By G. M. Donley
This was the routine these past eleven months: David and Lynette followed Doc Arny in the camper. Right now they could barely see his shoe reflectors as he crested the long the climb: a blurry flick flick flick flick through the night rain. David glanced over at Lynette, but she wasn’t looking at him. She knew the danger.
According to the map, they were now over the shoulder of Mt. Moosilauke, and NH Route 118 would presently start going downhill in a big hurry, with some sharp turns. The two in the camper had sort of stretched the truth and told Doc Arny that there was plenty of time to get across to North Woodstock before nightfall. He must have known that, though: anyone could see that there wasn’t much daylight left and a long climb at slow speed to start the route. They had stopped for a late lunch in a little diner in the town of Warren. There was a big military rocket on the town green. When Doc Arny stepped off the bike for a second and they pulled up the camper beside him to have their usual days-end consult, he had said how much he liked this little town. Still, he elected to continue on and they went out the other side of town and started going uphill. He never even looked at the map, just took their word, or Lynette’s word more exactly because she was in the passenger seat. He just said “okay let’s do this.” He said that maybe eleven times a day.
First his reflectors stopped flicking because he’d stopped pedaling to coast down the hill. He had that little headlamp on, too, but that wouldn’t do him much good in rain like this.
Then David, at the wheel, couldn’t see him at all. The bike can go downhill and take the corners a lot faster than a top-heavy camper. A yellow sign with a moose on it lit up for a second then was gone, followed by another one that said “narrow” and showed skid marks and the silhouette of an approaching vehicle. All it would take is a car coming up the other way, or a moose in the road, or even one wrong squeeze of the brakes, and that would be it. Death would finally get Doc Arny.
THAT WAS WHAT THIS WAS ALL ABOUT: Death and Doc Arny. When he first came home and told David that he was terminal, Doc Arny spent three days just sitting in his study. Being a physician himself, he knew the prognosis was grim, so there wasn’t any point in going through those neophyte stages of denial and anger. Three to twelve weeks. That was it.
David was back from a wasted year in SoCal after college, and he had just met Lynette, or rather just reconnected with her after that one brief liaison a couple years before, back in the summer before his junior year. She was always like the home townie girl while David was the college-boy son of the fancy Doc who worked in the city, so nobody ever figured it would work out. She had Farrah Fawcett hair 20 years too late and wore tight running shorts and a halter top all summer long and really liked waitressing at the Olde Brick Tavern. David already had a college degree and was just pausing on his way to unspecified greater things.
Doc Arny declared after that third day in his study that if he was going out, he was going out his own way: on his bicycle. A few years earlier he had gotten into doing triathlons, like a lot of hyper-competitive middle-aged guys with too much time and money on their hands do, and riding the bike had become symbolic of not needing to cave in to the daily grind everybody else had to live with. Father and son both knew that David didn’t have big plans for the next few weeks, so when Doc Arny asked David to help him, how could he say no? It was the least he could do for the old man, even though they’d never spent that much time together on account of Doc Arny’s career. Lynette took a leave of absence from the Olde Brick (since there were lots of students around for the summer to help cover and besides, David reminded her, it’s not like you can’t find somebody to wait tables) and she agreed to help David as Doc Arny’s support crew. Doc Arny bought a used Dodge Ram pickup with a camper back, cashed out a few investments, and agreed to pay them each $200 a week plus expenses for as long as the ride continued. It was sad, but also an adventure. Morbid, but romantic too.
The plan was based on the Race Across America cross-country endurance bicycle competitions. The camper crew would follow, buy food, do laundry, and all that stuff, while Doc Arny rode the bicycle. He hoped to make it a couple of weeks, maybe into Nebraska. That was the late spring of 2003. As fall approached, they headed south. Somewhere along about six months into the trip, in northern Louisiana, Doc Arny started saying that he was riding, not toward a rendezvous with death, but to stay ahead of death. As long as he kept going, death wouldn’t get him. Naturally enough, he kept going. Eighty miles a day or so, most typically. As spring approached, they began to head back north. Now, if you had asked David the general question of would he have agreed to follow his dad around in a camper truck for almost a year just waiting for him to keel over, of course he would have said no. And Doc Arny would never have asked David to do such a thing. But it wasn’t like that. Nobody was looking at that whole picture. Every day was just one more day, a new morning. Every day could be the last. What if you decided to call off the whole business and then boom, that afternoon . . . Who knew?
