We were going back to Zoar Valley to leave food for Samantha’s ghost. Samantha had been dead for five months, give or take a week. The week difference depended on what form death took for you. It’s not as existential as it might seem. If you believed that the log that took out the back of her head killed her right away, then Samantha died down in the bottom of that gorge while Kim knelt, trying to hold the back of her skull together. If you believed she was still around in some way for the next week, while her body failed inches at a time, then she died in a hospital bed. I believed both. What was Samantha died in the bottom of that gorge, but her body clung to life, and to the people so madly clinging to her. We begged her not to go, it can’t have been easy for her.
Can it still be murder if the law doesn’t use the word? Hell. Yes. Manslaughter is a term with enough ugliness to echo the truth. Negligent homicide? Sorry, just dropped a 70 pound log off a 300 foot cliff onto your head, and I meant to, but I didn’t mean to pulp the back of your skull? When is an accident still an accident? Oho, let me answer that one- when a twenty-two year old girl doesn’t get her right eye blown out of her head. When her lover doesn’t have to kneel in the mud holding her body as it seizes for four hours because the helicopter cannot land. Fog, you understand. Wild country in Zoar Valley. When she does not linger in a coma for a week while her family and her friends, two separate camps, linger in dumb shock with brain damage of our own.
Two teenage boys were drinking, fucking around on a cliff above a gorge. There were people down in the gorge, hiking, sitting in the sun. Walking along the river. It was summer. The boys had been throwing rocks, bottles and debris down the cliff, just to scare people. Boys will be boys. They found a log, a sawn section of tree trunk. It weighed seventy pounds and took both of them to lift it. A bit much effort for an accident? The hoisting over the cliff was the easiest part. It hit the wall about two hundred and fifty feet down, split, and picked up speed.
Samantha was hiking with Kim and their friend John. It was a pretty day, June. Not too many pretty days in Western New York. The winter gives a cabin fever that doesn’t shake till September, when the cold starts back up. When you are twenty-two it’s easy to be restless with school, work, and the city. A chance to get out of the city, to roam, to go hike down in Zoar Valley was just what the doctor ordered. Kim heard the crash of the log splitting and yelled to her companions to run. She dove left, the log came right and took Samantha in the back of the head.
It had taken them hours to hike up the river to the spot below the falls. John ran it back in forty-five minutes, trembling in shock. Kim stayed with Samantha. They were there, alone at the bottom of the gorge, for four hours. Twice the sound of a helicopter bounced off the cliff walls, twice Kim, frantic, thought help was coming. The helicopter never landed; the fog was too thick. Help had to hike up the river, carrying a stretcher. They hiked Samantha’s body back out the same way. By this time Kim’s sweatshirt was soaked in Samantha’s blood from hours of holding her, trying to keep her from hurting herself on the rocks as her body thrashed to conflicting brainstorms.
Time breaks everything down; hoping you can swallow anything if it’s small enough. Two hours hiking. Four hours at the bottom of the gorge. A week long vigil at the hospital, prayer circles, the altar of flowers and candles and pictures that grew up, first at the hospital, then at the apartment. Samantha’s body kept breathing, with intervention. On the third day the vigil grew to be too many people and we were asked to leave the hospital. On the sixth day her kidneys failed. On the morning of the seventh she was declared brain dead. The intervention was turned off. Even God rested on the seventh day. I was the one who had to keep her father drunk. We sat on the porch with a bottle of his favorite Scotch. I kept his glass full and my ears open as he spoke remembrances of his daughter. There wasn’t anything else to do.
Her body gave out around 11 PM. We had a circle in the backyard, soft and hushed by death. It didn’t feel right; this wasn’t a moment for softness.
I shouted out “Take heed! A warrior passes!”
If her soul was passing by I wanted her to know we saw how hard she fought. Her body had had enough; we had to let go. The memorial was handled by Mary and the theater company. Samantha was one of ours; the ritual was our responsibility. Weddings, births, deaths. We did what we could.
June day. I’d run into them at the gas station along Elmwood Ave. Samantha’s sleek black car, leased by her Dad the doctor, only she had to make the payments. She leaned out the window, blonde at the moment, caught smiling. They were going hiking, Kim in the front seat, John in the back. “Come on. Play hooky with us,” She said to me. I said no. I had to work, and after that, summer classes at the college. Dull, solid, steady me, always doing my duty. So they drove off, Samantha at the wheel. I’d see her again in the Intensive Care unit.
Zoar Valley; an appropriately ghastly place to die. I knew my Christian mythology. Zoar was the city where Lot and his daughters took refuge while Sodom and Gomorrah burned with the fire of God’s wrath. Not his wife, though- she’d already looked back and been turned into a pillar of salt. Too perfectly dramatic not to die in a dramatic way, dear heart?
