WE
LEFT A KID ONCE
So
the Prime Minister of England, David Cameron, left one of his kids in a pub.
Knowing the Brits, half of them are laughing and the other half are calling Cameron an unfit father.
Call us what you like,
but I’ve been guilty of the same crime. Or rather my husband Rob was guilty,
because he was driving. As a family, we were on our way to Las Vegas. As we always did on those
occasional trips, Rob stopped in Baker, to let us all take a drink-and-potty
break. That done, we merrily set off again. As usual, the noise inside our
eight-passenger Buick was so intense you’d think we were members of a traveling
circus. And that the circus was in full operative mode.
Rob
and I had six kids. I’ve always said
that six was too many for the capacity of my brain, that I couldn’t keep them
all on my mental screen at the same time.
I’d know someone was missing, but I was never quite sure which one.
On
this day we were twenty miles out of Baker when Bobby, our oldest, said, “Where’s Eric?”
It appears Bobby’s mental screen was better than mine.
“Eric?”
I said. “Why he’s right here, of course.”
“No
he isn’t,” said Bobby. “He’s not in our
row. Is he back there with you, Mom?”
I
didn’t really have to look. “Oh, my God.
I don’t see Eric. Where is he?”
“Eric?”
shouted Rob from the driver’s seat. “Didn’t he get in with the rest of
us?” He was still speeding along.
“Don’t think
he made it,” said our second son, solemnly. “Count ‘em, Mom. He’s not here.”
Even back then, Chris never panicked.
“Stop,
Rob! Stop!” I screamed. “We left Eric!”
“Good God!”
said Rob, “I told everyone to get in.”
With his usual great reflexes, Rob spun the car around, right there in
the middle of the highway. Within seconds he was speeding in the other
direction.
Finally our
daughter spoke up. “I saw him going to the men’s room. I never saw him come
out.”
“Eric was probably
looking at his hair again,” said Chris. “That’s all he ever does. He must’ve been looking when we left.”
“Hurry, Rob!”
I yelled. “Hurry!” Poor little boy, he’s only ten. “I can’t believe we left him!”
For twenty
miles I could hardly breathe. They were the longest twenty miles of my life. Poor
little boy, I kept thinking. The poor
kid. What will he do?
We arrived
back at the gas station, nearly crazy with worry. Both Rob and I leaped out of
the car, poured into the little mini-mart, desperate to find him.
There sat Eric
on a stool. He was calmly licking a popsicle. Strange as it seems, he didn’t seem
worried at all. “The man told me you’d be back.”
“Of course
we’d be back,” said Rob.
“Of course,” I said. “You know we
would.” God, I’m so glad to see you.
And then, in my relief and gratitude I couldn’t help thinking, He really does have great hair.
I’m
way behind on adding chapters from “A Circus Without Elephants.” Here’s Chapter 7.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
THE GREAT
SEQUOIA HIKE
NONE OF US WANTED it, but Bobby would be
leaving soon.
With our son’s departure imminent, Rob and
I scrambled to soften the pain that we knew was coming. Maybe if he had a last,
great weekend, we thought . . . which is how we happened to take the four
oldest boys to the High Sierras, a kind of final-hurrah for a departing son.
Determined to hike efficiently, Rob had
studied catalogues and ordered the latest marvels in deep-woods engineering,
two Mountain Master back-packs touted as offering perfect weight-distribution
over the hiker’s body. “These may be
expensive,” he said, holding up one of the khaki green contraptions and
fingering the aluminum frame, “but if they’re half as good as the Mountain
Master people claim, they’ll be worth it.”
“Money’s not important when it comes to our
backs,” I echoed. Then somehow I got the
message confused. In an odd twist of
logic, perfect weight distribution began to mean the extra weight disappears. Suddenly
additional ounces meant nothing.
Feeling smug at being so wonderfully
organized, I filled our packs with everything we could possibly need: canned pork-and-beans, frozen meat, canned
soups, dried eggs, pancake mix, jars of coffee, sugar, and syrup, extra
jackets, a flashlight, and various toilet articles and drugs. This in addition to raisins and candy bars,
sacks of nuts, cooking pots and a frying pan.
At the time it all seemed quite reasonable. We would, after all, be out of touch with
civilization for most of two days.
At the start of a rustic trail in Sequoia National Park, Rob and I squirmed into
our Mountain Masters and helped Bobby and Chris
with their bundles--all the sleeping bags rolled into two fat sausages. Chris
was now eleven-and-a-half and almost as tall as Bobby, who was nearly
thirteen. Eric, ten, and Kenny, seven,
carried tiny knapsacks on their tiny shoulders.
