Chapter 33: Elevation

 

Chapter 33: 

Elevation

I climbed slowly, where the uphill parts always just out-edged the downhill ones, but I never really felt like I was out of the The Goldenflower Woods until I hit a long stretch of ascending trail carved into the side of a mountain taking me steadily up, and over, and in. And then all at once I seemed to be encircled by peaks. Most of them were a silver gray, and despite their obvious seeming name of "Snowtop Mountains" they were curiously free of snow at the very top. It was the shoulders of their peaks that were festooned with glaciers.

I had snuck in through some low valley, climbed a ridge, and now looked out at Hundred Miles Lake. It was only two miles long, but the shining lake was the kind of thing a person felt in their soul and so didn't inspire one to quibble over a mere 98 miles. It was immaterial. The water was azure blue, which I think means super duper blue. It was clear as air. And it was terribly cold. I know the last from the next day, when I swam in it, sputtering and free and freezing. Of all the eight months or so of my great Agua Fria hike there was but one day where I spent a layover day simply lolling about merely because it was too lovely to leave where I was. 

That was on the grassy alpine shore of Hundred Miles Lake.

Charlotte took a layover day too. She kept catching trout for us to eat, so I came up with a new, better way to eat them. I had one pan, really a pot, and over low embers I would render what fat I could out of coarse chunks of the salami and maybe from a little of the cheese I had too (both of which were still delicious afterwards when they were dense and chewy). Then I fried up the little cleaned and beautiful trout on a super low heat. The cooking was slow and fiddly, but Charlotte and I became quietly as obsessed with it as Oliver and I had gotten with gin rummy back a few hundred miles. We ended up with great piles of tender greasy trout to pick over for hours. We only quit when we could eat no more.

Perhaps attracted by all the tantalizing fish smells a black bear wandered into our camp later that day, at dusk. I was alarmed until he walked over to Charlotte and they seemed to almost confer for a bit over by where her hammock had been strung up. After the bear disappeared into the woods, Charlotte looked up over at me.

"I'm afraid we're going to have to step it up tomorrow." She said softly. "Things are about to get difficult."

Chapter 32: Trees and Rocks and What Holds them Together

 

Chapter 32:

Trees and Rocks and What Holds them Together

If the Agua Fria Trail wanted to head directly into the Snowdrop Peak Mountain Range, it could have done it in 20 steep miles, but it had it's heart set on its singular, overall direction and so chose to angle slowly out of the deep woods in a slow merge with the formidable mountains. This set me on a weeklong gradual climb through a changing landscape. As the trees thinned and found breathing room, the Goldenflower Tree giants became even bigger, a quality accentuated from them rising to the very feet of clouds from an elevated position upslope of me. I was often looking up to where the trees even began, and from there it was many hundreds of feet perfectly straight up before they were finished.

At first it seemed as if I was running into Charlotte almost by accident at opportune moments along the side of the trail, but as I acclimated to her it became clear that we were indeed traveling together. I almost never saw her hiking the trail, but around lunch time, or at an important juncture, she was always set up, knitting or cooking, or simply waiting. We camped together every night, she keeping to her hammock and I to my tent. We slowly even shared meals though I did not like to watch her eat. She would sometimes provide fresh fish that I had no idea how she got. I often roasted them on sticks over the fire, a skill she taught me and that I slowly improved at. I provided her with salami. In contrast to Oliver she hadn't the slightest interest in Gorp, but took to my quantities of salami with a disturbing relish. I was glad to provide this meat from my collection as my long and close association with it was straining my relationship to it.

She never stopped being discomfiting, but she did gradually seem less alien to me. She was just so steady and thoughtful. She was far more forthcoming than Oliver, though even still if there was something she couldn't, wouldn't discuss she would simply fall silent for a bit and then say "Hmmm?" or "What was that dear?"

"What is it like being a god?" I asked her once while she was knitting and very slowly snacking on a chunk of salami (somehow at once?).

"Ah." She smiled. "What is it like being you?"

I thought for a bit. "Inevitable?" I said. "Nerve-wracking? Seemingly full of nearly implacable laws?"

She peered at me with her eyes. "There are just two" I insisted to myself.

"You see how hard it is to say." She said. "I am all the spiders within a hundred miles, maybe a thousand. The closer they are the more I am them. And I am you. Both you, and who you imagine me to be. I am something older. And I am myself, just like you."

"Do you have special powers though, like magic?"

"I can see the truth. It is a power you have too, when you dare."

"But can you travel in time, or see the future? Can you disappear."

There is a long, long pause. I think she has decided not to answer and is lost in her knitting.

And then she says "Yes."

With Oliver I had so many questions and he wouldn't answer them.

With Charlotte she would answer my questions, but I didn't know what they were.

Chapter 31: On Our Way

 

Chapter 31: On Our Way

In a campsite in the darkest forest I have ever been in, with a disturbing spider god a dozen feet away, I slept.

I mean, I slept after awhile.

But seeing as I didn't catch anything crawling over me in my tent I gradually cocooned more and more deeply into my sleep. Before I knew it I awoke to an actual splinter of sun that had found its way to my tent, lighting it up. I heard birds. It wasn't raining! I stepped outside and found, to my surprise, that Charlotte had gone without a trace. The hammock was as if it had never been. There wasn't a footprint or clawprint or bit of yarn left behind. I didn't know what to make of it.

