Virginia first knew the soft mossy undergrowth of the Old Cascades when she was a young camper a decade before the first moon landing.  Moss on the forest floor was dry in the summers when she went to camp at the foot of the mountain range, so the girls slept outdoors, and ate in the huge beamed hall of a main building with wide eaves on its cedar shingled roof.

            
            Virginia liked to feel the moss pad at the edge of her bed roll lined up in a row with her friends.  She sometimes laid her broad face on the moss as she lay on the ground.  The girls laid tarps under their sleeping bags, fearing moisture rising up from the deep soil.  Huge fir trees shaded them.

            
            “Widow makers,” a girl said.

            
            “What does that mean,” asked Virginia. She pulled her fingers through her thin dark straight hair, as she always did when she was afraid.

            
            “Those big dead branches way up the trunk can fall off and kill you.  The loggers say that,” said the girl.

            
            Looking up, Virginia saw thick dead branches on the trunk, and heavy branches lying on the ground around them.

            
            “No, it won’t happen to us,” said Virginia.  And it did not.

            
            Her skin tanned in two weeks of camp.

            
            They wore matching green shorts and little tuxedo ties for their march to the dining hall at every meal.  They invoked the Lord before meals by singing a blessing.  Thick tree trunks held up the dining hall beams, as if a temple grew from the forest floor.  Wood tables hewed from trees growing nearby, with matching benches, seated all the girls in the camp.  An old piano and a stone fireplace occupied one end of the hall.

            
            “Civilian Conservation Corps,” Virginia’s father had laughed when he saw the building.  He had been a member of the Corps.  “Guardians, back then.”

            
            “Guardians of what?” she said, straightening her back in her green uniform.

            
            “Maybe of the temple of Roosevelt,” he said.  “I’m not sure.”

            
            On Sundays in camp, the Girl Scouts had a service in a little chapel in the dense growth of vine maples across the creek and behind the dining hall, with benches hewn from trunks split in halves the long way, then set on pegs to steady the halves.  They sang every part of a church ritual they all knew by heart, their voices falling easily into four-part harmony.

            
            The girls were in the seventh and eighth grades.

---

           Years later, Virginia visited the camp again, now a private resort with bright amenities. Inspecting the great hall, she found the old beams covered with wallboard, and new rooms built at the sides of the building.  New modern aluminum furniture replaced old wooden.  Big screen televisions, libraries of CDs and DVDs, and computer terminals adorned every room.  New vinyl windows replaced the old hand-made wood windows.  The old stone fireplace was gone, replaced by a vast copper hood in the middle of the dining hall.

           Virginia wondered out loud who could afford such luxury, but nobody answered.

           She saw a framed card on the wall.

           “Please do not remove anything from the hall.”

           The prior of order of monks who lived in another building deep in the woods signed the card.  The monks belonged to an Order of St. John, with no explanation which St. John had called them.  Virginia saw men slipping silently through the vine maple jungle wearing matching long black wool cloaks.  She hoped they had not cut many of the little trees down. The old camp had been sold, with the girls’ songs not heard again.

           On a deep afternoon late in her week at the resort, Virginia stole some CDs, electronic copies of old cookbooks.  She did not need them, but she wanted to feed off them. They barely fit in the large leather bag she carried. By stealing them, she thought she might bring about a small piece of change in the world, she told herself.  She then chastised herself for slipping into insane rationalization of theft. She seemed to be always hungry, and always wanting change.

--- 

           Her dark room at the resort had hand-woven curtains and a bright spread over the huge bed with tall posts at the corners.  She wondered if the colors in the spread faded in the wash, but saw a tag claiming color fastness.  Every day she fixed her thin brown hair in a huge round mirror on the wall. 

           She had come to the resort alone to decide if she would keep the baby she was carrying, or terminate it.  Staying in her city apartment with her John while she decided was impossible.  She could not decide anything while she knitted, or crocheted, or sewed in that apartment. 

           And she would not tell any of her city friends about the pregnancy, having sworn John to secrecy while she decided.  They had decided, together, that they would not marry.  Their love, though intense, had never gelled into middle class plans for house buying and car buying. 

