They were playing tic-tac-toe without paper on the way to Pictured Rock National Park, imagining the grid with boxes numbered one to nine.
“Nine,” Mark said.
“Five,” said Albert.
“Six.”
“Uhh . . . three.”
“Seven.”
“One?”
“Eight,” Mark said. “I win.”
“Oh, damn!” Albert said. “I can never remember where all of yours are.”
Mark shrugged. “It’s just a matter of keeping the whole board in your head at once.”
“I think,” said Jim, the driver, “that a tic-tac-toe grid is a little bit too big for Bert’s head.”
Albert made a harrumphing sound and stretched his whole long body out on the back seat of Jim’s Chrysler. It was a huge car, big enough for all three of them to stretch, with room for the cooler, the groceries, and a tent. The trunk was crammed with backpacks and sleeping bags and two more tents.
“Some people play chess that way,” Mark said after a while.
“What way?” asked Jim.
“You know–in their heads. They remember where all the pieces are for every move in the whole game.”
“I had a friend,” Albert said from the back seat, “who played Monopoly that way.”
“Too much to remember,” Jim said.
They were not far from Germfask, Michigan, a town near the park. Four hours ago they had left Green Bay, Wisconsin, after a night with friends at a college there. The trip from Madison to Lake Superior was too long for a full-day push north; besides, it was summer–they had all the time in the world. Surviving the summer–especially this summer, Mark thought–was simply a matter of spending the most time with the least thought possible.
“Why don’t we stop in Germfask?” Jim suggested.
“Let’s not,” said Albert.
“You’re driving,” said Mark.
“It’s getting late,” Albert complained. “We have to put up tents and start a fire–I don’t want to do it in the dark.”
“It won’t be dark,” said Jim. “It’s only six o’clock.”
“Seven,” Mark corrected him. “Eastern time.”
“Seven o’clock,” Jim said. “We have time.”
“But I’m hungry,” Albert said, his voice rising in pitch. “Let’s get to camp and make supper.”
“I’m sure there’s a restaurant in Germ-whatever,” Mark said.
Mark could hear Albert shifting around in the back, probably folding his stick-like arms over his chest and pressing his thin lips into a pout. Albert sighed deeply, a sign of unhappy complicity, and said, “I brought my own food. I’ll wait.”
Jim stopped the car beside the Germfask Grocery and Book Shop and they stepped out onto the muddy sidewalk. Albert sighed again, angrily, and mumbled, “I’ll probably stub my toe in the dark now.”
The store apparently served several needs in Germfask. It was a small grocery, with a refrigerated case of beer, milk, and juice in the back; it was a bookstore, specializing in used paperbacks; and it was a tourist center, with two spinning racks filled with maps, postcards, and guidebooks. Mark spun the rack of postcards, and was surprised to see that many were black-and-white photographs with scalloped edges, apparently showing an old fishing camp as it had been in the 1950s, perhaps earlier.
“Look at this,” said Mark, holding one of the old cards up for Jim. “I’ll bet Jane would get a kick out of these.”
“You should get some,” Jim said, grabbing a cardboard box of William Penn cigars off the rack in front of the cash register.
“You’re getting those?” Albert wrinkled his nose at the cigars.
“There’ll be plenty of smoke from the fire,” said Jim. “You won’t even notice.”
“I doubt that.”
“So do I,” muttered Mark. He wondered why Albert had agreed to come along on the trip; Mark had asked him more out of courtesy than because he really wanted him to join them. Or expected him to.
“I’ll probably go to bed early,” Albert said, leaving the store empty-handed.
“He’s sort of a pill,” Jim said after Albert had gone.
“He’s a decent guy,” said Mark. “Just needs to loosen up a little. Camping will be good for him.”
“I’ll consider it a karma-building experience,” said Jim, setting a wrinkled ten dollar bill down on the counter along with his cigars.