So I lit a small fire. I ate a pop tart from a box of cherry frosted that I had acquired in town. I used the privy with considerable consternation and lots of cleaning it off first. There were no spiders there but an unusual number of slugs! I packed up. And I headed out to the trail. 

I hadn't gone more than a hundred feet when I came to a massive spider web strung across the trail. It was beautiful and looked fresh, but there was no spider in it. I preferred that, though with some trepidation- if I didn't see the spider then how could I know where the spider was? But at that moment that was not my main consideration. The web was my main consideration, all on its own. It was like so many of the globe spider webs I had thrashed down and through as I made my way among the Goldenflower Woods, except for one key difference; Woven into the center of the web was a single word:

"Terrific" It said.

"Well that's nice." I said to no one in particular.

Then I spent 15 minutes lurching about in the bog and muck and tangle of the woods to get round it without knocking it down. It just didn't seem right to mess with literature.

Chapter 30: Charlotte

 

Chapter 30: Charlotte

My last full day in the deep Goldenflower Woods, before I started to slowly climb out of them and into the mountains, was a rough one. It drizzled all day, in a heavy way that was never any kind of a rain, but that somehow dampened everything; my pack, my clothes, my skin, and my spirit. Spider webs were ubiquitous, and there was no trail traffic to clear them out. Slightly on the plus side of this they were easy to see, festooned as they were with jewel-like beads of water.

I thought about having a camp day, staying holed up in my tent to wait out the miserable weather, but not only were free days, with no miles gained, a precious commodity in my schedule and in relation to my shockingly ambitious food drops, but I barely had a campsite to stay in anyway. My tent was half in a bog and crowded into a tiny bit of space between a tree and a wall of fallen timber. It slanted weirdly, was wet, and uncomfortable. So I packed up, waved a giant branch in front of me for spiderweb protection, and went to seek better things.

The hiking was dark, damp and muddy that day. I had gotten a late start and so didn't start to look for a campsite until it was pretty late, not that I passed anything decent before then. But as the light slowly sucked out of the woods the terrain just seemed to grow worse and worse. I was starting to consider sleeping propped up against a tree, when, hiking along in increasing misery, fumbling to get out my precious flashlight to light my way in the deepening dark, I saw ahead of me a clearing and a light. It was a full campsite, complete with a firepit and a privy path, the first I had seen in two days. 

The only problem was that it was occupied.

There was a hammock strung up in the trees and a woman sitting primly on a fallen tree nearby, knitting by a small candle lantern and eating what looked like some sort of jerky. The objects of her camp were meticulously arranged. She looked up.

"Come into my parlor." She said. Her voice seemed to have clicks in it.

I recognized her at once. She was the older, deformed, for lack of a better word, woman from the pizza restaurant in Kohlrabi; according to Oliver, my next companion. Her head was flatter than a normal human head. She had two extra arms coming out of her ribs. Her eyes were tiny, round, and keen.

"No thanks." I said.

"Oh don't be like that." She chided. "Where will you sleep? There is plenty of room for your tent here and my hammock is neatly to the side."

"Um." I said, trying not to look at her. I looked at her. "So you're..."

"The next one." She said. "You have finished the easy part. You will need a friend to face what is next."

"That wasn't ominous at all." I replied.

She smiled, I think. Her mouth was strange. "I cannot hide what I am so well as your... other friends."

"I'm not great with- I paused-  spiders." I said the word spiders with a hush.

"I am not great with humans." The spider lady replied calmly.

"What's your name?" I asked.

She seemed almost flattered. "You tell me." She clicked.

"Charlotte?" I said.

She groaned. "Oh lord." She murmured softly and with a click, of mandibles?

"Well don't tell me you prefer Shelob." I countered, slightly miffed.

"Oh, Charlotte will be fine, and it's done anyway. Now make your camp." She commanded. "I have much knitting to do before I can sleep tonight. We'll talk again tomorrow. It will be brighter then."

Chapter 29: Goldenflower

 

Chapter 29: Goldenflower

Sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn't. 

I was alone again on the Agua Fria Trail, in some of the deepest woods of the whole trip, the Goldenflower Woods. I drifted in and out of a string of pieces of the National Park named for these stately and giant trees. The trail mostly skirted along the lesser traveled outskirts of the park, where the towering trees didn't grow to the tallest they got to, but were blissfully at their wildest, densest, and most graceful, and also, to my delight, did so in their namesake season. The trees flowered.

For four days I hiked through here, finding it impossibly beautiful and peaceful. But there were always problems on any long hike and in any environment, at least for me. The first, here, were the spiders. It was a very, very spidery forest! Thrashing through the trail, strewn with new spun webs in the morning, was so bad that I found myself putting off my day's departure until as late as lunch, by which time usually a few hikers, animals, and/or weather had cleared most of the globe spiders from the path. This meant though that I had to hike late into the evening, which exacerbated the other main problem of hiking through these woods- the one regarding campsites. There were hardly any. The forest floor was so teeming with ferns and moss and swamp and enormous tangles of fallen wood that any area open enough to pitch a tent on was extremely rare to find. And these unusual bare spots could be even harder to find as the night fell and the owls started commentating distractingly from above.

The third morning in the Goldenflower Woods was bright, dry, and breezy. I was camped, as ever in these woods, near to the trail, as getting anywhere the least bit away from it made for a long and messy expedition. This proximity gave me the mixed benefit of hearing a large group move through along the trail while I was gathering wood for a small morning fire. I found myself sensitive to other people, and didn't like the thrashing invasion of a big group, but on the other hand I now had firm confirmation that the day's trail ahead was, as a result, well cleared of giant spiders. I'm pretty sure I even heard a scream in the distance some time after they passed and I had no problem imagining its source. I'd been there.