He locked into a routine: ride every day, usually 70-plus miles, but never less than 30. The 30 would take him around two hours, so those were like their days off. The crew would find a laundromat, maybe a bike shop to pick up a couple new tires or something, and go shopping for the week’s groceries. Every once in a while Doc Arny would set them free to go see a movie, and that got to be like the only privacy they ever had, Lynette and David. That was kind of ironic, because the main reason they had gotten together in the first place was an uncomplicated physical attraction, and yet here they were in this situation where they were together almost all the time, but had no opportunity for intimacy. Either one of them was driving, and it wasn’t safe to do much while driving—or Doc Arny was in the camper with them. So they looked at going to the movies as a special opportunity.
One of the ones they remembered especially, perhaps because of its thematic connection to their adventure, was The Triplets of Belleville, a French animated feature about a bicycle racer who gets enslaved by an evil winemaker and is hooked up to a giant machine that he powers by pedaling. They saw it in a little art house theater in a college town somewhere. They sat about halfway back, all the way over on the left side and once it got dark Lynette sat on his lap with her jeans skirt on.
A COUPLE MINUTES AFTER the two yellow signs had gone by, David caught sight of headlights up ahead. He pressed the brake gently. The lights moved from right to left for a few seconds, two lights very close together, then the two bright spots moved farther apart and stopped. The road got quickly steeper and David braked hard to keep from going too fast. The rear of the truck squirreled around a little. He glanced over at Lynette again and her face was cold white.
They stopped the truck. Facing them on the opposite shoulder was a red jeep, its lights on and the driver’s door open. Lynette stayed in her seat while David got out to investigate. The New Hampshire plate had a shiny orange 07 sticker on it. Maybe twenty yards behind the jeep he saw a shadow moving and he walked toward it.
“David!” Came Doc Arny’s scratchy voice from further down the road, “Watch out for the fucking moose!” The shadow David had seen suddenly loomed out into the road, at least eight feet tall. His brain said camel but he knew it was a moose. He had never seen a moose, but he had seen a camel in the zoo one time.
David stood still. The moose looked at him for an uncomfortable half-minute, then it lost interest and ambled across to the other shoulder and crunched downhill into the underbrush.
This was unfolding like a David Lynch movie that he and Lynette had seen part of a few months back. He couldn’t remember the title. He was pretty sure it was David Lynch. The headlights of the camper made this one particular area of the road look like a little stage, and after the moose left the spotlight, Doc Arny and a guy in khaki overalls stepped into it. “Incredible good fortune,” said Doc Arny, walking the bike. “Did you see that?”
“No,” David said. “What?”
The other man spoke up. “First I come around the curve and see a moose standing crossways, next thing I know fella here slides right out from under it and lands himself in the ditch. You don’t see that too often.”
“Just a little road rash,” said Doc Arny, showing off his red-streaked thigh and forearm. “Be needing some more new shorts.”
“You slid under the moose?” David took the bike from him.
“Not on purpose,” said Doc Arny. “I didn’t even see the moose ’til I was under it. I saw the headlights, and started to brake and I guess the road got steeper right there, ’cause I wasn’t slowing down. I panicked and locked up the rear and wham! hit the pavement. Then I notice the moose passing by overhead. Right between his legs I went.”
“God’s honest truth,” said the bystander. He looked them over. “Fella oughtn’ta been riding his bicycle out here on a night like this, though, mind you. If you woulda ahsked me.”
“The man’s right, David. We should have stayed back there in Warren. I liked that town anyway. I like a town with a rocket.”
“Where you headed to?” The man asked.
“Private campground just this side of North Woodstock,” David said. “I forget the name.”
Lynette’s voice came from behind. “Is everything okay? Doc Arny?” She was now standing a couple feet behind them. Every once in a while, it struck David how everybody called him Doc Arny, no matter how they were related to him—his kids, his brothers, his wife before she took off with Lawyer Brad—he was always Doc Arny. David thought Lynette looked a combination of scared and relieved and beautiful standing in the rain in the white running shorts and green halter top. “Doc Arny!,” she said. “Look at you! You’re hurt!”
“Just a flesh wound,” Doc Arny imitated dialogue from a Monty Python movie, an annoying habit. “But maybe that’s enough riding for today. Thank you, sir, for your kind attention.” He turned to the stranger.
