The St. Ambrose School for Girls(28)
We are directed to four orange school buses that are parked on the main lane of the campus. As we funnel onto them, I see Greta and the Brunettes and am surprised my fantasy about her father didn’t come to fruition. She doesn’t look happy and I make sure that I am not on the bus she chooses.
As we motor off in one-by-one formation, the lolling suspension of our vehicle makes me regret that I ate anything, but fortunately, in this part of New England, it doesn’t take long to find a mountain. Which is how every dorm gets its own hill.
Just before I embarrass myself by throwing up, we make a wide turn into a packed dirt parking lot, and then comes the disembarking. Even though I’m right by the door, there’s no chance for me to get a head start on the exodus. Others are already out of their seats before the paddle and hiss of the Jake Brakes, and I let them go ahead of me, content even in all my nausea to not get trampled by the herd.
I wonder why they’re rushing. The mountain isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.
“Well, are you gonna get off?”
I snap to attention. My bus driver has turned in her seat, her thick arm draped on the back of her driving throne. She’s neither annoyed nor solicitous. She’s factual. She just wants to know if I’m gonna get off her bus.
I look out through the half windows. So many girls. And there, in the sunshine that is dappled as it flows through the finally changing leaves, are Greta and Francesca and Stacia.
I want to be honest with my bus driver and tell her that the last thing I want to gonna get off is her bus.
Instead, I nod and rise to my feet. As I go down the three steps and put my sneakers on the dirt, I wish I were sitting on my bed in a perfectly quiet dorm, reading something for pleasure. Like Nietzsche.
A clapping sound draws my attention and everybody else’s.
“Okay, folks, who’s ready to climb!”
It’s Hot RA. He’s pumped up for what’s ahead, and his vigor once again draws the girls around him, steel shavings to a magnet. As he delivers another speech, which is a repeat of our pre-bus talking-to, I stare at him through the heads and shoulders in front of me. I’m not surprised that the gleaming sunlight coalesces around him.
When he’s done with his reminders—stay on the trail, lunch after the climb, ask if you need help—he puts his sunglasses on. They are aviators like Tom Cruise wears in Top Gun, and the black lenses with the little gold rims and earpieces fit Hot RA’s square-jawed face like his bone structure was the one they used to create the design. In this regard, the Ray-Bans are like his vintage Porsche, a nationally available item that his attractiveness makes personal to him and him alone.
He leads the pack. Two hundred girls and ten other residential advisors follow. Strots is out in front with Keisha and the field hockey team. Greta and Francesca and Stacia are in the middle, releasing a concentration of sweetly scented molecules in their wake, a Glade PlugIn with many tanned legs. I am at the back—and so is Ms. Crenshaw, but she and the married couple from Tellmer’s third floor are in a clutch of conversation. I am relieved. If I had to walk with her, it would make the ascent twice as long.
It’s cool under the canopy of deciduous trees, and as I trudge the well-packed dirt of the trail, I’m thankful for that. While we go along and all the others chat, I pass the time looking at the leaves and measuring the color change. It’s a good distraction, my brain consuming the information my eyes provide, noting all the tiny tint variations of red and yellow that start at the tips and invade inward to drain the green.
As we approach the top, the fluffy trees fade away and are replaced by evergreens, and the climb is not as bad as I anticipated. This is what is going through my mind as I make a final turn in the ever-narrowing trail and am rewarded for my two and a half hours of effort with a keyhole view of the valley below. This tease of the horizon expands to the infinite as I finally emerge onto the flat, bald head of the mountain. Given that I am a last-place straggler, there is a crowd when I reach the trail’s end, but there is plenty of space. I choose a spot off on the left, and as I stand with the wind in my hair, my hands on my hips, and my eyes trained on the graceful undulations of the peaks and valley before us, I realize that I have chosen the same place as my table in Wycliffe’s lunch hall.
Voices carry and the topics of talk are varied, although almost none of them concern the magnificent sight available for us to purchase with our gazes. I am content to stand away from them all, and I am affected by the view in a way I could not have foreseen. Having faced repeatedly, and against my will, the vast landscape of what my mind insists on conjuring, I’m oddly reassured at a yawning vista that is physical. Undeniable. Experienced by others, even if they ignore it for the most part.
Hot RA is now calling for our attention. He’s standing by an observation tower. He’s telling us that there are drinks here, by his feet, and that we will begin our descent in five minutes. As I’m thirsty, I work my way around the periphery, the lichen-covered rocks I traverse gray and dry, and strangely slippery even though moisture is nowhere. As the wind whips my hair around and my cheeks burn from the cool air, I can’t imagine what it’s like up here in the winter.
I’m grateful there’s only one Mountain Day a year and the next one isn’t scheduled for February.
I wait in line at the three Igloo coolers by the observation tower. When it’s my turn, I plunge my hand into melted ice and come up with a bottle of water. I am quick to sidestep for the person behind me, and I retreat to the exact same place I was standing before. The twist top makes a crackle as I free it from its rim, and then I am drinking, my hot and dry throat like the roots of the twiglike plants that struggle to grow up here, catching and holding the cool and the wet. My stomach is a basin at my body’s room temperature, and as I guzzle, a ball of refrigeration coalesces there. I stop myself at the halfway mark. I don’t want to have to pee in the woods on the descent.