Grief was new to me. This was not just my grief, which paled in comparison. Outside the hospital, on the first night. Kim and I, chain smoking by the parking lot. No words. I punched the concrete wall, unable to speak. I was supposed to be good with words. I couldn’t do anything but light her cigarettes, swear, and stand there like half a corpse. Memory stabbed at me. Our last show, standing in the darkness as the crew set the furniture for the next scene. I stood with a bottle of wine and two glasses in my right hand; my left arm made a landing spot in the blackout. Samantha had a more elaborate costume change. She’d rush through it and come to my side, finding her way by grabbing my arm. I learned to stand in the spot I knew she’d reach for, so she’d always find me. We’d walk out on stage together. Hit the lights. That memory was a live coal, her hand on my arm in the dark.
Samantha’s family was coming, fresh horrors. The waiting room divided like a war camp, the dykes on one side, and the family on the other. Samantha had been estranged from her mother for over a year. The relationship with Kim was not approved of, but was not the source of the conflict. The love between Mary, Kim’s mom, and Samantha, threw this maternal loss into high relief. Samantha was a gem, sweet, talented, devoted, loving- her mom missed out on a great deal by cutting off communication.
I saw Samantha’s mother enter the waiting room. Samantha’s parents were divorced; her father had made some effort to get to know her friends and had even been to a few of our shows. Her mother preferred not to know. She’d always struck me as a brittle woman. Now she was frenzied, a woman who’s only daughter lay in intensive care with her head stove in. I don’t think she saw the forty people camped out on every available surface, she just walked to the center of the room. Kim got up. The last time Samantha had seen her mother had been at a restaurant along Elmwood, and she had refused to speak with her daughter. My chest got tight. With Samantha gone, the element that softened the conflict was gone. Emotions were ramped up with tragedy. Kim walked right up to the woman, who tried to look away. Then Kim opened her arms. Samantha’s mother went right into the red haired boy’s fierce hug. I’d never seen anything like it. Even in her hospital bed, Samantha was with us, working miracles.
We needed action; we needed ritual, prayer, and hope. The company had gathered, sick with grief, bludgeoned with it. Our heart had been punched out. One person can carry the heart of a community. The company had handled the memorial, her mother had handled the funeral. We tried to make it a celebration of her, with video clips of her performances from the last few years, singers, dancers - a chance for everyone to rise and speak. Her father came and spoke. I don’t remember speaking, but I did. I felt like I’d taken a shotgun full of nails to the abdomen.
I remember Mary telling us, before we opened the doors to the church, that it was up to us to set the tone. A tide of grief would meet us, an outpouring of anguish. Samantha was very young, and very well loved, and had died in a horrible accident. It was up to us to meet that tide of grief and turn it, if we were going to keep this ceremony a celebration of Samantha. We would have to keep it light, delicate, not let the grief weigh us down. Fill the room with love, Mary said. I hope we did. I know we tried.
Samantha had been a dancer. Not an inch above five feet tall, with hair that went from chestnut brown to raw blonde when the mood took her. Only full shades, no leopard spots or stripes. She had her limits. Tattoos, yes, piercings, yes, but worn with such innocent, inclusive delight it wasn’t fierce. It was a kid playing dress up. Her smile poured gasoline on the room and made you jones for a light. She wore her body and her sexuality with the joy of a woman who fought for both and knew their worth. Of course she fought. Family, self, eating, bulimia, religion, homophobia, all arrayed against her. To be young and pretty and femme and sexual and proud is abysmally difficult in a world designed to break all of these things. Watching her dance made your heart break and your blood riot, put silver awls through your eyes, made you want to protect and devour her. The clarity and purpose of youth was her right. She was loved hungrily and adored almost in measure for the love and hunger and adoration she gave.
You meet some people who are good. Samantha was one. Not innocent, but good. Sharp and bright as a thin steel blade. A vegetarian who drank and smoked like a cowboy. She giggled when she got stoned, and sang Ani DiFranco songs like a debauched angel. On stage she was fierce.
Her lovers were butch girls. She was a femme who knew how to touch masculine women to let them feel known and desired. On stage, at a party, her hand could find you casually and you didn’t think of your hips, but of the width of your shoulders. There was a certain gesture, she would lay her hand on your chest, fingers curling over your collarbone and you thought not of your breasts, but the muscles in your arms. There was a glance out of lowered lids that made you fall all over yourself to get her a drink, to pull out her chair or light her cigarette. I was more than half in love with her. We all were, the whole theater company. You couldn’t meet this tiny force of nature, this pagan angel pixie warrior and not adore her. You’d have to be dead.
