Abel could only manage a mumbled greeting. “Good morning.”
Now what? He was awkward suddenly, a fifties teenager on a first date. Winnie sensed his loss of candor. She sought to remedy that.
“I thought I’d try the coed bath this morning. The women’s bath is wonderful, but most of the women in there are institute guests. I thought I’d come in here and see how the great unwashed Independencians come clean.”
Abel laughed heartily, the vocalization echoing the length of the flooded chamber. It relieved his tension, so he settled back to chat.
“Your first experience in coed bathing, Winnie?”
“No, not really. In my senior year in high school, a friend of mine threw a wild party after graduation. We drank some beer, got into the pool, and the kids challenged each other to go in the skinny. So we did. How about you? I mean, other than here.”
Abel smiled and shook his head at a fond memory. “I landed a summer job at a college one year. There was a jumble of boulders nearby called Rock Pool in the Gale River. It was, I found out, a time-honored skinny-dipping hole. When I got there for the first time there were already two-dozen people on the rocks with their dogs. They were sunning themselves like turtles. It was wonderful. In some ways it even changed my way of thinking.”
“Oh, come on,” said the woman with an air of feigned distrust. “Why would skinny dipping change anything?”
“Like I said, there were two dozen people on hand. On the great rocks around the pool, they all looked identical, the men and the women and the little kids. Identical. They all looked like tiny, helpless little humanoid ants sitting on the rubble left behind by some long lost glacier. It taught me that we are all, men and women, male and female, one and the same fragile little creature.”
“Is that why you built this bath?”
“Oh, it may have something to do with it. The bath, though, is really strong glue that holds this community together. In the dead of winter, it really is an oasis against the dark and the cold.”
“So, radicals like their creature comforts, do they?”
“Oh, yes, yes, we do.”
Saturday was a day of rest. There were few classes and no lectures on this day. Abel sought to prolong his time in the company of the woman, so he advanced a proposal.
“Winnie, my daughter and a new friend and I are going to hike up to Table Rock this morning. It’s a bit of a trek, but it’s wonderful if you like a 200-foot cliff drop and a chilly wind. Would you care to join us?”
“This sounds conspicuously like a date,” said Winnie.
“Well, okay, consider it a date, that most ancient of rituals,” Abel nodded.
“That would be fine.”
The expedition of four climbed to the height of land on the bluffs, passed a summit building the community christened Lakota Lodge and snaked along the ridgeline to the northern tip of Big Stone Lake. Abel and his daughter shouldered daypacks filled with snacks and water and signaled everyone to button up against the fall cold. Pelee and her new pal Jennifer bolted along the exposed track. The adults followed at a more leisurely pace.
The air was colder high on the bluffs, running unimpeded off the South Dakota plains below. Winnie pulled a borrowed wool cap down low over her ears and down the back of her neck.
The footpath suddenly dropped down a short chute and came to a set of rough rock steps. The children were already up and over the steps and gone. Abel climbed up and stood at the top. Winnie scrambled up and faced him. Abel smiled and simply turned to one side. As he pulled away, Winnie was greeted with a tightrope walk on a knife’s edge. The scrub growth disappeared and in its place was a narrow rock gangplank.
“Look straight ahead, Winnie,” Abel instructed, “and walk just as you would normally.” Winnie threw a quick glance at Abel then quickly paced out into the void to show him she had the mettle. On either side, the drop was unchecked for hundreds of feet, and at the base of the cliffs the soils sloped away at sharp angles. There was no way to get a level bearing. The eyes and the brain simply could not adjust to the disfigured landscape.
The children were crawling now, Pelee in the lead and shuffling along at a good clip on her knees. She wanted to be the first at the very end of the pinnacle, where another step was a step into the realm of dust motes, summer bottle flies and falcons. Her friend Jennifer could only manage an inch each time she moved. She was terrified.
Abel hung back watching the trio with amusement as each tried their luck on the narrow ledge, a glacial erratic stone remnant anchored precariously in loose sediments and fractured rubble that composed the bluffs. Beyond the hikers stretched a yawning 200-foot gulf where the bluffs died away suddenly and only the splinter of stone held up suddenly clumsy feet.
Winnie made the trek out to Pelee’s friend on foot, but she felt she could go no farther standing up. The path was narrower still. A wrong step could be fatal. She was now trembling lightly. She knelt down and touched the rock surface. Instantly she felt relieved. Now she could look about at the skewed lands and try to enjoy the view, now that some stability had returned. Abel made his way, walking at his ease, to the woman and the youngster.
“You can make it. Look only straight ahead and you will be fine. Everyone has a problem with the heights the first time out.”
Abel slipped by the two figures huddled in the middle of the way and strode out to sit down with his daughter, their feet dangling over the very edge of the precipice. Winnie gathered up Jennifer and together they crawled the remainder of the way out to the drop-off. When they all clustered there, there were high fives and congratulations all around.
“Okay,” Pelee said, asserting herself, “you can’t say you’ve been on Table Rock until you put your feet over the edge. You have to do it. It’s the rule.”
Jennifer squealed. She cowered into a ball and would not move.
“That’s okay,” said Abel, “we’ll throw the rule book out this time, Jennifer. You can sit on my lap.” At that, he grabbed hold of the little one, held her tightly in the grip of his arms and sat her down as he said he would. The child was speechless. “You’re not off the hook, though,” he said to Winnie.
“Winnie has to walk the plank,” Pelee cackled with laughter.
Winnie took a deep breath, managed a half-hearted smile and swung her legs out over the edge of the cliff. “There. If you can do it, I can do it.”
The woman exhaled and peered down into the chasm. The sense of great peril was intense. She felt light as a feather and insecure enough to blow off the perch with the slightest puff of the breeze.
Father and daughter opened their packs and extracted treats for everyone which they ate in celebration. Even Jennifer’s stark fear slackened and she, too, took a seat on her own at the edge of the cliff.
As they nibbled their snacks, a whiskey jack flew across the void and landed behind them. The Canada jay, in its silver gray feathers, hopped close to the human strangers. Pelee took a bit of granola bar and held out her hand to the creature, the morsel on the end of her fingers. The jay studied it for a moment or two, rocking its head back and forth to try to determine what it was. Then it hopped again and came down on Pelee’s digits. It picked up the food in its beak and flew ten feet off to eat.
Jennifer instantly wanted to repeat the event. She reached out with her hand and, in a second, the jay alighted on her fingers, as well.