Jessica Bryant Klagmann, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
The dog went first.
We stepped out of the cabin—the bare, light-fractured shelter alongside the trail—after the rain stopped. The area had burned before, leaving open, grassy meadow interspersed with charred black spruce trunks and bright purple fireweed. Nils had gone out ahead of me, and our black and tan husky had followed him. I lingered a few moments inside, hoping to shake out the swarm of aggravation I felt buzzing in my chest.
After hiking for hours, we were getting close to the tors—large plutons of granite magma that had cooled beneath ground millions of years before, solidified, then emerged when the soil around them eroded away. I descended the cabin steps onto the damp alpine tundra and saw the dog dart to the left—a streak of uninhibited stamina. I assumed she would turn and run back to us, but she didn’t. Maybe she’d seen something—a squirrel, a hare. Hopefully nothing bigger. Sometimes she forgot everything else existed and just went after things, her mind set to pursue them as far as she’d need to. Nils kept walking so I called out after his bouncing backpack: “Hey, she just ran off.”
“She’ll come back,” he said over his shoulder.
But she didn’t, which forced Nils to stop and turn and look at me. I’ll admit he seemed tired, but I was tired too. Tired of talking. Tired of not saying the right thing. Tired of not being able to say the thing I meant the way I meant to say it. Alone on a remote trail in Alaska was not the place to be with someone when you no longer wanted to talk.
Funny, though, that we were there to finally look at each other again, to talk to one another again. My mother had come to visit, and since she was there, we took the opportunity to go on our first outing without the baby, just the two of us. Friends always used the term “date” at that point in their parenting lives, but the word never felt right to us. “Let’s go on a hike,” Nils had said when I’d told him about my mother’s plans.
She flew in from Seattle and pulled up to our cabin in a rented Jeep with oversized tires, climbing down from the tall seat and stumbling to explain that she thought you needed big-ass wheels to get anywhere in Alaska, which was true in many places, but not everywhere.
Our son had just turned eight months old, and it had taken that long to feel comfortable leaving him for more than an hour or two. This time, we’d be away all day and night. I was still nursing. There was plenty of milk in the freezer, but I didn’t know what was going to happen—to my son or to my body—being away for so long.
The plan was to finish the fifteen-mile trail in roughly eight hours, then stop on the way back to Fairbanks to spend the evening at Chena Hot Springs. I pictured us in a little rented room, tense muscles and tired bones. Having walked all day, having soaked until our minds floated out of our heads and we nearly passed out. A couple of beers or a glass of wine. And then Nils trying to pull me into the shower with him. Me resisting, unable to decide whether I wanted to go or not. My breasts throbbing, leaking through my bra.
But the dog ran off, so we ran off after her. The ground was muddy and rutted with tangled tufts of long brown grass. Every so often there was a lone, wiry spruce tree rising up from the soft earth. I watched Nils ahead of me twist his ankle and shout what I imagined was goddammit or something similar.
It’s just that I knew him.
He kept running with a limp, calling the dog’s name, and I followed. At some point though, I lost Nils too and was on my own. I passed through a pocket of trees to another open field, the trail long gone. I had no idea how I’d find my way back to it, or to Nils, or to the dog for that matter.
I worried about bears.
I was—reasonably, even if Nils thought overly—afraid of them. On the way up, before becoming immersed in forest, there had been blueberries encroaching on the trail. So many I thought for sure there had to be a bear around somewhere looking for breakfast. We hadn’t seen signs of any animals larger than a chipmunk all day. Yet, I worried about the bears I knew were out there. Hiding in unpredictable places.
Other things, too, were out there. Equally invisible. Equally frightening.
Nils would probably find the dog, I thought, and for a moment I considered doing nothing. Waiting, frozen there until I heard his voice calling from somewhere in the distance that the problem had been solved. My t-shirt and shorts clung to me with rain and sweat, and I tried to circle back in time, to replay my own history and pinpoint when I had stopped feeling not just strong—forget strong at that point—but capable of even the simplest tasks. Somewhere along the way, this change had occurred, but nowhere could I find the line that I’d crossed.
Still, if the situation’s beginnings were a mystery, I could recall the first time I had that feeling of utter dependence. Our son’s first camping trip. Four months old. It was a test run—not too far away, one day and one night. We were nervous about how everyone would sleep, zipped up and pressed together in sleeping bags. And although in the past I would have been setting up the tent while Nils gathered kindling for a fire, by some unspoken exchange, I found myself sitting in a camp chair, nursing the baby and watching Nils do everything. When he struggled briefly with the vestibule, and after I could no longer ignore the tugging of two competing desires, I settled the baby into some blankets in the play pen and went to help.
Overall, the trip had been a success. In four months, none of us had slept so well. I thought for sure this was a sign that things would never turn out as bad as I thought they would. But in the morning when we packed up, Nils grumbled as he attempted to jam the tent back into its bag. He muttered and I stayed out of his way and we almost came out of it unscathed, until I was blamed for the bent tent pole. I’d hardly touched the tent, and more importantly, I knew how to handle a tent pole. But this was just the first activity on what would become a very long list of activities I was suddenly unequipped to perform. It occurred to me later that I didn’t know whose list—Nils’ or mine—it was.