They set camp in the dark. Even in the light, it would have been difficult. Jim had forgotten to bring stakes for his pup tent, and had to run his guy lines to Albert’s on the left and Mark’s on the right. Albert didn’t stub his toe, but he did trip over the lines that connected his tent to Jim’s. While Mark built the fire–he was very proud of the little blaze that he started in the stone fire pit with only two matches–Albert went to bed. He hadn’t eaten.
“That really wasn’t a very good store,” Jim apologized. He had produced a folding lawn chair from somewhere in the Chrysler and was settling into a spot near the fire.
“It was interesting,” Mark said. He squatted by the pit, tossing small, dry sticks into the flames. “I love these postcards. They must be thirty years old.”
“Cigar?” Jim offered.
“Sure.” Mark took the cigar and peeled off the cellophane wrapper, stuffing it carefully into his shirt pocket. While Jim lit the blunt end of his cigar in the fire, Mark stopped feeding the flames and looked across the dirt road that ran by the campsite. In the dark, just beyond his range of sight, was Lake Superior. Words like, “Largest freshwater lake in the world,” statistics like, “31,000 square miles, more than half the size of Wisconsin,” filled his head. He didn’t know why he remembered those little facts–he had learned them in third grade geography class–but they were persistent. What they really meant, though, he wasn’t sure.
“Eastern time, huh?” Jim said. When he spoke, thick grey smoke oozed out of the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah,” Mark said. He put the end of his cigar in the coals and stirred the little red balls of heat. “Isn’t it strange? We went northwest, but our watches went east.”
“Are you going to set yours ahead?”
“I don’t know. I’d sort of like to just leave it in the tent all weekend. There shouldn’t be any time here in the woods.”
“Bert wouldn’t stand for that,” Jim said, laughing.
“I know.” Mark puffed at the cigar. The leaf wrapper was sweet, as if it had been dipped in sugar water, but the smoke stung his tongue until his whole mouth hurt. He decided to puff only occasionally, enjoying instead the sight of the cigar’s slow, smoky burn down to the butt.
“Four time zones,” Jim said after awhile. “My God, it’s a big country.”
“The Soviet Union has nine.”
“Really? That’s almost half a day!”
“A whole day just going from Alaska across to Siberia. But that’s arbitrary.”
“No wonder I never know what time it is,” Jim said. The wind blowing up the slope from the lake was wet and cold. It was, Mark mused, his first touch of Lake Superior, his first immersion in it. The airy lake stretched the limbs of the maple trees behind them, and turned them into wooden crickets rubbing mating calls on their leafy legs.
“Where’s Jane this summer?” Jim asked.
“Russia,” Mark said.
“Oh. Has she written?”
“Once.”
“How long does mail take to get from there to here?”
“A couple of weeks.” He puffed at the cigar and blew the smoke out of his nostrils. It stung enough to make him wince. “She’s been gone four.”
It was too cloudy to see the crescent moon or the summer constellations–Draco, Ares, Cancer, the Little Bear. The last amber streaks of the sunset had disappeared over the edge of the horizon, and the dark from the east had settled in heavily over the park. Their fire spread a pale glow as far as the front of their tents, but not farther. The trees, singing in the wind, were mystery.
“I was supposed to go out to San Francisco to see Karen last month,” Jim said. He tossed the stubby thumb of his cigar into the pit.
“What happened?”
“She suggested I not come,” he said. “It’s a long drive, anyway–Montana would be hell.”
“How’s Albert’s love life?” Mark asked.
“Be serious.” Jim laughed. “We’re three men alone in the woods,” he said. “Just like something out of a Hemingway story.”
“Just like,” Mark said.
Even with a down-filled mummy bag, it was a chilly night. Mark had expected the first week of July to be much warmer, even in the Upper Peninsula, but throughout the night he was jostled awake by his chattering teeth. In the pitch black of his tent, there was nothing to do but think about cold and distances.
