Coming Ashore Read online

  It was suddenly overcast. God, all I needed was rain. Then I looked carefully at the sky and realized it wasn’t really overcast: it was dusk. This whole thing was taking ages. Clive had warned me about this before he bailed. I really didn’t blame him. I could only see getting to the top of that peak. Why was it always the reward and never the journey I was after? I swore to God, whom I totally believed in at that moment, that if He let me make it back alive, I’d never mention making it to the top of the mountain. I’d just say, “I went mountain climbing.” I also swore I’d never think bad things about anyone ever again, except for Him if He didn’t save me.

  God didn’t seem to be helping, since it was getting darker and I was barely making headway. I started to panic. My heart began racing and I suddenly lost my bearings and had no idea where to turn. Nothing looked familiar. I decided to sit and calm myself. I tried to find an inner calming voice and then I heard Roy from so many years ago. He said when some task seemed too daunting it was best to cut it into bite-sized pieces.

  When I was a little girl and I’d said to Roy that we had too many deliveries to make before Christmas and got in what he called “a tizzy,” he’d say, “One at a time, girl; one at a time.” He would have me grid our deliveries in sections so we would have eight grids of eight instead of sixty-four deliveries. We would go grid by grid. When we finished one grid, we’d give ourselves a treat. His was usually a Johnnie Walker for the cold and mine was a hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows from whatever roadside inn was in our grid. When we were half finished, we had a meal. The deliveries always got done. When I asked what we would do if he got too tired to drive, he said the Rambler was like a milk horse and knew the route. Roy and I would plan our stories the next day for Coke break at the store. They were always based on our adventures, especially at Christmas time, when we would sometimes get to customers’ houses at midnight and we’d had many Johnnie Walkers and many hot chocolates over many grids.

  Roy always came back to me in emergencies because there ­never was an emergency with him — just a good story. When we hit black ice and almost froze to death in farm country in the ­famous cold snap of winter ’57, he said, “Well, we gots to get out of this alive — it’s too good a story to let lie fallow.” We did emerge alive, but frostbite bit a chunk off his nose and my ear. When the spring thaw came that year, Roy said we should go back and look for our facial features at the edge of that cornfield among the other ears.

  I divided the mountain up into grids: the rocky summit, the crumbling shale, the shoulder, the valley, the snow line, the creek, the narrow ledge, the mountain flowers, the foothills and finally the grassy bottom.

  I was so cold my hands were shaking and losing their elasticity and grip. I put them under my shirt and on my still-warm stomach and then tried again. It worked. I finally made it off the rocky summit. I looked at my bleeding nails and fingers and the shrill voice of Irene, the cosmetician at my father’s drugstore, came back to haunt me: “Look at those nails! Cathy, please remember those are jewels not tools.”

  As I worked through the grid, it was getting darker. My third grid down, I was sliding along the narrow path, when I looked across the valley and saw a cat’s eyes shining at me. The translucent eyes caught whatever light there was left or else they glowed from within, which was really scary. I guessed it was a mountain lion, though I couldn’t see his whole body because it was the same mottled grey colour as the mountain. Thankfully the chasm was too wide even for a mountain lion to jump, but it did give me some trepidation about what was ahead once there was no longer a valley between us.

  By this time, it was so dark that only a nocturnal animal could have seen more than a few inches in front of him. Plus each step I took was excruciating. Not having proper hiking boots, my toes kept getting jammed in the front of my flimsy sandals and had to take all of my body weight. With each step, it felt like someone had dropped a large cinder block on my toes and was now grinding it into my entire foot. I had laughed at Clive’s hiking boots, telling him he looked like a Hummel figurine. I guess that had been a bit premature. I’d thought the cold had been bad, but I was now relieved that the cold was numbing my toes.

  Finally, I made it around the north side of the mountain and as I rounded the west side of the path, I was swathed in moonlight. The heather that had just looked like stubble on the dark side of the mountain now took on a pinkish bubble-gum glow. The gentle wind propelled the heather into a slow-motion dance; it was a sensual Carmen-like tango, its dusky purple haze abruptly changing direction as the wind swirled.

