{"id":440,"date":"2018-04-15T16:58:29","date_gmt":"2018-04-15T16:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=440"},"modified":"2018-04-15T16:58:29","modified_gmt":"2018-04-15T16:58:29","slug":"story-of-the-month-getting-to-june-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=440","title":{"rendered":"Story of the Month: Getting to June Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>They don\u2019t call it Oh! Ridge for nothing, he thought as his car topped the hill, June Lake coming suddenly into view below him, an expanse of cold blue, with the mountains rising behind it, silver gray granite and pointed evergreen trees and long, falling waterfalls.\u00a0 <\/span>The sky was blue, too, a softer blue than the cold, deep lake, a soft blue studded with large, white cumulus clouds.\u00a0 <\/span>How did something as intangible as clouds take on such bright whiteness?\u00a0 <\/span>It hurt his eyes to look at them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019d forgotten his sunglasses.\u00a0 <\/span>They\u2019d been ridiculously expensive.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019d said they made him look sexy, like a suave, sexy secret agent.\u00a0 <\/span>He wondered if he\u2019d left them in the diner or in the motel room.\u00a0 <\/span>He\u2019d flung them down when they entered the room.\u00a0 <\/span>Flung down his keys, too.\u00a0 <\/span>He couldn\u2019t recall where they\u2019d landed.\u00a0 <\/span>The room\u2019s furnishings were generic, reaching for a sense of almost-luxury rather than a sense of homeyness, and achieving neither.\u00a0 <\/span>Not that he\u2019d noticed.\u00a0 <\/span>Not while she was screaming at him and he back at her.\u00a0 <\/span>Not while her face was twisted that way, and he could feel that his face was twisted, too.\u00a0 <\/span>The argument had been near its peak then.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There were the usual complaints, the usual defenses and counter-defenses, the accusations by her of his aloofness, the accusations by him of her tendency to melodrama.\u00a0 <\/span>What was not usual was the sudden, mutual silence.\u00a0 <\/span>They stood close to each other in that coiled silence like two boxers before a bout when the referee is outlining the rules of the fight, except that their fight was over, and somehow they both knew it at the same moment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not happy,\u201d she said quietly through clenched teeth.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cNeither of us is happy.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>The truth of the simple statement flooded his mind and drowned all objections.\u00a0 <\/span>When she saw he wasn\u2019t going to reply, her frown smoothed out and she walked to one of the beds and lay down.\u00a0 <\/span>He was reminded, madly, of a queen\u2019s tomb they\u2019d seen in a cathedral somewhere once, the queen\u2019s reclining body carved in stone.\u00a0 <\/span>Then she turned her head to the side, and he knew he had to leave the room, had to get out of the gloom of that shuttered room and into the fresh air.<\/span><\/p>\n

