by A N Sandra
“These clothes are slippery,” Lourdes said in disbelief.
“They are lightweight trekking clothes. They are warmer than they feel, they dry quickly when wet, and they are dirt resistant,” Miss Jan said. “When we get where we’re going we have more like them. You only have two changes of clothes for now, so think carefully how you treat them.”
Helena thought of the pile of laundry Maria did just for Lourdes alone every single day. Miss Jan must have known that.
Peter and Ray looked different in their trekking clothes and new boots. Their prep school look was gone entirely. Both boys looked older, like world travelers.
“It’s never good to hike in new boots,” Miss Jan said. “We’ll do a couple of hours tonight and set up camp. Tomorrow we won’t do more than four hours either.”
She had everybody stand by their pack and showed them how to put them on.
“I can’t wear this,” Ray said right away as he picked it up. “I can’t.”
There was a long pause as Miss Jan waited for Tawna to deal with Ray. Tawna stared straight ahead as Miss Jan looked at her, then Ray, then back at her.
“You are going to have to pull your weight,” Miss Jan finally said, firmly. She stepped over to Ray and placed his backpack on his back leaving him to fasten the buckles around his waist. “Okay, here we go!”
They walked away from the Bronco, following Miss Jan to a worn mountain path. Helena took a last look at the Bronco at the edge of the airfield and turned her head sharply back toward the path ahead of her.
We’ll stop here for the night,” Miss Jan said. “We’ve got this nice spot by the creek and we’ll have plenty of water for cooking and washing up.”
“That took more than two hours,” Ray accused her. He already had his pack off his back and collapsed into the meadow grass.
“You were really slow.” Miss Jan smiled calmly. “We need to start a fire. I’ll show you how to gather the right things to start a fire with!”
Peter perked up and Helena had to smile. Just the mention of building a fire got Peter’s attention.
Even though it was the middle of June, lots of things were still damp from melting snow, and finding dry pine needles and sticks was not as easy as it had seemed when they started looking. Finally, Miss Jan showed everyone how to lay out the materials for the fire, although Peter was clearly the most interested in the project.
“I want to see what’s in my pack,” Lourdes said when the fire was hot. It wasn’t quite dark yet.
“Unpack it on this tarp and I’ll talk to you about it,” Miss Jan said. She spread out a dark green tarp and Lourdes began to spread out the things in her backpack on it.
“This is the canvas of your tent,” Miss Jan said. “Helena has the other parts. You will share a tent, so you each carry half.”
Lourdes nodded. Helena got more interested. Cooperation with Lourdes would really mean she needed to do everything.
“These canvas shoes are your camp shoes. You can’t wear them to hike in, you wear them around camp. And these are your socks.” Miss Jan looked very carefully at everyone. “You each have four pairs of wool socks. Keep dry socks on your feet at all times. In a few minutes after we set up the tents, we will wash our socks out and hang them up to dry overnight. They probably won’t dry completely, so I’ll show you how to pack them up in the morning to finish drying.”
Helena had helped Maria do laundry as a small girl, but the idea of washing her own dirty socks out by hand in the nearby creek horrified her completely. So gross.
“These are your spare clothes. I know the underwear looks weird. Tomorrow you will switch underwear and hand wash what you have on.”
Now everyone looked horrified. Even more gross.
“That is your share of the food that we have. We have enough for eight days. I think we can get there in six days, but it might take seven. We need to be careful how we eat. As a matter of fact, everyone take the food out of your backpacks now and I’ll take out our dinner and then string the rest up in a bear bag.”
“Huh?” Peter asked.
“We need to keep everything that smells good to a bear or other animals in a bag that I’ll hang from a tree. Even toothpaste needs to go in the bear bag.”
“I don’t have toothpaste!” Lourdes looked at the contents of her pack spread out before her.
“Helena has a tube for both of you. You have the shampoo for both of you,” Miss Jan said. She bent over the tarp and showed Lourdes the shampoo. Lourdes sniffed in disdain at the small bottle of drugstore shampoo and Miss Jan pretended not to see her do it.
