Gramps parked his blue Buick behind Pop’s black Chevy and the edge of the road was close and steep. The road was gravel and the wood on either side was thick with green needles and dark brown bark. No sunlight hit the woodland floor, but if you looked straight over your head you could see the sky was blue and clear. We bundled out of the cars and the trunk was lifted and the duty of carrying the picnic basket fell to me. My brother carried the red lemonade jug with the white handle, and my mother carried Beck, who, while old enough to walk, was not equipped to handle the deep woodland terrain. 

 

I was at the age now when I had become taller than my older brother. I was taller than he was now, and bigger, and for the first time in our lives, while I was not able to beat him, I was able to hold my own, to bring things to a stalemate, where whatever pressures he applied to me, whatever headlock, or arm twist, I was now able to counter him, to break free, or, in some other way, limit the pain. And, one fight, I discovered, quite to my surprise, that I was stronger than he was in certain aspects – that my back was longer than his and so I discovered leverage, and points of relief hitherto not available to, what I had been, all those previous years, to me, the smaller prey. And while my grip would never be equal to his viselike hands, his tool manipulating mechanic’s hands and farm boy hands, I fed the cows silage too, handled the hay fork, carried corn silage by the broad fork to each cow, clamped in her stanchion, and I was surprised that one day my hands, too, could counter his, could force a release. 

 

And so, in a way, this parity meant that the full picnic basket, full of lunches and utensils and something hidden in the bottom, came to me as a responsibility, and while the handles joined over the basket to make it easy to grip, it was heavy, “Damned, what could be in this thing?” 

 

There was no path through the woods, not even a deer path, there being few, if any, deer on this mountain, and so we each headed down the heavily wooded hill in our own fashion, picking our way through the underbrush, which was not heavy, was not thick, as the canopy of hemlock and pine was too protective to allow enough light for a vigorous understory. And I remember my other sister, Deb, also younger, but not as young, walking on her own, her back stiff and her hair dark, as she was, of the four, the dark one, walking stiffly but on strong legs, with a dress on, as she always wore dresses -- in this case over her bathing suit -- and I think she had on rubber boots, and she walked on her own but as close to her father as she could get, as she always did, rising towards him like an eagle to the sky.

 

I didn’t care about duty, or privilege, or any of that, but if I was given a job, a task, I would do it in such a way as to get it done as efficiently and as fast as possible, so I would once again be free until something else was assigned my way by a father, parent, or school. Getting things done was about being free, because after the work was done, I would be free. I found, I don’t know why, but it generally took me less time to do things than other people, and you might not believe this, but, other people don’t take kindly to that. It wasn’t until years later that I found out this happened to my friend Garcia too. His father would be furious, “Why aren’t you raking that lawn like I told you?” 

 

“Because I’m done,” Garcia would answer his baffled father. 

 

And so, in keeping, I was ahead of the family now, not knowing the way, but knowing the stream had to be in front of me because it would be at the bottom of whatever we were traversing, and I stepped over an old, barbed wire fence, not much left of it, a pile of stones holding what remained of the fence post, as, on this part of the mountain, there was no soil in which to drive a post. The ground was covered in pine needles and hemlock sheddings and it was soft on the slab stone it covered, and in some spots the ground sounded hollow to my footsteps like there was a large, vacant cavern underneath where I was walking. “Thummp, thuummmp.”

 

I began to see a sparkle or two of sunlight in front of me and I began to think I might have found it and, yes, I entered a narrow opening with the stream running across wide expanses of flat stones laid out as if by a quarryman as big as God, by Zues, or like running water in the kitchen of Gaia. There was no one there. The stream ran from my right to my left, and the stream formed pools not more than one- or two-feet deep, and the color was hard to describe for, as the water of the pools was clear as a bell and I could see glistening pebbles of stones made of the same material as the mountain slabs, the water seem a turquoise, or a blue-green something that mixed hemlock, pine, and sky all into one color. 

 

I picked out a nice flat spot I thought the family might want to sit, one where Gramp could take off his Endicott and Johnson City shoes and roll up his wool pants and stick his feet in the cold water. I opened the picnic basket and took out the red and white tablecloth, and a roll of utensils wrapped in a napkin (the world was not yet in the grip of plastic utensils at that time), and other things and I was determined to see, before anyone else arrived, what was in the secret level of the picnic basket and I lifted the last hand towel off the wicker protector and, “Oh my god, a huckleberry pie!”