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Ascent and Descent

Chapter 10

“Be always sure that you are right, then go ahead.”

Marian jerked from her sleep and sat upright in bed. The voice was as clear as if her own father had whispered in her ear; a rich, resonating voice full of color and warmth, like oak leaves and smooth coffee. It had disrupted her breathing to an irregular stutter.

She inhaled deep and exhaled sternly, scanning the dark room, but there weren’t any sign of its speaker. It did not frighten her, though, for the voice soothed rather than startled. Looking out the window, she saw the sun had not dawned. The ticking clock over her doorframe was indiscernible; she aimed her flash-light (the one she kept for late-night reading) at its face. 5:23 A.M. 

She wanted to sleep, but her heart was beating too feverishly. She threw her legs over the edge of the bunkbed and jumped to the ground. Fumbling through the dark, she found the desk and chair and flicked her lamp on. 

Esther looked like a clown, fast asleep, sprawled out with face at the foot of the bed, and one arm draped off the side. Marian pulled a Bible picture-book from her drawer and opened to the story of Abraham. Minutes passed until Esther’s watch alarmed them it was 6:00 A.M. 

Thirty minutes later, the Dolor children stepped off the front porch carrying with them what they thought they needed most on their unknown adventure. Marian carried a backpack full of snacks and water-bottles. Herbert had stuffed his Gerber pocket-knife (a Christmas gift from his father) into his pocket. Each of them wore the new hiking shoes their mother got them as soon as they had moved. They felt prepared, but it wasn’t until they saw Aaron waiting under the poplar that they felt complete; he shone his headlamp through the dim morning light at their faces and waved.

The four children climbed the natural grade of the yard to the tree line and stood before the open gate; it was draped in honeysuckle and rhododendron, smelling of lavender. 

It all felt so solemn that Esther asked if they should pray. At night, Mrs. Dolor would pray with each child since before they remembered. And Mr. Dolor prayed whenever they took long trips or were about to do something scary. It always made the children feel safer, like no matter what happened, everything would be okay. Aaron didn’t understand and sneered, because he hadn’t yet learned about anything like prayer from his mother. He shut his eyes and remained silent while Marian prayed. The yard grew calm, a woodpecker buzzed by, chirping excitedly, and the smell of honey filled the air. 

“A-right, nows that that’s done-did,” said Aaron. “Less get goin and fixin’ this mess ya’ll did.” He smirked and turned to the gate. His eyes widened, and he jumped back when he saw they were not alone. 

Under the wide arch of maple trees stood the Ghost of David Crockett, as he had promised. He was glowing blue and white, and next to him stood a Donkey with black and blue-grey stripes running from his tall, black ears to the dorsal cross and down the spine over his white and brown hair.

“Hello, sir,” Marian said respectfully.

“Good morn, ch’ldren,” replied Crockett. “I’m happy you are still together.” He looked at the Donkey next to him. “Balaam will help you on your journey—Won’t you, Balaam?” 

“I suppose if I have to,” the Donkey muttered. 

I’ve never heard a Donkey speak before, and I’m fairly confident you have not either. Just as you would imagine, hearing a rusty, brash voice come out of the lips of a Donkey left the Dolor children and Aaron speechless.

“It’s not too often I get to help human kids,” Balaam said flatly. 

“You’re a—you’re a talking Donkey.” Marian’s mouth fell open. 

“And you’re a talking delinquent,” the Donkey replied. 

“Balaam ’s good for burdens and knows the forest well,” Crockett explained. “He can ‘elp you on your journey. Remember, you must find Atagahi, and you will discover how to close this gate.”

“This whut we get?” Aaron asked spitefully. “Yer a soup-natural bein and ye’n gives us a Donkey!? Tha’s alls we get?”

“I’m afraid so,” the Ghost said, smiling. 

The blue haze faded, and Crockett disappeared. His evanescence left behind a golden glint and parade of mesmerizing creatures. Little faeries, shimmering and shining like the fireflies that fill the evening twilight, dancing in the air about them. 

The children marveled at the sight of each winged creature spinning in grace and majesty. Esther giggled as one fluttered toward her and landed on her shoulder. The little blonde faerie curtsied and smiled; she stood no taller than Esther’s index finger and wore a dress made from moss and bark; a little hat of cardinal feathers wrapped in fox hair rested between her delicate, pointy ears; on her back, two transparent pink wings fluttered furiously, like a hummingbird’s need to keep flapping even when at rest. 

