The path less gravelled
- May 30
- 10 min read
“Ha! You chumps!” the Witch interrupted. “There’s a parking lot a couple miles that way, but the road to get there is closed. You’re trapped!”
“Maybe there’s a longer way around.” Mom tickled the Witch to put her in a better mood. “Any trail has got to be safer than what we just came up.”
“You’re ten thousand feet in the sky and everyone went home because of the smoke,” the Witch scoffed. “What are you going to do, fly home?”
“I don’t see a way out,” Mom said to me as her eyes continued begging the Witch to say it ain’t so. “I know it’s early, but we haven’t seen anybody else coming this direction all day. I don’t think we can count on anyone coming along to help us. As sketchy as it was, I think we’re gonna have to find our way out of this one on our own.” Her face went greyer than the smoke as she turned back toward The Inevitable. “Let’s hope the trail is easier to find on the way down. We’ll take it nice and slow. Inch by inch if we need to.” Then, so she would have something to live for that wouldn’t be too disappointing if she died and left it unfinished, she added, “If we survive, at least we’ll still have time to do laundry when we get home.”
We walked along the lake to where it became a stream, which became a waterfall, which fell off the same cliff that we had to climb back down. When we reached the edge, Mom leaned forward to look at the impossible path below us. She jumped back, startled.
My hackles prickled.
A labradoodle climbed into view. “Hi guys! Golly, that sure was steep,” he panted.
“Is it dog-friendly up here?” the man behind him asked.
“A hell of a lot more dog-friendly than what you just came up,” Mom said with eyes wide and eyebrows high. “Is there a trail that goes all the way down?”
“Of course.” The man tilted his head like Mom had said something confusing. “Although it gets a little sketchy down there a ways. How did you come up?”
“You see that scree field?” Mom pointed her chin at the pile of rocks that definitely did not look like a trail from here. “I clung to those rocks and climbed all the way to the top of that moraine before I finally found the trail.” She shook out the fear and looked the man in the face so he would look closely at her face, too. “I am Claire, by the way. Claire from near San Francisco. I drive a white Dodge van with California plates. This is Oscar. Nobody knows we’re here but you.” She held his eyes for a long second when she was done talking to let him know that she’d told him a very important message that he might need to deliver someday.
Mom and the man reminded each other to be safe, and the labradoodle and I reminded each other to have fun. They went toward the lake and Mom and I went back in search of the trail. We started downwards, looking around before every step so the trail wouldn’t have a chance to escape while we were distracted. For a while, Mom walked with only two paws on the ground until the trail dove under a blanket of white dirt the size of a small car kennel or a large driveway.
We looked down the white dirt to where the trail came out on the far side. Because of Mom’s silly two-legged walking style, this steep white dirt would be too slippery for her. A good life partner thinks about his Mom’s needs and not just his own. It’s called empuffy.
“Oh no! How will you get down?” I empuffed.
Mom studied the hill for a minute. She climbed onto the top edge of the white dirt and sat down. “On my butt!”
She lifted her heels and started sliding. Unlike when we’d ridden our tabottoms back onto the trail earlier that morning, she used her paws not as brakes, but as paddles to speed up. When she got to the place where the white dirt ended, she stuck her shoes hard into the gravel and let her butt slide off the ground, back into the air above her legs. She took a few steps to catch the momentum, shook the wet out of her shorts, and turned back to me.
“Your turn!”
I started walking after her, but pretty soon I was coming down the same way.
“Weeeeeeeeeee!” I thought loudly until I landed on the rocks next to Mom.
The next time the trail disappeared under more white dirt, I said, “You’re definitely going to slip and fall here. Look how steep it is.” The white dirt started high enough on the uphill side of the trail to block any chance of escape, and dove across our path all the way to a stream a ways below. The stream rushed headlong toward where the ground disappeared altogether, turning it into a waterfall just beyond where the white dirt ended. The mountainside above the white dirt was too steep and crumbly to walk on and everything else was better suited for sledding than walking.
“Yippee! I get to be a sled dog again!” I jumped onto the slope and started sliding just like before.
“NO!” Mom shouted, so sharply that I dug in my paws hard and stopped short. “If you slide down that way you’re just gonna plop into the river and fall over the waterfall. This time we need to go across, not down. You’ve got to think ahead, Spud!”
I didn’t remind her that thinking ahead was her job.
She grabbed the rocks next to the uphill white dirt and started climbing, hanging from her front paws and using her back legs for balance like she had earlier that morning. She went up, up, up until she was standing at the head of the white dirt a little ways above the trail. As she reached across the top-most part of the white slide, one of her back legs slipped, leaving a dirty streak in the frosty whiteness. She whimpered and hugged the mountain closer for a moment before pulling her stray leg back in. When she recovered, she carefully worked her way on feet, hands, and butt back down to the trail on the far side before calling me to follow.
I walked across the white dirt like normal.
There was no white dirt the next time the trail disappeared, just air. The trail had either fallen off a cliff, or hidden under a bush. Mom studied the ground carefully for hints about what to do next while I studied her face carefully for the same. We looked for a long time before Mom started climbing down the cliff. I followed her as the rock got steeper and steeper. She hugged the mountain as she waved her foot into the abyss, searching for the next rock to stand on.
“Wait here.” She held up her hand in the stay sign. She kept her hand up as she disappeared beneath it. Finally, Mom pulled the hand out of sight so she could use it to hang onto the next rock.
There was a lot of clattering and smashing. A second later, a cloud rushed down the lower mountain so far below that it looked like the setting of a different story.
When the cloud spent itself, I heard a voice call from the abyss, “Oscar, c’mere!”