  I was almost running now because the pain was too much when I stopped. I needed to get down while the moonlight was exactly on this spot of the mountain. Hours later, I was on the grass and knew I’d make it.

  When I was back at the road, which was much farther from the foot of the mountain than I remembered it, I saw a tiny stone house in the distance. When I got there and found it boarded up, I sank onto the steps and nearly cried. I found out later I was on a ridge surrounded by mountain peaks and not in fact near the bottom of the mountain. There were little hamlets in the mountain valleys.

  I stood on a peak and saw one light flickering in the distance. I thought it was only a mile, but as I kept going I never seemed to get any closer. My feet were wet from the bog and I was losing sensation all the way up my legs. When I lifted my right leg, sometimes it would fly to the side instead of in front of me. Finally, I found two sticks and leaned on them as crutches.

  Like Amahl limping to greet the wise men, I hobbled to the tiny door and knocked. A wrinkled man in a floppy black wool hat opened the door and said in English with a thick Welsh accent, “It’s a public house you’ve come to, lass. Anyone may enter, even an American.” His confrère at the door said, “Since when have the Americans knocked before entering?” How did they know I was American? I was way too tired to hear what a bad country the U.S. was or anything about Vietnam. All I could say was I’d lost feeling. The one Welsh man said to the other, “Our dear Lord and the Felinfoel Brewery helped us do that years ago.”

  As they laughed their heads off and jabbered in Welsh, they helped me hobble over to a roaring fire set in a wonderful old cooking fireplace that was at least as tall as a man. There were two warm milking stools set near the grate. As I gingerly lowered myself onto one, I looked at an old man who sat on the other. He had flowing white hair with just a trace of red left in his beard. He wore a hairy vest and smoked a long pipe with a bevelled stem. He pointed to a white furry dog who slept right at the fire’s edge and indicated I should put my feet right on his back. Confused I asked, “Where? On that curly haired dog?”

  “That, my sweet darlin’, is a sheep — unless you get wool from a dog in the United States of America,” piped up another man. Everyone was now crowded around me, howling with laughter.

  Finally a young man asked, “Where you from in America?”

  “Buffalo.”

  “The plains where the buffalo roam?”

  “No. New York.”

  There was a hush and the word was passed to the back of the crowd, “She’s from New York, now.”

  “Ah, New York is it?” the waitress said, as though that explained everything about why I appeared at the door with crutches in the middle of the night somewhere in or near Snowdonia.

  I said I’ve never seen a sheep up close until recently, nor had I ever seen one in a bar. This tavern was an odd place, a sort of big, snug barn that served alcohol. The ceiling had original beams, and the walls were burned with horseshoe prints and hung with cast-iron tools, the remnants of having once been a blacksmith’s barn. There were people from eighteen to eighty in the place and everyone was abuzz as though this was a special evening. The lamb sat next to the fire and its coat was so warm that I could bury my feet into its toasty wool blanket. The bartender made me hot mead with raisins floating on top. It felt so soothing to cup my hands around the hot mug
and gulp down the fiery liquid that I could have done a jig if I could have used “me pegs.” Unfortunately, they were still ungovernable stumps. I related to the few people who spoke English the whole tale of what had happened. A teenager translated and they were amazed that I hadn’t gotten lost. I had never even thought of the possibility of getting lost.

  “There are so many crannies in there, wee one,” said the ­woman who wiped the tables. “St. Christopher himself would get lost in its folds.”

  One thing I was taught by Roy was to watch for every visual sign when you make a turn and then commit them all to memory. He couldn’t read, so that’s how he got himself around. I never made a turn without committing the corner to memory and now that I’d thought of it, I had never once in my life been lost.

  As more people came in, they said a climber from East Anglia in a wool hat had not returned to the lodge and was presumed lost. I said I had seen him and told the mountaineering team when I’d seen him and where. “He was about five hundred feet below the jump from the Eve to Adam when he passed me. I noticed him because he was so wisely dressed and had a map in a plastic sheath. How come no one told me it gets colder on top of a mountain? Isn’t it closer to the sun?”

