The Campsite
By Rodney Cimburke
Copyright 2012 Rodney Cimburke
The Campsite
David was eight and this was his first and only camping trip. His parents, Cort and Charlotte had been coming to this same duff-carpeted saddle on the hillside since before he was born, and until he had reached this arbitrary number, he stayed with his grandparents, sometimes for a week at a time.
He didn’t actually mind staying with his grandparents, George and Rhea; they had that kind of old-couple house where the couches always felt like cool clouds in the summer, and cakes seemed to be sweating from the walls. There was a huge bible in a sweet-smelling cedar box.
His grandparents too camped exclusively at this spot, and there was a lengthy sequence of gilt-framed photos of the two of them there, and eventually his eight-year-old father with them. The campsite was the same, it just started sepia, and along with the aging subjects, the photos blended perfectly each into the next like an accidental prototype of the motion picture. The last snapshot was the one taken last year; his parents (who had somehow seamlessly replaced his grandparents in the pictures) were standing beside their dome tent, their smiling faces striped by the shadows of overhead branches.
The closer David got to eight years old, the more interested he became in the catalogue of past camping trips on his grandparents’ walls, and his grandfather’s stories of them. His father corroborated these tales, adding his own, until this secret place took on proportions that Camelot would be at odds to reproduce.
****
The closer the Subaru climbed to the campsite, the more treacherous the road became. They had long since left behind asphalt, and David couldn’t help but stare down into the canyon, the edge of which was only inches away from the wagon’s tires as it wound up into the mountains.
“Don’t worry Buddy,” Cort said, catching his son’s frantic eyes in the rearview. “Your mom and I have driven up here thousands of times, right Shar?”
“It’s true,” his mother answered, turning to smile at him.
The gravel of the road thinned until they were driving on the absolute plutonic stone of the mountains themselves, the little four-wheel-drive wagon lurching and hopping under Cort’s hands.
There was a last, nasty curve before they leveled out onto the high, wide benchland they were destined for. Cort stopped the car from pure memory; he got out and cleared away a patch of winter deadfall. He slipped back behind the wheel grinning at his wife and son. “Here we are!” He said.
He turned straight into the wall of firs where the pile of branches had been, the overhanging boughs brushing the car like a giant green carwash.
The road through this golden-moted forest could hardly be called that. Saplings stood in the middle of it and got sucked under the front bumper as they crawled through this verdant, somehow aqueous world.
The trees thinned and shrunk away from the road and the Subaru bounced into the clearing of the campsite. All three of them were holding their breath.
The terrace they were on had faulted, sliding down some forty feet, and the bare rock of the high scarp was jointed in columns and stippled with monkey flower. Beyond, the true mountains stood, gargantuan and improbable. The permanent glacial snow up there glowed in the morning sun; the glaciers themselves were underlit with their own light—a blue so blue it hummed. Two eagles set forth from some inaccessible aerie, wheeling and chittering, either welcoming them or warning them away. Cort cut the engine.
The only sounds were birds and the wind. After their ears adjusted to the absence of human noise, they could hear the glacier-fed creek plashing across the saddle on the opposite end of the clearing. The Subaru’s engine ticked as it cooled after the climb.
The lowlands they had left behind were spread below them; the town, so far away, seemed a model in a trainset, the church steeples looked cardboard and cheap.
“So,” Charlotte asked, bending down to David’s level, “what do you think?”
David’s mouth hadn’t closed all the way since he stepped from the car into this precious, slanting sunlight; he found no words in his eight-year lexicon that would do the place justice.
Cort sidled up to them, said: “This is our place, Buddy. Always has been.”
His parents smiled at each other, then started unpacking their gear.