Devil’s Lake

The first happened at a spot just ripe for it—a place that might have been designed by reality television producers best to effect accident. Nearby the highway thrummed, cancelling birdsong, wind, any small mammal scurry, giving backbeat to the danger promised in two languages: visitors have been injured and killed here. Still, they parked and followed the trail through the woods down to the cliffs where, in rough weather, waves dashed to their deaths the tourists, ancient and modern, who’d tried to get around the rock walls from their difficult direction. He wore new shoes. She, layers of sunscreen. Another sign previewed the pictographs.

Today was calm, summery-sunny, mutant variant of the scene’s normal setting. Sharp glints refracted from the blue waters of the deep lake before being absorbed into the warmth of the giant volcanic boulders.

And because of that calm it was possible to edge out beyond the guardrail. Deserted shoes attested to how many had climbed down already to swim around to the furthest pictographs that most people never got to see. Disturbed hornets circled, but lazily.

An older man in bicycle shorts had come huffing down the trail behind them. “They should have another rope,” he said in French-accented English at the place a short linked chain attached to the first section of cliff ledge ended.

“Tell me about it.” She’d dropped to a crouch, placing each foot carefully.

So clear and still were the water and sky that a lighthearted view of the whole scene was possible: Ancient Teenagers With Spray Paint Were Here. The swimmers far below splashed in what was, really, an awesome bathing site, available one-day-only due to this thin chance of weather; more remarkable than the red doodles of canoes, of humanistic figures, of what was maybe a moose or a deer.

The man said he’d been biking across the continent, out nearly forty days. He leaned to the wall and unzipped a fanny pack to extract a camera.

“How many more days do you have?”

“Twelve, thirteen. I miss my grandchildren.”

“Oh, yes.” They’d lived together for six years, unmarried, but had a cat.

Then, edging back toward the guardrail, she nearly put her hand over one of the hornets.

“Careful!” her boyfriend said.

Neither was looking when the bicyclist, straightening unsteadily and leaning back to photograph the pictographs, dropped his camera. It clattered down the rocks to the deep lake.

“Oh no,” he said. “Oh no.”

It was more heartbreaking than even a child’s cry. The white-haired man in his plastic bicycle helmet, standing so unsteadily and empty-handed before the red canoe, the red moose, the tiny, waving people so long preserved all this time.

They were several times mistaken for brother and sister when out with her parents. They must have looked like such a family of modern American times, adult children improperly launched. The absence of young children draining the scene of sex, its sense of natural order.

What was it about people so locked on the ideology of marriage and then children that they didn’t see other possibilities? But maybe it was something about them. Some truth only viewable through a passing stranger’s glance.

They were camping along the way on this summer trip: refilling water jugs at gas stations, stocking the trunk cooler. He drove and she studied maps, the front passenger seat brimming with atlases. They weren’t so old that they didn’t know music, changing it to match the scenery, pairing artists with landscapes.

But the trip came with a myriad of choices, parallel and multiplying other trips. Did they want to paraglide or bungee-jump or stay in and read? Which parks should they stop at? Were they spending too much or too little?

They decided on one overnight trek, winnowing supplies into backpacks, registering at the ranger station, passing day hikers on a trail measured in kilometers.

As they hiked she tried to commit to memory the seven animals and the paired teachings of the people who’d lived here, according to a marker. The bear was courage, the beaver wisdom. Most of the matches had made sense, but not the one for honesty, the sabe or sasquatch.

Sabe was like the Spanish verb “to know,” he offered, as if that should have mattered to the Natives who’d lived here.

Maybe it was because a person had to be honest about whether or not they’d actually seen one, she’d said.

Or it was a joke. Or did the shadowy, hairy figure make a good metaphor after all for the difficulty of clarity?

