Memorial Day (Part Two)

We left off at the part where I was yelling down the mountain at a Chinese woman who was not, in fact, my mother, to hurry up and bring me water. Mollified, I scampered away to higher ground. Once I was practically on the summit, I passed a group of college frat types on their way down. Jokingly, I asked if it was far to the top. "You're almost there!" They answered. Typical.

I made a beeline for the top, and proceeded to befriend and charm every potential Aquafina-packing male in the vicinity until I was sufficiently hydrated. Then I set about looking for my parents.

"Did you come up the Lost Farm trail?" I asked one dude as he appeared over the boulders.

"I don't know WHAT I was doing," was his answer.

So I went and perched on a ledge overlooking the trail and waited for my parents to materialize, meeting new boys and thus securing more water along the way. A few of us sat and took in the view and chatted idly, and before long there was a figure with ski poles sort of hobbling determinedly up the ledge below us, and it was my father. Another figure had materialized, but it was in the far distance, and heading away from the summit.

"Hey Dad!" I yelled. "Where's Mom?"

He looked up, and then pointed a ski pole in the direction of the figure in the distance.

"What's she DOING?" I asked.

"Ahhh," said my father, waving his poles dismissively. "Someone told her there was a shortcut. I told her to stick with the trail. But you know she doesn't listen to me." He huffed along.

"Typical," I told the boys.

We watched as my mother went farther and farther away.

"I wonder where she thinks she's going," said one of the boys. Indeed, we were all very curious about this, since the summit of the mountain was quite clearly UP, while my mother seemed to be going DOWN.

She would wander in one direction for a little while, and then turn around and go the other way, and then stop, and shade her eyes, and then start wandering back in the original direction. It was a bit like our family trying to find the mountain in the first place.

"This is fascinating," one of the boys said.

"I know," I said. "I wish we had snacks."

Which may or may not have been a strategic maneuver to obtain some of their peanuts.

So we sat back and ate some peanuts and watched my mother wander back and forth, and pretty soon my Dad came along and plopped down beside us and then I got some more water, and a luna bar.

The sun was getting low and there was a nice breeze and it was a pleasant afternoon, sitting with good company watching my mother be lost. Every so often we would forget about her and get caught up in conversation, and then we would remember and look back and she would still be in the same place.

"This would be a great drinking game," said one of the boys. "If we took shots for every time she turned around."

"We'd be WASTED," I said.

So instead we took bets on what time she would finally make it to the top. One of the boys finally started to look a little anxious.

"Maybe someone should go down and get her," he said.

"Nah," said me and my dad.

So we waited a little longer.

"I mean, it's a mountain," I said, as my mother started to go down the ledge away from us for the fourteenth time. "It leads into a peak, and the peak is right in front of her. I don't understand how it could possibly be so confusing."

We waited a little longer.

"Oh, all right. Maybe someone should go down and get her," My dad finally said.

So John very gallantly volunteered, since my father was old, and I was eating peanuts. He clambered with the ease of a mountain goat down over the slopes, and right as my mother, it appeared, finally found the trail, he was appearing out of the bushes. I could tell even from a distance that my mother was thrilled to be escorted up to the summit by a dashing young man, and she very pointedly commented on how nice he had been once she reached my father and I, who were chortling with the boys about something and finishing off the snacks.

All in all it was a day not completely bereft of dysfunction, but the important part is that every Oehlschlaeger ultimately made it, in one piece, off of the mountain. Some an hour earlier than others. We got take-out from a local sub shop, drank some white russians, and nobody so much as cried. Perhaps there is hope for human evolution?