The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [34]
“All right, then,” Rose said to Mary. “If you don’t want me to join the convent, I’ll drop the idea.” With this, she stood up easily.
Rose prayed for a sign—a new idea, anything. Pretty soon a black and white butterfly started visiting at her window each day. The Third Order Dominican nuns wore white tunics with black cloaks, lived at home rather than in a convent. “Ah,” Rose said when she recognized the sign. “Right profession, wrong order.” So off she went to join her Dominican butterflies.
“Up or down, Mary?”
I’m expecting a butterfly to appear, fluttering directions, but instead an orange Volkswagen Bug buzzes up the hill toward me. I stick out my thumb.
The bug screeches to a halt. A tiny woman with short gray hair leans out the window. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to hitchhike?”
“I guess they did.”
“Well, get in. You’re not going to Tahoe, are you?”
I didn’t know this road went to Tahoe. “I’m looking for Kay’s Resort.”
She nods. “Name’s Isabel.” She scrambles to clear the books and papers and cassette tapes and bags of trail mix off the passenger seat before I climb in. “I used to hitchhike,” she laughs. “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”
I don’t know what to tell her. I usually have my own car?
We drive up past Bob’s You Name It junk shop, past lumberyards and lodges, our climb marked by elevation signs at thousand-foot intervals. Melting snowbanks, thick pine groves, road construction. The Volkswagen spits and moans. There’s a boom box in the backseat, an old Utah Phillips CD.
“You’re not camping, are you? Without any gear?” I can’t tell if she’s genuinely concerned or just fill-the-silence wondering.
“Not sure,” I admit.
“On the run?” she winks.
“Sort of.”
Just above seven thousand feet, we pull into a tiny gas station without any attendants.
“My place is a just few miles further up,” Isabel says. “If you hike in from here you oughtta find a campsite. It’s not legal, but it’ll do.”
Now, maybe all Sierra lakes look the same, but I can swear I’ve seen this one before. Church camp with a visiting priest? I can remember building campfires with twigs and sticks, cooking meat and vegetables wrapped in tinfoil, but the memory is wispy and unfocused. I can’t hold onto it. A craggy red volcanic mountain rises from the indigo lake, a stranger among rounded green and snowy peaks. A campsite?
In the tackle shop/grocery store, the woman behind the old-fashioned register breathes through a plastic tube connected to a blue tank. Belabored inhale, belabored exhale. “Can I help you?”
I feel lightheaded. “Do you have any sleeping bags you lend out or anything?”
She shakes her head no. Thinning white hair.
I wander through aisles of chips and marshmallows, picture postcards of chipmunks and Thunder Mountain, Wish you were here. I grab a seventy-five-cent packet of onion soup, just add water.
“I’m looking for Dot,” I say as the woman pushes those big buttons on her giant cash register.
She nods. “If you head around the lake about a mile you’ll find an old cabin. First one you come to after the lagoon.” Belabored inhale, belabored exhale. “Just an old cabin. Stay close to the lakeshore or you’ll miss it.”
I have to cut off the sandy trail after just a few hundred yards to stay close to the lakeshore. I shove the onion soup packet into my back pocket as I climb over granite boulders, through stands of ponderosa pines and incense cedars. Patches of dry grass spotted with pennyroyal and brilliant paintbrush flowers. The old cabin is half hidden by red firs, lodgepole pines, western juniper.
A few steps to the porch. Knock, knock. “Hello?” No answer, but there’s an old hand-carved wooden sign on the red door: “Hospitality.” I push it open. “Hello?”
I scan the one-room cabin. A gray Mexican rug covers the floor. Stone walls lined with books.