  “There’s lots you don’t learn in New York,” the old man with the pipe said to those around him.

  The teenager who had translated said, “I’ll bet there’s lots you do learn,” clearly longing to get out of his mountain town with its two buildings.

  “Ah, we’ve lost many a man in that Adam and Eve gap,” the old man said.

  His crony said, “Many a man, many a man. It doesn’t look far, but if you overstep it the results are disastrous with sheer cliffs on the other side.”

  “Triw, Adam and Eve should never have gotten together; that’s why the good Lord split that mountain at the top,” the woman who owned the tavern said as though she was speaking from ­experience, and no one contradicted her.

  “Shut your clanging cakeholes,” shouted an old toothless ­woman at the bar. “It’s the time.” As she fussed with the tuning of the television’s one channel, I looked around and realized that this was one of those bars hidden from the authorities to avoid paying tax on the alcohol. That’s why the men were guarding the door. It was in the mountains and no one knew of it other than the locals.

  “What’s happening on the television?” I asked. It was way too late for soccer, which the English called “football.”

  “Why, it’s the moon shot!” the old man with the pipe told me. “It’s Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Doubt they made it. Another Kennedy promise from the colonies fallin’ flat on its arse.”

  His friend agreed, saying, “Why that young Kennedy couldn’t have driven straight across a bog let alone get to the moon — not when he was alive and certainly not now that he’s joined his maker.”

  “Nothin’ new about an Irishman wanting the moon,” his buddy replied.

  “This TV gets the best reception in the mountains,” another man reassured me.

  “Here it is now. Shut your gobs!” the owner yelled.

  There was silence in the room as Walter Cronkite came on. With Walter making me homesick and my feet throbbing as they swelled, my eyes teared up. I yelled in a mead-enhanced timbre, “Hi, Walter!”

  The teenage boy whispered to the old man, “She knows Walter Cronkite.”

  Suddenly we heard Neil Armstrong say, “The eagle has ­landed.” The picture moved to mission control in Houston, where all the engineers were jumping up and waving little American flags. Their smiling faces looked like my dad’s, and they wore the same thin ties and white shirts. Neil Armstrong bounced out of the lunar module and took a tiny step just to make sure the ground could hold him. He then said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Everyone in the bar clapped. I was so proud to be American. Just like when I was a little girl. It had been so long since I felt national pride. We’d done it. As Armstrong planted the American flag, a group of Welsh men came over and picked up my stool and cheered me as though I alone had sent men to the moon. The weird thing was I did feel as though I’d done it. They paraded me around with my swollen legs and we partied. Everyone bought me a drink of warm mead. I turned up my nose at the two men who had insulted the memory of John Kennedy. One man stood on the bar and made a toast to me saying, “The good Lord sent a bedraggled American to our manger door to share this great event with us. We can always say we saw it with an American lass.”

  >> <<<br />
  I stayed overnight in an apartment upstairs, where the owner lived with her husband. Miraculously, the whole time I was in Wales, no one would take even a farthing for their hospitality. As I lay in bed, although exhausted, I began thinking how much this moon landing would have meant to my father if he hadn’t had a brain tumour. I’m sure he’d watched it, but I didn’t know if he would have understood it or remembered it for more than a second. Yet the rest of the world would remember it for the remainder of their lives.

  The ’60s were drawing to a close. All the men that the counterculture had mocked, the engineering twits with their slide rules and pen holders in their pockets, “the establishment” men who worked hard every day, had made it happen. As I lay there under my frayed quilt, staring at the ancient ceiling beams, I began to feel differently about my idols of the ’60s: Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers, the SDS Weathermen and the Abbie Hoffman radicals. They were still activists with legitimate beefs, but they were no longer my heroes. I was growing up — I guess we all were.

