In the afternoon we relaxed with an easy hike and then a swim, this one in suits, not in our clothes. After that, I got out my notebook again and made some more ethics notes — these about an easy one, the philosophy of power.
In effect, the philosophy of power says that you should do anything you can get away with. If you don’t get away with it, you were wrong.
You really can’t argue with this, you know. It is a self-contained system, logically self-consistent. It makes no appeal to outside authority and it doesn’t stumble over its own definitions.
But I don’t like it. For one thing, it isn’t a very discriminating standard. There doesn’t seem to be any possible difference between “ethically good” and “ethically better.” More important, however, stoics strap themselves in ethically so that their actions have as few results as possible. The adherents of the philosophy of power simply say that the results of actions have no importance — the philosophy of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.
We slept that night in the cabin with the door latched, and there was a certain comfort and solidity in sleeping in what we had built. I can also say that the puncheon floor was much harder than the ground had been. Or perhaps I wasn’t as tired.
The next day was our last of the excursion and we celebrated it by jumping off the bluff across the river. Then we cleaned up the camp and came home.
It was foggy in the morning, and though the fog lifted, the clouds stayed low and gray over our heads. We set out in one big group this morning with Mr. Marechal leading and Mr. Pizarro bringing up the rear and carrying ropes. Looking at the river, our cabin was on the left and the shed on the right. We had gone upriver for our logs, and Mr. Marechal’s group the other way. We went downriver along the river bank, past the point where their skid tracks went uphill away from the river, and then around the long slow bend where the river curved out of sight of the camp. It was a gloomy day but we were in good spirits, chattering as we walked. Our group of six, reunited, walked together.
We picked our way along for more than a mile, sometimes having to leave the river edge and move inland, but making a pretty good pace of it. At last we came out on a sand shoal and looked across at an easy bank on the other side of the river and a broken and easily climbed bluff.
“We’re going to have to swim,” Mr. Marechal said. He waded out into the water until he was standing in water to his waist about one-quarter of the way across.
Then we were started across with both of our leaders standing guard. The water was cold and it wasn’t half as much fun to get soaked as it had been the first time. Our clothes are dirt and water resistant and dry quickly, but believe me, it is far nicer to have them dry off you than to have them dry while you are wearing them. On the far bank I dripped and shivered.
We all gathered on the grassy bank and then Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal splashed and swam across to join us. We climbed through the underbrush and tumbled rock and by the time we reached the top of the bluff, if I wasn’t fully dry at least I wasn’t shivering.
The bluff was covered with forest, too, but standing on the edge we could see the easy, forest-covered slope on the other side from above, a dark green rising carpet. Then we turned into the woods and didn’t come out again until we were standing on the bluff edge opposite our camp.
I didn’t like standing on the edge, so I came to the lip on my knees and looked down at the river. It looked a long way down — a drop big enough to kill you, and after that distances are academic. At the base, there looked to be just room to stand and no more. As it had been explained to us, the two ropes would be tied in place here at the top of the bluff and then each of us would whip the ropes around our waists and step off the cliff backwards. Looking down, I didn’t exactly relish the idea. I moved back from the edge and then got to my feet.
“Well,” Mr. Marechal said, “who’s going to be the first to try it?”
Jimmy said, “Mia and I will.”
Mr. Marechal looked at me and I said, “Yes.” I didn’t like the thought of doing it, but if it was something expected of everybody and I was going to have to do it eventually, I didn’t mind doing it first and getting it over with.
The ropes were tied to trees and then passed around our waists, around the main ropes, and then back around the waists again. Mr. Pizzarro and Mr. Marechal demonstrated for everybody how this worked. The ends were finally dropped back between our legs and over the edge of the cliff to dangle just above the river. In effect, what we were doing was putting ourselves in a running loop that slid freely on the rope and then moving down the rope to the river.
At the signal, we stood with our backs to the river, the rope taut between us and our trees. I looked down at the river and sighed, then stepped backward off the edge. I let line pay out for a moment and then stopped it and swung in to come to a halt with my feet against the cliff-face, my body hanging in the loop from the tree on the cliff above. I was almost surprised that it worked. Then I pushed off again and went down another six or seven feet. This was not hard at all, and rather fun. I looked over at Jimmy and laughed. Then, almost before I knew it, I was at the bottom. The bank here was wider than it looked from above, four or five feet wide, and Jimmy and I landed at almost the same moment.
We pulled the ropes free and waved up at the people on top.
“It’s easy,” Jimmy called.
“It’s fun,” I said.
The ropes were snaked up again to the top of the bluff as we watched.
Jimmy said, “There’s no sense in staying down here. Let’s go across the river.”
We swam across again and then watched while the next pair rappelled down the cliff. We sat on the last completed part of the cabin, a slab doorstep.
As we watched, I said, “Thank you for volunteering me, by the way.”
“I know,” Jimmy said. “You’re a reluctant daredevil. Aren’t you the person who used to crawl around in the air ducts?”
“That was different,” I said. “That was my idea.”
12
At the end of December, just in time for Year’s End, the kids on Trial on New Dalmatia were brought home. Of the forty-two kids who were dropped, seven didn’t signal for Pickup and didn’t come home. One of the seven was Jack Brophy, whom I’d known slightly in Alfing Quad. I thought about that, and I couldn’t help wondering whether I would come back to the Ship in a year. I didn’t dwell on the thought, though. Year’s End is the sort of holiday that takes your mind off the unpleasant, and besides I discovered something else that occupied my thoughts and gave me something of a new perspective on my mother.
Year’s End is a five or six day bash — five days in 2198, which wasn’t a Leap Year. In one of the old novels I read, I discovered that before the calendar was reformed, the extra day of Leap Year was tacked onto February. (This was as part of a mnemonic that was supposed to help you remember how many days there were in each month. My adaptation of it for our calendar would go: “Thirty days hath January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.” I have a pack rat memory — I even know what a “pack rat” was.) Under our system, the extra day gets tacked onto Year’s End.
I was in charge of fixing up our apartment for Year’s End. Jimmy and I made a trip down to the Ship’s Store on Second Level and picked out a piñata in the shape of a giant chicken and painted it in red, green and yellow. Jimmy’s dorm had a piñata, of course, but the impersonality of the dorm took a lot of fun out of Year’s End and I had arranged with Daddy for Jimmy to share ours. Between the two of us, Jimmy and I fixed the apartment very nicely and planned the parties we were having on Day Two (for our group of six and some of our other friends) and the big party on New Year’s Eve, more or less an open house for anybody who cared to walk in. Since that ticked off an obligation for Daddy, who has no patience for things like party arranging, he was just as glad to have us do it.