Losing the thread
- Mar 30
- 9 min read
When Mom returned, she tucked the Witch under the pillow, put her feet up on the spare tire, and we both tried to sleep through the restless twitching left over in her mind.
The sun, not the Witch woke us up in the morning. “Dog doo!” Mom said, sitting up straight without even checking with the Witch. “I was so preoccupied last night I must have forgotten to set an alarm. The trail’s gonna be jammed!!”
She took a poop juice pill from the first aid kit, filled a bag to the zipper with kibble, checked to make sure the Witch’s juice box was full, and we set off.
The car kennel welcomed us with a jack-o-lantern’s gap-toothed smile. “Hey look, Mom, there are empty spots!” I turned to see if she was relieved, but she wasn’t beside me. She was frozen several paces away, staring at a sign and lost in thought.
“Fee envelopes!” she said when I joined her. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Don’t touch!” I squeaked. “Envelopes are the mailman’s favorite type of boobytrap. People lick those things. It’s probably crawling with boogeyvirus.”
“All that fretting about parking… Why didn’t it occur to me that there would be fee envelopes?” Mom asked the envelope dispenser like it dispensed advice, too.
The trees were too socially distant and their branches too scraggly to make much shade. Trail dust gathered behind me as I walked, like the cloud that follows a galloping horse when the hero rides in to save the day. It ploofed from under Mom’s clunky steps like she was walking with elephant paws. It got in my eyes and stuck to the gooey spots in the crater where Mom’s bee sting used to be.
“Why, this trail isn’t hard to follow at all!” I pranced. “What were you so worried about yesterday?” I zigzagged across the trail to show her both how wide it was and how silly she was to worry.
“It does all the climbing at the end,” Mom said mominously. “We’re gonna have to climb like 4,000 feet in the last 3 or 4 miles. It’s gonna be like what we climbed with Lily yesterday, only we’ll already have 5 miles in our legs when we start, and 5 miles to go when we come back down.”
“Bah, you always think you can see the future, but nothing is ever how you expect it to be,” I reminded her.
“It says so on the map.” She poked at the Witch for backup and read triumphantly, “Here: 13.7 miles, 4,343 feet, 12 hours.”
I’m so glad that dogs can’t catch math. “Haven’t you learned by now that numbers are just something you made up to worry about? If you don’t like what they’re saying, just make up different numbers. Like this: onety miles, twoteen Friends, and five bajillion, nine zillionty and a half mouthfuls. See? It’s easy!”
Somewhere up the slope, a lawnmower-like growl shook the air, each snarl louder than the last. “Do you hear something?” Mom asked.
“I think someone’s mowing the lawn,” I said, not because it was true but because it’s rude not to guess when you don’t know the answer to a question.
Suddenly, a motorcycle buzzed around the corner. The Power Ranger on top must have been very lost to be so far up the mountain looking for a safe place to park. He put down his feet to give us time to get out of the way. When he spoke, instead of asking for help and directions, he asked where we were going.
“Are you going to the summit?” he asked.
The friendliness almost made me jump. Mom looked him up and down, searching for signs that he was looking for a fight. I guess you could say that Mom was the one looking for a fight, but when a fight finds you, it never seems like you were the one looking for it.
Fights had been harder to spot recently with everyone hiding their hostility behind muzzles and pretending like everyone else was invisible. The aggressive ones could turn on you in a flash if you broke one of their private rules, so you had to pay close attention to subtler warning signs. The most reliable tell was in their eyes, which couldn’t fake a friendly sparkle or hide a threatening stab.
Mom looked at her own scowl in the Power Ranger’s helmet window and then into his friendly eyes when he lifted the window out of the way. He pulled off the helmet so we could see his naked smile.
When he didn’t make any sudden moves, Mom answered cautiously, “Yeah, the summit’s the plan. But I’ve heard that the trail gets sketchy up ahead. We’ll see if we make it that far.”
“Most people stay on the fire road,” he said in a way that showed that he wasn’t most people and he knew we weren’t either. “When you get to the saddle, look for the stick with a string on it. Turn there and you can’t miss it.”
“Right, the stick with the string,” Mom repeated, like that was the most natural trail marker in the world.
“It’s wrapped around several times,” he reassured her. “And it’s a big stick.”
He hid his face behind his helmet again and buzzed off in a sepia cloud. Mom held her breath for a little longer to let the dust and boogeyvirus settle out of the air before we continued climbing.
The sun paid more and more attention to me as we climbed. It baked my back and breathed down my neck as I came closer to its place in the sky. I ran ahead looking for lean patches of shade where I could cool off while I waited for Mom to catch up. Finally, the mountain paused its relentless climb into the sun and leveled off. I lay down in the sliver of shade under a scraggly tree and watched the trail drop into the shady side of the valley ahead.
I was just about to point out the silliness of Mom worrying about a tame trail like this when something waving in the corner of my eye caught my attention. It was the same grey as a dead leaf but it thrashed its loose end like a tentacle rather than fluttering. Its other end was hopelessly trapped around a medium-sized stick.
“Mom! Mom! Look! A string! And it’s tied around a stick!” I said as she pulled my water bowl out of the packpack. “It’s the sign we’ve been looking for!”
