Backwater (7 page)

“You know the first rule of wilderness survival, Breedlove?”

“Use fear—don’t let it use you.”

“That’s the third rule, Breedlove. The first rule is
Decide You’re Going To Make It.
”

She pinned a button on my coat—a yellow-and-black yield sign with a slash through it like you’d see on a road.

“We do not yield, Breedlove.”

I gulped.

*    *    *

“Now the problem we’ve got,” Mountain Mama said, “is getting this old girl half-way up the ridge to the trailhead. The sun hasn’t hit full here yet and we’re going to need some more light.” We were in her ancient jeep that had lost its shock absorbers sometime during the Vietnam War. She vroomed the gas, shook her head at the sound, and jolted to a stop on a narrow, snowy trail.

She jumped around back and gave it a swift kick in the right rear bumper, which I felt in the front seat. She jumped back in the truck and lurched down a dark, bumpy road.

She shouted over the churning engine. “Here’s the plan. You stand up and lean out your side and hold that flashlight over there so it shines ahead of my lights.”

“You mean while we’re moving?”

“I don’t need much and I don’t ask for much. This is how we get up the mountain.”

“I have trouble standing on things that are moving. I stood on a float once and thought I was going to vomit.”

“Time to lose that memory!” Mama pointed at the big flashlight at my feet. I picked it up, stood shakily, leaned out the passenger side and shone the light.

“Hold her steady.” Mama pulled onto a narrow, wooded trail, rammed the lurching jeep up an incline; it slipped a bit at the corner, but she steered it expertly around a fallen tree.

“I’m not sure about this,” I said, clinging to the roof frame.

Mountain Mama slapped the steering wheel. “Fear is a gift, Breedlove. It shows us how to overcome. Like most gifts, it can be exchanged. I want you to change that negative energy into the positive energy that overcomes panic. I’m going to teach you how to rely on yourself in any situation. That’s chapter four, Breedlove—
You or Nothing.
”

“Could we start with easier situations?”

The jeep lurched forward. I reached deep for the presence of mind that overcomes panic and tried my best to think of fear as a gift.

The gift that keeps on giving.

But then I remembered that I came from people who were so full of adventure they lived on tiny ships with worm-eaten planks and made it across the Atlantic Ocean without killing each other.

They were seasick. They were scared, but they committed themselves to the future.

I straightened my shoulders, summoned Mayflower mettle.

Mama revved the jeep, started up the mountain, jerking like mad. I clung to the side.

The jeep jutted forward, upward, snow and ice crunching everywhere. Fast turns, unexpected jerks, a family of deer leaped off in the distance. A screech owl sounded, or maybe that was the brakes. It was like being on an action adventure ride, stuck in a wild, spinning car, trying to keep your breakfast down.

I tried closing my eyes, but that made things worse.

I tried looking down, but that made me nauseous. I could start puking and embrace the true spirit of Breedloves on the Mayflower, but I just concentrated on the light and kept it as strong and steady as I could.

I don’t know how many times I almost fell out, don’t know how I managed to hold on and live.

“Life doesn’t get interesting unless you take a few chances,” Mountain Mama screamed and revved the jeep up, up. “Here’s the shortcut to the trailhead.” She made the last steep climb, rammed the jeep into second gear, heard the big wheels spinning in ice, rammed it forward, shouting, “Hold on, Breedlove, and shine her steady!”

I clung to the frame with both hands as the jeep twisted and
turned up the narrow trail to something that only a wilderness guide could see.

Mama pulled the jeep between two huge pine trees and jumped out. I flopped forward in my seat, trembling.

She marched over to my side, slapped me hard on the back. “Chapter seven, Breedlove—
Celebrate Your Victories, No Matter How Small.
”

“Whoopee,” I said weakly, and covered my face.

The first problem with my frame pack was that it weighed forty pounds.

The second problem was that I had to carry it.

We’d been hiking for two hours through wooded forest that would have been more starkly beautiful if my back wasn’t assaulted by pain. Mountain Mama said the second rule of wilderness survival was learning to rely on yourself. I felt like I was living a how-to best seller and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the end. I trudged behind her and said maybe we could find another word than
survival
and she said that the cornerstone of a meaningful life was being hurled into the jaws of death and coming out the other side.

We hiked up to a ridge. I was surprised at how warm I was getting, despite the cold. We passed a three-foot snow drift; I looked behind me to see the footprints I’d laid in the snow. The wind picked up, swirling snow where my steps once were. No one could find me now if I needed help.

I trudged forward, worrying.

What if we didn’t find Josephine?

What if we did?

The wind picked up with a fury.

Snow began to fall, blowing fiercely and thick.

It was inane doing this in the middle of winter. Soon I was engulfed in a white cloud of pulverized ice. It beat against my face and eyes. Tears ran down my frozen cheeks. I tried wrapping up my face, but my scarf was covered with ice balls.

I couldn’t see anything, not even Mountain Mama.

My face and eyes stung from the lashing cold.

“Do you know why people climb mountains, Breedlove?” Mountain Mama’s voice was steady, sure, close to me, although I couldn’t see her yet.

“Because they’re there?” I croaked. “I can’t see!”

“Keep talking.”

“Fear is definitely using me at this moment.”

“No it’s not.” Suddenly, Mountain Mama’s great hand grabbed mine. I held on like she was a lifeguard saving me from drowning. She stood before me like a white, mountainous blur. “It’s just a whiteout, Breedlove. It won’t last forever. But we’re not going to be hot shots and start walking any which way because that’s how people get lost. That’s what happened to my father.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stupid fool thought he didn’t need a compass. He didn’t make it. Whiteouts can trick the best.”

We observed a moment of silence for her dad.

“We have a compass, right?” I said this loudly.

She put her hand in her pocket, took one out, held it out front.

“It’s not broken or anything? You’ve checked it recently?”

“We’re going north,” she said, moving forward purposely. “There are times in the woods where just trusting your instincts aren’t enough. Remember that, Breedlove.”

“I’ll try,” I said miserably, and followed her slowly, clutching her hand through the swirls of white, biting snow.

*    *    *

The whiteout stopped as quickly as it began, and Mountain Mama had shrugged off the stark reality that we almost got sucked inside the Swirling Snow Mountain Death Fog, never to be heard from again.

The new fallen snow made walking harder; we kept sinking knee-deep into snow drifts. Mama put on snowshoes and tossed a pair to me. It was like strapping long, thin tennis rackets to my boots; strange to walk in at first, but they allowed us to walk on top of the snow.

“I only use these things when I have to,” she complained.

I lumbered forward like the Abominable Snowperson.

She was talking about chapter five—
Focusing on the Goal Ahead.
This, Mountain Mama explained, got you through the rough parts—remembering why you were out there in the first place.

“How are you in the focusing department, Breedlove?”

I grinned confidently. The Breedlove focus has been documented through the ages—from Buckminster Breedlove’s ability to shoot skeet peacefully in the middle of an electric
storm, to Elouisa Breedlove’s attempt to swim the English Channel in the presence of a shark that she kept whacking on the nose until a passing fisherman saved the day by throwing his net over her and dragging her aboard.

I became famous at my school for writing three drafts of an essay during the Homecoming football game last fall that went into overtime. It helped that I’m not a big fan of the game.

“I’ve got it in my blood,” I said.

“I want you to look over there in the distance, Breedlove.”

I looked to gray clouds circling a high peak.

“I want you to focus your mind on one thing and one thing only—that’s our destination. That’s where your aunt lives.”

“Wow. That’s high.”

Mountain Mama slapped my back and sent me sailing into a snow drift.

I got up, brushed myself off, focused on the snowy peak in the distance.

She slapped me again, but this time I held on to a tree.

I gazed at the high peek, keenly aware of the historical privilege of being the first to connect to the missing link in the Breedlove family tree. Of course, writing about history is a great deal different than experiencing it. I felt like an explorer who was about to step into a new world and culture and I thought of Christopher Columbus discovering the new world, except, like me, he had a bad sense of direction—thinking he was in the outer edge of Asia instead of in the Caribbean. Then I thought of how he really treated the island natives, as opposed to what some of the less enlightened history books said.

