eyes. Every time the trail turned, she forgot the wonder from a few steps before and made me stop to pose again, as if she’d never seen me sit in front of anything so marvelous in her life. Even up close, the fluff on the cacti and cushions of white dirt sitting like hats on the pumpkin-grey boulders were a Pied Piper for the eyeballs. 

No matter how high we climbed, the mysterious peak never seemed to get any closer. Its steep sides only steepened in my eyes as it stretched away from us. Mom stopped taking pictures as scales of white dirt stuck to the bottom of her pants and a wet stain crept toward her knees. We climbed until all the peaks were looking up at us except the one we were aiming for. Each twist revealed a new catwalk that had been invisible from below. 

At long last, the trail led us around the shoulder to the backstage side of the mountain, where the exciting cliffs relaxed into ordinary slopes to make it easier for the workers who hang the sunrise each morning to get to their positions. So that’s how they do it, I thought with the same sense of wonder as the time I caught Mom pretending to throw the ball and sneakily hiding it behind her back.

As the white dirt got deeper, my fun-o-meter turned up and Mom’s turned down until the needles on both fun-o-meters busted their limits. I took reindeer leaps and left behind two snow angels for every cloud angel in heaven. Normally I don’t let Mom out of my sight when she’s off-leash, but today’s fluff-fest was too exciting and Mom wasn’t keeping up with the pace of my thrill. Mom hiked behind me with all the late-expedition excitement of Robert Scott. 

“This blows. I can’t believe this is happening to me again,” she harrumphed with the force of a snowblower. “What are the chances that we happened to come here the day after the only 2 snowstorms of the year?”

“I know! Isn’t it terrific?” I rolled onto my back and kicked my legs in the air to show how terrific it was. 

When I flipped back over to see if Mom had any questions, she wasn’t looking at me. Instead, she was looking at a black shadow traveling unnaturally fast through the white dirt. A man as graceful and handsome as an Oscar bounded two-leggedly toward us. His knife-legs cut through the white dirt with the same rockethorse enthusiasm as mine. His fashionable face fur burst open with a toothpaste-ad smile as he passed. 

“No better trail the day after a blizzard!” he gushed, like being out of breath was exhilarating, not exhausting. 

Nothing annoys Mom more than pep. Her jaw muscles rippled as she watched his shapely booty bobble gracefully uphill under lustrous black tights. His good cheer showed the lie in her excuses and she wasn’t about to let him get away with that. Mom raised her chin and her face drew to a point. She set her shoulders to determined and stepped into his paw holes. 

Mom heaved and grunted, scoffed and growled as she stretched her stubby legs to catch each pawprint in the Man-Oscar’s effortless stride. I kept her company, following alongside like a gleeful snowplow. 

The sun was bright on the ground as we chugged up the last slope onto the flat-topped summit. A cluster of trees wearing white coats two sizes too big for their flimsy branches blocked the view like a curtain. Every now and then, the grove made a plopping sound as the warmer branches dropped their heavy loads. We followed the man-tracks into their shade. 

“Eep!” I eeped as a snowblob narrowly missed me.

“Ack! It went down my neck!” Mom acked, digging a dripping clump out of her collar. “That’s it, I’m going this way.” 

My eyeballs lost her for a second as she stepped from the darkness under the trees into the squinty brightness. “Where are you going? The man-tracks go this way. Can’t you hear him?” 

The Man-Oscar’s powerful voice rang out through the clear morning. “…just out for a quick run while the snow’s still fresh…”

“After all that work, I want to enjoy the view by ourselves.” Mom stomped her own path toward where the white dirt ended and the sky began. 

“Ah right,” I said, “social distancing.” 

“Well, yeah,” Mom said, like it was obvious. “It’s obnoxious when people have phone conversations in the middle of the wilderness.” 

“Yeah. Ran up here this morning,” the wilder-ness said. “What are you doing this afternoon? Wanna come over for some beers and watch the— Oh right. It’s canceled. Well come over anyway. We’ll fire up the grill.” 

“It sounds like he’s inviting us to a party,” I said. “Do you think there’ll be snacks?”

“The whole world’s shutting down and this self-absorbed blowhard is having a cookout?” Mom grumbled. 

“He seems like someone who knows how to have a good time. Maybe he could teach you how to loosen up.”

“Being happy all the time is a mental disorder,” Mom growled. 

