Thus Spake Arethusa

The morning sun had been harsh against the windshield when Mal left the house, but by the time he pulled into the trailhead parking lot on Route 302, the day had put on a pearl-gray gauze. It would snow, the radio said, but the predicted accumulation had varied so widely as to be virtually useless: anywhere from a dusting to ten inches.

From the look of the parking lot, it seemed like the other people who had signed up for the hike up to the falls had all decided to stay home. There was not one car, besides Mal’s own, not one hiker at the rendezvous near the trailhead sign below the snow-laden hemlocks. He checked his phone for texts announcing a cancellation but saw nothing. There was still five minutes till the hike was supposed to begin. He’d wait and see.

Rolling his window down, he felt the air immediately crimp the inside of his nostrils. It was at least ten degrees colder here than down in Franconia.

The first flake fell like a cinder from some far-off blaze; it danced lightly before kissing his forehead. He turned on the radio and hit scan, searching for a weatherman’s cheery voice—funny how meteorologists were always happiest when a blizzard loomed—but heard only a static crackle, reception being poor this side of Crawford Notch.

Of all the places in the forest that he’d dragged her to, Eva had loved the trail to Arethusa Falls the best. Odd that she’d never come here before they met, this corner of New Hampshire’s White Mountains being practically in her own backyard. Whereas Mal had been an outsider—a “carpetbagger,” she’d liked to tease—having moved here two decades before as an adult, ditching the Boston suburbs so he could tramp through these mountains as often as he liked: every day, twice a day, even. Sometimes, when his computer repair shop was busy, he could squeeze in a hike for only an hour, but often he’d hang a sign in the door telling customers there’d been a family emergency, and he’d head out for days at a time, carrying a tent, a sleeping bag, and not much else.

The flakes started to dimple his windshield now, keeping their form despite the residual warmth from the car’s interior. He checked his watch. 8:05. Clearly, the hike was canceled. He gazed at the parking lot, tiny swirls circling across the macadam as if fleeing some invisible broom. Then he looked at his pack on the seat beside him, winter gear strapped into place: the trail spikes, snowshoes, insulated water bottles he’d dusted off last night after finally finding them amid the clutter in Eva’s old studio. How had they ended up there? Damned if he knew. The flower-frilled bottle was hers, and turning it in his hand earlier he thought he could still make out a trace of her lipstick.

Mal shut off the engine, palmed the key. He knew his doctor would want him to turn around and drive back home, but deep inside he really wanted this, needed it, even. Got to get back on the horse sometime, he thought. Outside, he wrestled the pack onto his back, pulled his poles from the trunk, and click-locked the car. Looming overhead were Frankenstein Cliffs, with snow-coated pines fringing the gray rock face named—as Eva had liked to point out—not for the movie monster but a landscape painter from these parts.

In the lot he could feel the wind immediately—see it, actually, in the snow’s horizontal footrace—though this eased considerably once he entered the thick understory. People had traipsed here recently, dogs too, but a freezing rain had melded their tracks into a vague white-gray waffle, slippery enough that he halted almost immediately, balancing cranelike in the middle of the path on alternate legs to stretch the red web of his trail spikes over his boots. This would have been an easy task leaning against the car, but here it was tricky: The hip that the doctors had replaced after the accident tended to balk when asked to bear his weight by itself, as if the new joint inside him were more elastic than titanium. Complaining about this had brought Mal little sympathy. “Ayuh, that’ll happen,” the specialist up in Lewiston had replied, seeming to imply that Mal had it coming. Which he did, Mal couldn’t help but think.

Time was, he’d have turned up his nose at the idea of joining a group hike. Hated crowds, especially out here, those conga lines of hikers chattering like bluejays as they tromped past in their United Colors of Benetton or REI or whatever, too self-absorbed to notice whatever wildlife they hadn’t already scared off—telling themselves they were out in nature when all they’d really done was bring the soundtrack of their lives into what should be a cathedral. Like tourists. Back in the day, he would walk off the trail a hundred feet to let the horde pass.

But the accident had changed all that. This was his first venture out here in years, the damage to his body being so extreme: the hospital stay; the lengthy PT he’d undergone, dragging his traumatized hip and knees around; the humiliation of home health aides waltzing him into the shower or to the toilet. They’d told him that, even for a young man, it would have been a long haul, and they didn’t lie. Reluctantly, he’d promised the doctors that his first trip back in the mountains wouldn’t be a solo jaunt. And he had tried to keep that promise. It wasn’t his fault that the other hikers had all chickened out this morning.

The trail spikes made a big difference: He felt his feet grip the steadily steeper ice like a superhero’s. The incline made him work, made his inner furnace burn hotter. After ten minutes of tentative footwork, learning to trust the purchase of each step on the thickening white chaff, he was matched to the severe conditions, warm and stable, and for the first time in years he felt the exhilaration of facing the extremities of the winter world. To go out in winter is to experience the world at its harshest, its most unforgiving. To move easily through it, to survive its battering, is joy. This creed he’d cultivated—even its exact articulation—never failed to surface in his thoughts out here, like tracks in the snow to guide his feet.