He wondered what Jane was doing now, and how long it would take a letter to reach her if he mailed one from the post office in Germfask. The postmark would amuse her if she saw it. But, he reasoned, there was a good chance the letter would never reach her—she was due back in the States in just six weeks, and he wasn’t really sure that it took only two weeks for mail to arrive. After all, he’d received only the one brief, almost terse, letter since she’d left four weeks ago; surely there were more in the pipeline.
Mark considered getting his flashlight and writing to Jane on one of the old postcards he’d bought, but then thought better of it. He wasn’t sure the fragile, yellow cardstock would survive the trip; and besides, there was something too exposed about the back of a card. What could he possibly say that he would feel comfortable having strangers read?
It was almost six o’clock according to Mark’s watch, which was still set to Wisconsin time. It was probably about supper time already in Russia—did Russians eat early or late, he wondered?—and Mark was starting to feel hungry for breakfast.
He convinced himself that it would be warmer by the fire than in his tent, despite the sprint to the cold fire pit, so he threw on his shirt. The fire had nearly burnt itself out, but was easy enough to rekindle.
Mark set the grill across the flames and put the coffee pot on the hottest part of the fire. He dropped two heaping spoonfuls of course-ground coffee into the pot and sat back in Jim’s lawn chair, breathing in the thick smell of smoke, coffee, and pine.
In the morning light, Lake Superior was a great sparkling disc framed by trees, road, and clouds. From the campsite, it was impossible to tell if the water had any more depth than a rain puddle.
An hour later, Jim came out of his tent, scratching his tousled head and stumbling toward the fire. Mark moved out of the lawn chair and made more coffee.
“What’s the plan for today?” Mark asked.
Jim sipped coffee out of a tin camping cup. “I thought we’d go out to the sand dunes.”
“Sand dunes?”
Jim pulled a tattered brochure out of his back pocket and opened it to the map of Pictured Rock National Park. “They’re a couple of miles up the shore from here. If we get out by nine, we can have lunch on the beach.”
Mark set up the aluminum reflector oven on the rocks by the coals and pulled the Pillsbury Butter Milk Biscuits roll out of the cooler. The dough was sticky and soft, formed into misshapen yellow balls that quickly turned ash grey as they cooked.
“You gonna eat those things?” Jim asked.
“Probably. I’ll eat things in the woods I wouldn’t dream of in civilization.” Mark moved the biscuits around, searching for the best heat. “A little dirt adds flavor.”
Jim poured more coffee into his cup. He sloshed the grounds up on the sides and scooped them out with his finger. “Save one for me,” he said.
Albert emerged from his tent at about eight o’clock by Mark’s watch. They put out the fire and zipped up the tents at nine o’clock. Jim had moved their lunches–peanut butter sandwiches, animal crackers, and apple juice–from the cooler to a small green backpack for the hike and picnic. Albert was grumpy–his bacon had slid off his plate and into the dirt, and his toast had burnt to blackness. The coffee had been too gritty, the orange juice had been too warm, and he hadn’t slept well all night.
Mark and Jim changed into hiking shorts for the walk to the dunes; Albert kept his jeans. Mark had seen Albert in shorts only once–his nearly hairless, white legs were covered with gooseflesh and his ankles were hidden under black nylon dress socks. Albert had always seemed a little grotesque to Mark, but in shorts he was nearly unbearable to look at.
The sand along the lakeshore was damp and cold, almost like mud. Mark took off his shoes and let the little white-tipped breakers smack against his bare feet. The water was cold and clear, fresher than any he had ever seen before. He could see the beach stretching out under the water, gently sloping, until the lake turned blue and opaque. The sky was cloudless.
They walked along the sandy beach for half an hour. Ten minutes along they began meeting the rib-like skeletons of old wooden ships, half buried in the sand. Long spurs towered over their heads, some terminating in ragged splinters against the sky. It was hard to believe that the lake, so placid this morning, could turn as rough and violent as a stormy sea. Mark wondered what it would be like in one of those storms, to know that your ship wouldn’t hold.