Rob had someone snap our picture, which
shows the six of us strapped into our loads, smiling, fresh, and eager.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Rob said, “if all our trips got off to this kind of easy
start?”
Our destination was Bearpaw Meadow, eleven
miles along the High Sierra Trail. As I
looked toward the forest, the air seemed to shimmer with its very cleanness,
and sunlight produced shadows as sharp as etchings. The woods smelled good, like damp leaves and
sap. In the sun it was warm, in the
deeper forest briskly cool.
“Let’s go,” I said, eager to test our
equipment. So Rob led off, his plump
Mountain Master giving him the proportions of a hump-backed grizzly. Strung out on the trail behind him, the boys
and I trudged along at just the right intervals to breathe each other’s
dust.
As we started up the first small incline, I
could tell that our backpacks were indeed well-designed, for I could feel the
weight in several unexpected places--not just in my shoulders, but also in my
arms, calves, and lower spine.
Then the trail grew steeper, and I began to
wonder if I hadn’t overdone the packing a tiny bit . . . Did we really need
four tins of pork-and-beans?
We’d been walking silently for maybe twenty
minutes when I thought I heard a groan up ahead. “You okay, Rob?” I called out.
He didn’t answer, nor did he slow the
pace. But minutes later he stopped and
sagged against a tree.
Catching up, I saw rivulets of sweat making
their way down the sides of his face, and he was bent low, massaging his
legs. “Sonofabitch!” he said. “My knees!”
Momentarily overtaken by the guilt which I
keep handy for such occasions, I started to apologize. Then stopped.
He knew what I’d been packing and he hadn’t said anything . . . and anyway, I was carrying my share.
But not very well. I found my own tree to lean against and felt
a dull ache recede from my muscles. It
appeared the Mountain Master people had certainly kept their promise; whatever
sensations you got, you got them everywhere.
For several minutes Rob and I rested in
disgruntled silence, dismayed that we were so much weaker than we’d
imagined. Neither of us felt like
talking.
The boys, on the other hand, seemed
annoyingly fresh. Bobby’s thin face was
alert, brighter than normal, and Chris
beamed at us out of chipmunk cheeks, his usual good-natured self. The two carried their packs as casually as
pocket handkerchiefs.
“This is neat,” said Eric, “isn’t it neat,
Kenny?” and Kenny nodded, and with much squealing the two dashed off after a
ground squirrel.
After awhile we set off again.
But the respite hadn’t helped. If anything, my load was heavier, in fact
inexplicably weighty, as though something big had crawled inside.
I wasn’t watching Rob anymore or the
Redwoods or the carpet of ferns. I was
watching the ground, staring at dust, staring at the trail. The minutes passed, and it no longer mattered
how the weight was distributed. The
whole blasted load could have hung from my neck, for all the help I was getting
from that perfect engineering. I felt
like I was hauling a Steinway.
Bearpaw Meadow was no longer
attainable. Eleven miles or one mile,
what was the difference, I was never going to get there.
Suddenly I couldn’t walk another step. With a last surge of will I gasped my way to
a big rock and sagged out from under the crushing load.
Rob stopped too, and in one swift motion he
jerked the pack off his body and dropped it on the ground. “My knees are through,” he declared. “Finished.”
In our separate foul moods, we stood there
panting. The boys watched in surprise as
Rob roused enough to drag his Mountain Master off the trail, growling that he
didn’t care whether he ever saw the damned thing again. “For two cents I’d leave it right here.”
“What if somebody steals it?” Eric asked. He was cute and blue-eyed, just outgrowing
his baby softness.
Rob laughed without mirth. “I’d like to see the thief who’s strong
enough to haul it away!”
So this was it, I thought, Rob and I
finally felled by our possessions, with too much to carry in either direction.
Six of us milled on the trail while we
tried to decide what to do. After
several irresolute minutes, Bobby offered casually, “I’ll carry your pack,
Dad.”
Rob and I stared at him and shook our heads
in unison. “You can’t,” Rob said. “If I can’t, you can’t.”
“Sure I can,” said Bobby, and he hoisted
Rob’s pack onto his scrawny shoulders.
“See?”
Rob smiled.
“Bobby, you haven’t tried walking yet.”
“I can walk,” Bobby said, and started
off.
With that Chris
picked up my pack. “You take my stuff,
Mom. It’s light.”
He was right, it was. So I carried Chris’s
load and Rob took Bobby’s, and the six of us moved off down the trail again
with our oldest boys in front, where anyone that strong deserved to be.
