Where there’s smoke
- May 11
- 7 min read
“Take that, you two-timing dingleberry!” I muttered, stomping on the Witch’s feeding straw and knocking her off the driving chair as if it were an accident. “That’ll teach you to sabotage our vacation.”
Mom’s sunglasses stayed on the front windowsill as we drove along the dry side of the mountains between Nevada and California. The air was faded and grey-brown like an antique photo, more ancient even than VHS. We’d been driving all day, and still the smoke followed us. The sky over Nevada on my side of the Wagon was still clear and sky-colored, but the smudge seeping over the mountains from California blurred the peaks on Mom’s side. The smell of camping crowded out the smell of trees and it seemed like only a matter of time before the whole world was filled with smoke. Even though the sun was still in the middle of the sky, I could stare straight at it without blinking, like staring at the moon. It wasn’t its usual sparkly grey either, but a sort of lava-grey that would have been quite nice on a pair of running shorts, but was unsettling, smoldering so high above the horizon like that. Cars stopped beside the freeway to take pictures of the neon-grey color of it.
The Witch ordered us off the main highway, and Mom’s eyes immediately left the road and began searching the trees. Normally, the Law is a lowland creature, but Mammoth Lakes is a rare high-altitude habitat where they herd all the wild wagon-dwellers into hotels. Mom kept her eyes in the forest as we drove the marathong-length loop around town searching for a good sleeping place, but there were already wagons behind every tree.
On the second drive-by, the Wagon found a car-trail that had more space between trees than the others. Mom leaned forward in the driving chair as we crept down the sandy path into the forest, eyes darting from Subaru to car-house, from igloo to Isuzu. She checked out the neighborhood for signs that dog eyes couldn’t see and the muscles on the sides of her face bubbled as her teeth clamped hard. When you accidentally find yourself in a circle of unfamiliar wagons, there’s always someone with terrible sleeping technique who spends the night shouting and playing music like the air is all theirs.
“I guess we’re sleeping between the drunk college kids and the rednecks tonight,” Mom said as the Wagon cleared a spot for itself in the crowd.
We walked into the woods to find a potty tree, Mom keeping her eyes on the ground like she does in the City to keep them from catching a Friend. When we came back, a new car was snuggled so close to the Wagon’s butt that it blocked the kitchen door.
“Oh no! What will you do about dinner?” I asked, hoping it didn’t mean that my dinner was also trapped.
When Mom saw what I saw, smoke came out of her ears and fury blew the hat off her head. Or maybe the smoke was there the whole time, it was hard to tell. “Forget it.” She clamped the hat back down with a paw, not bothering to tuck the stray hairs underneath. “It’s probably too windy to light the damned stove anyway. I’ll just have nuts and raisins for dinner.”
“But what about your morning poop juice?” I reminded her. “Don’t you need space to set up the stove?”
“We’ll figure it out.” Mom opened the door and made a hurry up motion. “Let’s just get inside and pretend this isn’t happening.”
She closed the Wagon against the noise of the people-puppy across the way practicing drums on a set of pots and pans. We ate our dinners lying down so that all we saw through the windows was sky. The ferocious wind kept our neighbors inside, so the racket they made wasn’t nearly as loud as the wind’s howling. Mom poked at the Witch to tell her a bedtime story, but the Witch was giving her the silent treatment.
“Fine. We should just go to sleep anyway.” Mom shoved the Witch under her pillow and flopped heavily on top to show that the Witch couldn’t dump us if we dumped her first. She said a good-night curse to the wall of cars blocking the road, flopped onto her other side, and pulled the other pillow over her own head.
It was quiet when the Witch woke us in the middle of the night to get ready for our hike. When Mom opened the door, I couldn’t believe what I didn’t see. Her curse worked! All the other cars had gone to H-E-double-hockey-sticks in the night, just like she told them to.
“Where’d everybody go?” I asked. “Oh no! What if they’re already on the trail?”
“I doubt that’s what’s going on.” Mom looked at the moon glowing the color of butt lights on a dark highway. She sniffed the air like she fancied herself a dog. I waited for her to howl. “I think they left because of the smoke,” she said instead. “At least that means it won’t be crowded.”
Mom had plenty of time to make her poop juice in the abandoned clearing before we took our positions inside the Wagon. As we got closer to town, the Witch came alive with all the messages she’d taken during the night. “What the heck?” Mom told the Wagon to pull over so she could give the Witch all of her attention.