It was a lovely day and I was making excellent time. The sun was out, its rays casting like quiet thoughts down into the woods below, filtering through the heavy, narrow, and impossibly high boughs of the goldenflower trees. A great breeze, more even a slow, quiet breath of wind, came running downhill to the valley I was in. I could hear it before I felt it, the susurration and change of pressure. Then the trees, in a kind of slow motion, bent before it. I felt the wind prickle my skin. And from above all the high starlight branches of the valley woods released great clouds of golden yellow pollen. It billowed out in enormous, heavy gusts, glittering clouds, like the smoke of the sun lighting heaven to a slow burn. It surged through the forest in ponderous, mingling and dancing waves. It was like a fire, a blanket, something unnatural, something ephemeral and heavy and real. And then, as if in a single moment, it settled into the great green mass of the forest and simply disappeared.

On my 2,799 mile hike across a continent I saw many amazing things. I crossed into other realities. I cavorted with gods, I wrestled with the heavens and was gifted by angels, but the rain of pollen from the goldenflower trees was possibly most magical thing I saw. 

Well, top ten. Top twenty for sure.

You know what? Forget it. It's not a ranking system. It was just... lovely.

Chapter 28: The Longest Walk

 

Chapter 28: The Longest Walk

My pick-up of my mailed package for our next hiking section went off without a hitch at the Kohlrabi Post Office. With a few groceries (mostly cheese) I was resupplied for another three to four weeks. But there was no excitement or sense of joy in opening up any of it. Oliver flatly and sadly declined to put anything I had acquired in his pack, although on a short break heading back to the woods I tossed him an nice bag of new gorp, this version containing butterscotch pieces. "Something to remember me by." I said. He smiled wanly, took a small handful out to eat, and then he packed it in to his half-empty pack.

After a month of my moping and worrying and dreading Oliver leaving, it was now Oliver who seemed inconsolable. I was the mature adult, reassuring him that all would be okay and he would have plenty of fun being a rabbit god without me.

My new book from my shipment was Don Quixote. When I showed it to him, Oliver, with all the spark in him completely snuffed out, weakly said "I would have liked to read that one." 

Forty years on no one has ever called me "Guv'nor" again.

We climbed back towards the woods and the main Agua Fria Trail. Oliver was leading. It started to drizzle. 

Oliver turned back to me and said "You know, you have less than 2,000 miles to go."

I said "Maybe we should try and do it all today." He smiled without a lot of heart.

The land was open for some miles away from the town of Kohlrabi. When we came upon the woods again they appeared suddenly out of a mist. Up ahead I saw Oliver enter them, the entrance a dark blot in the face of a wall of trees. I trudged along behind in my familiar quest to catch up to Oliver, who I would regularly find resting comfortably, munching gorp when he could, always waiting. But this time I kept going and did not find him. Indeed, I never caught up. I kept hoping I would, long after I knew I wouldn't, until I came to my bag of butterscotch gorp, lying, abandoned, on the middle of the trail. 

A rabbit dashed into the woods.

I heard a roll of thunder. 

It started to rain. 

"This is the driest thing I know." I said softly to myself, and walked on.

Chapter 27: Kohlrabi

 

Chapter 27: Kohlrabi

Kohlrabi was a tourist town, a gateway to the outdoors. And with Summer just rearing its mighty head it was hopping with visitors. After spending months in the wilderness this was strange and disorienting. People seemed cartoonish, like caricatures of themselves. To this day I feel this is the honest view of people in general, but no one can naturally hold on to a view like that. From that clear view one won't be able to interact with other people. The common presence and every interaction will serve to generalize one in the world. The sharp lines of a person's individuality dissolve as if in an slow acid. We are made permeable of, for, and to society. The world will make a person relentlessly more common on one hand, but on the other hand solitude works like a corrosive base to tear at your organizing structures and leave you mad. And so at first Oliver and I struggled to be intelligible to others, fast enough, simple enough, less stupefied by all the lunacy. But the world quickly and efficiently pushed us along and tenderized us. And soon the waitress was bringing pizza.

And by the third pizza place we were much more acclimated to civilization. We got a large olive and onion pizza. We were full and satisfied already, but neither of us wanted this dream of luxury to end. Fortunately I think the third pizza was by far the best one. It was already mid afternoon, and we worked slowly away at the slices. We clung to our idyll.

Somewhere in the midst of this I noticed a disquieting presence. 

Had it been there all along, or was it just that now that I was aware of it it was impossible to look away?

In the darkest corner of the pizza parlor sat a woman. She seemed disfigured in some way that I couldn't put my finger on. Her face didn't seem quite right, especially her mouth and the shape of her head. Her skin was shiny and lacked pigmentation in some subtle, unsettling way. She was much older than Oliver and I, maybe in her forties? She sat extraordinarily still, perching over a plate of what I think was just a bunch of lightly broiled pepperoni. She only seemed to move when I looked away.

"That woman over there is kind of freaking me out." I said to Oliver.

"Yeah." He said. "She would. But you'll get used to her."

"No." I said, my heart dropping.

"Be nice to spiders?" Oliver said in a sheepish sort of way.

"Holy crap." I said. "Do we have to say hi or something?"

"Oh, I'm not going over there. No way! But you can wave if you want."

