Mountain

by Ursula Pflug

  Or whatever you want to call us. Them. Us. Whoever.

  I was scared to stay there. Some guys said I could stay in their tent, that I’d be safer, just in case. I didn’t want to get raped. But then I knew they’d put the make on me, if I stayed. I couldn’t blame them really, everybody wants to get laid, just not necessarily with each other. There was this girl I met, who was staying with them, sleeping with one of the guys. Her name was Alicia. “It’s not bad really,” she said. It was like she didn’t mind being with him, not too much. He was okay. He didn’t really turn her on or anything but what the heck, it was just for a few days, and he was good at making camp fires and going into town on food missions and stuff. And when she was with him she had lower chances of getting robbed. Or raped. If you talk yourself into wanting it, then they don’t have to? I mean, what’s the difference, really? Sometimes they went to the food banks and sometimes they had money and went to the co-op and sometimes they got food out of the dumpsters behind hotels. “Do you like him?” she asked, meaning the other guy. He was okay looking, I guess. Blond. And he was nice to me. He really wanted me to stay with them too. With him. But they just weren’t my kind of guys, you know what I mean?

  I had dinner with them, pork and rice, and then I split. I didn’t tell them I was going to split before I ate, just in case they had second thoughts about feeding me. She was kind of sad I was going, Alicia was. She wanted a buddy. “You splittin’ on me, sister?” she asked. “Just when I was getting to know you?”

  “I’m gonna stay in the woods,” I said.

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know yet. But they just weren’t my kind of guys, you know?

  The path was at the edge of the campground, the other side from the latrines, right where Potter’s map said it was. I was amazed; I didn’t think it’d be so easy. It went through the woods, evergreens mostly, I don’t know what kind. I followed it for a long time, wondering if it was the wrong path. Wondering if the map was wrong, thinking it couldn’t have been so easy after all. But not turning back. Then there it was. A clearing in the woods, the floor covered with pine needles. I knew I’d found it right away. Secret Campground. I felt relieved. That I wasn’t scared of nature. Two paths going out from it. I checked them out right away. One went down to the beach, only it was a nice empty beach, no garbage on it. You couldn’t get to it from Lunar Beach; it was cut off by bushes and slash and rocks and shit. It wasn’t connected. A separate beach.

  Then there was another little path, going out the other side. It went to a stream. There was a big flat rock at the edge of the stream and on the rock there was a cup and some toothpaste and a toothbrush. They looked like they’d been there a long time, like somebody had forgotten them. Also there wasn’t any other sign of anyone’s stuff, so I sat down on the flat rock and had a drink of water from the stream. I just kind of knew it was good, you know what I mean? And maybe Potter had told me. Or someone, that the streams around there were good. Yeah, that was probably it.

  Then I just sat there for awhile, and thought about not being afraid of staying on my own in the woods. I pitched my tent, which was then just a big long piece of heavy plastic that I kind of rolled into a tube and weighed down with rocks and tied the two points up between trees with rope. That was a good tent. People used to laugh at it but I used to wake up mornings at Potter’s Curve dry as a bone and people’d be swearing at their three hundred dollar tents pouring rain on them all night. They’d kind of stare at me like I was from outer space. Girls with expensive hiking boots and boyfriends to start the fire when they were feeling too wimpy from their hike.

  You know the kind. I’d stare right back.

  I stayed at Secret Campground for a week, and then I fell in the river, you know what I mean. I stopped trusting Gaia’s gentle hand, giving you whatever you need when you need it, no more no less. God; whatever you want to call it. The thing that takes care of you. Gives you maps to Secret Campground. Free plastic. Things like that. Limpets to scrape from the rocks. Or whatever they’re called. Abalone? Already I forget, although I still know what they look like, how to pry them loose, how to eat them. The important things. The names don’t make you full when you’re hungry. Alicia showed them to me.

  No, not Alicia. Someone else. A girl. Maybe Lydia. Alicia wouldn’t have known. She never believed anything unless a guy told it to her first. Lydia. I went up to her camp and it was gone. Maybe it wasn’t gone, maybe she just moved it somewhere else. Or else I missed the trail. There’s a few different trails up there; some of them are people trails and some of them are animal trails, and sometimes you get them mixed up. ’Cause the place I finally got to didn’t look anything like Lydia’s camp. Looked more like one of Winter’s places. Junky. Not like Lydia’s place at all.

  Lydia was different. It was like she knew everything didn’t have to be horrible all the time; she knew how to make sure it was different. You could be alive a different way, be high even without drugs. But that was another of those things I didn’t figure out till later.