I wasn’t her lover. Kim was. Handsome, cocky Kim with her broad shouldered boy’s body, her dark red hair cut so short, you couldn’t see how it would curl. Auburn hair, her mother said, Audrey Hepburn hair. Mary was Kim’s mother, and the artistic director of the company. There were people who saw us on stage and wanted what we had, wanted to be a part of it all, the magic. When they found out that the magic was mostly work, that the love this group shared came from shared work, they wandered away. It’s easier to think it just falls from the sky, art, love, passion, friendship.
Still, theater is witchcraft. We transform the world, one audience at a time. The company would open every show with a witch’s circle, with songs invoking goddess’ names. The last show we did together, Samantha stood to my right as we sang. I hated my voice; I didn’t trust it, so I kept it low. I can still hear hers, clear and strong.
Kim and Samantha had known one another for ten years, from grade school. Kim had smuggled liquor onto the bus for a field trip and gotten Samantha drunk, they’d been busted by the nuns together. They met again at nineteen and became lovers.
Kim was like a brother to me. A brash younger brother who I admired and envied and never stopped worrying about. I met her when she was seventeen and I was twenty three, out one night in a bar. She looked like a fifteen-year-old boy; I couldn’t believe the bouncer let her in on the fake id. I’d just met her mom, we were working together on a drag show and I was handing out fliers for it. Kim took one and looked at me funny. I asked if she knew Mary, the director, and she burst out laughing. She told me she was Mary’s daughter. You could see it if you looked, they had the same Irish face, and if Kim’s hair ever grew out it would be a curly mane like Mary’s. I knew that Mary had a seventeen-year-old daughter, so I blurted that out, right in the middle of the bar. “You’re only seventeen!” Kim never forgave me for blowing her cover.
Before Samantha, Kim would crash with me now and again, after a breakup, between jobs and girlfriends. We would drink and smoke and not talk in depth about anything, two butches learning to negotiate emotional landscapes. I was older by a few years, different in background and experience, but next to Kim’s armored certainty, I felt unfinished.
I had an old fashioned set of manners that wore strangely in my twenties, like a youth decked out in his father’s pinstripe suit. Old fashioned masculinity; solid, capable, sure and genial was my goal, Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart. That just doesn’t work for a woman at sixteen, at twenty-three. I wanted to be a gentleman; Kim was an angry boy. Women responded to her with stupefying regularity. I was too soft, I didn’t have the anger. My girlfriends left me thinking it was other things they valued, my intelligence, my personality, not my masculinity.
There had been a few women, a very few, who had given just a hint that they liked what I was becoming. One night, at a party, I was standing in a corner talking with Samantha. Her hand stroked the lapel of my coat; she sang a few lines from the Cowboy Junkies Sweet Jane. It was a play on my name, she knew she could get away with calling me anything she wanted. People called me Jane, a solid, straight on sort of name, I thought, one without frill or frippery. Only in Samantha’s mouth did it become affectionate, ornamental, with sweet gilded on. A plastic champagne glass dangled from two fingers.
“Would you get me another drink?” She asked, and her voice was playful.
I’d heard that tone before, on stage. The trill of a command couched in a request. I ran. I brought the drink back and presented it to her with a bow, calling her my lady with all the swashbuckling ardor I could manage. She thanked me, without the theatricality.
“It was my pleasure,” I said.
She gave me one direct look over the rim of the glass.
“I thought so.”
I must have looked stunned, the moment passed quickly. But I never forgot it.
The future had given me a sliver of what life might be like and for the first time I tasted it, hot and sweet on the back of my tongue, the delighted attention of a femme. The thought had never before occurred to me.
October, the leaves had turned but not fallen. It was warm for fall, absurdly like a second summer. For us, locked and frozen since June, it was an affirmation that time had stopped with Samantha’s death, even nature held still. After the memorial had been ceremonies at one week, at a month, then three months. Grieving became a public function. Everyone grieves differently, but some thing became familiar. In the months after Samantha died there was a marked increase in alcohol use, and other substances. Couplings sprang up and faded, sparking like fireflies. There were fights, reconciliations. Ambitious projects were undertaken. Many company members got new tattoos, often related to her. Long nights spent reminiscing. We invoked her name as if we were terrified of forgetting. We held on so tight: Life in all its excesses.
Now we were going back to Zoar Valley. One night, over a beer in the dyke bar, we’d been talking about the rituals. Laurie suggested that we go back to the spot of her death and leave food for her ghost. Laurie and her lover Marie were Seneca; they followed the Longhouse path - traditional religion. We’d been talking about how different cultures see death: some people do not consider a man dead until he’d been gone for three months, or six, until all the proper ceremonies had been performed. Back to the gorge, I asked. Laurie affirmed. All our ceremonies had been in Buffalo up till then. It was nearing six months, it was about time for another, we could feel it. Laurie also suggested that perhaps, just perhaps, Samantha was still there. It was the site of the accident. It couldn’t hurt to try.
Privately, I thought it would be good for Kim to go back, if not with a sense of power, at least with back up. Good for all of us, perhaps. We’d become practiced at grief, we’d been doing little else but mourning since the memorial. Something needed to shake loose. I knew that I was holding on to her so tightly, everyone was. How could she get any peace, hearing the anguish behind her? Maybe it was time to look for some stillness.
There was one season where every show we did seemed to be about either Gertrude Stein or Joan of Arc. Finally we ended with a play with both of them, madwomen who thought they were historical figures. I played Gertrude, Samantha was Joan. She was perfect in a hooded gray sweatshirt with a silver breastplate over it, a tiny armored saint. She had to carry a cross full as tall as she was, slung over her shoulder, deadly as a battering ram. During the play Gertrude was supposed to taunt Joan. I spent our time together on stage hissing “Joan of Arc died in the dark. Joan of Arc died in the dark!”
When Samantha was in the hospital, we hung the breastplate on the cross and stood it by the impromptu altar. After she died, it stood in my basement. Every time I went down stairs to do laundry it would scare the life out of me, her armor on that cross. But I couldn’t give it up. I wanted to be frightened out of my daily routine. I never wanted to be settled again. Five months of this and the cross was starting to haunt me. Maybe it was time to let the grisly, gaping wound start to close.
Zoar Valley is located an hour south of Buffalo. Kim twitched for the entire ride, snapping open her cigarette pack, flicking the lighter, rolling the window down, then halfway back up again. Her fingers drummed on the dash, on her knees, against the door. I’d always envied Kim’s restless, angry boy energy. I didn’t now. Samantha had grounded and balanced her. Now she was gone, and Kim was all raw nerves and ticks.
She had a habit of looking away from you when you were speaking to her, scanning over your shoulder, seeking. Lighting cigarettes, looking for other people to greet. This had gotten worse. She couldn’t be still for a moment. Stacy drove, I sat in the back with Laurie and Marie. Two more cars followed us, thirteen people in all. A good number, I thought. Kim would have a coven with her when she went back.
We parked in an unassuming open field. The trail into Zoar Valley led off up and to the left, a wide open swath of grass with a gentle rise. Perfect for amateur woodsmen, urban guerillas. We could navigate every coffee shop in the city, find souvlaki at four am blind drunk, but true hiking was beyond our scope. For most of us, going to Michigan once a year for the Music festival and camping out with five thousand other women and a general store was as wild as we got. Laurie and Marie had grown up in Gowanda, near the Tonawanda Reservation, and knew some of Zoar Valley and the Cattaraugus Creek. It was comforting to have them along, their age and experience balanced the youth and madness of the rest of us. They were in their forties, as was Mikey. Mikey was an old school butch who had raised two sons after her divorce, come out in the feminist 70’s and managed to mingle bar culture with the new women’s movement. It was a strange mix, but very alluring. Mikey was also the mother of John, the friend who had been hiking with Kim and Samantha the day of the accident. John was still in too much shock to come back to the valley, but Mikey was a company member and had loved Samantha. She’d been friends with Mary for almost as long as Kim had been alive. They had watched the three kids grow up together, all three had come out and kept their bonds strong. The two mothers of the survivors had put together the memorial for the child who had been lost.
Despite having registered adults along, Kim was the acknowledged leader. She had charisma that lent her authority, even at twenty-two, and her bereavement gave her space. We wanted to do what she wanted. Most of the group was young, early twenties at best, puppies really. I felt old at twenty-five. Stacy had her ten-year-old son Justin with her. Some of the puppies brought backpacks with important things like cigarettes and water. We were only going for a few hours.
It was around one o’clock when we started walking into the woods, a single file of women and one child. Trails in Zoar Valley are deceptively marked with blue and white daubs of paint on trees and no legend. Kim recalled taking a certain trail, blue marked, then walking up the creek itself. We argued against walking in the water for hours, even in the warmth of the afternoon. We didn’t want to get wet; it seemed too difficult. There was a child with us. Kim was fairly sure she could find the overland route, but we’d have to climb down a cliff once we got to the falls. Deer Lick Falls was the site.
An overland route sounded good, dry and leisurely, so we tried it, following Kim. The gentle sloping path grew progressively more wild, deeper into the forest. The woods led to the truth of Zoar Valley- a maze of deep gullies and dragonback ridges of loose dirt and shale, with sheer drop offs on either side. The trail went from a road to a path, then on to a snake’s track up the steep sides of hills. We followed, as it grew more difficult, adjusting by degrees. The first forty-five minutes or so we laughed and joked, pushed at one another, smoked and talked. The trail grew more difficult, the smoking stopped and the talking pared down, leaving me to my own thoughts.