When they came to the fork in the path, Jim decided to stay on the shoreline. “It’ll be more scenic down here,” he said, shrugging toward the path that disappeared behind the trees.
“It would be drier on the cliffs,” said Albert. But Mark shrugged and followed Jim, who was already far ahead.
Eventually the path disappeared. The shore had become a long stretch of uneven limestone cliffs that rippled in and out like a curtain, forming bulges and coves. Rivulets of spring water, long and narrow cataracts, poured out of the cliffs as though Moses had struck them. Vines and small shrubs stretched down from the cliff tops and clung to the stones around the waterfalls. The forest leaned back from the edge as if leery of the sudden drop.
“Follow me!” Jim yelled, jumping from the path’s sudden end and into the shallow water on the shore. Mark jumped after him, then turned around to wait for Albert. The water was icy cold, numbing him from the knees down.
“Damn it,” Albert muttered. “What the hell are we walking through the damned lake for?” He sat on the broad boulder at the path’s terminus and took off his shoes and socks. For several moments he dabbled his toes in the water before sliding into the lake up to his knees. His jeans turned blue-black.
They all fell into their own pace. Jim was far ahead, carrying the picnic backpack over his head, disappearing into coves and then becoming a dark blur rounding a bulge. Albert was far behind, a slow, straight shadow moving with juggernaut precision, eyes downcast. Mark found an easy gait in the middle.
The water, which ranged between Mark’s knees and his ankles, was liquid glass, like thick, cold, wet air. His submarine path was built of rocks made round by millennia of glaciers and waves that rubbed them like a nervous man jingling change in his pockets. The lake was a transparent funhouse mirror, making his bare feet stretch and shrink as he walked. Around the stubs of cliff sticking out into Superior, the water fell to his ankles. In the coves, it crept up his thighs; the breaker waves slapped against the cliff, wearing their way deeper into the limestone with a wet, hollow echo. Occasionally he fished a round, flat rock from the path and threw it out toward the deep water, watching it skip several times toward the horizon.
The progress of the walk was westward and deep. Mark noticed, after a half mile of wading, that the water was rising higher up his legs. He looked for Jim up ahead, and it seemed that the vanguard hiker was pushing through chest-deep water.
“Deeper and deeper,” Mark muttered. He imagined himself walking on into the middle of the lake, steadily striding until his head was covered by waves. It would almost be easy, he thought, to simply keep walking.
Until he fell into the hole. He and the lake suddenly swallowed each other; he splashed forward, waving his arms, while his head plunged under the water. Panicked, he thrashed his way sideways and backwards and up, glimpsing the cliff and the cloudless sky through the water, stretched out the way his feet had been when looking down. He made a clumsy backstroke toward the shore and grabbed onto the cliff. It seemed like a long time before he dared to lower his feet toward the bottom and search for the shallow water again.
Albert was making slow progress toward Mark. He was up to his waist in Lake Superior, his light blue T-shirt turned royal up to his armpits. Every step seemed to be a struggle, a careful movement for which every possible consequence had been considered before action was taken.
“There’s a hole out here, Albert!” Mark called back to him, even though he knew that Albert, with his head turned ever down to the lake, would certainly see it before he fell.
Albert nodded, never breaking his stride. His confidence back, Mark continued along the shore, more conscious now of the stones under his feet than the cliffs and streams over his head.
When Mark reached the beach that suddenly jutted out past the limestone cliffs, he found a block-like Norman sandcastle, complete with a moat formed by a spring that ran down from the hill over the beach and a bridge across the circular barrier. Decorative stones–brick red and ivory white and jet black–were pressed into the walls of the castle and along the path that led from the sandy hinterlands to the bridge and fortress. Jim himself was stretched out on the beach, his feet in the water and his shirt balled up under his head. He had been busy while waiting on the beach.
