By
Ann Hillesland
We saw the frogs at the third lake. The
first two lakes we hiked past were more like pictures of mountain lakes than
actual lakes—deep emerald unruffled by wind or fish or waterbugs,
only an occasional blue jay cheeping mechanically.
But the third lake was shallow and
sandy, with a creek dashing through tall banks to ripple into the lake. Logs
snarled on the opposite side, carried by currents. And the frogs, tiny, the
size of my thumbnail, hopping away from our huge feet.
“Careful where you walk,” I told my
husband Christopher, but the frogs were so small and stayed still till our feet
were almost upon them. Too small to avoid, too small to feel if crushed.
Our car was the only one at the
trailhead. Driving the twisty road up, I wondered what it would be like to sail
the car over the rail-less curves, into the pine canyons deep with branches
soft and whispery as a bed. I pulled off and made Christopher drive, pretending
I wanted to see the scenery.
As his boots sank into the sandy shore,
he said “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” His voice seemed small in the wind,
the pines, the mountains. I looked across the lake at the raw cliff plunging
into the water, at the tumble of squared-off boulders and the miniature pine
trees that grew in dirt pockets. I wondered what had caused all that. An
avalanche? a river? a lava flow? Centuries later the scars were still there,
not even much softened.
We’d had a little ceremony after we’d
lost the baby. His idea. We planted a rosebush in the side yard. No sign or
plaque, but we would know what it commemorated. “It was soul whose time hadn’t
come yet,” Christopher had said. I watched the bush, waiting for the ground to
reject it, for it to sicken and die, but so far it was still alive.
At the other lakes we couldn’t hear
anything but the isolated call of a bird. Here, though, the valley was full of
the lap of waves, the buzz of unseen insects, and the rustle of frogs at our
feet as they hopped into the lake to float with only their eyes above water.
They thought they were hidden because of their mud-colored skin, but they were
easy for us to see. Christopher squatted down to take a closer look. His face
was serious, gentle. He rose up again, not moving his boots. He looked over at
me, eyebrows raised.
He didn’t need to say anything. I knew
what this trip was about. The doctor had said to wait three months before
trying again, and now the time was up. Christopher had loaded two blankets into
his pack for the day hike. Another kind of ceremony.
I didn’t want a ceremony. Something inside
me still felt empty and broken, no matter how often I told myself that first
trimester miscarriages happened all the time. When I’d told my friends and
family, I’d said “We lost the baby,” like we left it on a bus by mistake. Like
it was something we both did, instead of something my body did to us. I worried
about a whole side yard full of rosebushes, their fragrance like poison in our
house.
Christopher stepped closer, put his
arms around me. His body was warm in the cool mountain air. “It’s all part of
life,” he said. To him the tumbled avalanche made sense, and the lost baby.
Also, the humming bees, the flowing creek, the lake vibrating with life beneath
the gray cliff.
After spreading a blanket on the sandy
bank he took my cold hand. He stretched the collar of my t-shirt down and
kissed my shoulder, his lips moving softly against the tight skin. Still
holding me, he sank to the blanket. He unlaced my hiking boots, rubbing warmth
into my feet before slipping them under the other blanket. The sun moved in and
out of the white clouds, and though it was summer it reminded me of the
earliest days of spring, when the warm sun is rare and new and the whole world
is waking up to life.
He settled back onto the blanket and I
went with him, trusting that his vision was truer than mine, that life and
death could both be commemorated, celebrated.
But even as we moved together to create
life again, I wondered about the frogs, and whether we were crushing any
beneath the blanket as we rolled over in the sunshine, whether they were
wriggling beneath us, struggling for capricious life.