by Lou Cadle
Jim recoiled at the thought of moving to some distant cold place like Minnesota. For the most part, he liked Portland and didn’t want to give up his friends or work to make new ones. He didn’t want to suffer through more soul-callings and weddings and other traditional stuff that would be the inevitable result of living in a bigger Hmong community.
“But,” his father said, “Your mother thinks, and I agree, that there are bad influences every place.”
Jim nodded, happy to agree that kids sucked everywhere. The snowdrifts of Minnesota retreated to a safe distance in his mind.
“Your mother believes this. I worry a demon is looking to steal your soul and that is why you change. Demons cannot be easily fooled by moving to new place. The move might be more danger, take you away from soul if it stays here. Therefore. Make no plan of your own for next weekend when the shaman comes. For your mother, no telephone friends until. And we will increase music lesson to two days each week.”
His mother spoke up again. “And find more activity for you and Hli Dah with us.” Hli Dah, American Lida, was his little sister, eight years old and largely a mystery to Jim. “So that, as website say, you have stronger ties with us and less so with gang.”
“Thank you,” Jim managed to say, as they’d expect. Bad as it was, it could have been worse. Might get worse still, depending on what websites his mother found next. Tough love, Hmong style? Couldn’t be very tough. Military schools, then? He shuddered to think. His mother had a strange faith in what she read on-line. Half of his friends’ mothers couldn’t read English. They didn’t know how lucky they had it, living with only the old traditions at home. Jim got stuck with two sets of traditions, his father’s faith in the old beliefs and his mother’s new faith in Google.
^ ^ ^
Mount Hood, Under the Surface.
Molten rock, unimaginably hot, locked in the dark depths of the mountain, wanted to climb. Not like a person would want to climb, but like the bubbles in Chad’s ginger ale wanted to break the surface of his glass and burst. The magma wasn’t angry. It wasn’t raging, as the documentary narrators claim, any more than those carbonated bubbles were angry about moving up through the ginger ale. It was amoral, without emotion or free will. It needed what it needed.
And right now, filled with a stew of volatile chemicals, it needed to find a way past the hard minerals keeping it trapped. It could break through rock. It could dissolve crystals. It could find alternate routes to the broad central vent that led up through Mount Hood. It wouldn’t need to choose one among these many paths; it could try all of them. Somehow, it would find a way.
Section II: The Three Days before
2
Tuesday, June 11. 5:30 a.m. Cherryville, Oregon.
Norio was wakened by a crackling from his radio. The day had begun, but here in the western shadow of the mountain, one couldn’t exactly say the sun was “up”—it wouldn’t clear the mountain for hours yet. Dim light shone outside his window, visible at the edges of the mini-blinds. Another quiet spurt of static from the radio and he was fully awake. He walked over to get the radio and turned it up. “Say again? Over.”
“Norio, you copy?” The signal was breaking up.
“One minute.” He pulled the antenna out all the way and walked closer to a window. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“We have a developing situation on Hood.” It was Greg, in charge of monitoring at night.
“Tell me.” Norio stepped over to turn on his laptop and clicked through tabs of web pages as he listened. 5:25 a.m. Weather, 4° C, still overcast, possibility of snow above 2750 meters. Clouds for the next 48 hours.
“Fourteen earthquakes since midnight,” said Greg. “New deformation showing on the EDM, north and west.”
“Major?”
“No, more like last month.”
Norio clicked through to the night’s seismograms on the laptop, seeing mostly a repeat of what he’d been seeing last month when the quakes swarmed. He’d study them more closely later, plotting them on his mental map of the mountain. “What about the satellites?”
“Still waiting.” The satellite imagers had to be aimed at Hood first. Then the scientists could get wider ground deformation and heat maps.
