Sixty Days and Counting. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ or something. A work of art. We used to laugh so much at him.’

      ‘I should think the guy who made the trail would like it to be used.’

      ‘Yes, that’s what we said.’

      As they ascended they saw three or four more of these little staircases, always making a hard section easier. After an hour or so the slope laid back in a graceful curve, and they were on the rounded top of the hill. Pemetic Mountain, said a wooden sign on a post stuck into a giant pile of stones. 1,247 feet.

      The top was an extensive flat ridge, running south toward the ocean. Its knobby bare rock was interspersed with low bushes and sandy patches. Lichen of several different colors spotted the bedrock and the big erratics left on the ridge by the ice – some granite, others schist. Exposed rock showed glacial scouring and some remaining glacial polish. It resembled any such knob in the Sierra, although the vegetation was a bit more lush. But the air had a distinct salt tang, and off to the south was the vast plate of the ocean, blue as could be, starting just a couple miles away at the foot of the ridge. Amazing. Forested islands dotted the water offshore; wisps of fog lay farther out to sea. To the immediate right and left rose other mountain tops, all rounded to the same whaleback shape. The peaks to both east and west were higher than this one, and the biggest one, to the east, had a road running up its side, and a number of radio towers poking up through its summit forest. The ice cap had carved deep slots between the peaks, working down into fault lines in the granite between each dome. Behind them, to the north, lay the forested low hills of Maine, trees green over snowy ground.

      ‘Beautiful,’ Frank said. ‘It’s mountains and ocean both. I can’t believe it.’

      Caroline gave him a hug. ‘I was hoping you would like it.’

      ‘Oh yes. I didn’t know the east coast had such a place as this.’

      ‘There’s nowhere else quite like it,’ she said.

      They hugged for so long it threatened to become something else; then they separated and wandered the peak plateau for a while. It was cold in the wind, and Caroline shivered and suggested they return. ‘There’s a real trail down the northeast side, the Ravine Trail. It goes down a little cut in the granite.’

      ‘Okay.’

      They headed off the northeast shoulder of the hill, and were quickly down into scrubby trees. Here the ice had hit the rock head on, and the enormous pressures had formed the characteristic upstream side of a drumlin: smooth, rounded, polished, any flaw stripped open. And exposed to air for no more than ten thousand years; thus there was hardly any soil on this slope, which meant all the trees on it were miniaturized. They hiked down a good trail through this krummholz like giants.

      It was a familiar experience for Frank, and yet this time he was following the lithe and graceful figure of his lover or girlfriend or he didn’t know what, descending neatly before him, like a tree goddess. Some kind of happiness or joy or desire began to seep under his worry. Surely it had been a good idea to come here. He had had to do it; he couldn’t have not done it.

      The trail led them into the top of a narrow couloir in the granite, a flaw from which all loose rock had been plucked. Cedar beams were set crosswise in the bottom of this ravine, forming big solid stairs, somewhat snowed over. The sidewalls were covered with lichen, moss, ice. When they came out of the bottom of the couloir, the stairboxes underfoot were replaced by a long staircase of immense rectangular granite blocks.

      ‘This is more like the usual trail on the east side,’ Caroline said, pointing at these monstrous field stones. ‘For a while, the thing they liked to do was make granite staircases, running up every fault line they could find. Sometimes there’ll be four or five hundred stairs in a row.’

      ‘You’re kidding.’

      ‘No. Every peak on the east side has three or four trails like that running up them, sometimes right next to each other. The redundancy didn’t bother them at all.’

      ‘So they really were works of art.’

      ‘Yes. But the National Park didn’t get it, and when they took over they closed a lot of the trails and took them off the maps. But since the trails have these big staircases in them, they last whether they’re maintained or not. Mary’s dad collected old maps, and was part of a group that went around finding the old trails. Now the park is restoring some of them.’

      ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

      ‘I don’t think there is anything like it. Even here they only did this for a few years. It was like a fad. But a fad in granite never goes away.’

      Frank laughed. ‘It looks like something the Incas might have done.’

      ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ She stopped and looked back up the snowy stone steps, splotchy here with pale green lichen.

      ‘I can see why you would want to stay here,’ Frank said cautiously when they started again.

      ‘Yes. I love it.’

      ‘But …’

      ‘I think I’m okay,’ she said.

      For a while they went back and forth on this, saying much the same things they had said at the house. Whether Ed would look at her subjects, whether he would be able to find Mary …

      Finally Frank shrugged. ‘You don’t want to leave here.’

      ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I like it here. And I feel hidden.’

      ‘But now you know better. Someone looked for you and they found you. That’s got to be the main thing.’

      ‘I guess,’ she muttered.

      They came to the road they had parked beside. They walked back to his van and she had him drive south, down the shore of Jordan Pond.

      ‘Some of my first memories are from here,’ she said, looking out the window at the lake. ‘We came almost every summer. I always loved it. That lasted for several years, I’d guess, but then her parents got divorced and I stopped seeing her, and so I stopped coming.’

      ‘Ah.’

      ‘So, we did start college together and roomed that first year, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her for years. But when I was thinking about how to really get away, if I ever wanted to, I remembered it. I never talked to Ed about Mary, and I just made the one call to her here from a pay phone.’

      ‘What did you say to her?’

      ‘I gave her the gist of the situation. She was willing to let me stay.’

      ‘That’s good. Unless, you know … I just don’t know. I mean, you tell me just how dangerous these guys are. Some shots were fired that night in the park, after you left. My friends were the ones who started it, but your ex and his friends definitely shot back. And so, given that …’

      Now she looked appalled. ‘I didn’t know.’

      ‘Yeah. I also … I threw a rock at your ex,’ he added lamely.

      ‘You what?’

      ‘I threw my hand СКАЧАТЬ