“Nothing of it,” said the man. “You folks okay from here?”
They all nodded.
“Well take care then. Keep your head low.” He climbed in the jeep and closed the door behind him. The wheels spun on the loose shoulder gravel, then they caught traction and he was gone.
They loaded the bike, which seemed unscathed (but it was hard to tell in the dark), into the back of the camper and they got in and resumed the descent toward North Woodstock. There was no private campground on the way into town (David had made that up to discourage the bystander from further concern), but they didn’t need a campground anyway. They found a dirt pulloff along the river the road followed and that worked fine.
The camper had one bunk up top, suitable for a smaller person, and two sleeper benches down below that doubled as the dinner table seats. They microwaved a double batch of Mrs. Grass instant tomato veg soup and ate some blueberry pop tarts cold out of the box. They were all tired and still probably all thinking about the moose/dark/rain/mountain/headlights/bike crash incident. Nobody said anything, except when the soup was ready, Doc Arny said “Okay, let’s do this.” They ate the soup.
Then Lynette said “Night” and climbed up top.
Doc Arny and David settled onto the two lower benches. They always did dishes in the morning when they could see. “Dodged a bullet, don’t you think?” Doc Arny said after the light was out.
“Yeah,” David said. “Ironic.”
“Hmm?” He responded.
“Ironic,” David repeated.
He was quiet for a long time. “Yes.” He said after David was pretty sure he’d dozed off. “Ironic.”
IN THE MORNING David walked down to the river with Lynette to dump the dish water. “He looks fine to me,” she said.
“He does,” he responded. “He always looks fine.”
“He does,” she said. She was wearing her knee-length denim movie skirt.
“Is this a day off?” David asked. The back of his hand touched her forearm.
“I think so.” She stood up and tightened the upper knot on the back of her halter.
“Good. We could use a day off.”
Inside, Doc Arny was stretching some gauze over the road rash. He already had a pair of black bike shorts on. David closed the door behind him after Lynette came in. “Bike looks okay,” he said, running his fingers along a scrape on the left chain stay where the “Kestrel” decal had been abraded. “No need to swap to the spare.” The spare bike was actually David’s bike, which was the same size thanks to the similar heights of the riders. The two had ridden together occasionally in years past while Doc Arny was getting his triathlon hobby going, but not recently. It was a nice Trek, set up with wide gearing to match the “main” bike. Doc Arny stood up and reached into his back jersey pocket. “Here,” he said. “It’s Friday. Payday.” He handed David a stack of twenties.
“Cash?” David asked. They had the bank accounts all set up for direct deposit and they would just go to an ATM when they needed cash.
“Cash,” he said.
“Whatever,” David said. “Thanks.”
“No, thank you,” he replied. “You’ve foregone a lot.”
“Yeah,” David said. This had never come up before. “But how could we know?”
Doc Arny broke in: “Know what? That the old man would last a year longer than the prognosis and lead you on a slow goose chase through every podunk corner of the country?”
David just laughed. Talking to Lynette later that morning, they both agreed that they thought the conversation was going to go a little farther along those lines, but it never did.
“Well,” said Doc Arny, “I plan to put in my 30 this afternoon. Take a little nap right now. Why don’t you two go catch a matinee or something?”
“A matinee?” Lynette leaned over the table from where she sat beside David. She still smelled a little bit like rain. “Where?”
“Couple miles down the way in Lincoln there’s a theater. See?” He handed her a water-stained folded sheet.
It was a placemat from the diner they had stopped at back in Warren. The border of it was ringed with advertisements for local businesses and the interior was a map locating all the towns of the area. Lincoln was marked with symbols indicating food, lodging, gas, auto repair, tourist information, skiing, a hospital, a library, and sure enough, a movie theater.
“Why don’t we drive down there and I’ll take a nap in the parking lot?” said Doc Arny.
“But you’re already dressed to ride,” Lynette said.
“Didn’t want the road rash to scab up before I got the bike stuff on,” he explained. “And this way I can just wake up and go. Don’t worry about me. Meet you back there later.”
She winced as she watched him adjust the gauze. Then she glanced at David. Her eyes were dark and wet and sparkling.