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! the string flapped.
Behind the stick, the scar that passed for a trail was streaked with the skidmarks of countless slipping paws. It looked less like a path and more like someone fell down the mountain, knocking loose every tree and rock on the way down. It was so steep that when Mom stepped on it, her heel didn’t reach the ground. She snuck uphill on her tiptoes.
I thought that such an unruly trail couldn’t stay that way for long, but we climbed and climbed for weeks and it never settled. The only sign that anyone might have survived the slippery slope were the tree trunks worn smooth by sweaty palms.
The mountain finally flattened into a balcony wide enough for the trail to fan out like a river into several trail-like smudges. All it took was one step back from the edge to make the mountainside I’d just climbed invisible. The neighbor-mountain looked close enough to reach out and lick it. From here, you would never think that there was a whole valley in between, filled with dusty roads, decoy campsites, car kennels, Mom, and all her worries. I sat inhaling the scene while Mom crawled out of the earth at the pace of a rising sun.
Now we had a new problem.
Not only were there many, many trails on the balcony, but most of them didn’t look like trails at all. They disappeared behind thick curtains of brush before dropping off the sides of boulders taller than Mom. Where nothing grew, the trail was frayed and torn by greasy black rocks that broke through the threadbare ground and hid any signs of a path. I had to get a running start and cling to their wall-like sides like Spiderdog until Mom could step in and belay me over the top.
Again and again we followed the clearer of two smudges in search of the trail, only to find ourselves at a dead end. We would go back and climb over a graveyard of logs, or around a rock that seemed to dive off a million-foot cliff, and find a pile of rocks waiting for us on the other side to tell us we were on the right path.
Or were we?
We wandered, waiting for the scenery to stick to Mom in that way that made her take a lot of pictures and not want the moment to be over. But Mom’s inspiration was as slippery as the oily rocks.
“Isn’t this great?” I said as I executed another flawless crash landing. “It’s like we could do this forever and the trail would never end.”
“Why are we even doing this? This is insane.” Mom scooted to the edge on her butt and landed behind me like a sack of potatoes. “This isn’t the kind of day I’m trying to have.”
“Wait, you already knew you could choose what kind of day you want to have?” I asked in disbelief. “Then why wouldn’t you choose to have a great day every day?”
“Some days great just isn’t one of the choices.” Mom’s whole body sagged as she said it, like the words made her twoteen times heavier. “We’ve been wandering around up here for almost 2 hours, but according to the map, we’ve only made about a ½ mile of progress.” She dropped the packpack on the ground with a thump and plonked her butt on a rock next to it.
The moment we stopped moving, a Jillian flies came to buzz in my eyes. My ears filled with the sound they use in movies to show you that something is dead and rotting.
Mom looked at the ground that might have been the trail, or maybe it was just dirt without any rocks or branches on it. Her eyes followed the maze up the dusty wall behind it. The maybe-trail looked like a scream-sore throat feels after a day of ferocious barking. It was even steeper and more coarse than the one we’d already climbed, interrupted here and there with walls of drab-shiny rock to fall from.
“Some days all you can do is decide whether it’s worth it to keep fighting or just save your energy for a challenge with a better reward at the end,” Mom said.
“But I’ve never watched a movie where the hero decides to save his energy. What about grit?”
“What about it?” She looked at her hands, which were covered in dark lines. There were dark lines in all of her folding places so that she looked like a pencil drawing of herself, except much older. “I’ve got grit to spare. And sap in my butt crack. And I want a shower.”
“But don’t you want to overcome all obstacles, triumph against all odds, and all that hero stuff?”
“Not every challenge ends in a breakthrough, you know. Sometimes winning is just realizing that you’re banging your head against a brick wall before you give yourself a concussion.” She looked across the parched valley. “I’m not having fun, and it doesn’t matter how pretty the view is at the top. I don’t care to see it if it’s going to take us another 3 hours to get there. We’ve already gone 5 miles, or 7, or 8 ½, depending on which app you believe. Let’s go back.”
“But isn’t that failure?” I asked, wondering what happened to the Mom who had jumped into the jaws of death in Utah just to see a light at the end of a tunnel.
“Does taking a risk when you’re not enjoying it count as success?” It was the kind of question that answered itself.
I went through the worry checklist to figure out where I’d failed. The Wagon was safe from marauding meter maids. We had plenty of water and snacks in the packpack. There were people around to find our bodies if we got lost. We’d solved the riddle of the string and the stick. And we had a mapp to point the way. That left only one thing—the same irritating thing that had been like the sap in Mom’s butt crack all year—the wicked Witch!
I tried to sound supportive as I asked, “Is the Witch not feeling well?”
“Nah, we have plenty of battery.”
So I was right! The Witch was faking it for attention.
Mom carried on before I had a chance to tell her who was really behind her misery. “I don’t mind the navigation puzzle when I can see where I’m going, but this is danger without thrill and confusion without intrigue. This story is gonna end with someone breaking their neck.”
So even though we hadn’t reached anything that you could call a finish line, Mom turned her back on the scratched-up slope and started downhill.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