“How did you learn all this stuff?” Peter asked.
“Duane was an Eagle Scout,” Miss Jan said. “We went on lots of high adventure trips together.”
“Bet you never thought it would be this handy,” Peter said.
“That is for sure,” Miss Jan said, sitting back on her heels with a distant look. “I’ll show you how to set up your tents. In a couple of days you’ll do it faster than me.”
Helena thought that was unlikely, but it turned out that she was very capable with the seemingly flimsy tent rods, and with Miss Jan’s direction, the tent she would share with Lourdes was put together in minutes. Ray and Peter took longer with theirs, and Tawna sat as still as the Sphinx while Miss Jan tried to engage her in setting up the tent the two of them would share.
“I wish we could share a tent,” Helena said softly to Peter as they brushed their teeth with filtered stream water.
“We’ll have to find ways to talk privately on the trail,” Peter said. “This whole thing is so bogus I can’t even try to apply the rules of logic.”
“Well, you were kind of right about us being kidnapped. It just turned out we were probably kidnapped by our own parents,” Helena said graciously. Letting Peter be right sometimes was the kind thing to do.
“Kidnapped by your own parents…” Peter shook his head in wonder. “This whole thing gets weirder all the time.”
Everyone looked at Miss Jan blankly as she showed them how to secure the food, toothpaste, and other “smellables” into two bear bags and hoist them up a large spruce tree. A world in which bears would come try to take toothpaste was just not comprehensible to any of them yet. Even Miss Jan looked disbelievingly at the bear bags swinging in the tree, as if they might not be real. As if the whole situation might be a dream.
There was still light outside; Helena didn’t know how late it was but suddenly she was so tired that the idea of getting into the tent and into the sleeping bag she had spread out there was overwhelming.
“Can we go to sleep now?” Helena asked, unsure what to do next. Going to bed seemed safest. She remembered having to ask to go potty in kindergarten and felt the same way now.
Miss Jan channeled her inner kindergarten teacher and nodded kindly.
“Sleep as long as you want in the morning. Like I told you already, we need to break in your new boots and we won’t go too long tomorrow.”
Helena suddenly felt as if she had been unplugged. She didn’t have the energy to say goodnight to anyone, and she lurched toward the tent and flung herself at her sleeping bag. Fighting with it to get inside roused her a little, but when she was inside the bag she curled into a fetal position and went right to sleep.
“Ohhh, my God! Ohhh, my God!” Lourdes was screaming.
Helena felt her heart pounding hard. A bear. It must be a bear. Lourdes was screaming over and over again. In a semi-lucid state, Helena looked wildly about her for the bear. There was no bear that she could see… a snake? Helena hated and despised snakes… she couldn’t see one, but maybe Lourdes had.
The beam from a flashlight entered the tent before Miss Jan came with Tawna behind her.
“Shhh… what’s wrong… shhh…”
“Perry!” Lourdes screamed. “If we never pick Perry up from the kennel he will be there forever! He’ll think I don’t love him!”
Helena got out of her sleeping bag with a series o
f violent contortions and pushed past Tawna to get outside. Peter was standing in the moonlight, looking tortured.
“I thought it was a bear, then I thought it was a snake,” Helena told him. “She’s worried about her dog.”
“If I hadn’t been so upset myself I’d have known that Lourdes would do this when she realized she would never see Perry or her horse again,” Peter said calmly.
“What do you think they did with Perry and the horse?” Helena asked.
“Doesn’t matter what they really did, it matters what Tawna can get her to believe,” Peter said wisely.
“I know you should never hate an innocent creature, but I hated Perry,” Helena admitted.
“He was a miserable dog. He was smelly, he never peed outside when Lourdes walked him, and Tawna got mad at anyone who tried to make him mind,” Peter said practically. “I think he was an extension of Ray.”
“I had to give my room to Lourdes, after I’d just decorated it the way I wanted because Tawna said she needed the bigger room for Perry.”
