by Will North
Alec sat behind him so he could see through the front window. There was only one other passenger, a few rows back: an elderly woman who smiled at him sweetly when he nodded to her.
The little bus corkscrewed up the long hill out of Dolgellau and turned onto the A470, heading south. The road climbed steadily for several miles, leaving the lushly wooded river valley behind. As it ascended, Alec watched the landscape change from tidy village gardens to broad, sloping, daisy-dotted meadows edged with finely crafted drystone walls, and then to steeper, more rugged open moorland furred with thin grass and tough pale green bracken fern. The bus stopped at a remote junction high in the hills marked by the lonely Cross Foxes Inn. The old woman got out.
“Same time, Mrs. Thomas?” the driver asked.
“Same time, Fred,” she chirped.
The driver closed the door and turned to Alec. “Does cleaning at the inn. Bloody shame someone her age has to do that kind of work, but there you are.”
Then the bus turned onto the A487 and kept climbing, the landscape becoming more barren and weather-blasted. A couple of miles beyond the inn, the bus pitched over the crest of the pass and plunged into a gap in the mountains. Towering ramparts of rock loomed above the narrow road on both sides, blotting out all but a sliver of sky. The road itself clung to a nearly vertical cliff wall on the left. Huge blocks of rock littered the floor of the pinched gorge far below. At one point a mountain stream hurled itself off the high crags to the right, breaking into mist as it plunged, then re-forming as a stream again at the bottom before rushing downhill through the crease of the valley. The road itself was so steep the driver had downshifted to one of the lowest gears to save the bus’s brakes, and the transmission groaned against the force of gravity. A few minutes later, the slopes of the valley eased open. In the distance Alec could see a lake, slender as a finger.
When the road leveled out, the bus swung right across the oncoming lane into a lay-by with a small bus shelter. Alec recognized the place immediately. He was out of his seat before the driver came to a stop.
“Been here before then, have you?”
“Long time ago.”
“Then you know you’re going up the hard way?”
“Yes, but it’s the most beautiful way.”
“It is that,” the driver agreed, “but mind you don’t have a nap by the shore of Llyn Cau, now.”
“Why’s that?”
“Legend has it that if you fall asleep at Llyn Cau you’ll wake up blind, mad, or a poet!”
Alec laughed. “Too late for the middle one!”
The driver looked out his side window at the mountain. “Might get a bit of weather up there today; clouding up again, it is.”
Alec followed his gaze. Sure enough, though the skies to the south were clear and sun flooded the valley, a turban of cloud wrapped the summit of Cadair Idris.
“Thanks for the lift,” Alec said as he climbed down.
“Best of luck,” the driver called after him as he closed the door.
The bus’s horn gave a friendly toot and Alec turned away from the road, entering a dirt lane lined with neatly parallel old chestnut trees, obviously planted as an approach to someone’s home at some point in the past. After a few hundred yards he reached a wooden footpath sign pointing uphill. minffordd track, it read.
The path became steep immediately, scrambling over rocky outcrops beside a merry cataract and entering an oak wood that Alec realized must be a remnant of the forests that had cloaked this part of Wales for millennia. The trees were weather-twisted, stunted, and gnarled. Their roots snaked across the ground among the rocky outcrops searching for a soft spot through which to penetrate the earth. Some of the trees looked as if they were growing directly out of the granite itself. The hillside and boulders were carpeted in mosses of every conceivable variety of green. He stooped to look more closely at them and found they looked like Lilliputian forests themselves. Sunlight cut through the canopy here and there, creating shimmering shafts in the damp air.
After perhaps forty-five minutes of climbing, he passed through a wooden gate set into an old stone wall. The trees gave way to a steep slope of dormant heather, yellow-flowered gorse, early pink campion, grasses, sedges, and bracken. Ahead, the footpath curved off to the right, following the shoulder of a foothill called Craig Lwyd.