I looked over and thought she looked back, but I couldn't tell exactly behind her large mirrored glasses. Wait, was she wearing glasses? I nodded weakly towards her.

She raised an extra arm from somewhere, separate possibly from the ones on her table. Was there a glove on it or no hand at all? She then slightly waved it at, maybe, me.

"You'll be fine." Oliver said, and I was not reassured.

Chapter 26: End of an Era

 

Chapter 26: End of an Era

The last full day of our hike, before hitting the town of Kohlrabi, was 22 miles through the woods. And though these weren't the first woods of the Agua Fria Trail, they were the first gothic woods- the first mysterious and ancient woods. The other woods that we had traveled sometimes long miles in were lovely, but they were dry and neat. Needles and sparse plants covered the ground. They transitioned up from high, clean desert and then neatly back down. The air in these woods was sweet and thin. Everything smelled of pine, a refreshing smell people have bottled and sold for decades. The paths were clear and bold, open and steady. 

This ancient wood we now found ourselves in was dark. Its smell was rich and without translation, a brew of moss and maple syrup and mushrooms and dead things. The forest floor was heaped and wet, slimy and bursting with death and flowers and color and predatory plants oozing bait. Life and death teemed, or teamed, or both. We no longer roamed a planet here, we moved through the very guts of a single, complex, living thing. 

It was the first place I don't think Oliver liked.

In the morning we walked waving sticks in front of us to break the mass of spider webs woven across the trail. Sometimes there were such prodigious Globe Spiders, sitting in their giant webs, that we could not bear to knock them down and clambered instead through ferns and slimy mosses and dead, tangled trees to circumnavigate them. I led at all times, which was unusual, and though there were no big climbs, all the mud and careful footing required seemed to foil Oliver, who, for the first time ever, I found myself regularly waiting for.

With all the richness of this forest I felt sure the pathetic last dregs of our rations would be padded out by some fabulous, foraged mushroom stew of Oliver's, but in the evening, when we made camp, he had no interest in poking about. We nibbled carefully the last bits of all our food, meager as it was, down to a small square of extremely hard parmesan cheese that we carefully split. We would now have nothing but water until Kohlrabi in 10 or 15 miles.

I lit a large fire, our first in at least a month. It was hard to get going due to the damp in everything, but once we got it going it made quick use of our vast fuel as we piled it on. The fire seemed to bring back some life to Oliver. He smiled weakly once again, and talked a little. When I saw him out of the corner of my eye though he seemed almost transparent. Once, coming back to the fire with yet more wood, I thought he had wandered away until I nearly was right upon him. He warmed himself at the flames that I could almost see through him. The more I burned the more Oliver seemed to come to life and we soon had a massive bonfire. It was reckless and thrilling, but not really dangerous in the green and damp forest.

The next morning we woke early and Oliver seemed to be in better spirits. I was in an especially good mood for reasons I didn't understand. We were both hungry and eager to be on our way. That day I saw my first Goldenflower tree, the tallest trees in the world. Here on the fringes of their domain they were not particularly tall, but their elegance was unmistakable and some of them were beginning to flower. These were small and dense, and actually not technically flowers, and among the unusually dark foliage of the trees the golden clusters seemed to glow like stars in the night.

Soon the trail, now an offshoot of the Agua Fria, took us down and out of the deep woods and gradually into civilization. We crossed into the city of Kohlrabi on Paradise Street, and took that street down the hill to Main Street, which was bustling. Looking left and right we could see at least three pizza places for sure.

We both grinned. "I'm not really hungry, are you?" I asked.

"No." Replied Oliver calmly. "But we should probably get one pizza at each of those places so that we will know where we should go if we do get hungry."

So we did.

Chapter 25 Into the woods

 

Chapter 25: Into the Woods

Climbing 7,000 feet out of Paradise Canyon (which wasn't really called Paradise Canyon at that point anymore) wasn't hard. I had been backpacking endlessly through difficult terrain for almost two months now and was in the best shape of my young, notably sedentary life. But I still manage to remember that hike for its unpleasantness. It was just so... uphill. And though it was full of dramatic views, that was only if one looked back. And looking back always gave one the incredulous feeling of "Is that all we've done so far?" So the main view one inclined to was of the way forward, and it mainly consisted of hard, stony trails, winding, dry switchbacks, and of course, Oliver, whose fitness and nimbleness was always two levels better than my own, no matter how good mine managed to become. And so there he ever was, a hundred yards ahead.

But I think the real problem with this hike was we just didn't bring enough water.

It was a hot day, bone dry and cloudless. We drank all the water in our canteens by the time we were halfway out. Then we simply suffered. Unlike the few places one could hike out of Paradise Canyon in the National Park, here there was no defined rim, and in the end, after several weeks, we wound unceremoniously away from the canyon on the sketchy trail, climbing along gullies and ravines. Trees started to show up on the land. The view behind us became more mundane, and the world attained a roundness with big hills mounding into bigger round hills under a round sun and a round sky.

Finally the trees thickened into forest to swallow us up in their blissful shadows. And best of all we came to a stream. It was hard to be patient enough to treat our water there, but we did. We drank in almost desperate gulps, thinking we would be able to drink forever. But we weren't able to drink forever. It's a funny thing about being dangerously thirsty. It's everything, and then it's not. It all seems too easy.

We looked around. Yes, we were in the woods.

"Maybe we should just camp here?" I suggested, struck suddenly by the peace and punctuation of the place. Oliver nodded an assent. We were now two nights from the town of Kohlrabi. 