The road wound downhill, past some quaint shops that constituted North Woodstock, then, after a brief woodland interval it leveled off as the camper entered a bigger town. It was a single main street running down the middle of a flat valley flanked by steep mountains. The theater was in a little strip mall on the right that also had a grocery store, a laundromat, an outdoor gear rental shop, and a clothing outlet. It was 11:40 and the first matinee wasn’t until noon, so they had to wait those 20 torturous minutes in the lobby before the projectionist kid left the popcorn stand to go start the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean, number two or three. There was no one else in the place. They sat in the middle.
At some point they must have dozed off, because the next thing David knew the lights were up and there was a noisy handful of high school kids coming in and the previews had started again. They played it cool. Lynette stood up casually and said she was going to the ladies’ room. David waited for his one dead leg to wake up enough, then limped out to the lobby to wait for her. He leaned nonchalantly on the wall, fiddling with long untucked tails of his flannel shirt. The popcorn kid glanced over. When Lynette came out, they walked to the camper.
Depending how long his nap had been, Doc Arny should be returning in anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. They sat on the back bumper and waited for him. There was no rush to go anywhere. It was pretty nice, David thought, leaning back against the warm metal there the early afternoon sun.
As they leaned there, they watched the road for Doc Arny’s return. There were lots of Subaru wagons with roof racks. Behind the town, across the street, a big mountain rose up abruptly. It presided over the valley like an ancient castle, majestic, forbidding, impassive. Pines grew most of the way up alongside it, thinning out near the top. The very crest of it was bare, mottled with cloud shadows.
“Not a bad little town,” he said to Lynette.
“Nope,” she said.
“You ever wonder if you’ll end up staying in some place like this?”
“Nope,” she said again.
“Really, never?”
“Nope,” she laughed. “I know I will. That’s why I don’t wonder.” She pointed out a group of three people who were just climbing out of a white pickup over by the road: first a guy with a sandy beard wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, then one dark-haired young woman in black cargo pants and a white tank top and another in blue running shorts and a faded yellow t-shirt. Townies, not tourists.
“I see.” David nodded. “Well, what about me?”
“You’re here, too,” she replied. This was obvious, but it startled him. They had been together for the past year, but it wasn’t a real year. Was it? David’s brain changed its subject. Where was Doc Arny? The trio from the pickup meandered diagonally across the parking lot and entered the grocery store. The door David was leaning against suddenly gave way. He lunged his right arm out to catch himself but only succeeded in jamming most of the fingers. The back of his head hit the floor with a hollow thunk.
“Whoa!” said Doc Arny’s voice. When David’s eyes cleared, Doc Arny’s face was above him, upside-down. “Sorry, David. Didn’t expect anyone would be there.”
David raised himself back up to a sitting position. Lynette had already stood and was facing them. “We were waiting for you to get back from your ride,” she said. “You fooled us.”
“Didn’t go on a ride after all,” he said. David scooted over on the bumper so Doc Arny could get through the camper door. “In fact, I’m only going to do one more,” he continued as he stepped onto the pavement.
Lynette and David just looked at him, waiting for part two of the statement. There was no part two. He took a few steps out into the parking lot and then turned to face them. He’d changed into civilian clothes, khakis and a polo shirt. He looked up at the sky, then toward the mountains on either side.
“What do you mean?” David asked. After a long pause, he added “Is everything okay?”
“It’s time to wrap it up,” Doc Arny said.
“Wrap what up?” Lynette chimed in.
“It,” he said. “All of this.” He made a circular motion with his hand.
“The riding?” she offered.
“Tomorrow, last ride,” he said. “A doozy.” He grinned. He still hadn’t answered the question. “Sit down for a minute,” he said. They did, on the bumper. He pulled a tourist folder out of his pants pocket. “When I retired early,” he began, “it wasn’t entirely my idea. There had been some issues with malpractice liability—nothing that was anybody’s fault, really, but the publicity was bad and it pissed off the hospital administration—and the suits offered me a lucrative buyout. I could have taken that settlement and opened another practice outside the non-compete area, which was what everyone expected, but I elected instead to retire early. The truth is, it wasn’t that interesting to me anymore. The challenge was gone. Except for the challenge of not fucking up, which I don’t find particularly inspiring. So I stepped off that train.”
David recalled that Bradley Smythe, the guy his mother had run off with, was a malpractice attorney. Made him wonder. He worked out all the timing in his head and said, “And that’s when you took up the biking and triathlons, right? My freshman year.”
