Given that I could not use characteristics of the wind and barometric pressure in order to forecast the oncoming weather, the only clue left for me on the mountain that day remained the shape of overhead cloud cover. This, too, had been thoroughly detailed in my trusty text Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills. In Chapter 27, the types of cloud cover formation are categorized. You got your common cumulus clouds. You got your altocumulus and your cumulonimbus formations. Then you got your basic cirrostratus, your nimbostratus, and a few others not necessary to name. Their readily visible shape will tell you weather or not a cold front is approaching. It will tell you weather or not rain is likely and even the probability of thunderstorms or lightning. You just simply stand in a spot where the trees are not blocking your view, look skyward, and there you have it. Simple. I scrambled on to the largest sandstone formation in my location away from the obstructing limbs of the balsam fir and looked up. Simple, right?
Wrong! My panic attack was overwhelming. I was no longer in control. To my untrained eye, there must have been six or seven different shapes? Were they heaped, were they sheet like, how low were they, and how low did they need to be? Not only that, but the cursed fluff kept changing with every moment I looked. Every word of the book that I had memorized seemed to fly away with the strengthening winds. Was the nimbostratus formation the one that predicted a cold front and rains or was it the cumulonimbus pattern? I suddenly couldn't even remember what the clouds were actually called. Was there something called cirrobottomless? Or was it hippopotamus? Muchoserious? Whatamessimus? Don't bother spell checking. The more I thought, the more panicked I became, and the more strange the terms that came to mind sounded.
The winds were now howling and seemed to be swirling more like a tornado with a bad attitude. The sun could no longer be seen through the dark cover overhead. I could hear large branches breaking off the swaying trees in all directions. For secure minds, these mountaineering events could have been considered no big deal, just routine risks that come along on a nearly daily basis. But for me, with my biochemically determined stress-anxiety disorder, this was really heavy stuff. I was close to a psychotic breakdown. I began to see strange things. Black shadowy figures under the dark sky and within the balsam forests began to appear everywhere. I thought that someone was actually watching me. I started to think of all my disgruntled patients in my career. Did they plan this? Was this a moment they would seek their revenge? Maybe it was all the office staff to whom I demanded they find another job for some mistake that turned out to be my own. Or worse yet, all the in-laws for whom I always forgot the yearly Christmas gift. They had to be planning this for sometime. There were shapes that now stood out among all others. It was a frightening form that I believed I had first seen at some point in my childhood. Hundreds of them. They were more like monkeys than anything else. But they weren't monkeys. They had wings and they could fly and they wore some kind of funny helmet. Where had I see them before, I wondered? I started to recall something about the "wicked witch of the North"? My words were being spoken aloud at this point. "What is all this about?" "What do you want from me?" "Have I gone mad?"
I looked up again at the sky believing the end was approaching. I couldn't decide what was the greater problem, the eerie creatures within the nearby forest or the fear of a possible mountain storm. Suddenly, it happened. To the left of me was a black funnel with all the appearance of a whirling tornado headed directly towards the clearing in which I stood. To the right, however, there was an intense stream of light not dissimilar to the one I had seen strike the poster on the 6:50 AM train from Katonah to Grand Central. That light as you may recall led to the poster's metamorphosis and divining message. The rays touched the clouds on the right and their formation began to change. No longer the natural curves of a cumulus cloud, they became almost a rectangular shape. "My god, it's the poster", I said to myself. A message in clear blue lettering began to shine through the now white clouds much like that I had seen on that fateful train. It read "there is no place like...." The last word was hidden behind a tall tree . "No place like ...what!?", I shouted. The tornado on the left was nearly upon me. Was this my final breath? I thought the time had come for me to meet my maker and then, from directly behind me, I heard a voice. It was a gentle voice, ageless, and womanly. "Are you lost?", she quietly said.
I turned towards the voice and saw a most peculiar sight. She was standing alone, no more than three feet behind me. I had never seen anyone like her. Her shoes caught my eyes first, ruby in color with a metal buckle. These were not shoes for hiking to some desolate peak six hours from civilization. Just as the flying monkeys shook my memory banks, so did these "slippers". Where had I seen them before? How did she arrive here walking with shoes that were more appropriate for a piano recital at a local school than scrambling over rocks, streams, and sand. Her dress, too, seemed out of place. It was cotton, light blue in color, simple in design, and hung to her knees. It covered a white delicate blouse that matched the color of her ankle socks. It looked as if it belonged on a young child who lived in another era, perhaps in the late 1930s. She stood erect, lithe. But her face was not that of a young girl. It was a most unusual face. The eyes were as blue as her dress; bright, kind, and all knowing as if she had previously lived my current predicament. Her lips were innocent, red and full. Her hair was light brown in color, parted in the middle, and braided into two pig tails that hung in back to her shoulders. Her age, however, was revealed by the skin of her face. It was not a face that matched the rest of her appearance. Her skin was pale and lined. Indeed, the myriad creases over her cheeks, eyes, forehead, and mouth reminded me more of the topographical map of the Adirondack Mountains that I had obtained at a local mountaineering supply store in Lake Placid. Though she dressed as she might have seventy years ago, her age must have been closer to eighty-five.
"Perhaps, I can help you find your way home", she said in almost whispered tones. My mind suddenly became calm.The nightmarish creatures had vanished and the strong winds no longer blew. Suddenly, I could see from the corner of my eye what for a moment appeared to be a small black four-legged animal. The woman turned and gently called, "Toto, come here boy." The creature came from the woods to her side. It was a black Cairn terrier with a thin red color around its neck. "Toto?", I questioned to myself. Suddenly, it was all beginning to make sense. The sudden realization caused my entire body to quiver. With the shock of sudden recognition of an old acquaintance returning from some distant continent, I turned to my fellow traveler and asked, "Dorothy?". With a slight smile, a single nod of her head, and a gentle blink of her eye, she silently affirmed, "yours truly".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment