The Things Men Do – Trial Run

By Francis Marion of Highcountryblog.com

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
― George Mallory

I wasn’t a bad kid as a teenager but I was still a teenager. I can remember a few occasions when my shenanigans grayed my mother’s hair a bit more than it should have. It was standard teenage boy stuff. I came home late a few times. One of my favorites (but not my mum’s) was the time my folks got a phone call from the local RCMP. My buddies and I had been at the lake at one of the local resorts during school hours in June. It was hot and muggy out so we thought tossing a picnic table off the end of the dock and into the water so we could use it as a raft was a fine idea. At the very least, we figured It was a lot better than going to class.

Unfortunately, we got busted by the resort caretaker. He was pretty pissed and knew every one of us by name. So he gave us a choice. He’d call our parents and let them know what we’d been up to or we could go down to the cop shop and let the police know. We opted to turn ourselves in (I’m still not sure what the crime was – soaking beach furniture without a license??). We were less afraid of the police than we were of our dads. I guess those were different times?

Long story short the constable on duty turned us into our parents anyways. My mom teared up and got angry but my dad was less upset than I thought he’d be.  I got the standard lecture about being responsible, school, trust and so on and so forth. I can’t remember real well what happened next but I was sixteen so it likely involved splitting and stacking firewood. And that was it. I suppose I learned something. We never threw another picnic table into the lake and we stayed away from the resort for the rest of the summer to let the heat die down.

For years I never understood how I’d gotten off so easily.

Anyways, the end of June is a busy time for our household so while I am working late one-night last week the phone at my desk rings. It’s the house so I pick it up.

“Hi sweetie,” said my wife’s soft voice from the other end of the line.

“Hey babe, what’s up?”

“Your son would like to talk to you.”

“Ok put him on,” I was a little puzzled. The boy is fifteen and doesn’t need his mother to call me for him. I’m thinking, “what did he do”?

“Hi dad.”

“Hi, son. What’s going on?”

“Well, you know how the guys and I are talking about going camping in the mountains this summer on our own? Well, I was wondering if it was ok with you if we took off tomorrow and hiked into the lake to scout it out for our trip. We’d be gone early and back late in the day. We have a ride out to the trailhead and mom says she will pick us up. Can I go?”

Huh. Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

“Go into my day pack, take the water bladder, bear spray, first aid kit a knife and fire starting kit. Take the technical day hunter you used to wear when you were younger. And grab a headlamp from the entryway in case you get stuck out there after dark. Your mom’s ok with this?”

“Uh, huh.”

“Well, don’t get yourself killed or she’ll blame me.”

“I won’t.”

“And I want pictures for my blog. Come home without those and there’ll be trouble.”

“Got it.”

I got home around bedtime and checked his pack. He’d followed my instructions to the letter. His mother had made him a sandwich and stuck it in the fridge overnight. I grinned a little. I keep telling her he’s going to be a man soon, you have to let him do things for himself. She made him his lunch anyways. Mothers.

My son and I stood on the beach watching his sister float out into the lake. It was too hot to be at home or to work outside for any length of time so we’d gone to the beach after dropping mom off at her air conditioned office to get a few things done there.

“So I guess you heard about how things went,” he asked me in a muted tone?

Standing just in front of and beside him, I smiled out of his view.

“Of course I know what happened. Do you think your mother would keep it from me?”

“No, I guess not. She was pretty mad.”

“Yep. She was.”

“Dad, I swear to God, we thought it would be a better idea to just take care of getting home ourselves. I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong!”

“I know.”

The boys had hit the alpine early in the day and ran into the snow line. The Northern Cascades had upwards of 140% of the normal snowfall this winter and the back-country was still loaded with the white stuff. The lads had carried on for a little while through it but eventually lost the trail. I suspect the little alpine lake they were trying to reach would have still been buried anyways.

They then made the right decision and headed back towards the trailhead. Mom was going to pick them up at the drop off point at around 4:00 PM. They made it back by 2:30 and being twenty miles from town with no cell service, they made the decision to get back to town on their own. They hitchhiked. A lovely couple, seeing three fifteen-year-old boys hitching on the side of the road were kind enough to pick them up and drop them off at the edge of our community before they made their way back to the city.

My son phoned my wife from the outskirts of town for a ride. She wanted to know how he’d gotten there. He told her, “We got a ride with a stranger. They were nice people.”

For a smart kid who gets straight A’s, sometimes he’s not very wise. He definitely does not understand women, although he’s learning, and I don’t think he’ll pull that stunt again. To say that mom was less than impressed would have been an understatement.

We stood on the beach for a few more minutes watching his sister float about in the light summer breeze when he says, “Is mom still mad at me?”

“Does she seem upset?”

“No.”

“You’re welcome.”

He laughed a little and says, “How come you’re not upset”?

“Thank your grandfather,” was all I said in response. I doubt he understood but he will in time.

“By the way. You owe me three hundred and fifty dollars. That’s what a new Sat Phone is going to run me so that you can keep going into the mountains on your own.”

“Ok. Thanks, dad. By the way I emailed you the pictures I took.”

“Excellent. Good to know you can actually follow instructions.”

The breeze died off and the bits of cloud floating over the lake vanished. I headed back to the shade and the comfort of my chair, thinking “Nothing changes, really.”

Especially the things men do.

Northern Cascade Range – Photo Courtesy Francis Jr.

The Climb Up – Photos Courtesy Francis Junior

-30-