Memory can be an awful thing. You want to recall the best moments and all your capricious brain gives you are a handful of images- her hand on my arm in the dark. Lighting her cigarette, hauling her chair offstage after her monologue. Splinters of time. Then, without my will, my memory gave me this- Samantha asking me, one afternoon in the fall, “It’d be silly to major in dance, right?” The rising of her voice gave it away, I was supposed to agree that this was ridiculous, to direct her to a sensible conclusion. That was what I was known for, my steady, solid advice. I knew that she had changed majors multiple times, she was now in Nutrition. I was in the middle of being sensible myself, getting a degree just to get a job, after years of working in restaurants and living on six thousand dollars a year. I was worn out, tired of poverty, needing, at twenty-five, to feel like I was growing up in some tangible way. I was playing it safe, making my own concessions to poverty and my family’s expectations. So I played my part and answered her, giving steady advice. Dance, but major in something you can get a job with.
She ignored me and majored in dance anyway, and had nearly six months of living what she loved before the log took out the back of her head. I was never so desperately glad to be ignored in my life.
After an hour, the trail became a snake’s track along the top of a dragonback ridge. We had to crawl on hands and knees, the sides falling away for two hundred feet on either hand. Up we went, the trail egging us on. Then Kim stopped. The blue paint had petered off, she wasn’t sure that this was the right trail. The single line dissolved into a committee. Mikey thought we should follow the white markers. Stacy thought we should go back. We had a meltdown. Had the blue markers been lost a few twists of the path back, or had we gone astray a full hour ago? Kim knew the way. All we would have to do is backtrack and check the trail. So we did, doubling back along the thread for most of another hour, covering the same ground.
When a group gets together they stop thinking as individuals. We were all stupid with grief, bludgeoned, in shock. We thought this sounded reasonable. It never occurred to us that we were following a girl who had lost her lover, who was distracted, bereaved, operating on a level of emotion close to obsession. The need to get back to the spot where Samantha had died had become a quest; there was no way Kim would leave the valley without doing so. It would be a betrayal of Samantha, a giving in to the ugly fact of her death. It had become the only thing worth doing. We followed, spurred on by her fierce certainty. We found the blue trail again and followed it until we reached the wrong turn, easily identifiable in hindsight. Then we set off, confidant, along the white trail.
We marched along the white trail, not talking as much now, more set down to the task at hand. Two hours of waking had warmed us up, we were ready and military. When the white trail ended abruptly in the dead wrong direction we were stunned. It was starting to get late, we’d been circling like the Donner Party for hours. Kim cut in, telling us that this was avoidable if we’d only listened to her in the first place and agreed to walk along the river. After wasting the afternoon, the expediency of walking in the water seemed more reasonable. It was still warm enough, we could get soaked and let the air dry us out. We shouldered up our meager gear and set to march. The way down to the river had to be found. We struck off the trail, following the sound of the water. Laurie pointed us in the direction of a branch of the Cattaraugus Creek that she knew, it would lead us up the right way. We followed the sound, south.
The plateau we were on ended in a thirty foot cliff. It was part of a smaller waterfall, wet outcroppings of shale and granite, slippery but passable. The trail started up again at the bottom, sloping down to a river we could now see. Stacy had finally had enough. She had her child to think of, she didn’t have the luxury of the madness that was taking us over. She pulled back at the edge of the cliff, saying that she would take her chances in the forest trying to find her way back to the cars. Elizabeth, another woman who had a degree of sense broke off with her. The rest of us, ten now in all, agreed to follow Kim over the cliff.
Our perspective had narrowed down to a single objective- we were going to make it to the spot where Samantha had died. We were going to leave food for her ghost. When there is nothing left to do, the slightest distraction becomes vital, irreplaceable.
Left were Kim, our leader, Mikey, Laurie and Marie, myself, and a collection of younger company member and friends of Samantha’s. Laurie seemed to think that Kim was now headed the right way, it helped us to keep going. We went down the cliff face, hugging the rock, covered in mud by the time we got to the bottom, scraped but unhurt. The land sloped down to the river, easily followed.
The river was at the bottom of the gorge, bound by walls of rock. At the point where we met it we could still walk down the slight hills, but almost immediately we would be boxed in. There were no banks, the rock dropped straight down into the water. We would have to walk, not along the creek, but in it against the current, waist deep in water until we reached the falls. It was estimated as a two-hour walk. We’d been walking for approximately three hours already, it was four in the afternoon. At this point, what was a little soaking? We set off without discussion, anxious not to waste any more time.