When Eva began joining him on winter rambles, Mal for the first time had someone to share these inner monologues with, and he would frequently stop along the trail to philosophize: about the angle of stream runoff here or the predominance of birches there or anything else he knew and thought she should know as well. She would laugh at his penchant for pomposity, kid him whenever he’d begin spouting off to her in formulations she could soon quote at length, so predictable was his patter. It became such a part of their walks together that she came up with her own teasing response, a kind of amen to his preaching. “Thus Spake Arethusa,” she would intone with mock gravity, smiling and touching the curls behind his ear as she did.

Behind him a tree cracked loud, startling him. In very cold weather like this, it seemed to Mal that every sound was sharper, even ones he remembered from winter walks of the past: ice crunching underfoot along a swollen river, each step of the spikes on the frozen trail like a cracking of knuckles; water whispering under brittle silvery plates at stream crossings, the air bubbles trapped underneath splitting and dashing like amoebas. As usual, the sounds suggested to him his thirst, and he stopped to drink from one of his bottles; he stored them upside-down in his pack so they’d resist freezing longer. His teeth ached as he drank.

In a few minutes he came to the side trail that diverged left, so as to closely follow Bemis Brook. This had always been Mal’s preferred route, boasting several small cascades, but the footpath there had not been tramped down lately. The snow was falling faster now, and being so out of shape, he didn’t feel up to the strenuous work of breaking trail. Instead, he kept to the more traveled path, to the right.

She was a teacher. They’d met, of all places, at the dump, on a Saturday, one of the transfer station’s recycling drop-off days. Mal was in the middle of stacking up old Tandys and Compaqs that customers had brought in for repair and then abandoned once they learned how much Mal would charge to make such dinosaurs useable again. Eva was driving a pickup full of fifth-graders, along with the Bud Lite and Mountain Dew empties and other discarded trash that her students had collected off the side of Route 302 as part of an Earth Day project. As the kids unloaded the recyclables, Eva had parked herself on the tailgate of Mal’s own pickup, sipped her chai latte, and made small talk with Mal as he bear-hugged the old computers into the back of a tractor trailer. He wore a raggedy National Parks T-shirt whose logo she made much of; later, after a first date, she confessed that she’d really been admiring his legs.

Being such different ducks—he a late-forties, woods-loving techie tending toward solitary pursuits, and she, ten years younger, an activist in town politics and a book-group devotee—their romance took on a your-turn-my-turn character. One weekend she would drag him to a contra dancing workshop. The next, he’d guide her through a little-traveled patch of the White Mountains. In her circle of friends, Eva referred to Mal as a good sport, gamely trying activities outside of his comfort zone. For his part, Mal had left behind in Massachusetts most of the buddies he had. When he considered the matter, he had to admit that Eva, by herself, was his circle.

His footfalls were soundless now, the brittle chatter of his spikes on the ice silenced by the deepening snow. Scouring the sky above him, he found it impossible to even guess at the sun’s position, so thickly was it coming down. His toes felt a bite from the encroaching drifts; he’d neglected to wear gaiters, and his boots brimmed with powder. He removed his gloves to finger from his ankles what he could, but the cold air forced him to quickly tug them back on and rub the numbness away. He’d have to sit and swap out the spikes for his snowshoes. 

Picking a rock for his seat, he moved quickly to make the switch, which again required his bare fingers to effect. After he’d finished, he opened his puffy coat enough to tuck his reddened hands under his armpits and wiggle them like two nursing newborns. When feeling returned to them at last, he stood, brushed the snow from his face and beard, and resumed his hike through a stand of birches. The blue blazes they wore at eye level seemed to fade by the minute under a falling veil.

Eva was a good sport, too, taking to the mountains with the zeal of the converted, posting photos and trip reports online, hugging Mal on summits or deep in ravines, relaxing alongside mountain tarns. The teacher in her uncovered insights into their wanderings that he’d never considered on his own. She told him, for example, about Arethusa, the namesake for the towering waterfall this very trail visited. It wasn’t a Native American word as Mal had assumed, but the name of the nymph who, according to Greek mythology, was bathing in a forest river when she became the target of a lustful god, smitten by her beauty. In her flight, Arethusa asked help from the goddess Diana, who responded by transforming her protégée into a fresh-water spring, allowing her to escape the deity’s clutches. Eva loved such playful backstories, loved how they enriched what, under Mal’s tutelage, could be an arduous spartan slog. She would kneel along the stream, ear inclined, like a child with a seashell, pretending to detect an ancient murmuring, asking Mal if he could hear what she heard: a woman’s deep intelligence.