  Living in England helped me to see what was wonderful about the States. Americans had no class structure — at least not compared to England. In America, if you worked hard, you could get ahead. People were more free and could be judged on their own merits — something I didn’t really notice until I experienced the stultifying English class system. When an American talked, you could tell where he was from, but not his social standing. When those American aerospace engineers working on the moon shot talked on TV about what they had done, you had no idea what kind of family they had come from. All you felt was pride in their accomplishments.

  There had been many tears in the national fabric: Vietnam, the war that tore us apart, pit brother against brother and child against parent; the assassinations; the race rioting. But with the moon shot we could at least end the era on an up note — one that united us all.

  >> <<<br />
  Arriving in Shrewsbury in the county of Shropshire, I couldn’t believe that only five days had passed since I’d descended the mountain. I had hobbled through the roads that were still full of abandoned cars, eventually hitchhiking east from Snowdonia. Hitchhiking is for carefree youth, not for the prodigal woman who is walking on crutches one week after nearly having her lower appendages amputated. (Believe me, you don’t want the details.) The swelling had gone down, but the skin on my legs had split from having expanded too much and too rapidly and it was still peeling.

  Limping and in pain, I stopped to rest my tree-stump right leg in the Shrewsbury’s Dingle Gardens. In this sunken garden near a quarry, there was a mammoth ancient tree with a green octagonal bench that encircled the trunk. Since my leg was pounding, I propped it on the bench and wrote a postcard to Professor Beech. I had grown fond of him. The English system was so much different from the American. You could really share a lot with your professor because you had a one-to-one relationship. It was so much better than Psychology 101 in Ohio, where there were 200 students in a huge auditorium and you got extra points toward your grade if you would be a subject in an experiment. I was lucky to have found him. Although he was a repressed, major mothball tweed, he lit up over literature. If I mentioned any ­pathetic little stray thought, he took it seriously and always found an article on it for our next meeting. He seemed genuinely interested in my ideas. It may have been a good act, as he’d many years to hone his reaction to sophomoric id
iots, but I bought it. If I said I ­admired a particular passage of some writer, he would say, “Oh well if you liked that …” then he would whisk round his office on a sliding ladder until he ground to a sudden halt when he found something that was always remarkably pertinent. Nothing other than poetry and literature mattered to him. If I mentioned anything other than the written word, he just coughed and muttered, “Quite right, quite right” until I returned to the topic of literature.

  I had actually forgotten that I’d stayed overnight in Shrewsbury in 1969 until I unearthed a note folded in a book of Wordsworth’s poetry opened over thirty-five years later by my son who used my old volume at university. I can’t believe I wrote the following note, considering that any reference to the body made Professor Beech rapidly shuffle his papers and sometimes he ripped them up and threw them away faster than a modern paper shredder. As my mother would have said to me, “What were you thinking?”

  Dear Professor Beech,

  Well I think my enthusiasms have outdone our one and only Dylan Thomas. While his was libations, mine was mountain climbing. On the way to Cardiff to see Thomas’s haunts I began to be overly inspired in Snowdonia. I climbed the biggest mountain — everything here has a Welsh word so who knows what it was called. (Have the Welsh ever heard of vowels?) Anyway I climbed to the top, losing all friends on the way up, and by the time I got down after midnight I was on Welsh crutches (two crooked sticks and a jar of mead). The next morning all of my toenails turned black and the day following that, they all fell off. Apparently I killed the nail beds by putting pressure on the nail all the way down the hill. How come Wordsworth never mentioned his need for boots when mountain climbing? I guess he was only looking at the sky. Anyway, I now have the Byronic clubfoot. Then I developed cellulitis, some hideous infection that makes my leg look like I have elephantiasis.

  Lest you think I’m finished with my horror, read on.

  Then I got to Shrewsbury, trying to hobble home, and the police had blocked all the exits to the town. No one can get on a highway. The M6 and all the M’s are closed. The worst traffic jams England has ever had. Apparently everyone in England went to the investiture. (I will never believe anyone who complains about the monarchy again.) For a country of smart people, it is pretty stupid to have one main road. The police told me that people are running out of gas and food on the all the roads leading to and from Caernarfon.