“What does she want now?” I asked.
“There are 13 messages from Lily. That’s not like her.”
Where the hell are you? the Witch buzzed.
Are you safe?
Let me know you’re okay!
Mom poked the Witch harder than necessary and spoke directly into her face. “Where are there fires in California?”
“There are fires everywhere in California,” the Witch said. “Aren’t you paying attention? You’re gonna have to be more specific.” As if picking one off the pile at random, the Witch added, “Oh, there was this fire in a place called Mammoth Reservoir. Some people had to jump in a lake to escape.”
“That one! Where is that on a map?” Mom demanded.
“Mammoth Reservoir? Oh, it’s over by Sacramento somewhere.” The Witch showed Mom a balloon far, far away from our blue dot.
“Oh phew.” Mom’s body got a little less pointy. “We’re at Mammoth Lakes, not Mammoth Reservoir. Totally different thing.”
“Isn’t a rese-roar a kind of lake?” I asked.
“Totally different thing,” she repeated, a little harder this time. “Lily probably saw Mammoth and got confused.” She put the Witch back in her lap and told the Wagon to giddy-up.
We arrived at the trailhead at daybreak, yet this day came with less light than usual. We dismounted into the shadowy back-of-the-basement dawn.
“Is the sun having a bad day?” I asked.
Mom shrugged. “Summer’s ending. Maybe the night’s just getting longer.”
The trail led us into the cleavage between two mountains. I could tell this was a very pretty place, even without seeing it properly. When I turned to look back at Mom, I could barely make out an even bigger mountain hunched in the distance behind her. Perhaps there were more mountains behind it, but there was no way of knowing what else might hide in that murky dimness.
“That’s Mammoth Mountain,” Mom guided. “It’s only a couple of miles away, and yet you can barely see it!”
I raised my nose for a better look. It didn’t look much like an elephant to me, but it was hard to tell its real shape in all this smoke. “Isn’t it impolite to talk about elephants? Let’s give it some privacy.”
The grapefruit-grey sun rolled up the mountain. It lit the trees with an eerie glow like something in the Wagon’s tail lights right before we booty bump it. Its dull rays sparkled like fool’s gold in granite boulders and the river reflected its flat light like burning lava. After a while, the sun checked out completely and hid behind the smoke. It felt like the kind of cloudy day that has something worse planned.
Behind the smoke, I smelled that many, many people had passed along this trail recently. The only sign left of them was the faint smell of armpits and their shoeprints in the dust. We did meet other hikers, but they were all turtles coming out of the mountains, which was the wrong migration pattern for this time of morning.
“… have time to do laundry at least…” a dusty woman with more hair outside her ponytail than in it told her companion.
“… maybe head down to Badwater instead…” mused a man with a wooly beard to a lady whose outfit matched his.
“… lunch in town before we hit the road?” one man walking in running clothes said to another.
“Where’s everybody going?” I asked.
“They’re all leaving because of the smoke, I guess.” Mom’s shoulders twitched, shrugging off a thought like it was a fly in her ear.
Maybe they knew something Mom didn’t. I shook off the thought. Mom knew everything. “Why are we going the other way?”
“Probably because they’re more sensitive to smoke than we are.” Mom thought for a second. “Either that or they have higher standards than we do. Don’t think too hard about that.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. I stopped thinking about it right away, but it took Mom longer to shed the thought that there was something wrong with not caring about what other people were doing.
After a few miles, the trail made a hard turn and climbed a slope so steep that it seemed no trail could hang onto it for long. The climbing got steeper and steeper, rockier and rockier, until the trail turned invisible among all the steep and rock. Mom climbed slower and slower, using all four paws evenly. The flatter Mom got, the closer I climbed on her heels until she was practically standing on top of me. The ground was strangely unsteady, and I had to step carefully to make sure the earth stayed in place under me. If the ground couldn’t hold me, there was no telling what other unexpected things might happen. Mom, too, was having trouble with the trail. By now, she was standing on her front paws more than her back ones, hanging onto rocks with her claws so that her feet wouldn’t push the whole mountain away behind her.
“Don’t sit there, Spud,” she gasped in a way that didn’t sound right at all. “If I slip, I don’t want to take you down with me.”
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