           She thought the camp would be a good place to meditate, but it was not as she remembered it from her girlhood, so she decided to leave early.

           Taking her last walk around the grounds, she noticed that all the big old trees were gone.  The fallen branches were gone, probably sawed up and burned in the huge fireplace.

           On her last afternoon she rebelled by planting three red rose bushes under a corner eave of the building where they would catch the rainwater falling from the roof.  The next day, she saw the monks had torn her bushes out, leaving only damp bark dust.

           “I don’t know why they would do that,” she complained.  “They were planted properly, and they would be beautiful.”

           Nobody answered her.

           Leaving the resort, in a small nearby village named Sublimity, she called her friend Donna.

           “Let’s drive up to the mountain,” she said.  Donna and Virginia had worked together on a small newspaper years before.

           “OK,” said Donna.  Virginia was grateful, and said so.

           When Donna arrived in her tiny German car with the oval back window, Virginia packed her grocery sacks and leather bags of clothes and camping equipment in the small trunk in the front.  Donna roared the engine so smoke poured from the rear tailpipes as if it were an old 1940s black lowslung car restored to life.  She wore her favorite cowboy hat above her narrow face, her cropped hair almost invisible under it.  A plaid shirt and torn jeans were her charioteer’s uniform. 

           The day was cold and foggy.

           “I don’t know if it’s worth it,” said Donna.  “How do we know the top of the mountain won’t be too cloudy to see anything?” Donna was from Michigan, so she did not know about the mountains here.

           “It’s just fog, and it will burn off,” said Virginia.  “Look up?  See the blue sky?  This is a thin low fog, and by the time we get to the top of the mountain, it will be gone.”

           “Whatever you say,” said Donna, punching the accelerator.

---

           They climbed the mountain on asphalt pavement with a yellow stripe in the middle.  Virginia could remember driving up this road with her parents before it was paved, and she said so.

           “Hoo,” said Donna.  “I don’t believe in unpaved roads.”

            
            “Put those bags in back,” said Donna.  She pointed to two grocery sacks on the floor at Virginia’s knees.  Virginia leaned over from the passenger’s seat to the back seat to punch the bags into the luggage already in the back seat.  One bag fell forward into Donna’s neck in the driver’s seat.  Virginia grabbed and stuffed again.

            
            Huge dark trees overhung the narrow road on both sides, with an occasional fallen branch on the pavement in front of them.  Once, Donna braked and swerved to miss a branch that seemed to jump at them.

            
            In a place where the thin fog was darker and thicker, they ran into a junkyard of huge steel bearings dumped in the weeds from a nearby dam project, and rusted dump trucks sunk into mud.  A bad oily smell leaked into the car.  Strings of Christmas lights decked the old lifeless machinery along the road.   Donna swerved away from the center line while she looked at the shadowed hulks. The road seemed to skirt the big machines as if the pavement had been kicked and graded into a new path.

            
            The dripping fog coated the car’s windows with black muck, but not enough to hide blue and red police lights flashing in their rear window.

            
            Donna readied herself for him.  She rolled down her window, and laid both her hands on it, her driver’s license in her hand.

            
            “Good evening, officer,” she said. 

           “You’ve always got to know how to be subservient,” she said in a soft aside to Virginia.

            
            The officer’s tall black boots crunched the small rocks at the side of the road until he stood by the car.  Schaeffer, said a tag on his dark blue shirt. The officer wore a flat-brimmed smokey hat with a shining silver lariat wound around its crown.

            
            “I saw you swerve away from the middle of the road,” he said.

            
            “No,” said Donna.  “Not me.”

            
            “Drunk driving is very serious,” he said.

            
            “That yellow line is there for a purpose.  You’ve got to stay close by it, close by the center of the road, or you cause problems.  As long as I’ve been doing this, there are always people who don’t understand the center line, and drive all over the road.  Usually they have been drinking.  I like catching drunks.  Don’t you understand how dangerous it is to swerve from the center?”