Walking along the river was a slow process. The bottom of the creek varied from level sand to rough cut stone, calf high flow to waist high. In June it had taken three young people in good shape two hours to walk upriver to the falls. We were entering the river at a different point, far below their original spot. What we didn’t take into account was the season. It was now October; the river was many feet higher than June, swollen with fall rains, moving much faster. What had been waist high was now chest high or above. What had been passable along the rock walls was now buried, mired in whitewater breaks. We would have to cross and recross the river to be able to keep going. And the water was now as cold as the presage of snow. Our group was larger, measurably slower moving. It was later in the day, our physical condition varied more, we were weighed down with grief.
After an hour of fighting the water at a crawl, we considered turning back. Mikey spoke for it, Laurie and Marie guessed that if we moved now, we could make it down stream in about three hours and look for the highway. The cold had numbed our legs, our clothing was soaked to the shoulders. Kim finally exploded. She was not going back. We were more than halfway, we had been through so much to get this far, when would we ever attempt this again? She didn’t care who went back, she was going on. It was said with tears in her eyes, and it broke us down. We remembered why we where here, standing in the icy water, arguing. How could we abandon Samantha? We couldn’t leave Kim alone out here. It was now around five. We went on.
The river was swollen, full of debris, capping out at whitewater above the rocks in several places. The current was strong; to cross it we had to form a human chain and link arms, fighting our way diagonally through the water. One of the young women got knocked down, we had to haul her up from the current or lose her. The brown water was churned into rapids. I got my boot stuck under a branch and went down, my mouth filled with water. Mikey hauled me back up.
We collapsed into a sullen march, no talking or singing now. We kept close formation, as much practicality as comfort. All I could focus on was the back of the girl in front of me. Kim was on point. No direction came back through the line, we lost track of time. The afternoon was gone. The shadow of the cliffs fell across us, chill. The sun was starting to go down, but as deep in the gorge as we were, it would get dark faster. We had, at best, a forty-five minute run from the site of the accident, if we reached it and climbed the cliff back up immediately.
With no warning the line stopped. I looked up, we had reached the falls. The sun was going down. The failing light left little time for ritual. This thought reached Kim, even in her state. We were numbed by hours in the water. We had to think about getting out. There was a narrow shelf of rock above the water level, beneath a twenty-foot cliff. We had come down a similar cliff to get into the water, but climbing back up the slippery rock, with gravity against us, looked far different. The trail was somewhere at the top of that cliff, we’d have to climb up and search. Most of us set to getting up the cliff immediately. The coming darkness brought out a survival instinct.
Mikey shepherded the climb. We linked together what we had, a few belts and backpacks, as a climbing rope. This was thrown around the base of a tree roughly halfway up, growing out of the cliff face. The surface of the shale gave a series of natural steps, with momentum it could be scaled. I stayed at the bottom, helping boost the younger women up. We were functioning as a group again, but this time in concern for everyone’s survival.
Laurie and Marie were sitting down on the ledge with Kim. I watched them as they set out an ear of corn and a feather, the words they spoke were soft, in Seneca. Kim was crying. We didn’t have the time for a long ritual, even now the cliff face was a wet black in front of us. They left food for Samantha’s ghost, even as we tried to get the rest of us out alive.
I helped Kim up, boosting her until she could grab the makeshift rope and brace herself on the fragile tree trunk. From there many hands awaited her at the top, helping to pull her up. Laurie went next, then Marie. I went up before Mikey, with her boost. I stopped at the top and gave her a hand up. Kim was already off, heading up the trail, restless as ever. We had made it to the spot, with single-minded determination, but had no time to linger. Now we were fighting the vanishing sun. Above the cliff the path continued to rise, thinning out to a knife blade. It was a dragonback ridge we straddled, clawing out way up in the half light. The hills around us cast coal shadows, the light between the tree trunks was pale blue, fading to pearl. The sun was hidden behind the ridges.
It took time to claw up to the top of the ridge, time we didn’t have. The trail above us widened out into forest, into hills and deep valleys, more rolling than the narrow track we perched on. The air had gone gunmetal gray. I wished for the sun like a child. I could make out the sodden shirt of the woman in front of me. Kim called out from the front of the line to hurry, she knew the way.
We were straggling out all over the ridge. I looked back at Mikey, who was frozen, eyes shut, perched on the trail. I reached out and took her arm, there were tears in her eyes. Exhaustion, fear of heights, sadness, all came on with the failing light. She had pulled me out of the river when the current took me, I gave her my hand and urged her up the trail.
We started to trot, a difficult task with frozen, leaden legs. Hope spurred a last bust of adrenaline, we might just beat the dark and find the trail out. Up the slope we scrambled. My eyes were unfocussed, only my legs were moving. I slapped right into Marie’s back, she was stopped. The line had broken down into a rough circle. They were all standing , gaping. I felt anger bubble to the surface, why were we wasting the few seconds we had? Then I saw it, in front of Kim. A sign, with white lettering: Danger-Trail Closed.