The snowshoes helped with keeping his feet from sinking so deeply into the drifts, but they were less appropriate for gripping the ice underneath, and Mal found himself slipping backward an inch or two with every forward stride. Worse, the lurching that resulted from the backsliding seemed to cause his hip to disengage somehow, with a painful pop he could almost hear. In itself this did not worry him—such tectonic shifts had been an occasional by-product of his physical therapy—but he told himself now to keep track of their frequency. Above him, the wind gusted, hissing distantly one minute and clamoring the next, but the trees at ground level kept their counsel.

She was good for him, he knew. And he for her? Well, she had told him so, but still there had been storms—arguments that led to long silences, mostly his fault, due to his habit of dealing  with confrontation by retreating into a frigid stillness. These breaches lasted much longer than they both knew was reasonable. It was the worm in their apple, and each time they made up he would vow to never again let such canyons open between them. But there were laws of nature he’d been helpless before, deep tracks that he couldn’t keep from following, regardless of the mire they led to. And even now, even here, his thoughts revisited that dispiriting terrain.

Up ahead Mal saw a footbridge over the stream, which burbled under the wide planking as it rushed past. Someone had attached a homemade sign to the railing, with the words “Khazad Dum” incised with a woodworking router. Mal knew it to be a reference to some apocalyptic scene from one of the Tolkien novels—Eva had googled it—though why someone would conjure up such a  netherworld here, he had no idea. The snow, blown downhill along the stream’s wind tunnel, all but obliterated the letters. Beneath his feet, powder-cloaked boulders hunched like dwarves.

The night of the accident had been like any other. This he told himself over and over: Nothing he’d done that night was unusual, even ordering the third beer when the waitress came around with the dessert menu. Really, he’d been fine. But Eva, wary of his mood or his condition or both, had insisted on driving, grabbing his keys from the table and steering him to the passenger side with her usual conscientiousness. And really, would it have mattered at all who was driving when the pickup hydroplaned on the Route 93 on-ramp, leaving the rain-slick roadway to hit the riprap fifty feet below?

On one of the days that followed, Mal had watched the service from his hospital bed, via Zoom. The casket, the flowers, all of the arrangements were handled by Eva’s brothers. So hazy was Mal from the Dilaudid that he could barely keep from nodding off as they took her into the church and back out an hour later, which intensified the shame and grief he’d felt.

Past the bridge he began a gradual ascent that looked to be entirely untraveled. This section of the trail would be the hardest for him, he knew: steep, deep, and crowded with dense undergrowth. Still, the blazes were clear, the route certain. He plunged forward, ignoring his hip’s inner complaints. The twinges he felt going uphill would certainly abate when it came time to descend.

In minutes he came to a downed white pine blocking the trail, a large one, freshly felled by wind or ice. It could not be circumnavigated without great effort, so crowded was the surrounding forest litter. The high edge of its horizontal trunk was at Mal’s waist level, and the dense branches below would block any passage he might try on hands and knees. But he thought he might climb over it and pass. He hoisted his rear end atop the trunk and swung his snowshoed feet up alongside. He edged across, on all fours, his spine arched backward, but almost immediately his left foot slipped down into the branches below, and his snowshoe would not come back up through the tangle. When he struggled to free it, his other foot plunged through as well. Mal was stuck, sitting astride the trunk with his feet suspended six inches above the powder.

His plight was comical and frustrating, and recalled to him a long-ago winter hike with a friend: Mal was breaking trail through a deep snowfield near Mount Madison when he suddenly realized his companion was no longer behind him. He waited for five minutes, then ten, before backtracking. Minutes later, he came upon the guy, chest-deep in a spruce trap, having plunged through a thin crust into the shackles of the small trees’ branches. Unable to pull himself out, he’d been yelling for help, but the white-draped trees had swallowed his calls. Mal tugged him free. For years they would joke that it would have taken months for the spring thaw to yield up his friend’s body.

To free his leg now, Mal would need to reach down and release his snowshoe bindings. When he tried, he could touch only the top of his boots. His hip ached with every attempt. After minutes of this, he paused to catch his breath and wipe the snow from his face. The stillness around him was complete.

By ceasing his struggles, unfortunately, he gave the intense cold an opportunity to begin its invasion. This was the essential truth about winter hiking: that one must keep moving to stay warm. Rest breaks had to be short, meals eaten while continuing to move. His base layer, damp with perspiration and cooling, was already beginning its conductive assault on his core. Feeling this, he also felt the stirrings of fear.

He was about to try again to reach his boots when a gray jay fluttered down. It lit upon one of the white pine’s branches only feet from Mal’s head. The birds were regular visitors to hikers throughout the mountains, having learned that people at rest were reliable sources of gorp or granola bar scraps, often offered on a hiker’s extended palm. The jay tilted its head quizzically, as if mystified by Mal’s situation. 