He found the keys on the other bed.\u00a0 <\/span>Wouldn\u2019t he have seen the sunglasses if they\u2019d been there, too?\u00a0 <\/span>Seen them and not left them behind.\u00a0 <\/span>So he must have left them in the diner.\u00a0 <\/span>But he couldn\u2019t remember wearing the sunglasses during the drive from the motel to the diner.\u00a0 <\/span>He couldn\u2019t remember driving at all, how he\u2019d gotten to the diner, how a plate of eggs and toast and a steaming cup of coffee had come to be sitting in front of him at the counter.\u00a0 <\/span>He drank half the coffee, but he couldn\u2019t touch the food.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He couldn\u2019t remember making the turns that took him to Oh! Ridge and June Lake either.\u00a0 <\/span>It must have been muscle memory that had gotten him from the diner to the lake, where he\u2019d spent part of every childhood summer swimming in its frigid water, lying on his back on its gravelly beach to look at the Milky Way, netting crayfish from under the wooden swim raft, fishing for trout at small Gull Lake next door.\u00a0 <\/span>But muscle memory couldn\u2019t have taken him to the diner.\u00a0 <\/span>It was a new place, a few blocks in from the main route, not in plain sight.\u00a0 <\/span>Had there been roadside advertising signs?\u00a0 <\/span>And a big red arrow at the turn?\u00a0 <\/span>Or maybe it wasn\u2019t red.\u00a0 <\/span>Or even there at all.\u00a0 <\/span>What did it matter?\u00a0 <\/span>None of it mattered now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He could still see how she looked lying on the bed when he\u2019d looked back over his shoulder, stopping for a moment at the doorway.\u00a0 <\/span>He could still see the full stretch of her lying there, her face turned away from him and away from the door and away from the parking lot outside and the potato-brown Alabama Hills beyond the parking lot and the craggy Sierras looming behind the hills.\u00a0 <\/span>Her brown hair was spread across the pillow.\u00a0 <\/span>Her dress was dark blue like the lake, dark blue and still like the lake at dawn, like June Lake waiting for them up the road a way yet, Oh! Ridge waiting to surprise them with the sudden postcard perfect view, the ridge and the lake waiting, finally, only for him.\u00a0 <\/span>Her dress was still and dark like the lake, but she herself was quick and bright, like the flash of a quick, silvery fish in shallow water on a calm, sunny day.\u00a0 <\/span>Which was why her stillness and her turned-away face wounded him so.\u00a0 <\/span>Was she resisting her own nature just to spite him?\u00a0 <\/span>He didn\u2019t like thinking of her as spiteful.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019d never been spiteful before.\u00a0 <\/span>Maybe, like him, she just didn\u2019t want to see the ruination.\u00a0 <\/span>Maybe she was holding still in order to hold herself together, waiting for his exit so that she could grieve properly.\u00a0 <\/span>Or exult. <\/span><\/p>\n

And now he was here.\u00a0 <\/span>But what was here without her?\u00a0 <\/span>Only a place where he\u2019d been a boy in summer and once for a week at Christmas with snow and ice.\u00a0 <\/span>He\u2019d wanted to show her June Lake as a way to show her something of himself, a pure piece of his story.\u00a0 <\/span>Surely, somewhere inside him was something kept from those days, kept as he used to keep dried cicada skins in a wooden cigar box.\u00a0 <\/span>Precious to him in their mystery, definitive for each cicada of what it had been and what, larger, it had become.\u00a0 <\/span>But he felt smaller, not larger, shrunken from those brimful boyhood days in the sun and under the stars.\u00a0 <\/span>A wide-minded, wide-ranging boy grown to a narrow man. <\/span><\/p>\n

He would have to go get her.\u00a0 <\/span>He couldn\u2019t leave her marooned in Lone Pine.\u00a0 <\/span>But what would the long ride home be like?\u00a0 <\/span>Would she keep her face turned towards the window, pretending to be absorbed in the passing scenery?\u00a0 <\/span>Certainly, there was nothing left to say on either side.\u00a0 <\/span>Maybe he\u2019d stop in Bishop on the way back to see if there was a bus service she could use.\u00a0 <\/span>She wouldn\u2019t like it, but she wouldn\u2019t complain.\u00a0 <\/span>He could take her to the small airport at Mammoth Lakes, but that would mean more time in the car together than getting to Bishop, like convicts on a chain gang.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, he would have to go get her.\u00a0 <\/span>But first he\u2019d get another coffee.\u00a0 <\/span>He\u2019d take it to the shore of the lake and sit and listen to the wind sigh in the pine treetops, a sound he\u2019d always loved.\u00a0 <\/span>Others coming over Oh! Ridge might see him down below, a small figure in the beautiful, peaceful landscape, a figure, they\u2019d think, mesmerized by the beautiful landscape.\u00a0 <\/span>But he wouldn\u2019t be at peace.\u00a0 <\/span>June Lake wasn\u2019t his any longer.\u00a0 <\/span>It was just a place he used to know and that he used to feel knew him, now impersonal and impervious, as perhaps it had always been.\u00a0 <\/span>Impervious to the oh\u2019s of the delighted drivers on the ridge above.\u00a0 <\/span>Impervious to the man who\u2019d been a boy on its shores and in its icy waters and who sat on its shore again, sorrowing. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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They don\u2019t call it Oh! Ridge for nothing, he thought as his car topped the hill, June Lake coming suddenly […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-noellesickelswp","post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-allposts","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":443,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}