“That’s right,” he replied. “That was my new challenge. And I was good at it. Pile of trophies in the library. But I couldn’t shake the thought,” he fiddled with the brochure, “the accumulation of . . . all those times when I had succeeded in surgery, maybe it only bought them another year or two. Maybe six months. Maybe they would have lasted that long anyway. Who knew? There’s something that usually happens to people in med school, but it never happened to me. You start imagining the symptoms of your patients in yourself. It’s no big deal because it’s expected and therefore the supervisors and faculty all know what’s going on and they get you through it. But if it hits you at the end of your career, that’s not so easy. It happened to me and the only way I could put those thoughts away was to sink myself more into competition. Thus all the trophies. That worked until I detected symptoms that were consistent with advanced cancer of the liver. I consulted the usual resources to confirm my suspicions, and digested the recommended usual rounds of tests. I didn’t get any tests because it was so obvious what was happening to me. I didn’t need any further evidence. That’s when I told you all about it. And that’s why we’re here today.”
“Were you wrong?” David asked.
“Wrong?” Doc Arny replied.
“With your self-diagnosis.”
“David,” he said, “I’m a winner. You know that. I really did set out on this adventure with the thought that I’d be dead in a month. But it didn’t happen that way and the reason for that is simple. When I compete, I win.”
David nodded out of habit, though at the same time he was thinking about the malpractice and the divorce.
“Also,” Doc Arny continued, “Also I looked back on my life and I realized that I didn’t really know you, David, my only child. I needed to know you before I died. This would be a way to do that.”
“Except,” said Lynette, “that most of the time me and David spent looking at your butt through the windshield, just following you around.” David smiled. She had the nerve, or naiveté, to say what he never would. Sometimes that was very useful.
Doc Arny looked at her for second, then diverted his glance down to the brochure in his hand. He knew it was true. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m not feeling so terminal lately. And we’ve run through nearly all of the liquid assets I had cashed out to do this. So it’s down to one more challenge. Tomorrow. Mount Washington.”
“Mount Washington?” David replied.
He opened the folder. “The Mount Washington Auto Road. Generally acclaimed as the toughest bicycle climb on the planet. Beats anything in the Tour de France. It’s long, it’s ridiculously steep, it turns to gravel near the top, it’s winding and dangerous, there are no guardrails, and the weather is horrendous. Couple years ago, Genevieve Jeanson, the multiple women’s winner of the race they have every year, literally got blown off her bike by the wind. Three times. And she was most likely doped to the gills for superhuman strength. Tyler Hamilton won it a few times. Last year I think they had to cancel a race because of blizzard conditions. In July. It would be a suitable challenge for me to conquer, and a suitable endpoint to this adventure.”
“Then what?” Lynette filled the pause.
“Riding buddy of mine and a couple of his pals did it back in the early 80s, told me all about it. You’ve never been allowed to ride down the Mount Washington Auto Road. Brake pads can’t take it and if you lose your brakes you’re dead. They don’t want people flying off the mountain and they have to go rescue them. So you have to ride the cog railway down or take a shuttle van or get a ride with somebody. This road averages a 12 percent grade and sections of it are 22 percent or steeper. I’ll need my granniest granny gears.”
“And then you’re done?” David interjected.
He nodded, pointing at a regional map on the brochure. “Tomorrow morning, we set off from here, follow this Kancamagus Highway over to route 16 and head north to the auto road. Or maybe cut over on this Bear Notch Road to 302. That looks more direct and avoids the towns. The auto road starts at 1,500 feet, tops out at 6,288, all in a little over seven miles. You drive up and wait for me. I ride. We all drive down together. Early start, just to be safe.”
“Where’d you get that?” Lynette pointed at the brochure.
“This?” Doc Arny replied. “In that sporting goods place over there, while you two were in the movie.”
She began walking in the direction he pointed. “I’m gonna go look around.” Doc Arny and David sat there and watched her cross the parking lot.
LYNETTE CAME BACK about 45 minutes later wearing some snug new khaki shorts and one of those sport tank tops, black with spaghetti straps, kind of an Outside magazine backpacker chic version of her usual outfit.
“What’s in the bag?” David asked.
“More stuff,” she said.