Our rations at this point were thin and wretched. Oliver found a handful of rough, wild and bitter greens, and three mushrooms. I left him to it because I could still eat some barely passable salami. We rationed one handful of gorp each. It had been a reserved few days between Oliver and I, and quiet ones. We were both thinking our own thoughts, and the cloud of his leaving had hung over us. Sitting there, finishing lunch, I pulled out my last secret stash from town- an individual sized bag of Taco Doritos. We feasted and were very hungry.

We talked about pizza and played gin late into the starry night. 

Chapter 24: Paradise Canyon Forever

 

Chapter 24: Paradise Canyon Forever

The funny thing about the famous, wonder of the world, Paradise Canyon, is that it is bigger than you think. It is famous for being bigger than you think, and so, knowing this, you think you're prepared for all its grandeur and are girded against it being bigger than you thought, but no matter where you've set the marker on it, it yet manages to be bigger still.

This conundrum has never been foiled.

I won't talk about the breadth of Paradise Canyon here in this chapter, or the mighty height of its great cascade of walls. And I don't mean to discuss now the monumental size of the National Park, one of the country's largest, and the hundreds of miles it took to cross its boundaries from north to south. Also there is the matter of the complexity of the canyon that is not my subject here, where the Paradise Canyon exists on so many levels and in such astonishing folds and breaks and windings and hidden corners that each mile contains another ten hidden miles within.

No. As befits the story of a through-hike, I want to discuss just how long Paradise Canyon is! 

Oliver and I hiked through the entire length of Paradise Canyon National Park. It was amazing and long and beautiful and long and challenging and long. And then finally we came to the border of the park and so in theory were done. But the Agua Fria Trail took truck with none of that and continued on just as it was. The trail followed the same valley of the Bluestone River for a long, long time, and it  was pretty much the same deep canyon of the park- deep and colorful, massive and complicated.

It turned out that the whole "National Park" thing is just a trick, the perfidy of the labels of Man and the quiet con of his maps meant to entice and repel. I might even venture to say that the next 100 or so miles upstream of the Paradise Canyon National Park were prettier, more varied and more astounding even, than that which resided inside the fabled park itself. But Oliver and I probably wouldn't have ventured to say anything of the sort back then because we were just so tired of it all. There was so much endless navigating and rock climbing and sun and hiking up and down and down and up and up and down forever that we had, to some extent, had it.

In short, we continued through miles and miles more of Paradise Canyon, but when a person is hiking thousands of miles they become prey sometimes to what I like to call tunnel hiking. This affliction could come on one at any time and turn a complex, beautiful nature journey into a forced march, a pounding, bleary-eyed trudge of one foot in front of the other forever. Oliver was less prey to it than I, but looking back now I can see why I had one of my worst episodes of tunnel hiking during this particular phase of my Agua Fria journey.

The first reason was that due to what I had found in the future paradise of Paradise Canyon I now knew that ending my hike early, a tantalizing balm I had long been soothing myself with, was now only possible at the expense of a terrible disaster for the whole world. The second was that I knew I was in my final few weeks with Oliver, and it turned out that not only did I really really like Oliver, I was also profoundly scared of being all alone again.

For the first of these problems there really wasn't much help, but Oliver eventually came through on the second, sort of. It was on the day where we had come to Paul's Ferry, which was the second bridge over the Bluestone River in hundreds of miles, and marked an important point in our trail. Here we would cross the river and actually, finally, climb all of the way out of the canyon, heading out to the high elevation woods and ultimately to the town of Kohlrabi.

We were lunching by the river, which, for all our long traveling along it, was a surprisingly rare event because our hiking was nearly always working along two or three levels of cliffs above it. Our gorp was running dangerously low, but we had some good water and a few precious lembas left, which we had decided to finish off then and there as a way to say goodbye to the canyon and river. 

During that lunch Oliver turned to me and said "You know, I would continue on with you all the way if I could." He paused. "But I can't."

"Why not?" I asked trying not to be sullen.

"I can feel it already." Said Oliver. "I can't be too far away from my own land. I'll just fade out."

"So how long?" I asked. It felt to me like he was dying, or maybe I was.

"Kohlrabi for sure? Maybe a few nights after." He said, referring to our next town.

I nodded.

"Someone else is coming after me, you know." Oliver added. "To, you know, help."

I looked up at him.

"You won't like her at all." He said in a way that gave me a chill. "But try to give her a chance. She's on our side."

"What side is that, exactly?" I asked.

"See." Oliver said. "She'd probably answer that question.

 

Chapter 23: Paradise Lost

 

Chapter 23: Paradise Lost

The following morning, after sleeping for a long time, clean and dry and warm, in a luscious bed, deep in the stone of the perfect future, I awoke to find myself in my tent, on the stony ground, in the plain old unadorned wilderness, with Oliver stirring in his bag next to me. 

And like that we were back on our journey.

There were a couple of differences though. 

Now I knew everything.

Also, all of our stuff smelled fantastic, the tent, sleeping bag, packs, clothes- they smelled like... trees? summer? No, I've got it. They smelled like the pictures in Winnie the Pooh. 

There were also little cakes wrapped in large leaves in our packs. Oliver said they were fine for us to eat now. They were delicious and very sustaining.

"Aren't these more Lothlorien than Rivendell?" I asked Oliver about the cakes, which were known as lembas in Lord of the Rings.