            
            The officer talked for what seemed like an hour, then put his ticket book back into his shirt pocket. He got in his car, turned off his lights, and disappeared in the fog.

            
            “Christ almighty,” said Donna. “What a prince of a guy.”

            
            “Where in hell are we,” asked Virginia.  “It feels like we have crossed into another world.  And where is the mountain?  I can’t see it up there anymore.”

            
            She peered out her front window. She scratched at the glass, smearing the dark coat of dirt.

            
            “We have to clean this gunk off the glass, inside and out.  Let’s do that,” she said.

            
            They got out of the small car and scrubbed at the windows with old newspapers, gradually cleaning it.  Then they rubbed the muck off the inside windows, and cleaned their hands with a bottle of water Donna found on the back seat.

            
            The daylight around the car seemed to lighten, so they started again on the road winding toward the mountain.

---

            
            Turning a corner, they were in a village of large old houses with many rooms and stories and Christmas lights hanging everywhere. A sign looming by the road said “Isis Corner.” Virginia, a collector of state lore, explained that this name was a misspelling of the intended name for the town, which was “Ice Corner,” after a forgotten ice vendor.  Once entered on an official document, Isis became forever the town’s name. 

           The road to the mountain was not marked among the many streets, so they stopped at a corner.  Donna got out to ask for directions. She went around a corner on foot.

            
            Virginia waited in the car.  Across the street, she noticed two small children torturing three kittens by squeezing them and throwing them up against a garage door.   Virginia got out of the car and walked over to them.

            
            “Stop that,” she told them.  The children ignored her. The kittens were growing limp.

            
            Going up the pink house’s steps to find a parent, Virginia met a stout red-headed older woman coming down.

            
            “What do you want?” said the woman. Virginia saw that her red hair was a wig, with lank gray curls dropping below it to frame a round pimpled face. She wore a striped red chenille bathrobe dropping open in front.

            
            “Your kids . . .” started Virginia.

            
            Below them in the house driveway, the children got up and ran toward the back of the house, leaving the kittens behind.

            
            “Your kids . . .” she started again.

            
            “You leave my kids alone,” said the woman.  She screamed a phrase from the president’s recent speech on health care.  Finishing once, she started again.

            
            “Thirty million people . . .” she screamed, her words rough in her throat.

            
            Virginia backed away.  The kittens were now wrestling like normal kittens, so Virginia fled to the car.  Looking behind her, she noticed the women raise the garage door, showing tall bookcases full of books on every wall inside.  A larger cat came out and began picking up the kittens, one by one, and taking them inside.

            
            “Dear God in heaven!” she said.  Donna was already in the car.  “Her kids must need psychiatric care, and now they can afford it.”

            
            “Let’s get out of here,” said Donna. They took a left turn from that corner and soon were out of the village and on the narrow paved road through the woods again.

---

            
            The fog seemed lighter as they drove away from the little town, but the mountain did not show herself to them.  Virginia tried to look through the front window to find blue in the sky. She pulled the fingers on her right hand through her hair.

            
            The dank forest around them ended as they neared the timber line on the mountain.  Pines replaced firs as the air dried.  They crossed the weather divide on the mountain range. Old lava showed through a thin layer of plants without moss.

---

            
            Virginia noticed, as they approached the huge timbered lodge where the trees ended, that the St. Bernard dog by the door was gone.

            
            “Dead,” said a staff person by the door when she asked.  “His name was Pluto, like the Disney character.  We’re getting another one.  The tourists liked him.”

            
            “It’s not the same without that dog,” Virginia told Donna, though she knew mountain rescue was more complicated nowadays than sending a big dog up a mountain.  The dogs at the lodge barely moved most of their lives, becoming obese and friendly with the tourists. Without the dog the lodge looked incomplete.

            
            The big winged building was built of huge peeled logs and beams trucked in from far below, she knew.  Donna had not seen it before, but even with her eastern sensibilities she was impressed.  They turned around on the flagstone porch and looked south.  Before them stretched a line of volcanoes almost to California, three hundred miles away.  The alpine air shimmered around them. Squares of mile-wide clear-cuts showed ravaged and bleached naked forest floor in the spaces between volcanoes.