The occasion of the final ride called for a celebratory dinner, Doc Arny declared, so instead of cooking something semi-instant in the camper, he decided they should go out to dinner. There was a pizza place down the street on the opposite side called Elvio’s, and they went in there. It seemed to make a little more sense than the Chinese place that was in the same complex. They ordered a large pizza and salad bars. The ice machine was busted but the drinks were still pretty cold.
“Okay,” Lynette said when they were barely finished. “Time for bed. Big day tomorrow.”
That was kind of weird. Usually she was the one pushing to stay up later. But no one was arguing.
FOR BREAKFAST they were back to the quick instant dining, with coffee and some oatmeal. Outside it was misty and cool, but it often was like that in mountainous areas early in the day and sometimes into the afternoon, so they didn’t wait around for it to clear. “Okay,” said Doc Arny, “let’s do this.” They set off.
Doc Arny swung the bike into the road and began pedaling, a little asymmetrically: still stiff from the crash, David guessed. The camper followed about a hundred feet behind, flashers blinking. They’d had to replace a lot of those bulbs in the past few years. The road dipped down a little as the camper left town, then began a gradual ascent. Doc Arny seemed to loosen up after about 20 minutes as he alternated between sitting down and standing up over the pedals. The road hairpinned to the right and steepened. The transmission struggled to find the right gear as the camper huffed and puffed past a scenic overlook parking lot. “Some hill,” Lynette said. She was wearing the same new shorts and black tank top that she had bought yesterday. Fifteen minutes and a few sharp curves later, the camper passed a sign marked “Kancamagus Pass Elev. 2860” and the road leveled and started descending.
In no time the camper and the bicycle had gone from a deliberate 7 miles per hour up the hill to a careening 55 down. It was still cool out, and Lynette vocally worried that Doc Arny would get chilled. It happened all the time: riders got soaked in sweat going up, then hypothermic going down. The Euro bike racers would even shove newspapers handed up from spectators down the fronts of their jerseys to try to minimize heat loss. Watching the road ahead, David pulled up behind Doc Arny and contemplated getting beside him to ask if he wanted a jacket, but the road was too narrow and they were going too fast. A bike could fly effortlessly through these corners, but the truck always felt precariously top-heavy. So he backed off. Doc Arny would signal if he needed something.
A mountain stream appeared on the left. Finally the road began to level and the camper was rolling along at 25. A campground whizzed by. Then Doc Arny signaled a left and turned off the Kancamagus Highway onto a narrow strip of pavement labeled with a sign that read “Bear Notch Road—seasonal.” Almost immediately the road began going uphill and the speedometer in the camper was at 7 mph again. David turned the flashers back on. After a couple of miles of steady climbing, the road leveled and skirted the edge of a slope rising above to the right, then began to go down. “That was Bear Mountain, said Lynette, looking up from the map. Ahead they could all see some very tall, bare-topped mountains across the valley. “That’s it,” said Lynette. “Mount Washington. See the little radio tower on top of that one, and the black smoke from the cog railway?” They had, for the moment, been blessed with a clear and sunny day.
In a short time the camper coasted into a small town where Bear Notch Road ended in a T intersection with Route 302. Doc Arny turned right and the crew followed past a couple of ski areas along the bottom of a flat valley for a few miles until they hit Route 16 and turned north. “It’s a long steady climb up to Pinkham Notch,” said Lynette, checking the map again, “and then downhill for a mile or two to the entrance to the auto road.”
“What’s that map?” David asked, glancing over then back toward the road.
“Got it yesterday,” she said. “Guy in the shop said it was a good one to have. Has these topographic lines that show the hills, plus all the hiking trails. Not just the roads. I got one for the truck that shows the whole area and another one just for hiking that zooms in on this mountain.”
“Why do we need hiking trails?”
“So we can get off the road up there and not get killed.”
“Oh.”
The road steepened gradually. This had clearly been a tourist zone for a long time. There were generations of tacky roadside attractions like little animal zoos, restaurants with Bavarian decor, rows of little cottages—it all looked charming, but also a little beleaguered, comfortable enough now, but well-accustomed to harsher conditions. Soon the town was behind and the road climbed steadily alongside a looming bulk to their left. “Pull up beside him, David.” Lynette suggested. “Time to supply him up.” David did what she said. She rolled down the window. Doc Arny, startled out of his climber’s trance, looked over.