After another half hour of climbing, Alec stopped to catch his breath and drink some water. Already, the view behind him was spectacular: the flat valley of Tal y Llyn spread out far below in a stonewalled patchwork. The lake glittered in the midmorning sun. Across the valley, the rampart walls of Craig Goch rose so steeply over the southern shore of the lake that he wondered if the ground there ever saw the sun.
Ahead, the path and the stream parted company, the stream clattering down the hillside to the right, the path climbing steadily up to the left. Here and there, sheep picked their way among car-sized, lichen-encrusted boulders, and complained to each other, like old people in a nursing home.
With the stream’s racket behind him, the world now was uncommonly still and the low hum of bumblebees filled the fragrant air. Ahead, a ridge a few hundred yards wide blocked his way to the mountain. Ten minutes later, he crested the ridge, and spread out before him was a vast and silent mountain amphitheater with a sapphire blue, mirror-smooth lake for a stage—Llyn Cau. The lake was imprisoned by nearly vertical cliffs rising over a thousand feet in some places. The cliff faces were deeply etched with fissures and gullies and laced with waterfalls, some of them free-falling hundreds of feet. Shattered hunks of the mountain lay scattered about the scree slopes beside the lake—the weapons of winter, broken free and rained down by the insidious forces of frost. Far above and out of sight beyond the cliff rim, he knew, was the summit.
Alec slipped off his pack and sat on a ledge beside the lake. He and Gwynne had picnicked here on a warm afternoon many years earlier. They’d eaten too much and then laughed and groaned all the way up to the summit, with Alec often behind Gwynne with his hands on her rear, pushing, when she protested she could go no farther.
He took a sip of water and smiled.
***
SHORTLY AFTER THEY married, Alec was offered a position as a speech-writer for Jimmy Carter. The president had read the political opinion articles Alec had written while he was teaching at Columbia University. Carter liked his straightforward style. When the president’s chief of staff called with the job offer, he said that Carter had decided it would be better to have Alec with him than against him. The job was a huge opportunity and he and Gwynne jumped at the chance, moving to an apartment in Washington, D.C., within walking distance of the White House. Gwynne left Bergdorf’s and got a job managing a luxury women’s clothing store in D.C. that catered to the diplomatic crowd. They both knew it was a step down, but she promised him it was what she wanted; she was tired of the pressure in New York.
The next three years were a whirl of long days and glittering nights at White House receptions and at charity benefit fashion shows Gwynne organized at foreign embassies and the Kennedy Center. He’d even bought his own tuxedo. When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 election, Alec was promptly removed from his position, but they stayed on in Washington. Gwynne’s star had continued to rise and, having dragged her away from New York, he decided it was only fair for him to take a backseat and let Gwynne soar. He negotiated a publishing contract for a book on his experiences in the Carter White House, stayed home working on it every day, and had dinner waiting for Gwynne when she came home. When they could squeeze the time from her schedule, they traveled—often to England, a place they both loved. They never stayed in London, preferring instead to drive from village to village, hike in the countryside, and dream of having a place of their own there. On one trip, they’d brought her parents, so her father could visit the place in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales where his own father had been born. But the mines were long closed and the valleys were ravaged and bleak, so they headed north to the sceni
c wildness of North Wales. It was on that trip, while her aging parents rested at the bed-and-breakfast where they were staying, that he and Gwynne had climbed Cadair Idris, on a brilliantly clear and warm summer day.
***
ALEC REPLACED the water bottle, stood, and hoisted the pack onto his back. Not for the first time, he thought that whomever it was who first called cremated remains “ashes” should be taken out into a field and shot. They were not ashes. They had the consistency of fine-grained sand. They were not light and fluffy, as the word ashes might suggest; they were stunningly heavy. His back hurt.
***
IN WASHINGTON, people talked about what a striking couple they were. Alec had a New Yorker’s quick wit and, despite having been raised in a poor family, he moved easily through the diplomatic crowd. With her beauty, commanding physical presence, outrageous sense of humor, and hearty, unself-conscious laugh, Gwynne drew people to her the way light draws moths. And the affection between the two of them was obvious to everyone they encountered. They worked so well together at these events, someone once described the two of them, admiringly, as “the Gwynne and Alec Show.”