I looked down, but didn’t see anywhere to land even my front paws, let alone a runaway dog ramp if my brakes failed. Did she want me to take the same route as the rocks?
“I don’t know how!” I whimpered.
“Okay, I don’t know how you get down here either,” the Voice said carefully, like it was trying very hard to stay calm. “I was hoping you had a better idea. I’m coming up. Stay!”
Many lifetimes later, Mom climbed out of the cliff, hanging onto bits of the mountain no bigger than a chihuahua’s paw.
Our party was safely back together again, but we still didn’t know where to go. Mom studied the bush where the trail might be hiding. She ducked under a branch and studied the rocks and white dirt underneath for a very, very long time.
“I think it’s okay to keep going,” she said.
“Where?”
“Beyond that bush. We’ll deal with whatever comes after it when we get there.”
I found my trail and Mom found one that was better for her.
“This doesn’t look like the trail either, but at least from here I can see the trail farther down,” Mom said. “If only we can get to it.”
I looked down, down, down through the smoke at a faint trail miles below. Just then, the mountain under one of Mom’s shoes started a surprise sprint to the valley. She pulled her leg back like she’d stepped on something hot and hung on to an outcropping of the solid mountain for balance. This stampede brought even bigger rocks down as it went, making more and more noise, and leaving Mom hanging by her armpits and elbows.
I sat and Mom hung still as statues as we watched the rocks crash through the smoke. In the background, an ant-sized hiker stopped to watch the show from below. When the dust settled, the ant-hiker turned and walked the other way. Mom tested different standing rocks until she found two that worked. She took a deep breath and we kept inching down.
Just like on our way up the slide, Mom was doing a weird smacking thing with her mouth like someone had tricked her into eating medicine.
“What’s up with you?” I panted.
“I’m so scared that I have dry mouth,” Mom rasped. “I’ve only been this frightened a few times in my life.”
“Isn’t it exciting?” I asked, hoping she’d say yes so I would know the pounding in my chest and the sick feeling in my tummy were a good thing.
“Fear is only exciting when you’re not really in danger.” Mom said in a voice about to snap. “This is very serious. If either of us loses our footing, we may not survive.” I wasn’t sure if she was reminding me or herself. “We’ll be safe if we can just get down to where that hiker is. Easy does it.”
“Maybe you should bark at it and ask it to wait,” I suggested. “It can help me if you fall.”
But asking strangers for help was still more scary than whatever had turned Mom’s mouth into a desert, because all she did was smack her lips and plan her next step.
We inched and slid, and Mom boot-scooted and squawked, until little by little we didn’t have to plan each step. Eventually Mom began to walk on all twos again, one step at a time at first. When Mom no longer had to arrange each step in advance, I caught the smell of lunch ahead. In an instant, terror turned to hunger in my belly. I ran to investigate, with Mom trotting right behind me.
The lunch lady looked up when she heard my thundering paws. “Hi! I’m Oscar and I didn’t fall off the mountain, even when Mom screamed at me,” I announced. “I’m very brave, so I think you should pet me on my tabottom and maybe give me some of that sammich.”
“Hi,” Mom called as she caught up. “Do you mind talking to me for a few minutes?”
I was so stunned that I almost forgot about the sammich. Mom? Asking a stranger to talk to her? For no reason?
The lady put the leftover lunch into her packpack without sharing and stood up to Mom’s level. I closed the gap and gave her my waggly butt to scratch so she would know that we weren’t stranger-eating dangerous.
“I thought I was gonna die up there,” Mom explained quickly so the lady wouldn’t think she was the kind of person that would talk to a stranger if it weren’t a real emergency. “It would make me feel a lot better to talk to someone while I calm down.”
“Um…” the Lunch Lady agreed.
She never turned all the way toward Mom, but the Lunch Lady matched Mom’s pace so they could walk side-by-side, and I led the way. Mom and the Lunch Lady talked about normal things like driving, and muzzles, and their favorite trails, and how great dogs are, until Mom remembered how these things were important to her.
It turned out that the Lunch Lady was the very same ant that had chickened out when she saw all those rocks that Mom kicked loose fall off the mountain. And Mom thinks that she has no effect on the world! She probably saved the Lunch Lady’s life.
“Don’t feel bad, Mom chickens out a lot too,” I told her so she wouldn’t feel like a wimp. “Sometimes the bravest thing to do is to chicken out.”
“You made the right decision,” Mom said through her teeth. Her teeth wouldn’t let go of each other for many hours yet. “I wish I hadn’t gone up there. Absolutely nothing is worth risking my dog’s life like that.”
The whirlwind inside Mom didn’t calm down until we were almost home. The lights came down over the City in bright, velvety greys. Even when night made the air invisible, I could tell that the gloom had followed us by how the smell of camping blotted out the smell of ocean. When we reached My Hometown, the street lights shined cones into the thick air like heads drooping under the weight of a Cone of Shame.
My hackles were still buzzing from the mountain when we walked back into the Stuck House. One eye recognized it as the same home where I’d always felt safe. The other eye saw it as a stranger might see ruins, as the pawprint of what a long-ago life left behind.
While she waited for the dryer to finish, Mom asked the Witch to tell us more about the fires.
“You’re such a sucker,” the Witch said. “The fire was just on the other side of that peak you were looking at this morning. The one behind the lake. The fire’s burned an area one and a half times the size of the San Francisco Bay by now. Bahaha, you should see your face!”
“Holy dog doo, Oscar. Those stranded people who had to jump in a lake were walking toward where we were, just from the other direction. Talk about the wrong time to go to the mountains!”
“Sounds like we were in the right place at the wrong time,” I said. “See? Luck isn’t about avoiding danger. It’s about how good it feels when it doesn’t get you.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