The sun was gone, the forest had grown dark. Someone halfway suggested hiking out in the dark. Mikey’s voice was firm, exasperated. She vetoed the thought. We’d been gifted with dumb luck not to have anyone get hurt this far. We knew what was out there, dragonback ridges, deep gorges, valleys, a hundred chances to fall down a cliff, even if we knew the way and it was broad daylight. We would have to spend the night.
Laurie spoke up, saying that we should get out of the hollows to the flat top of a ridge, where the wood might be drier. A fire could be attempted. By hand we felt our way to the top of the next hill. The summit was fairly level, enough for us to sit in a circle and stare at one another. We’d been walking all day, hours of it in a winter cold creek against the current. The emotional high that had kept us going was gone. All of us were soaked, it was going to be a cold night on the ground. No one had any food. To cheer us up, Marie said that it didn’t seem likely to snow.
Groups of two or three were sent out to scour the ground for wood. Most of it was done crouching and crawling, to keep from tipping over any drop off. We hauled back what we could find, twigs, logs, vines, sticks. It had to be broken by hand. Mikey inventoried the backpacks. We had plenty of cigarettes, seven lighters, a pack of soggy gum, and three maxi pads. Mikey held the pads up, triumphant. “We have our fire starter.”
Mikey knelt down with a lighter and the pad. I recalled a story she told, that one winter when her sons were young they were poor and had no heat, they kept the stove burning and open to heat the apartment. Vines were piled over the small white square in an arch. I crouched behind her, ready to feed twigs and debris. The lighter, metal and decorated with a motorcycle, snapped smoothly open, giving off the smell of Butane. Pale yellow flame caressed the white square, licking at it like a cat. Was it soaked from our time in the river? Would we be spending a cold night on the ground with no comfort?
The flame caught at the square, and held. It engulfed the pad, rising to the vines, catching the threadlike bark. We were still in luck, pure unearned luck, that it hadn’t rained recently. We were soaked, but the wood was not. The vines burned, lent flame to the twigs, then the sticks. Fire came to us, midwifed by Mikey.
The longer logs had to be placed with just their ends in the flame, and moved in like pool cues as they burned down. It made a sprawling mass of a fire, but never had a fire been more welcome. Outer layers were stripped off, socks and shirts hung on sticks over the flame, roasting like marshmallows. Boots and sneakers were shed and opened, tonguing toward the heat, steaming. Safety returned with the fire, and a measure of good humor. The puppies sat nearest the flame in a circle, stripped down as much as they could stand as their clothing cooked. I kept scrounging for more firewood, paranoid that the pile wouldn’t last us until dawn.
The fire was all we had of comfort, it was also our signal that we were out here if anyone came looking. By now we knew that the people waiting for us would be frantic. Our cars were back in the field, we were lost in Zoar. I thought about Mary and my heart went out to her. She had lost Samantha, now her daughter, her oldest friend, and most of her theater company, were missing in the same spot Samantha had died. She had no way of knowing where we were, if we were all sound. We had each other, we knew that we would make it through the night with a little discomfort. As soon as the sun came up, we could walk back out.
People might be looking for us. For a while the idea was enticing, we would periodically stand up and shout at the top of our lungs. The sound echoed in the hills, but came back unanswered. We saw no lights, no signs of a search. Probably waiting until morning. Zoar was a big place, there was no way of telling where we had ended up. We gave up shouting. Roasted clothing was put back on. I sat on a log by the fire, next to Marie.
Kim, who had been standing and weaving, collapsed on the ground, the fight bled out of her. The return of comfort, the quiet, after a frantic and adrenaline flooded day, was too much. She folded her head down on her arms, crying roughly.
During the funeral Kim had been stoic and removed. All during the service, during the pallbearers that Samantha’s mother had arraigned (former boyfriends from her early teens), during the procession to the graveside. It was only when the coffin had been lowered into the ground that she had collapsed sobbing, unable to say the final farewell -unable to leave Samantha there, alone, in the earth.
Now she cried out the tension of the day, of returning here to the site of the accident. We’d had so little time down at the falls, no time for reflection or release. Perhaps that was a mercy. Kim always did better with violent deadlines and tasks. Her head raised, her eyes were smeared and bruised.
“I feel like shit. We got stuck out here, somebody else could have gotten hurt and it’d be my fault.”
The puppies clustered around her, offering he reassurances. Laurie walked over and stroked her back.
“We’re all fine. Nobody got hurt, we just got a little wet. It’s just a night in the woods. We’ll walk right out in the morning.”
This worked. Kim lay down, spent, empty. The girls slept on each side of her, for warmth, for comfort. Mikey lay down near to the fire. I sat up, electing myself to keep the fire going all night. It might not have needed it, but I did. I needed to do something for the group, to oversee something, to keep the night watch. Laurie and Marie sat up with me for a while.