  There is another path going from Secret Campground, a path I followed one day to see what was at the end of it. I followed it and that’s when I met Lydia. Lydia had a camp she’d made, a camp all her own, not like Secret Campground at all, which was nice, but it was for transients too, like Lunar Beach, only in a different way. Lydia’s place was in the middle of a meadow. You could see it coming from a long way back, because of the doors. She had a big wardrobe she’d picked up somewhere and brought right out into the middle of the meadow and parked there. You could get to her camp by walking around the wardrobe, of course, but she always made you go through the doors. You walked through the closet into her place, like. And there were shelves in the closet, above your head, as you walked through, where she kept some of her stuff. Sewing stuff, mostly. Cloth and buttons and needles and thread for embroidery. I tell you, walking through that closet was strange, because she’d cut the back out and on the other side there was just broad daylight, and Lydia’s camp. Her camp was just three board and stump benches around a fire circle, and, further back, a kind of cave under a cliff where she hung her pots and pans and her guitar on nails, and where she slept when it rained.

  Mostly she slept outside, beside her fire. And around the benches she’d planted flowers. Little rows of marigolds and something purple; I don’t know what it was. And petunias. Anywhere else petunias look kind of stupid but Lydia had them out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a meadow in a State Park. It was funny, her flowerbeds in a field of wild flowers. Like her row of pots hanging on the wall of the cliff, her rug spread on the sandy ground.

  “It’s Lucy’s wardrobe,” she said, when I walked through it.

  “Who’s Lucy?” I asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said and went to her knapsack and got it out.

  “Hey, this is a kid’s book,” I said, but Lydia said it didn’t matter, just read it, so I sat down on one of her benches and started to read, there was nothing else to do. Lydia had long blonde hair she tied back with a string and she didn’t wear any clothes and I asked wasn’t she afraid and she said “Of what?” and I said guys raping her and she said, “I would be down where you all stay, down there at moon beach, but not up here. Up here the wolves tell me when someone bad’s coming.” Lydia would say things like that to you. I almost believed her until I noticed she had this big walker hound at least I think it was a walker that loved her more than anything in this world, and that would help more than a bit.

  I read, because there was nothing else to do, and Lydia said “Well, if you’re going to read you might as well have some supper.” She disappeared around the side of the cliff and came back with some carrots that she stewed with beans and rice; funny how everyone always has beans and rice. She had a garden back there, she said.

  “What do you do in winter, Lyd?” I asked.

 
“Oh, I upgrade the shelter there,” she said, gesturing at the cave or alcove in the cliff or whatever you want to call it. “And I wear a lot of clothes to bed.” I found out later that Lydia did that to everybody who came. She made them read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and drink tea and eat stew.

  I have to tell you about her spice rack, though. While she was cooking she’d ask you whether you liked Vegit or Spike, cause it seems like most people like one or the other, not both, like coffee or tea. She’d ask because she had a rack of spices she’d picked up from different campers who’d left them behind. Salt and pepper, three Spikes, two Vegits, four basils, cumin, curry and cinnamon, one of each. Lydia had a blanket and a knife and a guitar. She gave me the guitar. “Too much stuff,” she said. “You can have the guitar.”

  I told her I didn’t know how to play so she taught me. I stayed for four days, which is apparently really a lot, and Lydia taught me “House of the Rising Sun,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and another one by a women’s band I really liked but forget how to play, it was too complicated. Then she told me to leave. At first I was mad she’d asked me to leave, but then I figured what the hey, I was leaving with more than I came with. I had a guitar, and I could play it. So I left. I went back to Lunar Beach, and except for the time she saved me from Winter I saw Lydia just one more time after that, when she came down to Lunar and shared a spaghetti dinner with me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her, “I thought you never came in?”

  “Oh, sure I do,” she said. “I come into town once a month.” She called the Lunar Beach Campground town, even though it was hardly that.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “For my supplies, like everybody else. You didn’t see me wading through any rice paddies up there, did you? Also I got to see how all my people are doing,” she said, “I got to keep an eye on my buddy Winter.” They have a big bin of rice they bring down to Lunar Beach once a day to feed all the homeless people and you bring your scoop or your cup and scoop out some rice. I thought it was pretty funny that Lydia did that too, ’cause she always seemed to have so much, compared to the rest of us, but she wasn’t beyond getting some free rice.

  “Winter’s your buddy?” I asked, having misgivings. I’d never told her about being with him, and I didn’t want to think she maybe liked him.

  “Sure, somebody’s got to have him as a buddy, don’t they, the old pussycat,” and then I saw Winter with a big bushy tail like a cat, twitching.

  “So what’s that all about?” I asked.

  “Oh, he just likes to get people all messed up,” she said, laughing. “But the truth is they’re messed up anyway, he’s just pointing it out to them. That doesn’t mean,” and she eyed me levelly, “that he doesn’t dig some mighty deep pits.”

  Truth is, I’ve already gotten mixed up telling this story, because the first time I stayed at Lydia’s wasn’t the time she gave me the guitar. That time was after Winter, when I went back up to her place for a convalescence, although I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time.

  She helped me to get away from Winter. It was Lydia who taught me the difference. Because she was the difference. Between people like Winter and what we could have, if we weren’t so fucked up looking for trouble. Like Winter is the dark side, the dark mirror of people like Lydia.

