I stared up the wall of rock – for a brief moment wondering how far up I could get on my own – then came to my senses and climbed into my pickup, pausing to enjoy the view and the strange journey that had led me here, a pas de deux with fate, or perhaps blind luck.
After talking with Lieutenant Mason, I had been sitting at home and shuffling through a lapful of travel brochures snatched from rest stops over the years. They were heavy on entertainment-oriented venues: Branson, Orlando, Gatlinburg, and other places that made me break out in a cold sweat. I was wondering if I should just put Mr Mix-up in the truck and start driving à la Steinbeck when the phone rang.
“Mr Ryder? This is Dottie Fugate at RRG cabin rentals up here in the Kentucky mountains. Feel like a little vacation getaway?”
“I, uh … What?”
“You stayed with us a while back, right?”
My family had lived in the area for four months when I was a child of seven, following my father in his job as engineer and bridge-builder. Then, almost a decade ago, at age twenty-seven, I’d returned before joining the MPD, a self-imposed weekend retreat to sort out a jumble of warring factions in my head. It hit me that I must have stayed at an RRG cabin.
“The last I was in your neighborhood was nine years ago, Miz Fugate. You keep records that long?”
She laughed. “Yep. An’ ever’ year we drop all the previous guests’ register cards in a hat and my daughter pulls out a winner of free use of a cabin. She plucked out your name. I sure hope you can come back and stay with us.”
Clair Peltier, a pathologist for the state of Alabama and my significant sometimes other, believes in the concept of synchronicity, thinking a webwork of logic underlies the fabric of the visible world, a fluid and spiritual mathematics with a sense of humor. She would have explained that my seeking a vacation spot and one arriving via phone was synchronicity: it was not luck, but an item on the universe’s to-do list.
To me it was just weird. But it had dropped in my lap, and it was free.
“You got any cabins available, say, next week?” I asked.
I heard pages flipping, Dottie Fugate checking a calendar.
“Choice is tight, cuz it’s summer tourist season, but we got one open starting Saturday. It’s in a holler in the backcountry and damn remote, to tell the truth.”
“I’ll take it.”
I started the engine and my truck ascended from the valley through pine and hemlock and maple, passing sheer rock faces where vegetation wouldn’t grow. I saw huge house-sized chunks of rock that had toppled from the ridges eons ago. The dark boulders sat in the forest like sentinels, and I recalled that during my brief childhood stay in the mountains I had imagined the boulders whispering to one another during the night, not through the air, but the ground.
I headed back to the cabin, stomach growling, breakfast burned away by hauling my ass up rock faces. The road was asphalt, potholed, crumbling at the edges, but a main county road nonetheless, the shoulders dappled with wildflowers. I curved past a cliff face and cut on to a tight lane, the truck’s springs squealing as the tires dropped from asphalt on to rutted double track of dirt and gravel.
Directly ahead, the road seemed to disappear, the effect of a precipitous winding drop into the tight cleft between two mountains, a hollow, or what locals called a “holler”. I eased down until the lane flattened out. Another few hundred feet and the road forked. To the left was the only neighboring dwelling, a sizeable log cabin visible through the trees.
The right-hand path took me a half-mile deeper in the hollow to my cabin, slat-sided and roofed with dark green metal. Behind, three towering hemlocks pushed into the blue sky, taller by a third than the surrounding white pines and oaks. The dark, raw-wood cabin looked native amidst the forest, as if it had sprouted on its own.
I climbed the porch and pulled my key, for the first time noting that the keychain had a label with the cabin’s name. Vacation retreats were given names – Rocky Ridge, Timbertop, Braeside and so forth – mine apparently named by its remote placement.
Road’s End.
I heard a hellacious din from inside and saw a blur of frenzied motion at the window. I sighed and opened the door.
A tornado blew out.
“Jesus, ouch, damn … calm down, Mix-up.”
Having saved my dog from the euthanasia needle with about a half-hour to spare, many would have figured his wild-eyed, slobbering delight was joy at greeting his savior, but jubilant chaos was his default setting: spinning in circles, bumping my legs, rolling on his back, a dog that delighted in everything.
Mix-up thundered between my legs, and I went down. When my head was on his level he began licking it like a beef roast.
“Stop, dammit. No, Mix-up. Sit! SIT!”
A strange thing happened, something I didn’t expect in a hundred years.
He sat.
His body twitched, but his haunches stayed glued to the ground. I stood, staring at the phenomenon. For a year I’d been working on commands, Mr Mix-up immune to my imprecations. I’d say Sit, he’d thunder in circles. I’d say Stay, he’d follow me like my pants were made of bacon. I’d throw a stick and yell Fetch, he’d roll on the ground and pedal his legs at the sky.
A couple months ago I’d spoken about Mix-up’s recalcitrance to his day-care lady, Lucinda Best, who volunteered at the animal shelter from which I’d rescued him. She’d recommended a nearby obedience school and I’d taken him thrice-weekly for a month, a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of watching other dogs learn to heel, fetch, sit and stay while Mix-up went his merry way.
It appeared he’d managed to learn something, though. Did one of his many breeds have a learning lag time? I held up my hand and quietly said, Stay. I backed away. He stayed. I back-stepped down the drive for fifty paces, hand up, repeating my command every few seconds. I stopped, gestured my way, said, Come here.
He exploded toward me. When he was two dozen feet away I thrust my hand out, said Sit.
He skidded to a stop in sit position. I backed away again, keeping him in place with the Stay command. I found a foot of busted branch on the ground, threw it down the drive yelling Fetch!
He tipped over and began pedaling his paws at the sky.
“Two out of three ain’t bad,” I told him, rubbing his belly. “Let’s go grab some chow.”
I opened the cabin door and went inside, the air cool and smelling of wood and my breakfast bacon. The walls were pine decorated with cheap buys from local flea markets: a red-centric quilt, a sign advertising Texaco Gasoline, calendar-style photos from the Gorge stuck in a variety of dime-store frames. The living room had a vaulted ceiling, with loft space above. Dormers let light pour in. The dining room and kitchen made one long unit.
I showered away the morning’s sweat and grit. Afterwards, I went to the kitchen area and lashed together two sausage and jalapeno cheese sandwiches. I cracked open a cold Sam Adams and dined in a rocker on the sun-dappled porch, serenaded by insects, birdsong and the tumble of water over rock in the nearby creek. Swallow-tailed butterflies skittered through the warm air. Somewhere on the ridge above the cabin a woodpecker drilled for bugs.
I leaned back in the rocker and set my bare heels on the railing as something puzzling happened in my neck and shoulders. At first I didn’t recognize the feeling, then it came to me.
They had relaxed.
I spent the remainder of the day hiking in the Gorge, watching Mix-up bark after squirrels and turkeys and splash through