If only you could fetch help, like Lassie, Mal addressed the bird silently. He shrugged his pack off his shoulders, causing the bird to retreat a few feet. Digging out his lunch, he broke apart his PB&J, took a bite for himself, and held out a piece. The bird hopped forward, its tiny claws tickling Mal’s fingers, and picked at the offering.

She would love everything about this moment, he thought: his comical plight, the bird, the stillness. Mal had always been about the miles, the solitude, the peak-bagging, keeping his backcountry scorecard. Eva was about the serendipity of it all. Now, that was gone. She was gone.

The jay had nearly demolished a nickel-sized corner of sandwich when it suddenly flew off. Almost immediately, Mal heard a crunch of footsteps and jangling metal. A young woman emerged beside him, her breath misting before her. She wore layers of bright neon turtlenecks and stretch-fabric leggings, and her pack was heavy. Clearly an ice climber, she had shed her thick down parka; it dangled from her pack, clipped on with a hot-pink carabiner alongside a cluster of crampons, ice axes, and thick coils of belaying rope. Her dark hair had slashes of bright scarlet, and silver loops lined a nostril and both of her ears. She narrowed her green eyes at Mal, as puzzled at his predicament as the jay had been.

“Hey.”

“Um, morning.” He looked down at the fallen tree. “In a bit of a bind here. Could you tell?”

She lowered her pack to the ground, pulled out a water bottle, and took a long drink.

“Shit happens,” said the young woman. She bent low to better see his trapped leg. “Believe me, you’re not the first person I’ve come upon in this situation. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just embarrassed.” He watched as the woman pulled out her cellphone. “Wait. What are you doing?”

She stood focusing on him, the phone held at arm’s length. “Trust me. You will want this someday.” His face must have registered his dismay, because she gave him a grin. “Come on now, smile.”

She walked back to her pack. “See? Now just give me your cell and I’ll text this to you. Really, you’ll thank me.” He was angry, embarrassed, but like a child he obeyed and told her his number.

“Now. Let’s get you out of there.” She stowed away her phone and water bottle, pulled a portable saw from her pack, and kneeled down to sever a row of small branches, enough to liberate him and allow her to duck under the trunk and drag her pack behind her.

Back on his feet, he thanked her from across the pine’s horizontal barricade.

“Are you going up Arethusa?” The obviousness of his question amplified his sense of embarrassment. “Duh. Of course you are. What’s it like, to climb the waterfall?”

“Amazing. You can hear the water running underneath you—faintly, but still. And all the while you’re hugging the ice face like a spider. When you get to the top, it’s like … you did it, she’s yours. Try it sometime.”

She shouldered her backpack and continued up the trail, a woman in a snow globe. Her gear jingled long after she disappeared from view.

Mal was very cold now from his forced inactivity, his layers wet and frigid against his skin. He should move, generate some heat, but he was reluctant to follow the woman. The trail belonged to her now; he was an outsider here, a pretender, a fool who, but for the woman’s fortuitous appearance, might have become a casualty of the winter forest’s iron rule.

Pulling tight the cinch straps of his pack, Mal ate the remainder of his sandwich, setting aside a large morsel on the pine trunk for the gray jay to claim later. The first few steps back down the trail twinged his hip painfully but he soon settled into a smooth rhythm and forgot his hardships. With each step his earlier tracks—and the woman’s—became fainter under the steadily falling snow. He thought of the photo that would show up in his inbox later, the embarrassing grimace glazed on his face as he posed from within the clutches of the downed white pine. There was only one person he knew who could appreciate the photo and the story behind it, and she was gone.

He’d been walking back for ten minutes when he spied a daub of turquoise fast disappearing under the drifting snow: another carabiner, which had obviously fallen from the woman’s pack. Bouncing it in his gloved hand, he stared off into the woods. In the stillness he could just make out the faintest murmuring of the brook. He listened intently for minutes before pocketing the carabiner and turning to traipse back uphill. His hip had ceased complaining altogether now. With each step he felt lighter, stronger.

At the falls Mal found her backpack, itself already wearing a thin white shawl. And yes, there she was, way up there holding fast to Arethusa, the bite of her crampons and axes punctuating the muffled whispering of the stream underneath: a multicolored creature improbably ascending a frozen garment, its glistening folds light-blue here, ferrous-dyed there. 

Mal dusted off the woman’s pack and placed the carabiner on its top panel, reverently, like an offering. He watched her a few minutes more before feeling the frigid air’s reminder that he should be going, and turned to walk quietly back out to the world.

DAVID DESJARDINS

David Desjardins is a journalist with roots in Rhode Island, having worked at The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, and other newspapers. His short stories have been published in Ruminate, Roanoke Review, The Worcester Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Arlington, Mass. with his wife.