It wasn’t until late in the day that they became lost, hours after bogging through a swamp, scrambling over boulders, plodding the intoxicating length of a white pine forest, sunlight dazzling through heady, sap-dripping trees. Long ago they’d passed up the first camping spot, in a tiny cove with a sandy beach (it was so perfect, but had they not yet hiked far enough?), and the second in a dark grove of trees but with a secure bear box, near a suspension bridge where a man who’d hiked with three tiny Chihuahuas had come to a halt, their feet too small to span the slats.

They shrugged out of their packs to hack their way down to the river. If they had to, they could follow it out. Drying sweat cooled their bodies as they filtered water, the river’s slowly swirling surface darkening as the sun dropped below the tree line. They looked back for a distant glimpse of the bridge, a hundred yards above the spot the river dissolved into rapids. Was the man still up there taking pictures? It could have been his flash catching at flecks of quartzite in the canyon. Had he turned back or carried those dogs across one by one?

Then a helicopter appeared, small as a hornet, its thrumming blades muffled by the river until it dropped low enough to beat the water in front of them like eggs in a bowl. The pilot and co-pilot spoke into their headsets, pointed where the young couple squatted on the bank.

They could hardly look at one another. They shouldn’t have been gone long enough to rouse a search party.

But no, they were being evacuated, the trail closed.

“We’re sorry to cut your trip short,” the ranger said after the helicopter had dropped through an opening in the trees, landed on the tiniest square of sand. A woman canoeing through a nearby cove had been mauled by a bear.

It wasn’t just that events unfolded in life to alter plans, to change courses—and that this in itself was on occasion remarkable—but that there came moments when the circumstances that had conspired to create each event became shockingly, if momentarily, visible—as clear in retrospect as a mapped genome, as seemingly finite, as potentially numerable, as pebbles on the bottom of an unmuddied lake.

They were car camping at a semi-secluded walk-in site at a family campground, and he was cooking a pork tenderloin they’d bought at a grocery store—its slug-like length set directly atop poker-hot coals just to one side of a burnished ring—when he told her he had decided to go back to school. School was back East, hundreds of miles from where they’d been living for her job out West, of which there was no question, not in either of their minds, of her leaving. He’d been offered a fellowship, he added, and she nodded because it is easiest to pretend that money is the thing making a decision.

They were deep in bear country still, but how had she never really worked up a fear of bears? A bear seemed to have a right to attack you, its inherent nobility coupled with its endangerment and topped with the sheer odds of it all. How did you die? Bear attack?

It was like what her college roommate, the only Christian fundamentalist she had ever actually known, had said about getting pregnant: if it happened, it happened. As if there were no such thing as a condom in the world. Not to mention the other.

He didn’t bring up semester breaks or Skype calls and neither did she. She didn’t even think of it. Or she didn’t think of it for longer than any of the other possibilities: that a sighing loon might pass; that they might overcook their dinner; that she might have been born with such an ability to create antibodies to allergens that, rendered fatally allergic to stings, she would have died that day on the cliff with the hornets; that rain could pool under the tent tonight; that gas would go up before the end of their trip; that it might not just rain but storm, fist-sized hail to bump the rash of bear maulings to tomorrow’s second page; that they might have been born siblings (and have fallen in lust anyway?); or have been born conjoined siblings who didn’t get along; that they might have gotten married three summers ago and, with two sets of twins, had four kids by now (but then how would their whole family and the man with the Chihuahuas have fit into the rescue helicopter?); that she might bicycle all the way home; that a moose might paddle by in a tiny red canoe; that she, too old for young men, would have to start dating older men now; that they might have gone swimming that day with the others who’d slipped down to the cool water; that the bicyclist, not his camera, would have fallen and she’d have dived into the water after him, swum out with his body and carried it on his bike the rest of the way home to his family; that a wind might blow their fire into the trees; that she might have too much whiskey from the flask tonight; that they’d have sex one last time and if she never told any of her friends it would never be sad or lame, it would never have existed; that a sabe might be standing right now in the shadows behind the trees snapping pictures: snipping up time into still lifes, stilled lives, shredding it of its unrelenting sequence.