"The whole Lord of the Rings thing is more of an inspiration than a direct one-to-one corollary." Answered Oliver, stuffing one of the cakes into his mouth.

"Were we really hundreds of years into the future then?" I asked.

"Kind of?" Oliver said.

"So everything is back to being inscrutable then?"

Oliver grinned. "I never stopped being inscrutable. They were the ones who did all the talking." He said, referring to our hosts from the night before.

"I am satisfied that we sat with people you took me to meet and they said that you were a rabbit god." I responded primly.

Oliver smiled shyly.  

We packed up, and hiked on. There were more than 2,000 miles still to go.

Chapter 22: The Council

 

Chapter 22: The Council

I also showered, just for the record. It was in something more like a private waterfall than a shower. It had been so long since I cleaned myself anywhere other than through rough attempts in freezing creeks that I was almost sad to see my protective crust slough off. New from my shell, pink, I emerged to find someone had come through my room and I had no clothes except one of those cloud garments with strange, cozy shoes that seemed to wrap around my feet of their own accord. Dressed, such as I was, I wandered out to the narrow streets. Oliver was just coming to get me. He was dressed like me.

"Nice togs." I commented.

"You like these? They're kinda comfortable I guess." He said waiving one of his shoes about. "Nothing so nice as yours!" Mine were exactly the same as his. "Let's get going. We have a council to attend."

"With Elrond, I suppose? Seriously? " If you haven't noticed the whole Shangra-La experience was teeming with Rivendell references from Lord of the Rings.

"Not very." Oliver admitted. "But there are a couple people you might like talking to. Remember not to eat anything Guv'nor."

We climbed through the intricate little town, winding along its narrow pathways, ducking through tunnels, across dazzling polished stone plazas, and catching glimpses of pretty, colorful rooms. Kids were playing freely through the buildings, in and out, and friendly people also stared after us curiously. A narrow alley wound into the cliffside and spiraled up. The walls glowed pale blue with some kind of phosphorescent crystals. Eventually we emerged out onto a broad mezzanine perched over the dell. There were some chairs there, and a table was filled with food and drinks. Two people were standing near the food table talking and snacking. One was tall and one was short, beyond that I couldn't say much except they were dressed in sort of normal clothes, by my standards, but seemed to be wearing them incorrectly.

"Ah!" One of them cried, seeing us. "Kentlemen! Welcome. I am so glad to bee ables to taco you! Helpo youself to the fudendrink."

I turned to Oliver before he could warn me again. "I know. Just the drink. There's so much nice salami in my pack at home."

Oliver grinned and turned to our hosts. "I'm afraid your pants are on backwards, and inside out. So is your baseball cap, which is why it keeps falling off. No criticism."

The two people chuckled at this. "We athought to mako more comfortble by dressa likoo!" Then they both started laughing and their caps, which were balanced precariously on top of their heads, fell off. I picked one up. The sports team logo on it was of a saltshaker and said "salt". I straightened it out, and put it properly on my my head.

"Like this." I said.

"Oooooh!" They exclaimed, super impressed.

"What's with all the colored liquids?" I asked looking over at the table.

"Try them all!"

So I did. They were sodas. Some were sweet. Some were savory. They seemed super interested in my reaction so I narrated.

"This one tastes like grass, but pretty nice!" I said. "Raspberries and chocolate?" One of them started taking notes. "Maple bacon?" I guessed, adding "I really like this one. Oh, cherry, really really cherry, but spicy too, with red pepper and a lot of smoke. Oregano?" Oliver, not hugely interested in all this, had poured a huge goblet of the thick, fizzing orange one. I pointed at it and said, laughing "Carrots!" The small one didn't laugh, but seriously took a note. So I poured a couple fingerfulls in one of the many glasses and it tasted like carrots, but with many subtle herbs in it.

"Shah wee talk?" Suggested the tall figure, ready to move on.

Everyone was agreeable and we ensconced ourselves in the chairs.

"Wha woo you klike to know?" Asked the tall one, Elrond, I guess.

I considered it. "How about, where am I? Oh, and is Oliver a rabbit god?"

They both grinned delighted at me as Oliver rolled his eyes. The short one said "Twenny tree thirdy tree. Thass where yous are. And... yes!" He said triumphantly.

"Aha!" I cried. But then I realized the confirmation on Oliver being a rabbit god didn't really get me anywhere. So I said "Could you actually just explain everything to me then?"

They said they could!

And then they did.

Chapter 21: Shelter

 Chapter 21: Shelter

Three people, robed in something that looked like they were made from puffy clouds, were standing in front of Oliver and I as we reappeared in their world, or their world reappeared around us. One of them said "Whoa!"

"Did we disappear?" I asked.

The "whoa" person shook their head yes. "Then you cames back, but kinder transparenty, and I puts ma hand tharew you!"

"I felt it!" I cried.

"Whoa." Everyone said all at once.

"But what was the Winnie the Pooh thing?" I asked.

Oliver kicked me lightly on the ankle and subtly shook his head no.

I rolled my eyes.

"Coo of you to drob by." Said one of the figures. "We mebby expecty you too?" (I'm presenting their dialect as best I can, I know it sounds slightly demented, but I'm probably overemphasizing how much of it was understandable because they spoke kind of fast).

"You expected us?" I asked, surprised.

"He probby dunnut tell you mush?" Suggested one of these people derisively, gesturing to Oliver, in a way that implied that everyone else also found him somewhere on the continuum between the extremes of exasperating and delightful at any given time.

