Читать книгу Shaped by Snow. Defending the Future of Winter онлайн

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The name jogged a memory. I already knew this place from a story my mother told me. My dad invited my mother to this place on one of their first dates to join his family for a weenie roast. According to my mom, Baqui, already over fifty years old at the time, started at his house and ran up Rock Canyon to meet them, rather than riding in the car.

I brought up this story and my grandpa chuckled.

“I just dropped your Uncle Barry off here the other day so he could do that run in reverse.”

During the weenie roast, perched on that rocky outcrop, my mother witnessed the underlying bones of my father’s family, what lay beneath, what made their family what it was: a deep and desperate love of the mountains, of the soil and the maples and the dry, oxygen-deprived air. She also glimpsed what her future could be as a part of that family, what a relationship with my father might become.

We emerged on the outcrop and my grandpa made a sweeping motion from the tip of the peak to the east, known controversially as Squaw Peak, tracing its shoulder down as it arced toward us and then south, dropping into the basin. He explained this unseen boundary as the northern edge of what used to be the homestead of a man named Louis Richard. I’d never heard his name before, and was startled when my grandpa said that Louis was his uncle, his mother’s brother, a shepherd who used to bring his flock into Rock Canyon during the summers in the early 1900s.