“That was so uncool,” Peter agreed. “Dad should have grown a pair and put his foot down, but they were just married, and he wanted to make her happy.”
“Nothing’s changed,” Helena snorted. She was suddenly aware that she was outside in the forest with no shoes on and it was extremely cold. Her toes felt like they were being poked with sharp needles. “Now I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to sleep!”
There were lots of sobbing and comforting noises going on inside the tent. Helena might have felt more sympathetic, but she’d never liked Lourdes’s dog anyway and it was very cold. Lourdes was the one having the fit, and she was the one displaced. It was the story of the whole time they had been a “blended family.” They should have been shaken and stirred, because the blending had not worked.
Helena had no idea how cold it was outside, but her toes ached as she shifted from one foot to another trying not to have a fit herself. Finally, she gave up on waiting for Lourdes to calm down completely.
“Hey, guys, I’m coming back in, make room,” Helena shoehorned her way back into the tent. Miss Jan backed out to make room for her. “Thank you,” Helena told her.
Tawna was curled up next to Lourdes, holding her as she sobbed.
With thrashing gestures Helena got back into the sleeping bag and tried to warm her feet by pressing them together. It didn’t work. She had allowed them to get too cold. She should have put on socks before bed, she realized. She didn’t even know where her socks were in the dark. In grave misery, she listened to Lourdes sob over a dog instead of her lost life and hoped she would not lose any toes to frostbite. The good news was that if she did lose toes she would certainly make less fuss than Lourdes was making now, but that was only slightly comforting. She imagined a panel of judges for sorrow giving her a seven for missing appendages, while Lourdes got a perfect ten for pining after a dog that was no doubt already rehomed to a wealthy family and not missing them a bit.
Just about the time Helena got back to sleep it was time to wake up. Miss Jan had said they could sleep as long as they wanted, but clearly she hadn’t been telling the truth. Everyone was awake and eating powdered scrambled eggs. They were the worst things Helena had ever eaten, including the Tibetan tea with rancid yak butter she had been forced to consume for a cultural appreciation class last year.
“I don’t think the Dalai Lama would touch this stuff,” Helena scoffed, but forked it into her mouth, remembering the tea. Peter couldn’t follow her train of thought and looked concerned for her mental well-being.
“Maybe Confucius would?” he questioned.
“Who knows?” Helena shook her head. She didn’t want to explain about cultural appreciation class, or anything else. Tibet couldn’t be stranger to her than the Alaskan wilderness with its imposing spruce trees, rugged rocks, and crisp cold air even in early summer. She remembered that her mother, a woman who often seemed irrelevant, had come to speak about Tibet at cultural appreciation day. Her mother had studied in Tibet for three months in college.
“We might eat worse stuff than this,” Peter said. “I don’t know how I’m going to eat food grown by Ray and Lourdes.”
“Well… it’ll be fresh. This stuff is… I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure it’s eggs. It might have egg flavoring.”
“Yes,” Peter agreed helpfully. “Egg flavoring. This stuff is plastic parts with egg flavoring.”
Miss Jan showed them how to carefully repack their packs. Tawna and Ray were so inept that Miss Jan did theirs for them. Helena folded and rolled her clothes carefully the way Maria had taught her as a small girl and they fit back in her pack smoothly. She felt a little smug when Miss Jan patted her pack in approval.
“Off we go,” Miss Jan said, trying to sound cheerful when they were completely packed. The midmorning sun bounced off her pack as she led them toward the trail.
“This is the first day of the rest of your life,” Peter joked at Helena as she walked in front of him.
“Maybe it’s the first day of the last of my life,” Helena answered, not sure if she was joking or not.
This is a great fire!” Miss Jan enthused as she watched Lourdes blow on the blue flames and fan them bigger.
Miss Jan was clearly trying to teach everyone her mad camping skills after they finished their four-hour hike. First, she had inspected everyone’s feet without their hiking boots on and nearly wept tears of joy that no one had blisters.
