And in the mountains the other need, maybe the biggest need, was satisfied--the need to feel close to his father.
He'd taken to making more weekend jaunts into the San Gabriels and the San Bernardinos, even to the high desert of the Mojave; anything to clear his mind and his soul, and to maintain that perception of connectedness with his father. But the extra time in the wilderness wasn't working as well as it used to, and that scared him. Was it the cumulative stress of holding down a job and keeping up his grades as he neared graduation that was making it harder? Or was it something else?
In preparation for what he anticipated as being a difficult senior year, he had undertaken the lengthiest solo hike yet, a month long expedition that combined several past hikes he'd made with his father. But here he was, a week into it, and it wasn't working. Oh, there had been moments, like catching that trout at Chicken Spring Lake two days ago, but he felt just as empty as he had the first day, as he had for months now.
Brian was afraid. He was afraid his life was beginning to spiral out of control. If the mountains couldn't help him, what could? He didn't know, and he felt helpless.
One time while hiking with his father, when Brian was only eight or nine years old, they had been caught in a summer cloudburst. Their trail had been following a creek and the water in the creek bed began to rise. His father wisely decided they needed to move to higher ground, but to do that they had to cross the stream. His father went first, with Brian on his heels. The knee-deep creek was only about ten feet wide, but to an eight year old boy, the other bank looked like it was a mile away and he stayed close to his father. There had been a gravelly sandbar in the middle that was above the waters of the rising creek and his father stopped there for a moment as Brian waded out of the water to join him.
"How're you doing, Brian?" he'd asked in that deep gentle voice that was such a part of him.
"Fine," Brian answered after a moment's pause. He couldn't let his father see how nervous he really was.
His father rubbed his rain-slick head and started across the second half of the creek. Brian hesitated before following, watching the suddenly murky water swirling around his father's knees. Even as he looked on, the water seemed to grow deeper and the current stronger. Brian began to panic. He couldn't do it--the water was too fast. A large portion of the sandbar sloughed off into the creek, followed by another. His island was sinking and he was stranded!
"Daddy!" he screamed.
His father, midway between the sandbar and the opposite bank, turned and took a long step back. His strong hands scooped under Brian's arms and lifted him off the sandbar, swinging him in a wide arc high over the muddy water. The moment seemed to freeze as Brian looked down. Far, far below, the rushing creek had risen over his father's knees, sucking at his legs like a greedy monster, trying to pull them both down into its slobbering mouth. He clutched desperately at his father's arms, terrified of plunging into the torrent.
Then Brian's eyes went to his father's face.
The driving rain had plastered his father's dark hair to his forehead and his eyes were shining up at Brian, full of joy and love, and a wide smile split his sun-browned cheeks as he laughed out loud. Suddenly Brian was coming down, down, down onto the opposite bank, his wet trail shoes touching on solid ground, and as his father waded up out of the creek to join him, there was nothing in the whole wide world to be afraid of, ever.
Thinking back now on that feeling of helplessness that clutched at him in the middle of the rising creek, Brian realized he was feeling much the same now, and that the feeling had been slowly growing stronger since his father's death. Maybe his mother had been right after all; maybe he did need to see a psychologist. The thought was no more appealing now than it had been shortly after his father's death.
But yesterday, because of a girl's laugh, a strange girl he knew nothing about, something in him had changed. There was a restlessness in him that hadn't been there before, a feeling that he had been wasting time. He had a vague sense of what it meant. Before, he had just been going through the motions of life. Now he wanted to live. That was the reason for his detour to Whitney.
The trail followed Whitney Creek and passed the Crabtree Ranger Station. The lodgepole pines that fringed Crabtree Meadows back at the trail junction were once more giving way to foxtail pines and as Brian continued even the foxtail pines began to thin out. The trail crossed Whitney Creek several times by means of fallen lodgepole trunks. The trunks were slender and made for wobbly crossings. The last crossing was the hardest; a twelve-foot balancing act over three feet of running water. A drop into the creek here could wash a hiker downstream strapped to a pack that suddenly weighed four times what it did when dry. Brian flipped open the quick-release on his waist belt and crossed the shaky, six inch log without incident.
The trees disappeared altogether as the trail climbed above Timberline Lake and when Brian finally reached Guitar Lake, at an altitude of more than 11,500 feet, the only growth was a short tundra-type grass that grew only where it could find enough nutrients in the gravelly soil. He scouted around and in a field of small boulders next to the lake found a patch of bare sand just big enough for his tent. A low rock wall formed a crescent around the spot; a crude windbreak erected and kept in repair by generations of backpackers. Slipping out of his pack, he propped it against a large boulder before stretching and rolling his weary shoulders.
Clambering onto the boulder, Brian surveyed the lake and its surroundings. The lake actually did resemble a guitar. It lay with its neck pointing due west, in a natural basin with the peaks of Mt. Young and Mt. Hitchcock to the north and south respectively, and Mt. Whitney looming overhead to the east. Everywhere Brian looked he saw granite. Granite cliffs, granite canyons, granite peaks, granite boulder fields; even the ground was decomposed granite. The only trees he could see were miles to the west, a vast blanket of green flanking both rims of Kern Canyon and its adjoining highlands. He knew there were trees just below the lip of the basin, at Timberline Lake--the scent of pine rose out of the canyon on the light afternoon breeze--but they were out of sight beyond a glacial moraine.
It was almost too much. On past trips it hadn't bothered him, but now the sight of all that rock made him feel out of place, like he was in some alien world. He felt an urge to hoist his pack and run back down the trail, and he might have given in to it if he knew he could get past Karen and her friends without being seen.
He closed his eyes and focused on breathing as he tried to think rationally. What would happen if he did go home? What would be different? The reasons he had taken this trip in the first place still existed: stress from school and work, and the need to feel closer to the memories of his father. There was no benefit to be gained by leaving the mountains.
Brian opened his eyes. The late-afternoon shadows cast by the broken terrain were growing longer. Even if he decided to leave, he would need to spend the night here. It was too late to move on or go back. The feeling of indecision passed and some of his anxiety went with it.