Mrs. Espry, the best history teacher I ever had, wasn’t afraid to go beyond the statements of fact in the textbook that other teachers treated like gospel. She showed us how historians were battling over what actually happened at different events; she’d pull out popular history texts to give us facts and primary sources so that we could draw our own conclusions.

Mrs. Espry said if it wasn’t for historians showing how women and minorities played such a significant role in history, we’d still think anything important that happened on this planet was the result of a long string of rich, white, over-achieving males. When Mr. Leopold, my history teacher, mentioned the “founding fathers” in his first lecture of the year, my hand shot up and I said, “From where I come from, you can’t have a founding father without a founding mother who was there doing the serious labor.”

He apologized and gave me extra credit for insight.

I wondered what the truth was about Josephine. I wonder a lot about what’s true, but you have to do that as a historian. Tib said If you’re looking for truth, you’ve got to understand the human gift for distortion. “People need to make things bigger than life. That’s how stories grow into myths, Ivy. You’ve got to watch that tendency to fabricate when you’re doing a family history and anything else. You’ve got to find things out for yourself when you can.”

“Are you focusing, Breedlove?”

I shook my mind clear.

“The mountain,” I assured her, “is my destiny.”

She slipped her snowshoes off and motioned me to do the same. I did.

“All right,” she shouted, pressing ahead, “let’s take the ledge.”

I stepped back. “Ledge as in a narrow, flat surface that projects from a wall of rock?”

“It’s a bit narrow,” she said. “Put your feet exactly where I put mine, take your time, and don’t look down.”

“I’m not personally ready for a ledge.”

Mountain Mama turned to me, her eyes bright with the joy of knowing she had a best seller in her future.

“What you’re really saying, Breedlove, is that you’ve never done this before and have no experience to pull confidence from.”

“What I’m saying is that I’m not personally ready for a ledge.”

“Breedlove, Breedlove, you’ve lost sight of the goal so soon.”

Mountain Mama took my trembling hand and led me to the top of the snowy rock. Below us was a sheer drop.

I was petrified.

She rammed her axe into the ledge and cleared a huge piece of ice.

“We’ll just give you a few minutes to get used to the idea. Think of the ledge as a way to get to your destination, like a bridge or a tunnel.”

“I hate tunnels.”

“Think of the ledge as the only thing standing in the way of you and something greater.”

I looked at the ledge, thought of my bedroom back home
with my purple quilt and my soft mattress, my two down pillows that were like sinking into little clouds.

“I can’t do this.”

Suddenly, a big piece of ice came crashing down inches from my feet.

I moved toward the ledge. Mountain Mama attached a thick rope from her belt around my waist. I pictured myself hanging perilously in mid-air.

Slowly, Mama guided me on the ledge. I watched her scuffed boots jam into jagged rock. I followed, not looking down.

“One step at a time,” she said. “That’s how you cross it.”

I followed, gaining inches, feet. At one point I slipped slightly. She yanked the rope tightly and I hugged the side of the mountain, clinging to rock face.

She was strong. “Nice rebound,” she said.

My face and head were sweating despite the cold.

My breath came in quick gasps.

“You’re making it happen, Breedlove.”

My pack felt like it weighed five hundred pounds.

“Almost to the other side.”

“I can’t do this.”

“A little bit more.”

“I can’t move!”

“Three more steps.”

Mountain Mama leaped over to flat, ledgeless mountain. And the knowledge that I was on the ledge alone caused me to absolutely freeze.

“You’re there, Breedlove. Just reach for it.”

“I can’t.”

She reached out her strong hand to me. I was afraid to let go of the rock.

“Come on.”

Slowly I held my trembling hand out to her.

My movement was more of a pitiful lurch, but I took three small steps and landed face down in a snow drift on the other side.

It wasn’t pretty, but I was alive.

I took off my wool cap. My hair was soaked and matted, dirt and snow clung to my coat and pants. I kissed the snowy ground.