            
            “The weather is not always this good,” said Virginia. “And damn those loggers.”

            
            “I’m glad we got away from the awful fog,” said Donna.  They could see the fog lying like dirty old ragged and rotten insulation pulled from a fallen house in the valley below them. Little puffs of whiter clouds showed above the blanket, signaling warmer places putting up higher clouds above the fog.

            
            Virginia wondered if those white puffs showed ancient warm springs under the cloud, each with its loyal attendants always near, and sometimes plunging in to fire a cure for something.

            
            To the east, a dry blue haze blocked the view of everything. 

            
            “It’s September,” mused Virginia.  “I need to get back in school.  I’m almost through with my degree.”  She planned a teaching career, and writing.

            
            “I think you should get rid of it,” said Donna.

            
            “I know,” said Virginia, and she began to cry.

           An older woman passed them on the lodge steps. She looked at Virginia curiously.

            
            Virginia’s tears dried on her face in the light breeze.

---

            
            Over a lunch with two bottles of wine in the lodge dining room, Virginia explained how it happened, despite her precautions.

            
            “Sometimes it just happens,” said Donna soothingly.  “You have no obligation to take care of whatever lodges itself inside you.”

            
            “It seems to have grabbed me, though.  My mother never told me how instincts take over,” said Virginia.  “It goes against everything I know and feel to get rid of it.”

            
            “Instincts, my ass,” said Donna.  “It’s only a lifetime of training.  Weren’t you a Girl Scout?  That kind of training sticks to you.”

            
            “Yes, those were innocent days.  We were like little nymphs in the woods, tending to tradition,” said Virginia.  “I wonder what those girls would think of me now. In those days we never would have thought of getting rid of it. Nobody did that.”

            
            “They are not here,” said Donna. “That was three decades ago.”

            
            They ate in silence at the heavy wood table.  The dining hall was almost a copy of the Girl Scout camp, another triumph of the CCC.  Bare wood beams showed throughout the lodge. Young people served at table wearing unpressed uniforms.  One was without a tie, another had a shirt-tail hanging out, a third wore a shirt open to her waist, with a tie falling out of her pocket.

           After lunch, they walked to their rooms.   In a long hallway, a ski showed its tip poked through a heavy wood outer wall, a lesson about taking precautions and never letting loose skis run down the mountain.  Through a window, they could see the back of the ski, its front disappearing into the lodge’s wall.

           “I feel like that wall,” said Virginia.  She felt her flat belly, where the baby did not show yet.

---

           Changing in their rooms to warmer clothes, they went outside the lodge to the single summer season working ski lift, the Magic Mile.  Its towers seem to climb skyward toward the glaciers showing on the peak.  They bought tickets.

           They were silent all the way up, and then jumped out of the lift chairs to a platform high above t brown lava bare of snow. The platform sat atop a tall tower made of thick weathered planks, with gray splintering steps leading them down to the bare loose lava below. In winter, snow could be twenty feet deep around the tower, or deeper, Virginia said.

           Climbing higher in the loose rock, they came to a little hillock of dead lava.  They could see the lodge below.  Glaciers and the icy peak itself gleamed above, seeming close in the thin air.  They sat down.

           “Someday we will have to come back and climb the peak,” said Virginia.

           “It’s dangerous,” said Donna.  “People die up there every year.”

           “Only in the dangerous months, I’ve heard,” said Virginia. “Some months you can walk up the peak in sneakers.”

           “When it comes to big mountains, all months are dangerous,” said Donna.

           Pushing the loose rock around with her shoe, Virginia noticed a glint of metal.  She picked an old yellow gold wedding ring from the loose lava.

           “Damn,” she said.  “Even the stupid mountain is poking me.” She pulled the fingers on her left hand through her hair.

           “It’s just somebody who came up here to celebrate a divorce,” said Donna.

           They laughed. 

           Virginia threw the ring downhill, and it disappeared.