Days in Parallel
They started out with the intention of doing something fun together. The old man brought faith and survival to the relationship, and Elsbeth brought education and parenthood, and persistence. They both brought strength and stamina, success in each of their own varieties, failures, too.
The season bloomed early with spring beauties dotting the forest floor and the early chirp of robins in the air. The two set out from Rock Harbor toward Daisy Farm, each in their own thoughts. Elsbeth hiked ahead by twelve paces, hiking to the rhythm of the Old Man’s trekking poles scraping and pecking the rocks in close synch with her own. Her brow furrowed in thought. She was a girl running barefoot alongside a stream to the fallen log to get to the other side. It was a memory before her awareness of trouble.
The Old Man remembered the sounds of different humps, those across a desert amidst a group of men with full rucks, quiet and dangerous, men cursing under their breaths, eyes darting right and left, ever alert for threats, for a glint, for the slightest thing out of place. Those memories were too close, even here on the trail behind Elsbeth. He laughed to himself: She was the pathfinder. He was the pathfinder but let her think whatever.
They chose the trail ascending up to the Greenstone Ridge just after the Three-Mile Campground, heading up the steep incline at a measured and slow pace. They were new yet.
They weren’t young, each having had multiple prior relationships with a variety of different ends, some having come about in betrayal, some drifted apart, some in violence and divorce, yet others in death. She was a widow; he had been wronged, built a whole house for a woman who decided after the fact to let him know their relationship was “open.” All their ends were final, whether through death or infidelity or just plain hurt. And the hurt marked them.
They both breathed hard as they approached the steep incline, each looking and trying not to appear looking for a place to sit for a moment to catch their breath. He still smoked, but she did not. As soon as they sat, he lit up. She wished he wouldn’t have. She’d quit years before and was thankful every day for the strength to have done it. What you need most is air, she thought, directing the comment to him, but she did not voice it. Her breath slowed. His did, too, with a few coughs to clear his lungs.
“Look at the that,” he said, pointing to the sky.
“An osprey?” she asked.
He nodded. They sat watching the hawk float on the breeze.
After awhile, she stood up and hoisted her pack onto her back, trying not to groan. It was damned heavy.
He grunted as he hefted his onto his shoulder and shrugged into the harness. She smiled.
They set forth again, climbing once more and then descending slightly to walk along a meadow that had been cleared in the woods by an old beaver dam that had long since been abandoned. Their poles tap, tap, tapped along the rocks and roots of the worn and rugged trail.
In the midst of the clearing, swamp grass grew tall, nearly shoulder heigh. They both stopped simultaneously, spying a young bull moose grazing at the marshy edge where a slow stream meandered into the soggy meadow.
Their eyes met and turned back to the view ahead of them. It was morning, before the moose would go for a nap in the midday. With no reason to hurry, they lingered, he shooting video with the GoPro, she using her phone.
In her head, she heard echoes of days past. Yells pierced the distance between them at the house and her on the trail along the river and over the fallen log. Her parents were fighting. Her siblings were playing in the forest with her, safe. He was drunk yet again. But that was the better time in her estimation before the truly dark times yet to come.
“Pssst!”
She glanced at the Old Man. He smiled and indicated with a nod to the left of the moose. A fox peeked from between the clumps of swamp grass, observing the moose. It seemed oblivious to their presence. They watched until it disappeared back into the tall grass. Apparently, the young moose was in no hurry to finish grazing. Elsbeth and the Old Man turned and hiked quietly, parallel to the meadow, until the trail ascended again and disappeared behind a spruce tree.
They followed the trail, approaching the ridge, each quietly breathing, walking with and away from the paths they had traversed before. His pack was heavy, but it was no ruck. There were no weapons. There was no ammo. There was none of his parents’ religion, although there was a God. He knew that as strongly as he knew that he had survived.
When Elsbeth divorced the first time, she was no longer welcome in church. The divorce only made the clergy state out loud what was implicitly communicated when she was a child having children. She didn’t mind leaving. She was certain that God wasn’t in church. She had the sense that whatever entity a God was had imbued the earth around her with its very essence. There was God in the moose, in the trail, in the osprey and the fox, in the rocks, even in the sweat that ran down her back under the harness of her pack.
The Old Man read the Bible, carried it in his cargo pocket across the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan. He told her that he read it, knew it, quoted from it. She felt a little dismayed, maybe daunted, because of the weight many people gave to it, people who seemed to think she was always wrong or not worthy. That book, he said, meant something. In its words, he found a route out of his childhood. She smiled because that book also propelled her forth from the abrupt end of her own childhood, propelled not by the book’s doctrine, just by how its substance was interpreted and used. Could fifteen-year-old mothers be at fault? And if so, for what?
She had not really minded the congregation’s rejection all that much. More than anything, it was confusing. Why would they bother? Where she came from and her path forward didn’t follow the route they planned, and no one had helped her to find that path. It didn’t seem to exist for her. She was lost before she started. It was too late at the moment she was born. She would never be right in their estimation because their options where never available to her, no matter how she might try. And it took her a long time to come to understand this fact. Nevertheless, she did what was necessary for her small family to survive, regardless of what it took.
They reached the trail junction at the apex, and each stopped without consulting the other. As they dropped their packs, they both breathed heavily and dug out their Nalgene water bottles. While they caught their breath, they sat on the packs, feet splayed out in front of them.
He drank sparingly, conserving as he knew to do. The was no water on the ridge. There had been no water in the desert either, except for what he and his men carried or the choppers dropped out of the sky. Otherwise, he and his men were on their own.
She realized that he had done the same–he had survived. She drank sparingly, too, aware of and following his model.
Her eyes followed the curve of his rounded cheek. His rested on her blond hair and fell to her cheek, raising then to her blue eyes.
“We can do this,” he said.
“Yes, we can,” she replied.
What this was neither said, but each had an idea.