“Feed zone,” called Lynette. She handed him two fresh, full water bottles as he handed his empty ones in. Then she leaned out the window and stuffed a couple of energy bars in his back jersey pocket. “I think we should go ahead now, since I’m sure it won’t be safe to follow you all the way up. You want us to pre-pay your fee or you want to do that yourself?”
“I’ve got it,” he called in. “Yeah, you go ahead, that’s what I was thinking.”
“That way we won’t get stuck if there’s a line,” she said.
He nodded. “Okay, let’s do this.”
AS THE CAMPER PASSED the Pinkham Notch Visitor Center, David angled his head to the left and looked up to see the mountain rising darkly out of the valley, right up to its imposing bright and barren summit, but then it was gone behind trees. After a few minutes coasting downhill, the camper came to the left turnoff for the auto road. The ticket-takers seemed skeptical about the width of the camper top, but Lynette persuaded them that it was no wider than the cab itself, and eventually they let them go on. They handed David a cassette tape called “Above the Trees” and one of those bumper stickers that says “This Car Climbed Mount Washington.” David handed them to Lynette and she stuffed them both in the glove box.
The road started off with a pleasant enough interlude in the woods, but the motor was working hard already. David shifted it manually into D2. A few minutes later he shifted it manually into D1. He would have figured that going down this road would be scarier than driving up, but the problem with going uphill was that he couldn’t see the road ahead of them at all—just the massive gleaming hood of the truck and the clear blue sky. So David rolled down the window and stuck his head out the side in order to see the pavement ahead. This was disorienting in its own special way, but at least he had some confidence that the tires were going to stay on the road surface. He asked Lynette to do the same and confirm that the right-side tires were a foot or two from that edge. He didn’t dare to glance over for long, but when he did, Lynette seemed notably unconcerned, leaning back with her legs up and one bare foot out the window.
The camper nearly stopped all forward progress as they negotiated a mortifying switchback turn at the edge of an abyss, but someone was coming up behind them now, so David forced himself to speed up a little. Finally the camper reached the seven-mile post and the road made a broad, sweeping approach to the summit, finishing with one last preposterously steep pitch just before the parking lot. David jammed the parking brake in as far as it would go and left the transmission in gear.
“Don’t forget good walking shoes, David.” Lynette, who had to date done the entire trip in flip-flops, was lacing up a pair of brand-new hiking boots. “These were on sale.”
David rummaged in the back and found a pair of work boots that seemed sturdier than his worn-out running shoes. Before they went anywhere he needed to hit the men’s room, so he walked up to the tourist building at the top and Lynette said that while he did that, she would get some water and snacks and close the car up. It looked like a moonscape up here, a huge pile of rough round rocks. The wind was blowing the smoke from the cog railway steam engine that was parked at the depot into a horizontal black stripe. She was waiting outside on the observation platform near the restrooms when David got out. Her Farah Fawcett hair blew across her face and David thought the tank top looked not warm enough. “This way,” she said.
They took a quick look at the spectacular panorama from the observation platform, then descended past an old stone hotel building to find the trail Lynette had in mind. She led him down a steep, curving track for about ten minutes and came to signs saying “Gulfside Trail” and “Crawford Path.” Lynette took the path to the left, saying aloud “we want Crawford.”
“How long do you think it will take him?” David asked.
“Depends how long he argues with them.”
“Argues?”
“No bikes allowed, not for a long time,” she laughed. “Just for a couple races every year.”
David stopped but she kept walking. He called out. “You knew that?”
“Yes, it’s printed right there in the dang brochure. Come on,” she motioned him to follow. “We have a good four hours to go.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” David jogged carefully over the moon rocks to catch up.
“We have to make Mitzpah Hut. It’s like a hiker hotel, comes with dinner and breakfast. I made reservations yesterday. The guy in the store knew all about it. There’s a closer one that would have been easier, but it was booked full, so we gotta make good time. Get down off the mountain tomorrow and catch the hiker shuttle bus back to Lincoln. I said I could start Monday.” The wind muffled her words.
“Start?”
“Work.” She looked over at him. “Duh.”
Duh.
“Doc Arny can easily rent a seat in a shuttle van,” she continued. “There’s one every fifteen minutes. It’s a nice comfy guided tour. He’ll learn a lot on the way up. I left the keys in the truck and it’s unlocked, so when he gets there, he can decide.”
David assumed his face looked as blank as his mind felt.
