It has rained for three days. My father and I have waited for three days in our sleeping bags in a lean-to. Drips on the corrugated roof, drips on the chestnut leaves, drips down my neck when I shuffle out to pee. I have read all my Star Trek novels and he has read all his James Bond novels. Our lean-to stinks of pipe smoke and bug dope and dirty underwear. The forest rocks are wet. The forest leaves are wet. The forest air is wet. We are bummed.

Why haven=t we moved for three days? I am 16 and this is our eighth summer backpacking; I do what my father says. If he says we stay put, we stay put. If he asks to take one of my prescription pain killers--assigned for trapezius muscles torn canoeing a week ago--I hand him the bottle. I do fidget and argue and grumble, but it=s his decision to lay low and rest his sore knees and gaze into the glowing green world. And when the roar of rain becomes a day of drip, drip, drip and he says, ALet=s go,@ I go.

When we go, it=s farther into Baxter Park, in Maine, to Wessadequok Lake, a deep, green fjord with an empty box of a cabin on its center island. There, we make vegetarian chili from a mix. Our farts are so bad that we can smell them upwind--a mean feat in the steady blow created by the almost wind tunnel of the fjord.

To be immersed in Baxter Park is to be singular. Pine trees don=t want to be friends. In the wilderness, despite trails and stone fire circles, you are just another element in the immediate space. You have no currency to elevate or protect yourself. Your hands become instantly smudged with dirt and it spreads to your face and calves and shirt. Campfire smoke gives you pimples. Blackfly bites make blood trickle down your neck. The weight of your survival, carried in your backpack, turns your hip bones and collar bones purple. It=s hard and it hurts, itches, burns, tears, and scrapes.

I=m in a canoe with my father. We are washing our clothes in the lake. The constant breeze is holding our canoe against a cluster of granite off the island. The place could not be more clear, more decorated. On each side of us, the mountains rise like the edges of the earth. White birch and douglas fir and hemlock flow in the breeze. This green is different from the rainy forestBit is GREEN, dark, in charge. The sky is blue and without contrails. The water is clear down to the trout lurking in the rocks. We hear red-winged blackbirds, chickadees, squirrels, fish jumping, the shushing of the trees.

AYou=ve dropped your... your...@ my father stammers. I turn to look at him. He=s pointing into the water beside me. My bra is floating there. I scoop it up and turn so he cannot see me wring it out. What am I doing sleeping in an empty cabin with my father? I am terrified that my period will start and that I=ll have to carry pads to and from an outhouse or a hole. Ashamed of my breasts and my single bra. Frustrated that my underarm hair, so soft and delicious in the lake breeze, draws disapproving frowns from him. To me, he seems not to want me to be female--no bra, no breasts, no menstruation, no weakness--but he disapproves of my masculine hairiness. I curdle in self-disgust. I don=t want to be alone with him anymore. I need some relief, some happiness.

We are climbing Mount Katahdan, desperate to see other people. This was part of the plan from the beginning, but if it weren=t we would go anyway. Our need is that great. We get our first break when we pass through a campground. The people raise their hands and nod. We raise our hands and nod.

AGoing up Katahdan?@ someone calls.

AYup.@

AHave a good trip.@

AThanks.@ That=s it. We are human again.

The first part of the trail takes us up through the same kind of forest we have seen all along. But halfway up, I find a break in the trees to our right. The forest floor dips away from the trail, becomes a pit of rocks, and slopes back up again. In the middle of the pit sits a granite boulder 15 feet tall. I jump into the pit and look around the bottom of the boulder.

AThis used to be a pond,@ my father deduces. I turn slowly around the pit, imagining water covering me.

AThis is what the fish used to see,@ I say. AThey all died, didn=t they?@ He nods

On the other side of the pit is a meadow. The foggy wind brings soft grass smell to us. We haven=t seen any open spaces since we left our van. I run into the meadow and find blueberries, blackberries, goldenrod, and sumac. And a flat spot in the scrub.

ADeer,@ Dad says. AThey must have slept here.@

I stand for a long time, imagining I am a deer, comfortable in the meadow. There are no wolves in Baxter Park, but there are bears and people. Did I flush the deer? I look to the edges of the meadow for movement, deer scent, eye contact. If they are there, they are better at this wilderness thing than I am. No matter how many years I have foused on the slightest scratch in the leaves or waft of a bird=s wing, I am still the lumbering beast out here.