From
time to time Rob and I exchanged incredulous glances, amazed at this turning
point, that our roles had been reversed with two pre-teens. But the bigger boys never said a word. Not a complaint, not a murmur.
They carried those Mountain Masters all the
way to Bearpaw Meadow, they slept on the ground that night, and Sunday morning
they hauled their loads five miles up and down a precipitous, winding trail to Hamilton Lake and out again, then back the eleven
miles to our parked car. Thirty-two
miles in thirty-four hours.
The only time they complained was at Sunday
morning’s breakfast. They didn’t like
the scrambled eggs, which I’d made from a dried packet and a cup of stream
water and which cooked up into a dark, gray-green viscous blob, a mess that
only Dr. Seuss could love. “I’ve never
seen green eggs!” Bobby said, screwing up his long face.
“I’m sorry, Mom, it looks like a big,
squashed slug,” said Chris.
“Pancakes, then?” I asked, tossing the
green eggs into the campfire because nobody else wanted them either.
Kenny watched the eggs as they
sizzled. “Good you burned ‘em, Mom. They coulda made some bear sick.”
But the pancakes, too, turned a strange
color in addition to being dense and hard.
I was finally glad we’d hauled in the heavy, canned baked beans.
Sunday night we ran out of everything
except food (of which we had enough to take us through the winter), out of
time, daylight, and energy. We’d tried
to go too far, lingered to catch a few fish too many. But we had to get back to Orange County
that night because our flight to Denver
left the next morning.
As the light faded and the miles didn’t,
Rob said, “Boys, we’ve got to keep going,” and Bobby nodded and led us down the
murky trail as though he always went hiking in inky darkness. He still hadn’t mentioned the piano on his
shoulders, nor had Chris.
Behind Bobby came Rob with a wavering
flashlight, then Chris and Eric,
both resolutely quiet, and finally Kenny, who began asking, “What if we see a
bear?”
From the rear I told him we probably
wouldn’t see any bears, we were making too much noise, and Kenny said in a
nervous, pipey voice, “How do you know?
Are you sure?”
“Yes, I said, and yearned to have this over
with, not because of the bears or the darkness but because I felt like I’d already
walked a thousand miles.
About ten-thirty Rob’s flashlight gave out
and we all disappeared. Such an irony, I thought. All
those canned goods and only one flashlight.
An eerie tension crept over us, not helped when little Kenny, thin and
skitterish as a bird, began to whimper.
“I’m scared. There MIGHT be a
bear.”
“There’s no bear, Kenny,” I promised.
“I think I hear a mountain lion.”
“It’s just Bobby stepping on a twig.”
“What if a cougar jumps out?”
“Cougars won’t bother us,” I said. “They’re afraid of people.”
“But you don’t know, Mom. You don’t know.”
With increasing anguish he named all the
wild predators one by one, the spiders, the snakes, the wolves, while up front
somewhere Bobby searched out the trail.
For the next two hours Kenny clung to my
hand and sobbed into the night.
Periodically Bobby called out the
distances. “Mile five,” he sang out,
because he’d somehow managed to spot the wooden marker nailed to a tree. And later, “Mile four.” When he missed mile three, the tension became
so thick even Rob sounded edgy.
By then Kenny was crying hard enough for
all of us.
SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT WE emerged from the forest and staggered up to
our station wagon.
As Rob lifted the pack from Bobby’s narrow
shoulders, he clapped his hand on Bobby’s arm.
“You guys were terrific.”
Bobby smiled and nodded, a private,
satisfied smile. The moment was vintage
Bobby, the start of the quiet triumphs we would one day see so vividly. I thought it odd that he didn’t seem weary at
all.
The boys all climbed into the back of our
large station wagon and immediately fell asleep.
Rob said he’d take us down the mountain and
I could drive the rest of the way home.
Back on level roads once more, we stopped
to switch drivers. When I stepped out of
the car on my side, a surprise was waiting.
With no warning whatever--before I’d taken a single step--my legs gave
way and I sank to the ground like a collapsing card table.
I sat there, startled; my legs had never
behaved like that before.
From the pavement, wanting to tell him what
had happened, I looked through the open car door toward Rob. I expected to see him standing there,
waiting. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in a heap on the ground. Like me, he’d stepped out and buckled and
gone down.
As I drove the rest of the way home to Orange County,
I wondered if there wasn’t a better plan than taking Bobby to Denver.
For a whole weekend he hadn’t wheezed once. No coughing, no fighting for breath.
Perhaps instead of the Home for Asthmatic
Children, we ought to send him off to the High Sierras with a thirty-pound pack
on his back.