“Whether to follow,” she said. She resumed walking.
DAVID GINGERLY BACKED the beep-beep-beeping camper out of its parking space, then began down, first negotiating an incredibly steep hairpin turn out of the lot to the top of the road. He stopped to wait for a few hikers to cross, and as he did, his eyes refocused farther away and below, where a line of people the size of punctuation marks made their way along a cairn-traced path. Maybe one of them was Lynette. He began the winding descent, the precarious road always materializing just in time for him to follow it around the next bend. When at last he got the camper back to the base of the Mount Washington Auto Road, there was Doc Arny, seated on a picnic bench, the bike leaned up behind him. As expected. David tooted and waved and went past him to park the camper in a gravel lot. The brake pads smoldered and stank.
He walked around to the back and got out the spare bike. Before driving down, David had put on bike shorts and a jersey borrowed from Doc Arny’s large wardrobe of cycling apparel, and the spare cycling shoes and the spare helmet. There were no spare sunglasses so he swiped the ones from the truck.
He locked up the camper, climbed on the bike, and rode over to the picnic bench. It took a second for Doc Arny to recognize David.
“Hey Dad,” said David. “Let’s ride.”
“Where?” Doc Arny said. “No bikes allowed.”
“I know,” David said. “There’s a good loop we can do from here that takes us down by Gorham. If I can make it back up the hill. I haven’t exactly been riding much.” He pushed off and headed toward the main road, Doc Arny followed.
The slope was gradually downhill on Route 16 toward Gorham and they pedaled easily along the highway. The shoulder was wide but the car and truck traffic was fast and frequent, so they went single-file until they got to the turnoff David had planned to take, onto a tiny side road. “This goes a few miles then reconnects with 16,” he said, “then we just double back on 16 to get back to the camper. So this is the best place to chat.”
“Chat about what?” Doc Arny asked as the sounds of the main road faded and they rolled along the narrow rough pavement through birch-pine forest. “Did you know? That bikes weren’t allowed up Mount Washington except for those couple special days?”
“I didn’t, no. Not ’til we got to the top.”
“Where’s Lynette? She knew?”
“She knew. Today she’s hiking from the summit down to one of the overnight hiker huts they have up there, and tomorrow evening the plan is for her to meet me back in Lincoln.”
“You didn’t go with her?”
“I could have. Maybe should have. But instead I said I’d meet her in Lincoln because I needed to talk to you.”
“That’s pretty feisty of her,” Doc Arny laughed.
“Yeah, there’s more going on there than some people might realize at first,” David said.
“You think I underestimated her? Dismissed her as a simple country kid?” Doc Arny said.
“I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about me,” said David.
“David, I think the main person you’ve underestimated is yourself.”
“What would you know about underestimating yourself?” David laughed.
“Touché,” said Doc Arny. “But I’m serious. The fact that you’re here right now says a lot about you.”
“Such as?”
“Such as you could have ditched me and gone with Lynette today but you didn’t. Such as you’re going to meet her tomorrow and you could have given up on her. Such as you’re willing to risk what you have with her to do this with me. Such as you’re willing to tell me that you’re choosing a different path than I might have envisioned.”
“What does that mean?”
“Listen, David. I screwed up a lot of things in my life. I know it. All I know how to do is keep running to try to stay ahead of it. Whatever IT may be. In the process I distanced you, I distanced my marriage—who knows, I might have even given my evil nemesis Brad something real to get his claws into, besides your mother. I’m not going to do it anymore. Life is too short.”
“I’m going to stay in Lincoln with Lynette, Dad,” David said. “We’ll get a house, I’ll get a job. She already has a job.”
“I wondered,” said Doc Arny. “She did seem to like the place.”
“I like the place. It suits me. I’m readjusting my picture of my life, and I’m liking what I see on that road ahead. I told Lynette that I wanted to be here with her. She wants that, too.”
“Good for you. She’s a keeper.”
“But that I also wanted us to offer you the chance to be with us.”
“You’re nuts.”
“She said yes.”
“Said yes? I’m speechless.” The older man stopped pedaling and coasted, the bike’s freewheel whizzing loudly. “Why do I deserve that?”
“Just keep pedaling.”
This story appears in The Virtues of Alignment, a collection of short fiction available as a print paperback and ebook. See the Miscagon Publishing Project page for more information.
Contact: info@gmdonley.com