But there was trouble backstage. What no one knew was that Gwynne, despite her obvious talents and radiant facade, was terribly insecure. Her hands trembled every morning as she did her makeup. She was often sick. It wasn’t that Gwynne was failing at work or in any other aspect of her life. It was that she feared failing. And somehow the more she succeeded, the more she feared failure. Over time, Alec took on more and more of the responsibilities of their marriage. At first he didn’t mind. Given his own family, he was used to being relied upon: if something needed doing, he did it; if there was a void, he filled it. It had always been that way; it was what he did. He felt that if he kept telling Gwynne that he loved her and believed in her, she would come to believe in herself.
But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, his belief in her, his encouragement, his cheerleading, only added to the pressures she felt. And they added a new fear to her list: the fear of disappointing him. She didn’t say anything about this, and he didn’t see it.
The years passed and Alec began to resent the burden of this care-taking. He talked with Gwynne about taking some responsibility for her own life, but her response was to become even more dependent, creating situations from which he’d have to “save” her. It began with small things, like repeatedly being stranded at work because she’d misplaced her car keys. In time, it grew to acts of self-sabotage—“forgetting” important appointments, delaying dealing with troublesome employees, failing to deliver important reports to the store’s owners. At one point, Alec realized he could no longer trust his wife to tell him the truth about even the smallest things; instead, she told him, and others, whatever she thought they wanted to hear.
It was when she began drinking heavily that his frustration changed to fear. He wanted to be understanding and patient, he wanted to love her into wholeness, but he found himself becoming angry and hypercritical. And then one day he realized he had nothing left. He was empty. It stunned him. He thought his love and his determination were unlimited. He thought the energy he could pump into their relationship would never be exhausted. He was wrong.
They separated. Alec’s White House memoir had sold well and he went off to the Pacific Northwest to write poetry, thinking that perhaps he could write himself clear about what was happening to them. A few months after he left, Gwynne was fired. She never gave him a candid explanation, but he suspected it was because of her drinking. Then, miraculously, an up-and-coming New York designer who had decided to open his own retail boutiques asked her to manage them. Alec returned to Washington. They would move back to Manhattan, where she said she had found a “fabulous” apartment in a brownstone on the Upper East Side. They would start over.
When he got to D.C. she hadn’t even begun packing; she was paralyzed by the task of organizing everything. He sent her on to New York and, in two days of furious work, packed up their belongings, loaded them into a rented truck, and hauled them north. He met her at the new apartment.
The place was dark and filthy.
“It’s New York,” she said when she saw his face. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know, someplace habitable?” he’d replied. He wasn’t even angry; he was heartsick.
In the coming weeks, after cutting a deal with the landlord to split the cost, he renovated the apartment, replacing the antique appliances, and installing almost-new kitchen counters and cabinets he bought cheap in New Jersey from a demolition contractor. After a couple of months, it looked like a place someone might actually want to live in.
Except he wasn’t the someone. One day, he left for good; he had come to feel he was going crazy, that he had to leave to save his own sanity ... and maybe Gwynne’s as well. He knew he was part of the problem; it took the two of them to do what they did. He thought that if he left she’d have to take charge of her own life at last. He drove to Seattle, got a small apartment overlooking Puget Sound, watched the sunsets, and wrote poetry that he knew he’d never publish. They agreed to divorce. They also agreed to remain friends.
***
ALEC TRUDGED UP the mountain, these memories heavier even than the container in his pack. The footpath now followed the razor-sharp southern edge of the amphitheater. The route had become a relentless series of jagged rock shelves and eroded gullies. At one point, he paused on the vertiginous rim and looked over the edge. A thousand feet straight down lay Llyn Cau. Its surface had changed from blue to black. It looked like a tiny onyx gemstone caught in a tarnished silver clasp. Then he looked up and was dismayed at what he saw. The tight turban at the summit had unraveled and now the entire upper plateau was swathed in dense cloud.
