Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [29]
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