The treeline ends at my father=s favorite place: A knoll overlooking a clear pond. He asks me to look for a pattern in the pond, and I see it. A set of moose tracks runs diagonally across the bottom. I raise my eyebrows at him--So?

AThis pond is above the treeline. Nothing lives in it, so nothing disturbs the sediment. Those tracks have been here since the last time I came, over 10 years ago. Who knows how long they were here before that.@

I argue microbes and and wind and ice formation and dissipation for a few moments, but he disproves all of that. I argue an obsessed moose who comes along every June and tromps across the pond. No way. I insist that a ranger comes up here with antique moose feet on stilts, and at the same time we bark, AFake moose prints!@ Then he points straight ahead at the back of Katahdan, into the glacial cirque. I look up into its face, and even from this distance I feel it leaning toward me, larger than any one thing I have ever seen.

Dad says, AI have to show you something else. This takes us a mile out of our way, but it=s worth it.@

This part is fun--skipping across granite wedges and boulders and over scrubby blueberries. A quarter mile closer to Katahdin, I am slower. I watch the face more. I watch it so that it will not fall on us, because it is huge. It is so tall that I cannot stand and look up at it. I have to brace on a rock or my father. It is a sheer rise of granite, curved, carved by a glacier thousands of years ago. I can see the curve, see the straight up and down of the granite=s veins. The weight of it leans over us. My father takes me up a rise and sits me on a stump.

AOkay, there used to be an outhouse up here,@ he begins. ASurely no one would be looking back from Katahdan, so the outhouse had no door. Now imagine yourself sitting on the pot, in the middle of getting it all out, gazing up at this cirque. Is that looking into the face of God or what?@

I don=t need the outhouse. I see God=s face. It=s radiating to me and I get it.

The top of Katahdan is spacious and genteel, with no-dirt day hikers taking pictures, but the best part is the Knife Edge, a skinny crest that runs half a mile. Here=s something to lord over friends. On the south side, Katahdan falls down steeply to a forest and the Acivilized@ side of itself, where the northern end of the Appalachian Trail comes up the mountain. On the north side, Katahdan falls into nothing. Another cirque is carved here, and for two thousand feet down there is nothing but gray, lichen-covered granite boulders giving way to fresh pink granite boulders when the old ones fall off the mountain. On this side, clouds run into the cirque below us and are forced straight up to swirl over themselves and over the Knife Edge, blinding us regularly. The trail is three feet wide at the most. Sometimes. We take this giddily.

Then comes my kind of trail: Descending. I run away from my father and his tender knees, leaping from boulder to boulder, free climbing the big ones to jeer at him, and scrambling down again. Boom, boom, boom, boom--my body broadcasts my boots on rocks and my day pack bouncing against my back. I make it to the flat forest half an hour before he does. So I go back and meet him. It=s no good getting somewhere fast if there is no one to talk to.

We have been eating reconsitituted oatmeal, freeze dried beef, and noodles for 10 days. At the end, the hike out is pure mud. We have six miles to go. He says, AIce cream.@

I say, AHot fudge sundae! Vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, malt powder, a huge mound of whipped cream, no cherry.@

He wants to hear more. He has found a way to suck my boots from the mud and get us home faster. ASteak."

AA porterhouse! So big you need a hack saw to cut it. Medium rare. Baked potato, sour cream, and butter. Oxtail soup with Mom=s dumplings--no, her matzo ball soup with hunks of chicken and carrots and onions. Seder! I want a seder!@

We=re done in two hours, not bad for mud. It=s horrifying to reach the van. This means not waking up to a chipmunk scratching over my sleeping bag. No more silence filled with birdsong and wind. No more smoky rain around our lean-to. No more not looking at each other but knowing we are each there. We throw our packs in the van, peel off our steaming socks, and walk tenderfooted to a stream to drink Moniques, Dad=s invention of Tang and scotch.

On the drive out we stop at the first ice cream shack. AMy daughter needs the best hot fudge sundae you can muster,@ he announces to the clerk. She hands him soft serve with chocolate sauce. She doesn=t get my dad.

He is ashamed when he hands it to me. AI=m sorry I couldn=t do better for you. Your first sundae should have been exactly as you described it on the trail.@ Of course, I don=t care--it=s calories and I didn=t have to carry it. But he is truly upset not to be able to do this for me. I see that he thinks about me, loves me, wants me to be nurtured. I gulp the sundae and grin at him with brown ice cream teeth. I want him to know that I get him.

© 2000 Katherine Russell

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GETTING DAD © 2000 By Katherine Russell