Eileen Gunn
Questionable Practices
For Michael Swanwick, who doubled my productivity over a decade, and for Marianne Porter, who said “Humor him.”
Up the Fire Road
Andrea
The main thing to understand about Christy O’Hare is he hates being bored. Complicated is interesting, simple is dull, so he likes to make things complicated.
Used to be the complications were more under his control. Like one time he went down to Broadway for coffee, but the coffee place was closed. So he hitched a ride downtown, but the driver was headed for Olympia on I-5, so Christy figured he’ll go along for the ride and get his coffee at that place in Oly that has the great huevos. He ended up thumbing to San Francisco and coming back a week later with a tattoo and a hundred bucks he didn’t have when he left home. I think he was more interested in doing something that would make a good story than he was in gettiing a cup of coffee. But I did wonder where the hell he was.
He’s not a bad guy. I don’t agree with what my mother said about him being a selfish son-of-a-bitch. But Christy is the star of his own movie, and it’s an action flick. If life is dull, just hook up with him for a while. And if life seems slow and meaningless, go somewhere where you depend on him to get you back.
Like the ski trip. It’s not that he wanted us to get lost on Mt. Baker, where we could have died of exposure, but ordinary cross-country skiing, on groomed trails, with parking lots and everything, is just so crowded and boring. Starting out way too late makes things more interesting. Drinking a pint of Hennessey and smoking a couple joints makes things much more interesting and gives the Universe a head start.
That’s how we found ourselves, last year, four miles up a fire road as the sun was setting. Early March: warm days, cold nights. Slushy snow, pitted with snowshoe tracks, turning to ice as the temperature dropped. Did we bring climbing skins for our skis? Of course not. Did we bring a headlamp, or even a flashlight? Nope.
“We’ve got an hour of visibility,” I said. “Let’s get back.”
“It’s all downhill. Won’t take long. There’s a trail that cuts off to the hot-spring loop about half a mile ahead. We can go back that way, and stop by the hot spring.” He extended the flask to me. “Here, babe, take a drink of this.”
I pushed it away. “It’ll be dark by then,” I said. “How will we find our way out?”
“The hot spring is just off the main road, the paved one that we drove up. We can walk back down the road to our truck in the dark. No problem.”
As it turned out, the hot spring was a lot farther away than that, but it was a natural enough mistake, because we didn’t have a map. We didn’t have much food, either, just a couple of power bars, and we didn’t have a tent or even a tarp, and we didn’t have dry clothes. Oh, yeah — we had the cellphone, but its battery needed a charge.
By the time we found the hot spring, it was dark. There was a moon, but it was just a crescent, and it wasn’t going to last more than an hour or two before dipping below the trees. I was starting to shiver.
“We got plenty of time,” Christy said. “Let’s warm up in the hot spring, then we can take our time getting back to the road, ’cause you’ll be warmer.”
Well, it made a certain amount of sense. Of course, we didn’t have any towels or anything, but our clothes were wool, so they’d keep us pretty warm, even though they were wet with sweat from climbing up the fire road. All I had to do was get my body temperature up a bit, and I’d be fine for a couple of hours.
It was slippery and cold getting down to the hot spring. It wasn’t anything fancy, like Scenic or Bagby. No decking, no little hand-hewn log seats, just a couple of dug-out pools near a stream, with flat stones at one side, so you don’t have to walk in the mud.
We took off our skis, took off our clothes, put our boots back on without tying the laces, and moving gingerly and quickly, in the cold air and the snow, climbed down to the spring, shed our boots, and started to get into the water.
Hotter than a Japanese bath. We dumped some snow in, tested again. Still hot, but tolerable. Soon we were settled in and accustomed to the heat. It sure felt good — I was so tired — but adrenalin kept me alert. We still had a ways to go to get back to the truck.
That’s when I saw the old guy, watching us from behind a tree, the moonlight making his outline clear. Creepy, I thought.
I whispered to Christy, “There’s somebody watching us. Don’t look like you’re looking. Over to my left, past the big fir.”
Christy liked that, I could telclass="underline" it suddenly made things even more interesting. He liked danger. He liked the idea of someone watching us get naked. He sidled around for a better look, and tried not to look like he was looking.
Then he froze. “It’s not a guy,” he said. “It’s a bear.”
“What do we do?”
“Stay here and hope it goes away.”
“Do bears like hot springs?” I asked.
“Fuck if I know. I don’t think so.”
I kept my eye on the figure in the forest. It still looked a lot more like a guy than a bear to me. It came closer. It obviously could see us. It waved a mittened hand, and resolved into a guy with a big beard and a fur hat. “How you folks doing tonight,” it said.
“Whattaya know,” said Christy, “a talking bear.”
Christy
I met Andrea at Burning Man. She was welding together a giant sheet-metal goddess robot with glowing snakes for hair. She was wearing a skirt made of old silk ties, and nothing else. No shoes, no shirt. Great service, though.
I lost my heart to her. I would do whatever she wanted. It’s been that way ever since. She wanted a baby, and now she’s got one. Doesn’t need me any more. Neither of the women do — her or Mickey. The babies need me, though. I’ll stand by my kids, if their mothers will let me.
I’m not going to say that Andrea lies, but what happened on Mt Baker wasn’t my fault. I didn’t even want to go skiing that day. It was dark and rainy in the morning, and it was a long drive to Mt. Baker. That’s why we got there so late: she kept changing her mind about going. And if I hadn’t been stoned, I wouldn’t have misjudged the distance to the hot spring.
She’s always saying that it’s my fault when I screw up. Sure, I screw up, but why assign blame like that? Everybody screws up — even Andrea screws up sometimes. That’s why I like skiing cross-country: because, when you screw up, you can recover. Usually, anyway.
You can make more mistakes, going cross-country, like finding yourself in the middle of fucking nowhere without a sandwich. But sometimes you get a chance to see stuff that most people, in their safe little lives, never even dream of.
Like the sasquatch. Where would you ever see a sasquatch, if you didn’t go cross-country skiing? Or a talking bear, either. Whatever.
I figured it would calm Andrea down if she thought it was a talking bear, because that’s an idea she’s familiar with: ursus fabulans, the talking bear. We all know the talking bear. Even the Romans knew the talking bear. Ursus in tabernam introiit et cervesiam imperavit, as the book says. A bear goes into a bar and orders a beer.
But I knew it was a sasquatch — I’m not an idiot, Mt. Baker is crawling with them — and I wanted, naturally enough, to find out more. Besides, we were sitting there in the hot spring, facing a long, cold, dark walk back down the side of the mountain to the truck. The sasquatch asked us, real friendly, how we were doing. I saw no problem with partaking of his hospitality, you know? Maybe the sasquatch had a nice little cabin somewhere, or a warm cave with a fire already going. Maybe the sasquatch had a treasure and would bestow it upon us if he took a shine to us.