give them up gladly.”
There was an edge in his father’s voice, a finality to his words, that warned against any attempt to disagree or even to continue the discussion. But as the flyer curled downward toward his father’s hilltop hermitage, Christopher wondered in silence why the words and the emotion behind them sounded so familiar.
It was a cliche out of a storybook family life Christopher had not lived, and he did not take note of it until after the fact.
“Would you mind if I took the skimmer? I’d like to run down to Vernonia for a little while.”
His father did not mind. Saturday was the same as any other day to the self-employed, and William McCutcheon was already settled before the comsole in his den, attending to some of the myriad details of his multiple businesses.
“Be back by noon, though,” McCutcheon called back over his shoulder. “I want to hike across to the fire tower and see if that last storm finally did in the roof. But I have a couple of hours of work in front of me here first.”
“Okay.” It would take them two hours to traverse a distance the Avanti could cover in ten minutes, then two more hours back, but Christopher did not object. He had wondered how they were going to fill the hours until Sunday morning; a walk through the forest was among the most attractive options.
The skimmer, a five-year-old Saab, gave no sign of having been used since Christopher was last there. As he stowed the cover and ran through the power-up sequence, he found himself wondering exactly what his father would be doing while he was gone.
Christopher had never been invited to share the fine details of family—that is to say, his father’s—finances. He had never been offered a clear picture of where his father’s money came from— nothing as simple as, say, his grandfather Carl, who had been a millwright, or his great-grandfather William, who had been one of the last of the logging-truck drivers to work the twisting highways and narrow dirt roads of southwest Columbia County.
As best as Christopher understood, his father was at once a land broker, a biomechanical engineer, and a political consultant. The engineering had come first and was the only profession which could be deduced from the contents of his father’s den-office—the shelves and walls featured models and drawings of clever and impossible gadgets, as well as the certificates for the two nanotech patents McCutcheon held in his own name.
Profits from the patents had apparently led him to land and then to brokering, which seemed to take the most time, return the most headaches, and generate both the most income and the least discussion. The consulting had come along but recently, growing out of ever-more-healthy contributions to the Oregon Greens and the Republican National Party. Christopher was not sure exactly what his father had to offer them beyond money, nor how much he had had to do with the successes of “his” candidates for governor and, in the last election, U.S. senator.
But whatever the source, there was no question that there was money, in more than adequate supply. The host contract with Deryn had run to six figures (he had found a copy playing teen-hacker games with the housecom files), and the nurture contract had probably more than doubled that. His sister, Lynn-Anne, had gone to Bennington, Christopher to Salem Academy at fifteen and then to Stanford, all institutions with if-you-have-to-ask tuitions. And though the house, a double-dome Fuller in redwood and seal-shingle, was modest to the eye, it sat in the heart of more than six thousand acres of fir forest which had not seen a saw for a century—and to all of which his father held title.
It had never been a silver-spoon life. But if his father had ever had those tastes, it probably could have been.
Once a sodden mud track beaten down by an endless parade of heavily laden trucks, the old logging road leading down to Vernonia Road—which the state insisted on calling Route 47— was long since impassable for a wheeled vehicle. The forest had a tumbling-over-its-heels vitality, an irrepressible fecundity that had reached out to claim back the right-of-way the moment it was abandoned, a dozen, a hundred species of plant conspiring to soak up the scattered sunlight and heal the wound.
All that remained to mark the road was a serpentine trench of young trees winding through the taller Alpine fir and lodge-pole pine blanketing the ridge. Taking the skimmer down it was a challenge to its ground-hugging flight system and to the reflexes of its driver. The reward was seeing the forest the way it showed itself best—from below, surrounded and looking up.
It was five miles and fifteen minutes to the bottom. At times the ranks of evergreens to either side seemed like the pillars of a grand cathedral. The air was humid and rich with the scents of life and decay. Christopher drew it in and breathed back out the tension in his muscles, the tightness in his chest. If only I could relax with him, he thought. If only he could see me as I am.
A hailer marked the end of McCutcheon property, and a few hundred meters farther the logging road met the highway. It had been at least a decade since 47 had been maintained for wheelies, and the ancient pavement of Vernonia Road was cracked and fissured and carpeted with moss. Most of what little traffic the artists and cityfleas of Vernonia generated had taken to the air, though the moss bore the crushed tracks of the fat-tired omnis which brought freight in from Forest Grove, fifty kilometers to the south.
Christopher cruised slowly, noting with idle interest how fungus and rot were fast pulling down what had been a home near the roadside, that one nearly denuded hillside was beginning to come back from the fire that had blackened it, where a sterile new white package house had been tucked in among the trees above tumbling Beaver Creek. But it was less than half a year since his last visit, and little had changed except the season. His pace was set less by the desire to sightsee than by the fact that he really had nowhere to go.
The house on B Street had been his home for fifteen years. A dozen years had passed since he left there, long enough for all of his peers to have moved on or mutated into strangers. As for adults, Jimmy, who had given him his first guitar lessons, and Nick, the haiku poet who had befriended him, both still lived in town, so far as Christopher knew. But he had not progressed very far along the path that either man had urged on him, and he did not think either would think much of the path he was on.
As he headed north toward Vernonia, Christopher considered stopping at old Hamill Observatory, the one- time private astronomy center sitting on a thousand-foot ridge just to the east, a mile up McDonald Road. In its prime, the observatory had been a mecca for amateur astronomers, and its presence had helped retard development in the forested Nehalem-Pebble Creek watershed for half a century.
But it was an idea whose time had passed. Astronomy now belonged to the satlands brightening Earth’s night sky. While Christopher lived on B Street, Hamill was limping along, ingloriously, on tourists’ curiosity and pay- per-view satland-sightseeing. And while Christopher was at Stanford, Hamill’s owners finally bowed to the inevitable, retiring its ninety-year-old telescopes and shuttering the silver domes. There had been talk of making it a county museum, a state education center, but nothing had come of the talk. Christopher let the turn-off flash by. There would not be much to see now.
Then, rounding the last big curve south of town, his attention was caught by the red-rusted gray steel of the Nisqually trestle. There had been dozens of bridges and trestles along the old narrow-gauge logging spurs through Columbia County, as both the river and the railway switched back and forth at the dictates of the land. Most had been torn down; a few had been preserved as part of the Columbia County Linear Park.
But the trestle just south of town was
On impulse, Christopher pulled off the road and parked the skimmer. He clambered out and studied the span with a smile, remembering how much higher and longer it had seemed when he was seven and ready to cross it for the first time. The metal had been slick with condensation, the river surging from a recent rain.
The last thought stuck uncomfortably in his ego, and before he quite realized what he was doing, he was standing atop the north end of the trestle, looking down through the web of metal at the river and across at the thicket of birches into which the roadbed vanished.