“Hey, Jim,” Mark said, dropping down beside him, exhausted. “Did you hit that hole out there?”
“Jumped over it,” Jim said. “It was like zero-gravity moon-bouncing.”
“I fell into it,” Mark said. “All the way under.”
“Surprise?”
“Big.”
Mark lay down beside Jim, letting the sun press warm fingers against his wet chest and legs. He was suddenly aware of his hunger.
“Do you have the lunch?” Mark asked.
“Over by the Royal Palace,” Jim said. “It got a little wet.”
Mark rolled over and crawled across the beach to the green backpack beside the sandcastle. It was a darker green than when they had started.
“The animal crackers dissolved,” Mark said after he had pried open the cardboard circus wagon. “They’re mush now.”
“How are the sandwiches?” Jim asked.
“Not much better. The apple juice is fine, though.” He pulled the tinfoil tab off of the steel can and sipped at the amber juice. “It’s nice and cold.”
“We’ve got the world’s biggest cooler here,” Jim said, waving his arm sleepily toward Lake Superior. “It’s just a little leaky, that’s all.”
Mark stretched his feet out toward the cliffs and lay back with his head near the edge of the beach. The sun was warm on his cold legs. He started to doze off, listening to Lake Superior splashing against the sand. Somewhere close by were children—he could hear laughter bouncing off the water, distorted like his feet had been on the hike.
In Russia, it must be about midnight. He wondered if Jane was far enough north that it was still light outside. He decided that she must be; her letter had been postmarked in Leningrad, and she had said in it that the city they were staying in was only an hour away by train. She had also mentioned that she would be sharing a coach on the train with Brad, who was from Connecticut; Mark wondered if Brad was much better looking than him.
Albert staggered onto the beach like Robinson Crusoe first landing on his island, and dripped on Mark’s head as he made his way to the backpack. His face puckered when he saw the sorry state of their lunch. He chewed silently on the soggy peanut butter sandwich and sullenly drank the apple juice. He ignored the animal crackers completely.
After Albert had finished his lunch, he stood up and peeled off his soaking wet jeans–he had been wearing swimming trunks under them the entire time. Jim rolled his eyes at Mark, who tried to hide his giggle against the back of his hand. Mark stood up and walked around the sandspur, heading inland. Jim and Albert followed.
Steep, tall sand dunes rose from the far end of the beach as high as the cliffs they had passed. A large group of children– ten or eleven years old, probably from a summer camp–were running up and sliding down the dunes, or splashing roughly about in the water.
“Looks like that’s the only way up,” Jim said, nodding toward the dunes. “That or the cliffs.”
“Or back through the water,” Mark said. Albert glared at him.
“They look steep,” Albert said.
“Look–those kids aren’t having any trouble,” said Mark. The children ran up the dunes as easily as they ran across the flat beach. “It’ll be a lot easier than all that wading.”
“And drier,” Jim said.
Mark was wrong. The dunes sloped gently up ten or fifteen feet until they became hard-packed dirt that rose steeply toward the top. It was nearly impossible to find a hand and foot hold stable enough to pull himself off of the gentle sand and onto the packed wall. And once that had been done, there still remained the problem of scaling the dune.
Mark scrabbled and slid and nearly lost his shoes, which filled with sand and sank until he jerked them up by the tongue. His mouth filled with dust and his hands chapped. Once he turned around and looked down at the tiny beach below and saw that the children had used large rocks to spell out, “JESUS SAVES.” Mark was not so sure of that. His shoulders and legs ached from the climb.
And all the while children ran laughing past him up the dune or came tumbling down in a great cloud of gleeful dirt.