"He doesn't tell me anything." I said with real grievance.

"Striber!" One of the people said admonishingly to Oliver and then flicked their fingers out at him.

"Probably better if you don't call me that." Oliver said in an undertone. "And I have given him as many excellent hints as I am allowed." He protested.

The shortest of the three cloud clothed people took me by the arm and said to me, as they started leading us along to the village, "Well, leasy he brought you ere. You'll lenna thing o two finely. There willby a meet umorrow."

I understood that about as well as you.

Someone was nice enough to take my pack from me. And we were taken to one of the little piled up houses by the little river. The river was bright aqua blue and we crossed it on a pretty stone bridge with detailed carvings of fleur-de-lis gone wild. We went a short way up an alley and I was given my own room there, with a bed, and a bathroom. It was amazing! I mean, yes it was amazing because it appeared to have been built in fairy land, and the bedspread was made out of cloud stuff and was delightfully soft and good smelling, and the bathroom was a wonder of engineering, like the plumbing was made out of waterfalls. But mostly, after almost six weeks of living in the wilderness, it was amazing just for being a room, a private room, inside!

Traditionally in a narrative like this the grimy, travel-smeared main character takes a fantastic shower. But in order to prove to you that this story is all real I'm going to tell you the truth.

I took a poop.

I could go on and on about the wondrous toilet, but I won't.

Chapter 20: There and Back Again

 

Chapter 20: There and Back Again

As we stood above, at the mouth of a cave, admiring the secret dell of Paradise Canyon, three people of indeterminate gender, wearing something like gowns made out of patterned clouds fashioned into a puffy garment (they looked comfortable!) climbed up undulating stone stairs towards us. We climbed down to meet them.

"Welcoom." One of them said with a strong, twisty accent I did not recognize, and handed Oliver a lightly steaming, comically oversized goblet. He took a sip. Then he handed it over to me with two hands. I took a sip too. It tasted like carrots and mushrooms, and then butterscotch and something more vanilla than vanilla and then

It was gone.

We were standing on a rough, Paradise Canyon mesa overlooking the great unpopulated wilderness vista and, down below, the Bluestone River. My hands were empty. Oliver and I were alone. The secret valley was gone. All the magic was gone.

"Shoot." Oliver said.

"What happened?" I asked.

Oliver put a finger to his lips, thinking. "It was a hallucination?" He ventured halfheartedly.

I cocked my head at him and side-eyed him.

"No." He said. "And there was someone I wanted you to talk to there." He considered it again. "I know! Take out the meteor."

I took it out. It was in my pocket. I tried to hand it to him.

"No. Don't." He said sharply. "Hold it in this hand and put your palm face up." Oliver said lifting my free hand up. "Now place the meteor over your palm."

I did that.

"Close your eyes, and put the meteorite on your palm."

I did that.

"Slowly curl your fingers over it while carefully picturing the village in the dell. Remember the smell of carrots and thyme?"

"No." I answered. "It smelled like lemon and vanilla."

"Yes, good! Though odd." Oliver added. "What color was the smoke in the chimneys?"

I had a strange, momentary feeling just under my ribs, almost like my stomach rumbling or a hand passing through. "Uh." I answered, distracted. "Color? Orange. And pink, piglet pink. Blue. A burnt yellow, like ochre, honey?"

"Can you see the three people we met?"

"Yes? Those long, cute, fuzzy coats?"

"Good." Oliver said. "Open your hand back up, then your eyes."

I opened my eyes. 

I was in a beautiful wood on a windy summer day. Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were standing in front of me. Pooh said "Hello." and Piglet kind of ducked back behind him shyly. Eeyore circled round himself about 15 feet back of them and then toppled over.

"Close your eyes!" Oliver called out with so much urgency that I did. He put his hand over my eyes. "Okay." He said. "So, open your hand first, then your eyes, but picture the valley from before."

I did. I pictured the valley and the chimneys and the little river as well as I could. I thought I could smell the lemon candy again.

"Oh, so good!" Cried Oliver. "Open your eyes now."

And we were back!

Chapter 19: The... Dell

 

Chapter 19: The... Dell

Yes. We disappeared into the back wall of a cave in Paradise Canyon.

"You can see how it's just a trick of the light Gov'nor." Said Oliver as we passed through a dark wall of solid stone.

"I have found that when people perform fake magic they lie and say it is real magic, but when people do real magic they say it is fake magic." I replied.  I slapped the polished stone behind us that we had just walked through for emphasis and proof. It made a noise (and hurt my hand).

"Er, it's a one way trick of the light?" Oliver suggested.

"Admit you're some sort of rabbit god." I demanded.

"Just enjoy the moment." Oliver said, grinning toothily.

So I did. I looked around. "We're in a cave?" I suggested.

"Yes." Oliver replied. "But it's facing the other way." He said this like it was important.

"It looks a lot like the cave we were just in." I said.

"Yes. But it's facing the other way." Clearly I wasn't getting the pertinent point.

So we walked out of the cave and then I got it.

Looking out the mouth of the cave there was a dell. It was still part of the Paradise Canyon, but also apart from it. It had trees in it for one thing, graceful, beautiful trees, and it was riven deeply into the landscape, completely sealed from the rest of the canyon by towering walls of stone on all sides. A small, open river, a brilliant aquamarine, ran through the whole of the valley, lined by the swooping trees, currently full of purple flowers. And then, built up, in rising steps away from the river toward one of the looming stone walls, was something like a village. It didn't seem carved of stone so much as poured from it, a little like the work of Gaudi, with everything curved and naturalistic. Eccentric towers rose from among the widely varying levels of the buildings, sometimes ornamental, sometimes emerging into chimneys with colored smokes pouring out of them, and occasionally defying the heights with a high room looking out over the riven dell. 

