The clouds were back the next morning. If you could call it morning. It was like Great Dog in Heaven was sitting his Almighty booty on top of the clouds like a cushion, making the sky sag even closer to earth.
“This weather gives me the creeps.” Mom shrugged her shoulders like someone she didn’t like had tried to hug her. “Of course the day I come to Mt. Hood it would be buried in clouds. I don’t know how people live like this. We should have kept going to Washington.”
“But you said that Mt. Hoodie was too famous to miss,” I reminded her. “What kind of hood is it? The fuzzy kind with fur on the inside or the scary kind like the Zodisack wore?”
“The pointy kind.” Mom gave a mean look to the ugly clouds. “It’s supposed to look like a perfect cone. I guess we’ll never know. At least now I can say I’ve been here... so I never have to come back. ”
“Pointy like a birthday hat?” I asked.
“More like Mt Doom,” she said mominouly. "Don’t you feel it?”
“What? The sogginess in the air?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t it make your skin... erm, your fur crawl?”
“I kind of like it. It feels nice. Like a cool pillow before a nap.”
“Well it makes me feel like the cops are after me.”
Now that Mom mentioned it, there had been more ghosts than usual floating in the darkness overnight. The Wagon had spent the night in a forest as dark and silent as a graveyard. The shadows were full of lines of any which size going any which way they wanted. Some of them glowed eerily like bones in the moonlight.
When the first light sifted through the trees, I discovered the real reason why the forest was haunted. All of those femurs and rib bones that surrounded us overnight were really sticks, stripped to their underbark and scattered throughout the forest. They snarled in the trees’ lowest branches. They clumped like scarves around boulders. They were scattered higgledy piggledy on the ground, in wavy patters here and spikey tangles there. It was as if someone had bought a forest kit at Ikea, but gave up when they got to the small pieces.
“It must have flooded here recently.” Mom shuddered again. “I don’t like to think about all that water.”
When I dismounted the Covered Wagon, it was like the sky swooped down to hug me. The soft, damp air wrapped gently around me like a cozy blanket. The trees swayed softly in the breeze, and somewhere in the background, someone was playing a white noise machine.
"Ack! Do you feel that?” Mom gasped. “The barometric pressure! I feel like I’m choking.”
“What's bariatric pressure?” I asked.
“Barometric, not bariatric. It’s the word for that feeling you get before a storm that reminds you that everything is horrible, you’re a failure, and everyone hates you.”
“Oh that feeling,” I said because I was afraid she might show me if I told her I didn’t know what it felt like. “I thought you meant that feeling you get when you have to fart.”
In the silence between Mom’s whining, I listened to the hiss of the white noise machine.
It was more of a roar than a hiss, but a lion’s short roar— more like the nonstop roar of a vacuum.
Mom led me to check out the papers on the house-shaped sign at the trailhead. “It says the bridge is washed out. Great!” She waved her arms like a Karen at the customer service desk. “Just Great! We came all this way and we’ll never see anything now.”
She stomped off into the forest before I had a chance to ask what else the sign said.
Instead of stepping over them, Mom kicked a tiny dam of loose twigs lying across the trail. “Well at least the water’s gone down.”
“How do you know?” I asked. I hadn’t seen anything wet yet, except the air.
“A flood must have left all this debris behind when the water went down. Maybe can wade across.”
“Wade across what?” I asked.
“The river. Don’t you hear it?”
“Is that what that is? I thought maybe a hunerd football teams just scored a hunerd touchdowns somewhere in these woods, and a hunerd stadiums full of fans were cheering for them.”
I leapt over a notch in the dirt where a trailside puddle escaped. It ran straight down the center of the trail, cracking the path in two as a trickle became a stream between our paws. Mom hopped from one side to the other, finding the flattest bits of leftover dirt big enough for her shoes. I scampered in and out of the woods on the drier side of the trail so I wouldn’t have to get my paws wet.
We hiked without planning past our next step until a gurgling sound made me look up. Ahead, a river swallowed the trail. The ribbon of water wasn’t big enough to hide the rocks on its bottom, but was big enough to push you around if you crossed it. The only sign that the trail continued on the other side was a soggy log—a ragged, mangey thing with a few dried needles still clinging to its remaining branches.
“This isn’t so bad,” Mom said, speeding up a bit. At least someone dragged over a log. It’ll be slick, but I bet I can grab those branches for balance.” She looked down at me. “You might want to swim.”
“You know I never want to swim,” I reminded her. “It’s just something that happens by accident in an emergency.”
“Suit yourself.” Mom put one shoe on top of the log where the bark was worn away. Once she had her foot arranged just so, she stepped up.
Except that by the time Mom was above the log, her foot wasn’t underneath her anymore. She squawked and broke off the end of the nearest branch as she slammed down onto the log in the same position as a cowboy on a horse.
She made a pirate noise in disgust as she lifted her far foot and shook the river out of her shoe. “Forget it. I might as well just wade through myself,” she said. She stomped into the river, shoes and all.
“Mom! Mom! Come back! You’ll get your shoes wet!” I shouted after her from the dry bank.
Mom didn’t even look back to make sure I was okay. She just tottered forward, waving her arms to keep her balance against the current. “Well what are you? Chicken?”
“Am not! You’re just doing it wrong. It does no good to swim your arms like that unless they’re in the water.” I hoped I wouldn’t have to demomstrate proper swimming technique.