Just as Esther felt as though she’d gained a new friend, the little faerie flitted away; the rest of the pixies joined her, scattering over a footpath at the entry of the gate and disappearing on the other side of a sugar-berry.

“Yunwi Tsunsdi,” said Balaam the Donkey. “Well, there’s better time than never to get started going nowhere. C’mon, children.” 

Ofttimes, the beginning of a much anticipated journey can be as unexceptional as the mere waking and the passing of a day; it comes and goes and before you realize it, your feet have begun walking and the commencement is far behind you. This trip was no different; weeks of bated breath and worry, culminating into a night of shivering hands, wild imaginations, loathsome anxiety, and early risings, all to be met matter-of-factly by a talking Donkey, a quick hello from a Ghostly friend, and then, thrust upon a path through a forest into the unknown. 

The path led the children and Donkey through a thicket of maple, hackberry, walnut, daisies and dandelions; great pines and cedars pierced the canopy like skyscrapers; their needles draped across the dewy rhododendron; powerful oaks reached their strong arms through the thicket, and their fingers snapped as the children brushed against them. After passing up and over a row of hills, the party splashed through a creek’s overflow along the path and veered north-northeast until they had jumped the rough terrain of a small inlet. 

The morning sky was still dark behind the tall mountains, as Balaam turned east and scaled the uneven slope of the growing mountainside. Each child fought to stay with him, grabbing saplings and mossy rocks to help themselves up, while muddy stones protruded from the ground cover and gave the impression of an ancient walkway. 

Aaron followed close behind Balaam, shining his bright headlamp every which way to guide the group through the dark green shadows. They didn’t say much, as the beginning of any dark hike is met with fear and apprehension—a slick stone could roll an ankle and an unfamiliar leaf may hide a copperhead. But soon the sun burst over the crown of the mountain, and their hard push was met with zipping cardinals, chirping robins, and bounding rabbits; a box turtle hid in its colorful shell on the path, and a red salamander squirmed underneath the wet leaves beside Herbert’s foot; syncopated cicadas screeched as the sun lifted higher; an eagle chirped half a mile over the western horizon; and the wind swept through the canopy like shallow waves rush into a luscious coral reef. With each step, the children disappeared into a world without people. 

Balaam seemed to complain about most everything and never remembered where they were going or why it was so important. The children presumed he lived in this forest, and thought it strange that he despised it so vehemently. He would say things like: “I always hated crossing creeks,” and “why haven’t they made a road here, yet,” but he never explained who he meant by “they”, and the children suspected he didn’t know either. Every few hundred yards, he asked the children to remind him of what they were doing. Repeating themselves again and again was a chore, but his raspy, quiet voice reminded them of Mr. Dolor’s father, so that made up for it; it gave them fond memories of Granddaddy taking them fishing in the spring at Great Uncle Earl’s pond. 

Balaam’s whining made Aaron’s arrogance more tolerable. He acted as if he knew everything, saying things like, “That there’s soapstone; You-all knows the deffrence ‘tween a hawk and a eagle? Them-there’s are deer tracks, not hawg tracks; iffen you walk afoot that there tree-gum, yer gonna get stungs by yeller jackets”. The Dolors had spent most of their time enjoying the look of forests instead of studying them, so they didn’t know if what he said was true or not. Regardless, it felt obnoxious. 

After an hour, the peak came into view, and the children pushed themselves hard to reach it; it was a rocky summit of scattered slate, sandstone boulders, and loose gravel. The trees pealed back and the children counted seventeen peaks on the horizon, rolling like green and blue, luscious waves, masked by thin, smoky puffs in the north, and dark, ominous thunderclouds in the south; titanic ancient trees pierced the green canopy in scattered points, dead and lonely, robbed of all their glory, and waiting for a storm to knock them into the vast forest below. 

The path ran north around the slotted slate and bouldered sandstone, before bending west into the trees again and descending harshly down a muddy slope for thirty yards and evening out onto a thin shelf overlooking a river, that they could not see, but heard, some three-hundred feet below.

“Weeper’s Run,” said Balaam. “This was as far south as I had ever been before today. Legend says the river was formed by the tears of our ancestors. But I can’t imagine they would need to give them up more than us.” 