I smelled candied lemon and vanilla. A bulbous room on top of one of the towers was wrapped round in unequal circular holes and a great flow of something like firework sparks poured out of them at random.

"Don't eat anything while you're here, but you can drink whatever." Oliver said.

"Oh." I said.

Chapter 18: Porcupine Creek

 

Chapter 18: Porcupine Creek

We had worked our way around into Porcupine Creek. The trail was relatively friendly down to it. First it climbed along up the broken cliffsides, moving straight away from the river, and then it wound down in careful switchbacks to a wide open section of the creek- a quiet valley where the stream meandered unfettered for awhile.  Below this point the creek tumbled over a 50 foot fall and disappeared into a narrow crevasse we could now happily avoid. 

We decided to camp here because it was one of the most friendly spots we had seen in a week of hiking. Paradise Canyon's vistas were astonishing all along, the scenery breathtaking, and the landscape barren, wild, oversized and astonishing. But it gave everything a sense of awed formality, like we were endlessly in a Cathedral, and no matter our religion it would still be appropriate to be ever respectful.

Porcupine Creek, spread out as it was where we were, gave protection and oasis to a richer plant life than we had been seeing, from actual grasses to thin stands of cottonwood trees. It was a pretty place, lovely really, open enough for some sun and sky, but contained to a modest size by low, broken blue cliffs, so that we were not overwhelmed and enthralled by miraculous vistas. We were so taken with the spot that it was the earliest we had made camp in ages- with the sun still high in the sky, and with the energy for once to do more than just put up the tent and eat food out of bags.

Oliver went to his beloved foraging, and we had a tasty stew that night- something I didn't know I missed so much. There were tiny kernels of corn in it! I used obsessive care in picking out my one stream photo for the day, and my journal entry was a long one, covering many things I could not be bothered to discuss from the past week. Like the evening when a fox wandered into our camp, so closely and with such presence that I thought it would speak to us. It did not. It merely sniffed around cautiously. I marked that it seemed to show a special interest in Oliver, but if there was any ancient enmity there I sure couldn't tell it from Oliver, who grinned with delight at our visitor.

We had also seen, over the past week, regular large flocks of dark birds flying overhead. Oliver always had us stop and rest for a bit when we spotted them. I had just been noting these in my journal entry, sitting on a stone over Porcupine Creek, when the biggest flock of all, low enough now that I could hear the roaring of their hard beating wings, began to fly over. At first I didn't realize just how enormous this particular flock was, but as it passed overhead it thickened until it seemed to darken the sky, a cloud of gray birds briefly covering our valley completely, from one canyon wall to the other.

And then they were gone.

"Did you see that?" I asked Oliver when he came back a while later with a wet cloth bag stuffed with weird and mysterious weeds and roots.

Oliver nodded.

"Do you know what they were?"

"Passenger Pigeons." He said. "It's not great, but probably inevitable. At least I know where we are now Guv', and," He raised his eyebrows over a twinkle in his eyes. "What we can do about it."

I sighed. It was going to be one of these inscrutable conversations. Okay. "So." I said. "Where are we?"

"The mid 1800's?" Oliver replied.

I looked around and shrugged. "I guess it looks as much like the mid 1800's as anything else." I said.

"That's the spirit!" Oliver replied happily.

The next morning we found our way out of the canyon almost as easily as the way in, though there was a short, nerve-wracking section we had to climb. At one point, up on the mesas again, Oliver was unusually keen to leave the main trail for something more like an animal track that led up to the base of the next set of cliffs of the Canyon. "I'd really like to get up there." He said pointing some vague, shadowy area out ahead.

"Have you been here before?" I asked with a sudden intuition, even though he had said before he hadn't.

He scrunched his face like there wasn't a clear answer. "Sort of?" He said.

The animal track disappeared into nothing, as they so often do, and now we were wayfinding across rocky, open country. But now I was equally interested because the cliffs we were angling up towards appeared to be riddled with caves. "Maybe we should leave our packs and explore up there." I suggested. I have always been fascinated by caves.

"Let's get closer." Oliver said. "There might be a way through and we'll wish we didn't have to go back for them.

So we struggled up to a worn ledge below the caves keeping our packs on. Most of these caves were really just shallow indents in the cliff. There were no exciting pictograph or ruins here. At best it might be a good place to get out of the worst of a rain, but it wasn't raining.

Then we found something deeper. Oliver was leading as if he was looking for something. "C'mon." He said, and I followed him in.

It wasn't that much deeper. It was a great, scooped out hollow in the cliff, with dark, smooth walls, and full of crumbled stone and boulders at the bottom. The back of the cave was maybe 75 feet in, and we climbed the boulders up to reach the back wall of the cave. The view out of the frame of the cave to the canyon below was especially inspiring, but Oliver was completely absorbed in some private search of his own.  "I'm almost sure this is it." He muttered, feeling along the rock face of the back of the cave.

"Can we take off our packs?" I asked. This lark didn't seem to be going anywhere and the boulder hopping was tricky with 50 pounds on my back.

"Hang with me there just a titch m.... Ahh!" He cried. And I looked up as he was feeling along the back wall of the cave.

His hand disappeared into the stone.