When he finally made it to the top, pulling himself under the wooden guard rail that ran along the edge of the dune, Mark turned around and looked out over the lake. Up here, it wasn’t framed the way it was back at the campsite–the lake was opened to his eyes, laid out round and long and huge. It buckled in the middle and melted off toward the horizon, the same way the sky turned into a dome at its zenith. To his left, westward toward camp, was a long line of clouds that turned gradually darker shades of grey until they were solid black far out toward Minnesota. He thought he saw a few flashes of sheet lightning in the slow-moving storm. But here, on the dune, the sun was still warm and the sky pale blue. It amazed him that a sky could be so big as to hold these contradictions at once.
“Looks like rain,” Jim said. He had made it to the top of the dune long before Mark, having moved nearly as quickly as those children.
“Must be over our tents by now,” Mark observed. “Did you roll up the windows on the car?”
“I hope so.”
It rained heavily while they walked back to the campsite along the wood-slat path through the woods. Jim ran ahead again, yawping like a barbarian as the cold rain poured over him. Mark walked and jogged at intervals, already so wet that it hardly mattered how long it took him to get back to camp. And Albert had returned to his juggernaut pace, his jeans tied around his neck and over his head like a pathetic hood.
Back at the camp, they found a smeared note underneath the Chrysler’s windshield wiper. It consisted of a mimeographed copy of the park’s camping regulations and a handwritten message from the ranger, made illegible by the rain. The third point of the regulations–“3. NO MORE THAN TWO TENTS may be pitched at a campsite at one time”–had been circled in blue ink. The brief storm had passed while they were on the path, and the sky had returned to its original pale blue. It was dry enough, Jim concluded, to comply with the ranger’s suggestion.
“I can just take mine out from between your tents,” Jim said. “After all, they’re your stakes.”
“No,” said Mark. “Let me take mine down.”
“Why?”
Mark shrugged. “I’m not sure. I just feel like taking it down.”
“Suit yourself, I guess.”
While Mark took down and rolled up his tent, Albert prepared his supper. It was more successful than his breakfast–a small grease-fire in the sausage pan was the only disaster. Mark pulled up the stakes that Jim’s tent didn’t need and watched Albert’s face relax as he filled himself with sausage patties, baked beans, and two oranges.
“I guess it was a good trip,” Albert said after he was finished.
“What do you mean?” said Jim. “You hated every second of it. You complained about the water, you griped about the sand dunes, you mumbled about the rain. You didn’t even try to eat your animal crackers!”
Albert smiled and dabbed at his lips with a crumpled napkin. “It was an adventure, though. I guess.”
By sunset, Albert was in a good enough mood to share the last three William Penn cigars with Mark and Jim. They sat around the fire while the night settled on them, reconstructing the day. Albert didn’t remember the miniature waterfalls or the sudden hole; he had a clear conception only of the multi-colored rocks under the water. Jim only remembered that the spring-water falls were very high and cold; he didn’t remember the vines and shrubs clinging to the mossy stones around the streams. Only Mark had stood at the top of the sand dune and tried, unsuccessfully, to hold the whole of Lake Superior in his mind the way he had held the tic-tac-toe grid.
“It was the storm,” Mark said, “that I liked best. The way the lightning flashed way out west while the sky over us was so blue.”
“It wasn’t blue for long,” Albert muttered.
The constellations–Draco, Aries, Cancer, the Little Bear–wheeled around the North Star, and the moon had grown into a fat scythe. Lake Superior’s night wind had started to blow again, pushing the wispy smoke of their fire toward the two tents that huddled against the trees behind them. Mark listened to the now-familiar sound of the waves stretching themselves flat on the beach.
“Where are you going to sleep, Mark?” Jim asked.
Mark shrugged. “Out here, I guess.”
“Aren’t there bears?” Albert worried.
“I don’t think so. I’ll just sit up with the fire for a while if you guys are going to bed.”
Through the trees that pressed in against the road Mark saw the purple and magenta flashes of the Aurora Borealis, high over the lake. The Northern Lights danced and wriggled like a snake, bending like the shoreline they had waded beside. The darkness filled in the coves and retreated before the bulges, wet and cold and clear and huge as Lake Superior itself.