“You agreed to have dinner with Lily and you’d only just met her, too,” I pointed out.

“I hadn’t just met her, I knew her from the internet. It’s different.”

“But you promised me hot dogs,” I reminded her. “The internet doesn’t make hot dogs. He seems like a fun guy to share a hot dog with.”

“He’s not inviting us, he’s just talking on the phone.” The disgust in Mom’s voice showed what she thought of people who talked to their witches in public using their mouths rather than their thumbs. “And you made up the part about the hot dogs. For all you know, he’s a vegetarian too.” 

“Not with that beard.”

We slogged toward the boundary between mountain and air so that Mom could mark our accomplishment with pictures. With white dirt covering everything, though, it was hard to tell where the rocks stopped and the sky began. 

“C’mere, Oscar! Up-up!” Mom tapped a rock far from the cliff like she’d never seen anything so marvelous. 

I was more interested in hearing the man-Oscar’s thoughts on the game being canceled. “Did you hear something?” I asked the sky in his direction, which just so happened to be in the opposite direction from where Mom was waving the Witch at me.

Mom snapped her fingers like a flamenco dancer to get my attention. “Oscar! Oscar! C’mere. Up-up!” she begged like a paparazza, waving her paw over the rock like it was even more amazing than she originally thought.

I ignored her. The Man-Oscar was talking about grilling.

“Fine,” Mom said, her voice flattening from a happy teakettle to a gong. She chased after me with shovel-arms, scooped me up like a forklift, and plopped me on the rock. 

I stood like a statue with my head sunk low between my shoulders in a sulk.

Mom’s voice pretended we weren’t in a fight, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. “Oscar! Oscar! Lookit me! Over here!” she begged. 

I thought rock-like thoughts and gazed toward where the voice was coming from. 

Mom sighed and put the Witch back in her pocket. “If only people knew how many tries it takes to get some of these photos,” she grumbled, like I was the party pooper. 

She swiped the white dirt off the rock next to me and sat. We let the soothing burbling of the Man-Oscar’s weekend plans wash over us as Mom ate her nut-and-raisin kibble. Even with a mouthful of snacks and no new trail to break, Mom’s face still looked dreary.

I took in the sky and the cloud-like summit around me. A thought occurred to me and I perked up. “Hey, Mom. Did you notice?”

She scowled at the bag for not mixing the raisins in right. “Notice what?” she chewed. 

“We did it! We came here to see the top of the mountain and we didn’t give up, even though we had the same problems as last time. We persisted. We overcame. And we did something we thought we couldn’t do. Doesn’t that feel good?”

“Know what’s funny? I thought I wouldn’t have the grit to push through if I stayed positive. Like, if I expected the worst, I’d be prepared for whatever the trail had in store. I never hated the step I was in, but as things got harder, it was unbearable to think that the worst was yet to come. Bracing myself for something I hadn’t even faced yet was exhausting, but the idea of giving up was even worse. The struggle in my mind was tougher than anything the mountain threw at me.”

“Changing your plans isn’t the same thing as danger,” I reminded her. “You can’t let the things you don’t see ruin what’s right in front of you.”

 “I know. But they feel the same.”

“Maybe you could enjoy it more if you let things turn out differently than you expected without trying to fix it,” I coached.

“Without misery and suspense, it wouldn’t feel so rewarding when it ends.” She threw the last fistful of trail mix into her mouth without bothering to check that it had the right raisin-to-peanut ratio. “I suppose that’s why I like hiking so much. Life is full of uncertainties, but at least in the wilderness you expect the unexpected and can put solved problems behind you.” She stood up to look down at the sky, and Sedona underneath. “And there are no downhills in real life. Every day feels like an uphill slog.”

Mom knocked the white dirt from her butt, fitted her toes into the nearest heelprint, and let the accomplishment carry her downhill like a sleigh. I ran ahead to spread good cheer to any other hikers we met along the way.

 “How much farther?” the uphill hikers gasped. 

Look at these poor nincompoops in their department store sneakers, Mom’s thoughts said to me, already forgetting her own despair. “Not that far. Only a little more than a mile,” she chirped out loud, enjoying how their faces fell like white dirt from a branch. To rub it in she added, “The view is beautiful.” 

“But you didn’t see the view because you were too chicken to get close,” I thought back. 

“Still counts,” her smile said as she tromped away.

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