He leveled and unhitched the MPP, then set up camp. He hoisted his cooler into a tree whose branches were strong enough to support it but not strong enough — hopefully — to support a black bear. He stopped to watch four deer in the cottonwoods lining the creek, looking at him attentively.
When he was done with the cooler, he stood a few yards away from the MPP and tried to fully appreciate it in this context. How could this svelte man-made confection even be in this wild place? It was the equivalent of one of Steen’s perfect pastries, labeled and in its paper cradle, sitting atop Mount Everest. He shook his head at his good fortune, photographed the MPP from several angles, thought of the yawning aloneness and the huge exertion that were to be his for the next three days.
It was early afternoon by the time he was ready to set off for Madman. Enough time for two runs, he thought. He strapped on his snowshoes and started up the edge of the run, where the snow was shallow and he could sidestep confidently without sinking. He stopped and rested on his poles. The incline was steep, and the way was long. You asked for this, he thought. Within minutes he was breathing hard, but he timed his breath to his movement to make a rhythm, stuck to it, made some progress. He stopped and looked up again, panting now, not believing how far he had to go.
Forty minutes later, he was above the timberline, at the top of Madman, lungs dry, heart beating hard. He stepped up to the very edge of the cornice, snowshoes strapped fast to his back, ski tips in the air. He sipped from the nozzle of the hydration pack. Down-mountain the breeze in the pines made a long, distant rustle. He felt the familiar brew of fear and exhilaration jostling around inside like two ski crossers dueling for the best line, the brew more potent after Wylie’s five-year absence.
He waited for a break in his thoughts.
The fire was hard to start, as usual. He set a small circular grill across the rocks and heated a can of stew. He watched the flames cast light and shadows against the MPP and felt his vast aloneness. Solitary was right. He thought of lovely Pilar at Great St. Bernard’s Hospice and mysterious Juncal at Tegernsee and noted those lovers’ great distance from here and now. But really, it was only months.
He wondered again if he’d done the right thing in coming home. To what avail? He’d regained his family but lost a brother. He’d resumed a pointless lifetime feud. He’d found a possible way to help the people he loved — and realized that he’d been avoiding just that for a number of years now. And maybe, in the same possible way, he could help himself. For the first time in his life, Wylie had a plan that included more than just a short-term future. That night at Jesse’s, around the barbecue, he had described his idea to Jesse as a dream — his first official Wylie as a grown-up Dream — which at the time had struck him as pompous and bourbon-induced.
But now, bourbonless at ten thousand feet, dream still rang true to him. He felt confident he could win the Mammoth Cup. It would take training and luck. Then, close on the heels of the Mammoth Cup would come the X Games and an even higher level of competition. More training and more luck. But the World Cup tour? The Olympics? He almost scoffed, but he didn’t. Why not the Olympics? Why couldn’t that be his dream? Wylie Welborn, Olympian. Olympic ski-cross medalist Wylie Welborn. Were only certain people allowed to dream that? Which people? So what if he was almost twenty-six? So what if he couldn’t afford to tour?
After dinner, he burned the paper bowl and towel, stashed the stew can in the cooler, and hoisted the cooler back into the tree. He set more wood on the fire.
He stepped into the MPP with irrational pride. By the light of an electric lantern, he made up the MPP bed, using Jolene’s mock-Navajo blanket. He climbed in and propped himself up, closed his eyes, and imagined his first run down Madman just a few hours ago. Not bad. It was tentative enough to test the snow and find the hidden patches of ice and to avoid the lower trees and the potentially deadly wells around their bases. But tentative on Madman was still close to breakneck on most any other course.
His second run was made with heavy legs and a mind dulled by hours in a bumping truck and nearly two more hours of high-elevation climbing. Wylie could tell he was twenty-five and no longer twenty. But maybe he could overcome age with training. And this was the place for it. It always amazed him that he could find conditions like today in any but the driest and warmest of years. Solitary, Madman, and Breakfast Creek — all his. A private paradise to train in, Grandpa’s birthday present. Adam had told him once that he’d brought Sky here for his twelfth birthday, too, but Sky had never, to his knowledge, come back. It takes a certain mind-set, Adam had said.
Wylie yawned and felt his energy all but gone and the sweet call of sleep. The box in his mind that housed the Taliban sniper from Kandahar had wandered to the edge of its shelf, where Wylie was now surprised to find it tilting in precarious balance. Sometimes his own tiredness allowed the boxes to spill. Sometimes they’d empty in his dreams when he was defenseless, and all he could do was wake up drenched in sweat, repack them, and place the boxes where they belonged, just so.
He lay in the module and looked up through the portholes at the bright pinpricks of stars and planets and the wide granular dusting of the Milky Way. These seemed indifferent to him, but not wholly different from him. He heard the steady sough of the wind in the trees and was for a long moment unsure where he ended and the world began.
That night, Wylie dreamed he was in Portillo, Chile, after having driven the MPP all the way there to see April Holly. In the dream, April was beautiful but skeptical of him. He had brought her some board wax you could get only in Mammoth. She made jokes about the trailer. In his dream, the MPP had sat silently, absorbing the jokes, riddled with bugs and dirt from the six-thousand-mile journey from California to Chile.
When Wylie woke in the early morning, the battery-hogging lantern had all but run down, but the sunlight was waiting just outside the portholes above him.
Breakfast Creek gurgled in the distance.
He made three runs that day and three the next. He timed each of the latest runs for the last minutes of light before thorough darkness closed on Solitary. The moon was right. In this final twilight, Wylie’s reflexes had to be quicker, while operating on less information. He finished his last run on the third day in moonlit darkness, planes of silver and black rushing him in rapid overlays, guided half by his senses and half by faith.
Later, he bathed in Breakfast Creek, then bundled up in Jolene’s blanket in the MPP. He put on Jolene’s wool boot socks, too. He read and wrote by the freshly charged lantern. He drifted off to sleep, still believing that his idea of making the Olympics was not just a foolish indulgence. In the morning, he felt the same way. It was a quiet confidence, no swagger in it, just faith. The same faith that had guided him down the mountain in the near dark.
Chapter Nineteen
As promised, Wylie got back to Mammoth Lakes the next day in time for the town council meeting. Steen’s application for a sidewalk vending permit had been contested, which required a public hearing before the council, where all sides could be heard.
The Town Council met upstairs in the Von’s shopping center, Suite Z. Steen thought it would be a good idea to show pictures of the Little Red Pastry Shed, so he had two foam-backed posters made from Beatrice’s photographs, and borrowed two easels from an artist friend in town. Wylie and Beatrice helped Steen set them up in the space between the town council members and the citizens. Beatrice kept adjusting them for good viewing angles. The photos were good, in Wylie’s opinion, showing the bright colors of the shed and the beautiful blue Mammoth sky. The town hall seats were full when the meeting started at six.