CHAPTER TWO

“We can’t fix it, Del,” Dad said. “We’re in a bit of a situation here.”

“A situation?” Mom’s voice rose. “You mean we’re stranded here in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ll have to walk out to the main road. It’s not that far.”

“You can’t walk out. You have no idea where you’re going.”

“I’ve got the GPS. I can see the road, Del.”

“The GPS got us into this ‘situation,’ as you call it, in the first place.”

I wasn’t scared, exactly. But I didn’t like that Mom was mad at Dad, that now it seemed as if she’d been right and he shouldn’t have taken the back road into the wilderness. It seemed to me that Mom was usually right, in that brutally practical way she had, but I couldn’t help myself from taking Dad’s side most of the time anyway. Something made me want to stick up for him, and made me wish she wouldn’t point out the mistakes he made.

I know you’re not supposed to love one of your parents better than the other. Then again, you’re not supposed to love one of your children better than the other either.

Dad was looking under the truck again, as if he might see something different than he’d seen the first time. I went and joined him. The road and the rocks were stained dirty brown.

“Yup. As I suspected,” Dad said.

“Is the engine seized?”

“I’d say so. It must have been that rock we hit a while back when we bottomed out. We must have been losing oil ever since.”

Dad and I both looked down the road, in the direction we were going. It looked less like a road and more like a washed-out trail, scarred with deep runnels where rain had cut into it. A tumble of jagged rocks had collected in the dips. About fifty feet ahead, trees swallowed the road as it curved out of sight.

“I think we’re close. This should join up with the highway up there. It shouldn’t take me long to cover it.”

“You’re going to walk?”

“If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s walking,” he said, smiling at me.

Mom got out of the truck. “I think we should just wait for help,” she said. “If we had a cell phone…”

“A cell phone wouldn’t work out here, even if we did have one,” Dad said. “And I think we could wait a long time for someone to come down here.”

“I thought you said it was a logging road. It’s used all the time.”

“I may have been wrong about that.”

“Wait until tomorrow at least. We can make a fire. Maybe someone will spot it.”

Dad cleared his throat and spat in the dust. He spoke quietly. “No one’s going to take any notice of a fire in the middle of the Oregon bush.”

They must have both been thinking what I was thinking: that no one would know we were here, and no one would even worry about us for probably a good two weeks. We had not taken the most direct route, either, even before we took the shortcut. Dad said we’d take the faster route back after the hike, when we’d be eager to get home. But for the drive down we’d go into what he called “more interesting country,” through the forests of Oregon. That didn’t sound like him; except when I thought about it more, it seemed to me he was stalling. He’d rather be driving than hiking. Dad really wasn’t an outdoorsy guy. His idea of adventure, Mom said, was taking a Sunday drive.

“We’ve got everything we need to camp,” I said. “I can set up the tent.”

“Everything except food,” said Mom.

“We’ve got food,” I said. “We’ve got some, anyway.”

“Don’t worry,” Dad said. He turned to untie the ropes on the tarp covering our gear. “I’ll walk out of here tomorrow. I’ll start at first light.”

I climbed onto the back of the truck with a strange feeling of excitement bubbling in my chest. I should have been afraid, but I’d often imagined how I’d survive if I got stranded in the bush, and now here we were. It was only for a night, but still. It was a chance to practice. I pulled out the tent. It was a small lightweight one for backpacking and was really better suited for two people than three, but I’d convinced Mom and Dad that it would be big enough for our Grand Canyon trip. The website said you could sleep outside under the stars, and that was my plan.

“Where should we set up?”

Mom and Dad both looked into the woods, but they seemed not to have really heard my question. I jumped down and took the tent into a clearing that was just a few feet off the road.

“I’d rather be on the road,” Mom said. “If someone comes down here, I don’t want to miss them.”

“It’s too rocky, though.”

She looked at the tent distractedly and said, “Put it where you want then.”

Dad went off to hike farther up the road to see what condition it was in. I set the tent up easily myself, and rolled our sleeping bags out inside it—Dad’s on the outside, Mom’s in the middle, mine beside hers. Then I went to gather wood. When I got back with the first armload of branches, Mom was sitting on the tailgate, rolling a cigarette from her secret tobacco pouch.

“I thought you quit,” I said.

“I did quit.”

“But you brought your pouch.”

“It’s just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“Emergencies.” She had her head down and was rolling carefully. She ran her tongue delicately along the edge of the cigarette paper, then met my eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you know what.”

“This isn’t an emergency.”

“It’s not?” She struck a match and it flared on the end of the cigarette, the skunk-sweet smell of her special tobacco scenting the air.

“It’s an adventure,” I said.

“Okay, Francie. You have your idea of an adventure and I have my idea of an emergency. Can we agree on that?”

“Can I use your matches? I want to light the fire.”

“It’s not too early?”

“I’ll gather lots of wood. It’ll be better with a fire. I’ll make you a seat beside it.”

She handed them to me, then closed her eyes and took a long slow inhale.

I went back to the clearing where I’d set up the tent. The sunlight blinking through the budding branches had softened already. The sun sat just above the mountains. When it sank behind them, it would get chilly. The woodpecker’s rapid staccato rang like a small jackhammer. Ms. Fineday would say to pay attention to the woodpecker. It wasn’t afraid. The woods were its home and everything it needed was there.

I looked for the best place to make the fire. It couldn’t be under low-hanging branches, but I wanted some protection from the wind so the embers wouldn’t scatter if a gust came up.

A rotting log about thirty feet long lay on the forest floor. I found another, shorter one and dragged it over to place at a right angle to the long one. I’d make the fire in the corner, between the protection of the two logs. I had no shovel, so I used a rock and my hands to dig a hole first. The sweet, mushroomy peat smell of the soil rose up. I tore some of the beards of dried lichen from the hemlock branches and set them among some twigs and small branches. Then I went and gathered some more, bigger branches. The woods were growing shadowy and cooler. The sun would disappear soon.

Making a fire was all about preparation. If you did it right, all you’d need would be to set a single match to it. Grandma taught me that. We built fires when I stayed with her out at her cabin on Gem Lake and Grandma challenged me to build a one-match fire. Even in the rain, I could do it, if I could find dry tinder, peelings of inside bark or grass.

Grandma died two years ago and the cabin was closed up now. We hadn’t been there since she died. Whenever I asked to go, Mom said all it meant was work for her. Mice had overrun the place and the pump for water no longer worked. And Dad said it meant we’d have to rent a boat and trailer, since Grandpa had sold the one Grandma used and there was no road in. But I knew there was more to it than that.

We never went. I wondered whether the loons still made their nests in the cove by Grandma’s cabin, or if the eagles had gotten them. I didn’t care if there were mice; I thought the cabin was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. When I learned to drive, I’d go there myself every weekend, canoe over so I didn’t need a trailer, and I’d live there like Grandma did, all by herself, all summer long. I didn’t know if I believed in ghosts, but I liked to think that Grandma was living there still.