  I stayed with Winter for a month. There were seven of us, five girls and two guys. He was very sexually attractive. “You’re a magic girl,” he said to me, the night we met, and “I am glad to be here among you good people.” Everyone was passing around plates of beans. I kept noticing how much he was eating, at the same time as talking about what a shabby scene it was and how he didn’t belong there; he came from a much more up-market kind of crowd. He was just passing through—you know the rap. I did notice that, but then he told me about my magic and I just watched how he glistened. He wasn’t beautiful but he had a glow. The thing with girls is, they’re so sexually vulnerable. Did I use that word right?

  Forget it, I know I did. Like, here you are, trying to make a place for yourself in the world, and it isn’t a very friendly place. I mean, you have to worry about rape and robbery and getting enough to eat and you want to be independent and still you want to have company. So you go with what looks like company, what looks like a friend, and it turns out all they were after was your space. They want control of space.

  Winter wanted control of space so he could feel powerful. He would get other people, women, mostly, to give him their power, and then he would have more. He was like a black hole, one of those black hole things they have in space. He would get near you, and he would start to suck. He would suck in all your light. And once he’d sucked enough, you couldn’t get away any more, just like the light that goes into those holes.

  Where does it go? Do the holes ever spit the light back out? He had all these girls and boys and we’d go on food missions together and we were a family and he was like a father to us. He said he’d take care of us and we were so glad because we thought he’d given us what we’d always wanted so badly. A loving family, and somewhere to rest. He had a house even; it was further up the beach, right on the water. You could hear the waves crash at night. It was full of rattan furniture with flowered upholstery that looked out the big picture windows at the sea. There was a big pink bedroom I had all to myself, until Winter came. It didn’t seem so bad. It sure beat Lunar Beach, or even Secret Campground, for that matter. You could hardly blame me. And I didn’t think it was worth much, sleeping with him; I’d never been made to feel it was worth a whole hell of a lot, so why not? It didn’t seem so very much to give after this pink house full of shiny beautiful kids. They were all so beautiful, his kids, and they had beautiful clothes: mauve and pink satin gowns like right off of television and I wanted to be like them so bad.

  It turned out the house wasn’t his; he was just caretaking. When the people came back we all had to leave, but by then it was too late, I was already hooked. I was somewhere where you didn’t have to be watching out every single second who was behind you, who was going to try and steal your stuff, and who was going to try and put the make on you, and you’d have to talk your way out of it and they’d be crabby, not wanting to hear it, or they’d want to not do any asking or talking at all, but just take what they thought they deserved.

  Winter knew all that. The irony is we gave him what we thought he was protecting us from, namely: we all slept with him, so we wouldn’t have to sleep with other people we didn’t like.

  We gave him our space, so we wouldn’t have to be alone. We didn’t even think of it as protection really, it was just, like, we were a family and in families everyone takes care of each other and the father’s supposed to take care of the children. It was just, like, not having to worry for awhile. And to live an ideal life. Because let’s face it, we’re all idealists. We all want utopia. A happy family. Not worrying, because there’s nothing to worry about: because you’re safe inside the family, and nothing bad can come in from outside. We were sick of being alone. That’s what he really got us on. Sick of being lonely and alone.

  It felt real too, except for the little bit of “what’s wrong with this picture?” The part I still can’t figure out is how he got all those people to do what he wanted. It was like some kind of sexual hypnosis. Why would a whole lot of people do what somebody else wanted? “The Father,” they called him. “Because he’s like that,” they said, “like your father.” Not like mine, that’s for sure. He was like everything I’d ever wanted. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Maybe he could do it because he had so much power that he’d taken away from other people. Maybe that’s what the glow was.

  Maybe we were all looking for an outside authority, instead of looking for it in ourselves. But what’s wrong with wanting that? A nice father, someone who’ll take care of you and know what’s best. It’s just a sham, though, just a lie. It doesn’t exist now and I bet it never ha
s.

  Also, he was telling us we were magic, which in our deepest hearts we knew to be true. He was telling us our space was magic, and it is, maybe the only magic thing. I think, inside, that’s what we’d wanted more than anything all our lives, was for someone to tell us how magic we were. We kept waiting and waiting to hear it, and nobody ever did. They just said we weren’t smart enough or beautiful enough or too young or we were poor or we should fuck them, while all along there was a little voice inside going “Yeah, maybe that’s true, but what about my magic? Can you do what I can do? Can you make things happen just by imagining them?” I bet not. And then Winter came along and said we could do anything we wanted, have anything we wanted, and he said what did we want, and so we said, of course, that we wanted to be stars. And Winter said he would make us stars. And we believed him, because, once you went into the fold, into the family, there was, like, this hum that permeated everything and it felt all soft and good like you’d just come and you believed it, believed anything was possible and maybe it was. All we had to do was fuck him. Of course, game over. ‘Cause once you’ve given it away it’s not yours any more, your power, I mean. You don’t have to lose your power by screwing someone. I really believe that, that it should make you strong—but that’s how he leeched you, was through the connection made by sex. Because once you’re connected that way it can be really hard to break.