He reached the top of Craig Cau, a secondary peak, descended a shallow swale, and had just started up again when the cloud engulfed him. The temperature dropped immediately but the coolness was refreshing. The route ahead climbed through a bleak world of weather-shattered granite. There was no footpath to follow now; a series of cairns—pyramids of piled stones left by previous climbers—marked the way upward, assuming you could distinguish them from the rest of the rock in the thickening mist.
Alec was glad he knew this mountain and was one of those lucky people with a built-in compass. It was as if there were iron filings in his brain that lined up with Earth’s magnetic field. It had always been this way, so he wasn’t worried; he climbed though the cloud without pause. At each cairn, he added another stone; it was a climbing tradition, one designed to ensure that the cairns were always there. The hair on his arms and legs raked moisture out of the mist and left him sequined in silvery droplets. He had a rain jacket in his pack but he was still too warm to wear it.
The boulders over which he now clambered were wet and slippery. Often as not, he was using his hands as well as his feet. The higher he climbed, the worse the visibility became. He had never climbed in a cloud before and it was denser than any fog he’d ever encountered. There were times when he could see only three feet ahead. Finding the next cairn was becoming more and more difficult.
He was also hungry and guessed it was after noon. He sat down in the lee of a massive block of granite, put down the day pack, and pulled out the cheese he’d brought.
“Not exactly a walk in the park today, is it, Miss Davis?” he said to the box of ashes in the pack. He’d always called her that; she hadn’t taken his name when they married.
***
AFTER HE AND Gwynne had separated and finally divorced, he’d kept to himself. He found the solitude suited him. He remembered a snatch of a Wordsworth poem he liked: “When from our better selves we have too long been parted ... how gracious, how benign is solitude.”
A year passed and Gwynne called one night to say she’d been recruited to be the chief designer for a small but imaginative clothing manufacturer in Boston. Alec had always believed that Gwynne was meant to be a designer, not a merchant, and he was delighted for h
er. It didn’t surprise him at all that in this new job she excelled, designing clothes that doubled the company’s business every season. Nor did it surprise him when, two years later, she was fired again.
This time though, she broke the pattern. She entered a treatment program and got sober once and for all. Then she started her own business, as an interior designer. The business flourished and she reveled in her independence. She’d found her niche. Things were going right for her at last. So it came as a shock when she called—was it only two years ago?—to tell him she’d just gotten out of the hospital after having two malignant lumps removed from her breasts. He’d had no idea she had cancer. She hadn’t told him.
After the surgery, she went through the usual cycles of chemotherapy and radiation. The prognosis was very good, even if the process was brutal. The chemo made her terribly sick. Her hair fell out. They were in touch every day. He kept asking if she needed him to come to Boston, and she kept saying no. “If I need you,” she promised, “I’ll call.” He was proud of her. She had finally taken charge of her own life.
***
ALEC FINISHED THE cheese, shouldered the pack, and kept climbing until he reached a point in the increasingly impenetrable fog where every other direction was downhill. It felt like the summit, but he knew instinctively that it wasn’t. There should have been a short concrete pillar at the summit—a surveyors’ trig point—but it was nowhere to be seen. There should have been a low stone shelter as well, but he couldn’t find it. The world around him was missing most of its usual dimensions; left, right, and up had vanished into a miasma of gray. There was only down; he could see his feet and a bit of the ground around them. That was all.
He pulled out his Ordnance Survey map, but without a good idea of where he was, the map was useless. He closed his eyes and put his internal compass to work. When he opened them again, he walked perhaps fifty yards and found a ladder stile that climbed up and over a barbed-wire livestock fence. Beyond it he found a cairn. So far so good. He descended a few hundred yards, following a succession of cairns. Then he seemed to run out of markers. He went back to the last one he’d seen and began circling it in ever-widening rings, like the sweep of the band of green light on a radar screen searching out a blip that would be the next cairn.