The air was cold and damp as the three of us dispersed. With the dog lost, and Nils and I more or less lost, I knew somehow that I had screwed that up too. I could have tried harder to keep track of the dog, even though she’d been with Nils when he left the cabin. I could have stayed closer to him, and maybe then we wouldn’t have been separated.
Cloud shadows slid across the land. The view was so unbroken the world looked empty, but there was texture everywhere. Hardy, yellow-green bushes and twisted grass. The triangular shapes of trees thrusting out of the ochre fields. Mile upon mile of forested hills in the distance. Layer upon layer of mountains beyond—each layer a shade lighter blue than the one before. Each a little hazier and thin.
A peak, a crest, and then the ground dropped from under me, sweeping down toward the tors. They rose from the tundra like guardians. They were giants—some twenty feet across, fifty feet tall. Solid, dark formations with some kind of unnerving magnetism. Maybe it was my imagination, but my feet began moving involuntarily in their direction.
I saw Nils ahead of me briefly, moving further and further away. He glanced toward the massive tors but veered off into a small grove of stunted trees. I knew eventually he’d come back. We’d find each other again and we’d have the dog back and we’d forget about things for a little while.
Or we’d try to. He seemed unbothered by the way our relationship had evolved, but it was consuming me from the inside, this feeling of helplessness, and as much as I wanted to blame him or motherhood or both, I knew that was inaccurate and unfair. The problem was rooted somewhere else.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child, my parents were impressed with my stamina for chopping firewood and my ability to fix my own bicycle when I’d been stranded miles from home. In college, I drove two hours round trip for school and work in downtown Boston. I spent nineteen days alone on Vermont’s Long Trail. Yet now, I was nervous behind the wheel even in our small town. I grew lethargic at the thought of chores. Apparently, I couldn’t even set up a tent without breaking it.
My motherly tasks weren’t causing the problem, but I’d begun hiding behind them. Lately, when Nils offered to carry the groceries into the house while I got the baby down for a nap, I was relieved that he wouldn’t see me making six trips with the bags, when for him it would take only three. When he started doing all the driving, because I was better at keeping the baby happy in the back seat, it was so much easier than dealing with his criticism about how I handled traffic. Doing only the things that were specific to my being a mother—things that, apparently, I alone was suited for—seemed simpler than trying and failing to do everything else.
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I looked up at the tors—goliaths of the tundra. Their massive presence seemed impossible, alien on this flat expanse of earth, like black liquid had bled up from the ground, defying gravity, then hardened. Nature had a way of imposing these kinds of monuments in my life, seemingly out of nowhere—reminders that anything was possible.
Once, in a wilderness survival book, I’d read that what we take for granted most in the wild is a good vantage point, and usually by the time we realize we need one, it’s too late. Height is an opportunity, a chance for new perspective. What you can see from up high is like gold, especially if you lose your way. And if you know how to read the land around you—hills and tree lines and landmarks—you can figure out almost anything.
I knew we should get to higher ground if we wanted to find the dog.
For a moment, I thought about calling out for Nils to come back, so I could tell him about my idea. But I thought better of it, anticipating the comments he would make about how we didn’t need a better view when there was nothing but open space all around us, and how impossible it would be to get any higher anyway, with the tors too tall and the surrounding trees too difficult to climb.
I let him drift out of sight and approached one of the tors, standing close, pressing my hands against the cold, rough granite. My nose touched its cool surface. I looked up at the place where I needed to be, with no idea how to get there.
The sound was clearly not thunder, but that was my first impression. It was more like a groaning than a growl too, so even though my next thought was of bears, at the same time I knew it was something else.
It was the tors, moving. Not traveling across the earth, but vibrating. And then the one I was touching began to crack. It shook until the ground was shaking and I was shaking, and it began to open, slowly at first and then all at once, a fan of light bursting through from behind as it split right down the middle.
Nils’s guidebook said that they’d cracked before, so my brain did not immediately register it as shocking. Historically, when water seeped into tiny fractures, then froze, it broke the rock apart. Still, that would take years. This was something else. Something rough and fierce and violent, like the ground beneath my feet was erupting.
An enormous V shape stood before me, full of dense shadow and hidden places. Its weight could have crushed a being much larger than me, but that isn’t what happened.
When the tor was still and silent once again, my body still vibrating, I reached into the crack. It was less than two feet across, like a doorway into something rather than a passage through. The inside of the rock was not smooth, but jagged and uneven, like anything that has been torn rather than cut.
There was just enough space for one person to fit inside. I left my backpack lying on the grass. It crossed my mind, as my fingers gripped the craggy surface, that it may close up at any moment.