I tried jumping onto the log. Luckily, my reflexes are quicker than Mom’s. When I felt myself slipping, I hopped back to dry land for a safe landing.
“Mom! Come back!” I whimpered, pacing up and down the bank like I was looking for a way to follow. I was really hoping she would take pity on me and come back to tell me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to.
“C’mon, Spud. It’s not even that deep. You’ll only have to swim a few strokes.”
“You said it yourself! Nothing good ever happens at river crossings on the Oregon Trail.”
“That’s just a game,” Mom lied. “Do I have to lead you by the leash?”
“No! Not that!” I begged. I searched the log for another spot with enough bark to make balancing easier. I found one and made a leap for it. It wasn’t as flat as the top, but if I stayed just to one side and kept running, I might...
BAF!
I slipped and tumbled into a branch. The branch caught me for just long enough to find my next step. Phew! That was a close one. I was already half way across the log. All I had to do was make it a few more steps and I’d be able to jump the rest of the way to safety. I sped up even more and...
SPLASH!
I was in the river.
I paddled to the shore and crawled to Mom’s side with extra bedraggledness. “eh-HEH! eh-HEH!” I coughed. “I’m so glad you made it out okay.”
Mom must not have noticed the sarcasm in my accent because she said, “See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?” She waggled her feet to shake the water out of her shoes. “And to think, they put up a sign about a little thing like that.”
The wetness in my fur mixed with the wetness of the air as we walked until I was no wetter or dryer than anything else in Oregon. We had survived the dreaded river crossing that was Game Over for so many trips on the Oregon Trail. So why did that roaring in the distance still give me the willies?
It was getting louder.
The trees that had been as constant as wallpaper all morning suddenly opened up. A grey sky and the angriest river I’d ever seen filled the space left behind by the trees. The river tumbled over itself in frantic ruffles as it raced down a canyon that chopped off the trail. It was only a baby canyon, about twice as high above the river as Mom is tall, but something about it told me that it hadn’t been so deep at breakfast time and it would be deeper by dinner.
Across the canyon lay two flimsy logs. More like toothpicks, really. The bigger one, which was about as big around as my chest, already had all the branches broken off, probably by clumsier dogs too big for the flimsy sticks to catch. The smaller one was about as thick around as Mom’s arm and lay at banister-height above the other.
When I looked at Mom for instructions, she was studying the logs, too. She looked down at the river, where the tiny tip of a boulder stuck out over a ruffled collar of lumpy water. She looked back at the logs. I didn’t like where her look was going.
“I could use that top log for balance, but then how would I carry you?” Mom asked without taking her eyes off the river.
“But I don’t like it when you carry me,” I reminded her.
“True. You’d probably make us both fall in.” Mom’s eyes followed the smooth dip of water under the logs to where it smashed against the next boulder and exploded into rapids again. She watched the frothy tantrum trample itself as it scrambled down the canyon over rocks and who knew what else. “Your harness isn’t all that different from a climbing harness,” she added, still looking at the river. “If I told you that you could do it, would you believe me?”
I looked at the river, too. It bashed itself against the boulder so hard that it made me wonder if water could hurt. “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you really think that?”
We both watched the river for a while. The river did its best to impress us.
Mom finally tore her eyes from the log and started walking slowly along the edge of the ravine, studying the cliff, the boulders, and all that water as she went.
“Did you lose something?” I asked.
“If we can just find a spot where the drop isn’t so high and the river isn’t so swift, we could wade across.” She said it with the tone of someone describing a heist at the beginning of the movie, leaving out the part where the real drama would come later on so as not to ruin the suspense.
Mom stopped and stared at three boulders that weren’t so far apart from each other. They weren’t close enough to leap from one to the next in a single bound, but if you were willing to get wet, you might crash from one to the next without getting smashed to bits first.
“Mom, I’m scared,” I admitted, but only because no one else could hear me over the river.
Mom's eyes were also big with fear. I didn’t know her eyes could get that big without ears to pull back or a tail to tuck. When she finally moved, it was with a blink so big that it shook her whole body. She made a noise like a shiver. “I’m scared, too. But if we keep letting ourselves get turned back, we’ll never see anything cool. Dirt roads, weather, mapping errors, losing the trail, snow, rivers... If we let them all stop us, then what are we even doing?”
“Don’t forget boy scouts, and cereal killers, and baths,” I reminded her. “All those things can stop you, too.”
Mom looked up at the clouds and her face reflected their gloom. “And not letting me pump my own gas. Anyway, what if it’s just those clouds making me feel like something awful is about to happen. Maybe I’m just psyching myself out.”
“Psyching yourself out? Never!” I reassured her. “I’m the one who’s scared.” Behind the roar of the river I could almost hear sappy music swelling like we were in a Very Special Episode of a TV show as old as Mom. “I didn’t want to admit it because I didn’t want you to leave me in the Wagon while you had adventures all alone. But I’ve been scared ever since the trail fell into the river.”
“I guess this is why you always lose half your wagon party at river crossings in Oregon Trail.” She looked at me. “The game, I mean.” She sighed. “Okay, fine. Let’s go back.”
Mom’s eyes finally washed ashore on the ground in front of her feet as she turned to walk back.
“Psych!” I said triumphantly when I caught up. “I was just tricking you into chickening out first!”
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