“This is just great! It’s too good to be true that everyone’s boots fit like this!” she exclaimed. Her enthusiasm over other people’s feet in the face of worldwide disaster amused Helena, who would rather suffer hives than look closely at Ray’s feet. It was nice that Miss Jan had something to feel happy about, though.
“Wow!” Lourdes glowed as she stepped back to look at the first fire she had created without a single match.
“You’re a genius, baby!” Tawna exclaimed.
Helena thought that was a little strong since even cavemen had been capable of making fire, but she was impressed anyway. Miss Jan showed Lourdes and everyone else how to gently feed the fire to build it up to the point that it was ready for larger sticks and then branches to fuel it.
“Peter, let’s get you started on some cooking lessons!” Miss Jan said enthusiastically, spurred by the success Lourdes had enjoyed with the fire.
“Maria is my favorite cook,” Peter said unexpectedly.
“Maria is the best cook,” Helena said softly. Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought of Maria’s hands quickly rolling out flour tortillas on the thick cutting board in their home kitchen.
“Maria isn’t here now,” Miss Jan said firmly, as if she knew that Helena might be about to break down.
Peter could see Tawna waiting for him to fail to measure up to Lourdes, and he couldn’t stand to lose any competition. “I’ll cook something amazing!”
“I was thinking hobo dinners,” Miss Jan smiled. “Tonight you can make hobo dinners for everyone and tomorrow morning I’ll show Ray some amazing things with freeze dried bacon.”
“The fun begins,” Helena said softly so that no one could hear her.
Three days of hiking had passed uneventfully other than Ray, Tawna, and Lourdes all beginning to stink because they refused to wash their undergarments by hand. The freezing cold mornings and evenings were hard on the native Texans and they moved slowly in the, but Miss Jan did manage to get them to move. Only two blisters among the whole group, and no one contracted food poisoning from the food fixed by Ray and Peter, who cooked most of the food because they liked to be near the fire.
“This is easier than I thought it would be,” Helena told Peter as she finished tying her hiking boots.
“This would be the best adventure ever if it wasn’t for the Hollister Foundation trying to kill us and bring on the end of the world,” Peter answered.
“It would be the best adventure ever if we could lose Tawna and Ray and Lourdes,” Helena co
rrected him.
“It’s been fun to see them struggling,” Peter said with a small smile. “Makes my days brighter.”
It was true that seeing Ray carry his pack down the trail after trying every which way to avoid it was refreshing. Back at the penthouse he had never done anything he considered too hard. Tawna even had a special tutor come help him with his homework, but everyone knew the tutor was really doing most of it for him. Watching the rules of the trail applying to Lourdes hadn’t hurt Helena’s feelings either. Tawna was still beautiful without makeup, but she had a sour look at the end of each day when Helena knew she was wishing for a stiff drink or six. All in all, it was nice to see the people who had previously bent every circumstance to their desires having to deal with the consequences of refusing to wash their underwear, even if it was unpleasant to smell them.
“Let’s move out!” Miss Jan called cheerfully. With years of experience in the wilderness Miss Jan looked fresh and confident in dark blue trekking clothes. Even her hat was set at a slightly jaunty angle. As the days went on Miss Jan seemed more like the chipper housewife she had been in Texas.
“I’m ready!” Peter followed her like a golden retriever puppy as she walked up the trail ahead of them.
Helena made sure her water bottle was full and started behind them. Behind her, Lourdes, Ray, and Tawna began to gather their things to move on. The trail was narrow as they cut across the side of a rather steep mountain.
A low rumbling sound filled the air and Helena thought she was getting sick to her stomach for just a second before she realized that she was experiencing an earthquake.
“Run!” Miss Jan yelled.
Peter began to run forward just as Helena realized that small animals were darting across the path in front of her and that birds were shrieking overhead.
“We should go back!” Tawna yelled to Miss Jan, refusing to move. She was clutching Ray to her and Lourdes paused in between her mother and Helena, unsure what to do. Meanwhile small rocks and animals bounded all around them, as though they alone were frozen in time.