As I climbed, I thought of the summer before I got pregnant, Nils and I squished into a two-person tent on an unnamed island in Blackstone Bay, south of Whittier, Alaska. Neither of us had ever been anywhere quite so remote, so far away from radio signals and the conveniences of civilization. We’d been paddling the whole day, novice kayakers at best, a little lost but completely in love so what did it matter. The only sounds had been the calving of glaciers, and that night we’d slept the sleep of the dead. When I woke in the morning, Nils was gone, outside wandering the misty beach. I found him beneath a twisted tree, head tipped back toward a bald eagle on a branch above.
Every time it rained, I thought of that moment, how he was just ahead of me, facing away, looking at something rarer and much more magnificent. Sure, I thought. Anyone can find the glory in an eagle.
But the most interesting thing I’d seen on the whole trip were the tiny, nearly translucent mushrooms that grew upward from the tree behind our tent. I never got to tell Nils about them, though I’d found their vulnerability admirable.
Wedged inside the dark crevice of a broken rock that never should have broken, I remembered these mushrooms and their striking ordinariness. So hidden and unassuming. Maybe no one else had ever seen them before. Maybe any small creature could squish them with ease. Maybe they were boring, the plainest thing that ever existed.
Or maybe they were the heart of an entire ecosystem.
This fractured granite was the answer to my impossible plan. Fingers gripping, I pulled upward. The muscles in my back and shoulders woke. My foot slipped once, my hip scraping against the rock as I caught myself. I emerged at the top of the tor, scrambling onto the peak of it, then stood looking across the tundra, wet with rain, the sky steel blue-gray.
I was taller than anything.
A great division hung beneath me, but I had scaled its height. The earth had opened up for me, but it had not lifted me up. That energy had been mine.
Eight months before, I’d spent thirty-six hours in labor, an indescribable pain roaring outward from my center. Every contraction felt like my entire being was shaking and exploding. Women do this all the time, Nils had told me, which had been meant to make me feel less scared, but only made me feel like the experience—which felt overwhelmingly singular and all-consuming—was somehow ordinary. I thought my body was breaking in two.
And then, miraculously, we were looking at our son and it was over.
Except it wasn’t. Every experience after was an extension of that one. I had been responsible for growing a human being inside my body. I had given birth to that human being, and had been feeding that human being—also with my own body—his whole life. He woke multiple times at night, but I was always awake just before he started crying anyway, as if I could sense his movements in my sleep.
This kind of thing did not simply end, and the multitude of its occurrences across the globe did not diminish its significance. Even if the initial feat itself would eventually be buried and forgotten, it was a culmination, not the end, of my capabilities.
My back throbbed from the climb up and there was a tear on the sleeve of my shirt. My hip was bleeding. My feet straddling the rift, I looked out over the surrounding land. There were other tors, all striking in their own ways. One with a flat top looked like a wave, curving inward where wind and sand had blasted it over the centuries. There were two tall, skinny ones, like pillars—one leaning against the other. Just beyond them, a giant fist stretched upward, knuckles pointed to the sky. For a moment, I was dizzy with the elevation and perspective and lost my balance, nearly falling. But again, I recovered.
The dog appeared then. I watched her run like a pinball between the tors toward me. She hurtled across the field and slowed for a moment, like she sensed my presence.
I would have stayed there suspended forever, but I knew I had to move quickly. I sat with my feet hanging into the crevice, then lowered myself in. The effort of holding on was even greater on the way down. My fingers bled. Close to the bottom, I lingered where it was almost too tight to breathe before crawling out.
All I had to do was whistle and the dog bounded up, panting. I clipped her leash and we started walking toward where I’d last seen Nils. There were trail spurs with dead end signs, and I figured he’d gone down one of them, but I stuck to what I could see. He probably wouldn’t be impressed by the fact that I’d found the dog, but that wasn’t the point. I gripped the leash tighter, the veins in my wrist pulsing.
Eventually he emerged, his baseball hat and t-shirt damp. Thumbs hooked into the straps of his backpack. When he saw us, an expression of relief came over his face, and I knew he had genuinely been afraid. He reached out, his hand briefly touching the rip in my t-shirt, his eyes wandering over my various scrapes and cuts.
Then it seemed he finally acknowledged the presence of the tors. He unfolded his map, which had a tiny picture of the huge plutons in one corner. His eyes lifted from the sheet of paper to the actual tors and then back.
I looked back too, half-expecting the rock to have closed up again. Or to find that it had never broken at all, and I’d only imagined it. But everything behind me remained, even as I found the trail again.
I didn’t describe that force of nature, the reason the tors did not reconcile with his maps. I didn’t explain how I’d lifted myself to the top and how the height had made everything else seem inconsequential. I stood the moment up—an unshakable tower—before my feet began moving across that vast wilderness.
Jessica Bryant Klagmann grew up in New Hampshire, then received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Her writing appears in Whitefish Review, Terrain.org, Stonecoast Review, echoverse, and elsewhere. She’s been a writer for environmental programs in northern New Mexico, a college writing instructor, and an adult education program director. Fascinated by landscapes, she’s usually running on mountain trails with her dog, hiking in canyons with her family, or restoring a hundred-acre forest in Maine.
More can be found at www.thehillsdranktheriver.com.