Esther stopped on the shelf and gazed through an opening of silver maples and poplars; the height made her heart race and she loved it. On the far side of the river, she glimpsed the unruly climb of another mountain wall, rising equal to their height, and twice as steep, covered in poplars, elms, maples, and oaks; in their trough, she saw a hint of the rushing, black river. The opposite cliff was marked in red, clay drawings, indiscernible to the eye, but whimsical and fantastic; she imagined prehistoric people leaving them before the river wore down the rock and created the chasm. Who were they and where had they gone? For that matter, how did a Donkey learn to speak English?

“Don’t get left behind, Ess!” Marian hollered. Esther turned around and realized the group had gained thirty paces north without her. She scurried ahead to meet them.

“Hey Donkey,” said Aaron. “What’d ye’n means whenever ya said that you-all a-hadn’t gone this afar south afore? Ye’ns means you doesn’t knows where-all we’s goin?”

“My name is Balaam,” replied the Donkey. “And it all depends on what we are looking for—what are we looking for again?”

Marian smirked. “A special lake,” she answered. “A fountain…”

“The Fountun of Youth!” Aaron exclaimed. “Ah! I’mma gonna live foraver and get richer’n Dolly. Hey, Donkey, I thoughts you were a-suppos’ta be leadin’ us.”

“Ah yes, see, that is the funny thing about leading,” Balaam replied. “—More often than not, you are actually following.”

“Balaam,” Marian replied sweetly. “If you gave us an idea of how far away it is, we could decide whether we should rest and eat or not.” 

Balaam stopped walking and grunted (the Donkey way of sighing in frustration). “I suppose resting is never a bad idea,” he said. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the food gets raided by ants and sandworms.”

“What are sandworms?” Herbert asked. 

“You’ve never heard of them?” Balaam asked. “Great big worms that crawl out of the sandy soil at night and eat your leftovers.”

“Ah, that’s horse-scat! I ain’t never aheard of ‘em,” Aaron crossed his arms. “Sounds made up.”

“I’m sure ‘never hearing about something’ is the prerequisite for all things not known,” Balaam replied. “Though I wonder if that proves it to be ‘made up’.”

“Well, it’s not night,” Esther said. “And there’s no sand around here.”

“It’s a good time to stop,” Marian decided. “C’mon, I made sandwiches and snack baggies for everyone.”

Marian rationed the food out, and the kids ate a good meal, and there were no ants or sandworms, nearby.

“I’m sure they will be at our next stop,” Balaam warned. 

The journey led them to a steep, rocky decline, heading northwest toward a wide enclave; dog-sized boulders and mid-sized tree roots formed a path downward that felt more like climbing-down than walking. Marian and Aaron sat on their butts and scooted from trunk to trunk on their descent, pushing the wet, soft underbrush out of the way as they went. But Herbert and Esther couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling about it, so Balaam let them push against his chest and barrel as they went—the two scooting the invisible shelf and the Donkey steadying himself with shaking, stiff pasterns. “I never much liked safety, anyway,” he complained. It was a kindly gesture, but Herbert still felt overwrought by the thought of the Donkey’s trembling hooves coming from underneath him and the three tumbling into the abyss.

“You alright?” Esther asked him.

“Yeah,” Herbert lied. “Just wish this Donkey were a little bit heftier for the two of us.”

“Are you saying you wished I was fat?” Balaam gawked.

Esther giggled, and Herbert lowered his head between his shoulders.

The shoulder began to slope, and soon the party reached the bottom of the ravine. The air was dense and moist and they didn’t hear anything but the buzz of mosquitoes, horseflies, and sweat bees flying close to their ears. 

“What are we looking for?” Balaam asked.

“A lake!” Aaron hollered. 

“Oh, right,” said Balaam. “Cross the Run, and on ’til the mountain splits.”

The children followed Balaam as he took them through a grove of thin water oaks and thick morning-glories. The ground became muddy, and each of them slipped once or twice down the slope, until they turned round an embankment and heard rushing water. 

In her excitement, that she probably regretted later, Esther fled from the group and skipped over the rising and falling path to find the black river she had glimpsed from the peak. Mud flung from the wet underbrush and slapped the back of her sprinting calves. Twice, she nearly rolled her ankle, but corrected her footing on the roots, and kept running and giggling; the trees bristled in the wind, a starling chirped overhead, and all the while the sound of water grew louder and louder. She shoved a vibrant green rhododendron out of her way and bounded upon an expansive, rushing river. 

“It’s here! It’s here!”

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