“Checking the seismo data,” he said, sizing the computer windows so the seismograms were stacked one on top of the other. Norio stared at the amplitudes and wavelengths. Hmm. Two seismic signatures were low-frequency, shallow quakes, nothing more than five seconds. Volcanic tremor there. Then again two hours later for a half-hour. Another signal looked like a rock fall, the line loose and wobbling. Probably not significant. He flipped over to the screen showing the broadband monitor mounted to the southeast of the summit. It was working, but the tiny lines said little to him. The seismologist at the CVO would be able to give his interpretation, more accurate than Norio’s, soon after he arrived at work. “Maybe nothing’s happening. Nothing important, I mean. Hard to say.”
“I’m going with something important, Nor. We lost monitoring stations, too.”
“What? Lost one? How?”
“Lost two, both of the new ones on the northwest and northeast faces. One, that could be some tech glitch, antenna down, or an avalanche, but two scattered ones?”
“Unless something went wrong when they were installed last month, identical bad batteries, maybe.” He scrolled back through the seismograms and saw that indeed there was nothing for two of them after three in the morning. The last signal on one made him think harmonics. They’d gone off-line within minutes of each other. It wasn’t enough information to paint him a clear picture.
Still, Norio’s heart began to beat faster. His mind pulled him several ways at once. Where were his clothes? Gotta get dressed. What had happened to the stations? Without the stations, they were blind to the north. What did the summit look like? He pulled open the shade of the eastern window in his cabin, threw open the window—damn, it was cold out there—and stuck his upper body out to see the mountain better, but all he saw upslope was cloud. Not ash cloud, regular Oregon cloud, atmospheric water vapor. He shut the window. “Okay, okay,” he said, feeling fully awake after the blast of cold air. “Kate on the way in?” Dr. Kate Wilson was the director of the CVO, Cascade Volcano Observatory, in Vancouver.
“Yeah, she’s moving. When she gets here, I think we’ll be calling in the response team again, maybe pulling people off Helens and Lassen. I already put the alert up back at yellow, aviation still green. She okayed it.”
“Could still be nothing. It added up to nothing much in April.”
“You have any sense of that?”
Norio shook his head, irked at such a touchy-feely question. “You know more than I do at this point.”
“Okay,” said Greg. “I knew you’d want to be awake and ready for whatever comes next. When Kate’s in and up to speed, we’ll do a video conference, figure out what we all need to do.”
“Thanks. Over and out.” He put down the radio, made sure it was plugged in and charging, and hunted for the Bluetooth for it in the pile of gadgetry on the dresser. Pushing around the pile of loose change, cables, cell phone, and the dedicated GPS unit, he organized his gear, and coiling cables he might need into neat stacks.
He put coffee on, took a two-minute shower, threw on yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt, and checked to see the laptops were both plugged in and charging. Whatever Kate decided he should do, before the end of the day he might need parka, boots, crampons, screws, pickets, and rope. Handheld thermal gun wouldn’t weigh much, though its resolution and accuracy wasn’t anything compared to the big imagers they could send aloft. Binoculars. Gas readings were better taken from the air, so he might be in the air in a few hours. Or he might be hiking up the mountain. Mumbling to himself, he stacked equipment by the front door, one pile each for climbing and flying, and a third pile he’d need for either.
By the time his computer beeped at him for the conference with Kate, he was organized for whatever the day might bring.
>
3
Morning, South Flank of Mt. Hood. Fire Road 309.
Jim brought another armful of wood to the fire. Lida was setting the table while his mother bent over the fire, turning long sausages in a cast iron skillet. “We could use a propane stove for this,” he said to his mother.
“I learned to cook with a wood fire,” said his mother. “It is easy.”
Yeah, well; she wasn’t the one hauling the wood three times a day. A stick in the fire popped. His father walked up with a heaping metal bucket of snow and set it nearby to melt for wash water. After four days up here, they each knew what they had to do at mealtimes. On Sunday, his father had found the shaded depression that still had a supply of slushy snow to use for wash water, so they could ration their drinking water supply and wouldn’t have to drive to a campground for refills every day.
If they had managed to get a real campsite at a campground, there would be water coming from a tap, tidy piles of cut wood to buy and burn, and maybe people other than his family to talk to. But after the two campgrounds they tried were full Saturday morning, his father sent Jim to ask the camp host, who directed them several miles south along a road to this dispersed camp site, “dispersed” a word meaning all the way to hell and gone, as far as Jim could tell. All it was, really, was a pale dirt spot cleared from the forest. They hadn’t seen any other people since setting up camp. His father had been happy with the outcome. “Better for family time,” he had said, almost breaking into a smile.
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Five more days to go after today. The first day, Saturday, had been a nice day, warm, birds singing. Then came the first night of sleeping on the ground, cold and restless for Jim, every rock and clump of grass a torture to him. On Sunday the clouds—or fog, or whatever this gray blanket was called—had drifted over them. The birds sang less.
After the wet spring the Portland area had, water had seemed to spring out of the trees and ground under the cover of the cloud. He had to be careful not to get the edges of any material wet. Dew wicked up dry fabric like some monster with a will, one determined to make more misery for Jim. A line hung between two trees now, draped with four sizes of damp socks, sad little flags hanging in the mist, for all the good it did to hang them there. Every day, no sock was much drier, and new socks joined them. Jim was on his last pair. Now, at eight in the morning, everything was beaded with the awful dew: the socks, the trees, the tents, and their blue Kia Sportage parked under the trees. You couldn’t see any distance at all, so they might as well be camping in their own backyard as halfway up Mt. Hood.
If they were camping in the backyard, he’d be able to sneak in and play a game or read a manga. Use a toilet. But no, here they were, and Jim now knew what solitary confinement must feel like.
Breakfast was ready, rice porridge and sausages fried deep brown. The smell of them drew him. They sat on folding stools around the tiny folding table, with just enough room for a paper bowl and cup for each of them, and they ate in silence.
When they were finished, his father announced that they would go on a walk and help Lida identify wildflowers from her book. Jim had an urge to jump up and run around the table and scream like a maniac, pulling his hair, babbling nonsense words. He wanted his friends and video games and music and the city, not this wildflower shit again.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love his parents. He did, and he was willing to eat dinner with them every night, spend every Sunday with them, but this? This was beyond the call of, what had his English teacher called it in Hamlet, fibial duty. Was that right? Whatever.
His mother and sister tossed the paper dishes into the fire, and then carried the pot, pan, utensils and bucket of melted wash water away from the campsite to wash them out of sight of the campsite, in the hope that the smell of soapy sausage water wouldn’t attract bears into their tents. The week’s food was suspended on ropes high off the ground, the mist turning all the bags a gray color, so that it was like having the ghosts of food floating over their heads rather than real food.
Jim put out the fire at his father’s direction, stirring, shoveling, stirring.
His father said, “I received your report card on Friday. Your grades were worse this year than before.”
“School work is harder,” Jim said, stirring the dead fire more to avoid looking up.
“The only A plus all year was in auto shop. I think you can try harder. Not so much fun with gang friends.”
“Father, really. They aren’t a gang.”
“I know,” his father said. “Not gang like in Asia. Those were real gangs. Terrifying men with big guns. But you speak worse now, your grades drop, you care a lot about nothing but care nothing about what matters.” He touched Jim on the shoulder. “I wish I could tell you in a way that you could see. In ten years, you will have your university degree and other friends. In ten years more, you will have your own children and not be able to remember the names of these friends from today, not one of them. Their names will be gone, their faces will be gone. They will be gone from recall, but you will always have family, and clan, and your wife’s clan, and your culture.”
Jim wasn’t sure he’d marry a Hmong woman. Or marry at all. He said only, “America is my culture too.”
“I know. And we would not stay here if we did not want you to become American. Adding is fine,” said his father, “but you need not subtract first to add. Do you understand?”
“I guess.”
“You hold on to what is good,” said his father. “Study is good. A grade of A is good. Family is good. You hold to those.”
“Yes, Father,” Jim agreed. Anything to end the lecture. He was getting wet squatting on the damp ground.
His sister came back into view, the empty bucket swinging at the end of her hand. Father went to help Mother.
“Did you feel that?” Lida asked Jim.
“Feel what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. Like an earthquake.”
“No.” He watched Father open the car trunk for Mother. She put the pot and pan back inside.