“We spent all day walking in circles, we went wrong at every turn, but nobody got hurt. It’s like something didn’t want us to leave,” Laurie said. I nodded.
“I don’t feel like Samantha is still here. Back in Buffalo, during the rituals, in the theater, I feel like she’s there.”
Marie pulled Laurie back to lean on her. I remembered that they had been lovers for twenty years. The thought staggered me. Laurie liked to say that she’d started dating Marie because she drove this great big boat of a car, a sleek Thunderbird. She had been seventeen, hanging out with Marie’s cousin, and Marie would come around, quiet, handsome, a few years older, with that car. “I knew I’d get with her, to get to that car. I ended up liking the back seat a lot,” Laurie would laugh, usually over a beer at the bar.
“There’s something wrong out here. Not bad, just off. Sad,” Marie said.
That I could readily believe. I’d had enough of Zoar Valley. If this was refuge, send me back to Sodom and Gomorrah. If the trip settled nothing else, I would never feel the urge to go back there. Laurie and Marie curled up eventually, Marie’s arm around her lover. Laurie elbowed Marie to move over, then pulled her back in. I set myself to keep my night long vigil, looking into the fire.
I fed the fire with sticks, pushed the big logs in as they ate down. The vines sent up too many sparks, I left them off to the side. My body had been pushed to its limits, but I was sitting near warmth, whole, my clothing had steamed itself nearly dry.
These things settled, I looked to how I felt, like probing a wound. I had moved past my exhaustion, the warmth and the rest allowed my body to care for itself. All the madness of the day, all the pushing to extremes, the excess of emotion, all gone now. I had to face myself alone in the dark. I thought about Samantha dying down below me in that gorge, about her not knowing what had happened. Catapulted into death with no explanation, no warning. By myself, I let my heart break. I had never lost anyone I loved before; she was the first.
I asked for an answer, a sign. Meaning. If she was there, I wanted her to touch me. If god was there, I wanted that to touch me. Anything to help me bear this, the knowledge that death existed. That we all ended, could end, at any time.
Nothing. Just the sounds of people sleeping, breathing, the snap and hiss of vines on the fire. No words, no visions. No Samantha, lingering nearby in the frozen echo of pain and astonishment. Whatever she had been wasn’t there, down by the river, haunting the gorge. She was gone. No hand on my arm in the dark. I let that thought settle down on me. The night nearby was full of small sounds, beyond that, the hills muffled everything. We had come looking for a ghost and found only silence.
I kept the fire going and sat up with it all night. I was lightheaded, but it felt better than sleep. It was good to be awake as the smeared blackness started to show the individual trunks of trees, as the light turned a faint powdery blue. I had kept the night watch.
The ground was coming clear as the darkness thinned. It was in the stillness, when I wasn’t asking, that my answer had come to me on soft feet. It waited for me to notice, patient, as I waited for the sun to come up. Samantha wasn’t here. Mary, our director, always said, “Pure purpose is fearless.”
Samantha had been fearless. Even knowing she was dead, I couldn’t see her ending. I didn’t know, not for sure. In that moment I chose to believe that she went on, she would be there when we did a show, when we drank and cried and spoke about her. She wasn’t down in Zoar Valley, locked in that gorge. She was free of that. My grief didn’t dissipate, but it felt more balanced, I could lift it better. She deserved a chance for peace. If all I had was my choice, I chose to let her rest. She had been through enough.
The company woke in stages, put out the fire and started to walk. The trail wasn’t hard to find. In forty minutes we were on the wide sloping path, headed back to the field.
Mary met us at the mouth of the trail with the county police, the sheriff’s department, the fire department, ambulances, emergency vehicles- the entire cavalry. Kim was at the head of the line. She burst into tears as soon as she saw her Mom, frightening Mary, until she saw the rest of us strung along the trail, dirty but whole. She hugged each of us as we came out into the field. Her night had been far longer than ours, waiting in that field in a car until the rescuers could march in at dawn and seek us. I hugged her, and told her that we were all right. We’d gone in together and come out together and that was enough. There would be things I could do for Kim, even if we didn’t have the words. Help her find ways to let go.
I was happy to leave Zoar Valley, I yearned for the city. For my own Sodom and Gomorrah. I didn’t have to worry about any god’s wrath, nobody was answering. Samantha’s death had been hideous and bloody and wrong. Unjust. Don’t think I forgot. There wasn’t any purpose to be found in it. But it had happened. If all I had to offer her now was a chance for rest, I would offer that. I prayed, not to god, but to Samantha. We know you fought, baby. We didn’t want to let you go. You are loved, oh you are loved. Its okay to go, now. We’ll look after each other. We won’t forget. We will listen for you. Peace to you, Samantha. Deep peace.
-- Susan Smith