Abandon

Scott called out, “Everybody in one piece?”

Abigail looked up, Jerrod beside her, his eyes still closed, teeth gritted, body quaking.

The boulder field steepened near the pass. Abigail used her hands to climb now, the weight of the pack disrupting her balance, feeling envious of the llamas’ surefootedness.

They came to a series of ledges.

“Take your time!” Scott yelled. “This section is very sketchy, and the rock’s rotten. If you start to freak out, let us know. We’ll talk you through it. Focus on what’s above you, and don’t look in the direction you don’t want to go. Namely, down.”

The ledges ranged in width from four to six feet, contouring up the rock face. Abigail focused on putting one foot in front of the other and dragging her left hand along the rock to maintain her balance. The others had gotten ahead of her.

At the third switchback, she made the mistake of glancing down, had no idea they’d climbed so high above the boulder field, the exposure overwhelming, waves of dizziness engulfing her, filling her stomach with razor-winged butterflies.

Her knees weakened. The world tilted. She stumbled toward the edge. Jerrod grabbed her arm, pulled her back.

She crumpled down on the ledge.

“Abigail.”

“I can’t breathe,” she gasped.

Jerrod knelt in front of her. “You’re okay. You’re just hyperventilating. Close your eyes and take deep breaths.”

She did what he said. Soon, the dizziness had passed and she could open her eyes without the world spinning.

“You saved my ass,” she said as Jerrod pulled a climbing rope out of his pack. “What’s that for?”

“I’m gonna short-rope us together until we reach the top. Can you stand up now?”

Abigail got to her feet and Jerrod reached around her from behind and began to wrap the rope around her thighs into a makeshift harness.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Sure.” He cinched the rope around her waist.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Were you in Iraq?”

He stopped midway through his knot, turned her around so they faced each other.

“Yeah, actually. How’d you know?” His voice had tightened.

Abigail looked back over the boulder field at the glint of the lake where they’d stopped the previous afternoon. “Your dog tags,” she said.

“Oh, right.”

Other things, too. Especially the way you reacted when the rock fell. A couple years back, she’d written a piece for the Times about soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, interviewed dozens of vets with PTSD. No question, he had it. She saw the damage in his eyes.

At noon they crested Sawblade Pass, just a wind-ravaged thirteen-thousand-foot notch in a cirque of spires, ridden with old snow, sun-cupped and brittle as salt crystals.

They dropped their gear, took shelter from the wind.

From Abigail’s vantage point, she could see down the other side of the pass—a two-thousand-foot drop into a box canyon. At the close end, she thought she saw the ruins of a mine. Farther on, perhaps a mile away, rows of dark specks peppered the timberline forest.

Emmett yelled, “Dr. Kendall!”

Lawrence had been exploring a recess in the rock at the end of a nearby ledge. He poked his head out. Emmett waved him over and Lawrence came and squatted beside him.

“What are those specks down there?” he asked.

“That’s Abandon.”

Abigail took out her cell phone. It roamed for a moment, got a signal.

She called her mother to tell her how beautiful it all was.

SIX

 T

hey spent the next hour descending a talus slope, and by two in the afternoon, they had reached the remains of the Godsend, Bartholomew Packer’s mine. The stamp mill looked to be one winter away from collapsing. Boards bowed and splayed out on all sides, and amid the wreckage of the mill stood one of its indomitable cast-iron rock crushers.

They followed an old wagon trail as clouds filed in from the west. Pockets of snow clung high up the canyon walls and snowmelt bled out from them in streams down the rock face and into the ruts of the trail, making their boots squish in the mud.