“I maybe heard it as much as felt it,” persisted Lida.
“You’re trippin. You can’t hear earthquakes.”
She seemed unperturbed. “Mom didn’t feel it either, so maybe so.”
He hated it when she was agreeable, though she often was. At least an argument would be some entertainment. He was going to die of boredom on this mountain before Sunday. He’d die and become a ghost and rise to float next to the ghostly food bags and be stuck in this clearing forever. And if he survived but his father prevailed, he’d die of boredom back in his real life, instead. He wanted to do something, break out of invisible chains he felt tightening about him, but there was nothing he could do.
“Let’s go look for wildflowers,” Lida said, irritatingly happy. At eight, maybe she had no reason to be unhappy.
Jim had plenty. He suspected she was cheerful right now simply to irritate him. Stifling a moan, he followed his family onto the fire road. Wildflowers. Kill me now.
4
Cloud Cap Trailhead, Mount Hood, Oregon.
The ski patrol guy leaned against a filthy Wrangler, chewing gum. Jackson—“like Wyoming” he had said the first time they met, several months before on the mountain—Jackson-like-Wyoming Bellew was an aging ski bum, in his forties, tall and wiry, face lined from years spent squinting against the sun, looking like a movie cowboy, if one ignored the orange vest and climbing backpack.
“Appreciate your coming along,” Norio said, raising a hand in greeting, hoping to avoid a handshake.
It worked. “Ski season’s over,” Jackson said agreeably. “Just waiting for an avalanche now, climbing accident. So, North Face, huh?”
Norio nodded. The weather wasn’t going to allow them to see anything from the air, so Kate and he had decided that he should try and get close to where the monitoring stations had failed and see what he could on the ground while she organized back at the CVO in Vancouver. If they w
ere lucky, the clouds would start clearing by tomorrow. If they weren’t lucky, Thursday or Friday. Today, he’d do what he could with what equipment he had on hand. “Should we take your car or mine?” he asked.
“Yours, I guess. Government dime and all.” Efficiently Jackson transferred his gear as he talked. “So we’re going up the right chute?”
“I’ll show you on the map and you decide about the best line to climb.” Norio pulled out a topo map of the mountain and spread it over the hood of his 4 x 4. Pulling a glove off, he waited for Jackson to join him then pointed, thump, thump, to the two locations of the missing monitor stations. “Might not have to get right up on them, depending on visibility up there. Just get us close enough to see.”
Jackson nodded. “Don’t mean to offend, but I have to ask. What’s your climbing experience again?”
“I’ve been on rope a few dozen times. Rappelled only once on mountain ice, in Alaska. I’m not going to go straight up two hundred meters on a glacier on rope with any joy.”
Jackson shook his head. “Shouldn’t have to.” He looked Norio up and down and seemed satisfied with what he saw.
“Still think there’s any way we’ll get down tonight?”
Jackson glanced at his watch. “If we move our cans right now and don’t stop to sightsee. Ice steps should still be solid. Would have been better a month ago.”
No choice. The mountain had chosen the date.
Norio drove to the closed road, waited for Jackson to unlock the gate with his key, and parked in a turnout on a packed four or five inches of snow. They ate a handful of trail mix each, drank some water, and geared up, Jackson telling him to put back items that he had on hand already.
He pointed to a metal box, about the size of Norio’s hand, that he was tucking away. “What’s in there?” he asked.
“Plastic bags. Collection box for samples.”
Neither had a tent—if they needed to, if something went wrong, they could dig a snow cave. Norio carried a down sleeping bag, in case they got stuck overnight or injured, and what handheld equipment he could. With a half-pound of trail food, five pounds of water, and lightweight climbing gear, his pack was over forty pounds. He’d need a pack mule for everything he’d like to take up with him. He wouldn’t be testing any gas levels today, and that bothered him most. Nothing to do about the forty-pound pack but ignore the pain. He got it balanced on his back, snugged it down, and finally nodded to Jackson, whose pack seemed considerably lighter, and followed the other man up the hill and toward the misty heights.
