He signed, “I am going with you.” He pointed to the camera. “I’m inside there.”
THE chopper was loaded up with more than enough provisions for her stay at the shack, long enough to recharge her batteries but short enough to make the President’s State of the Union Address where she’d be officiating.
It really was a shack, not some millionaire’s conceit. This was no mountain mansion with a staff of five and rooms for twenty. Isabel had bought the tumbledown log cabin from the estate of a recluse who’d lived there since before World War II and, apart from the roof and the walls, which she’d had freshly insulated, there wasn’t much in it… All its magic was outside.
Over the years, so-called nature lovers wrecked great tracts of the Appalachians’ fragile alpine vegetation, especially around the 2,000-mile hiking trail that spans from Mt. Katahdin up in Maine down to Springer Mountain in Georgia. If it wasn’t trees lopped for firewood or soils compacted by walking or erosion, it was the food and trash left behind that weaned the wildlife off nature. You didn’t have to be a tie-dye wearing eco-nut to want these remote reaches rededicated as wildernesses, though it helped.
In local Park Ranger Andy Goodman’s case, his extra motivation was that humans hampered his grey wolf reintroduction program. Consequently, the deal he’d negotiated with Isabel was that she kept no foodstuffs stored at the shack unless she was staying. Nothing his wolves could sniff for.
Isabel’s pilot and co-pilot were already inside the chopper. Apart from her food, she’d packed fresh batteries for the lanterns and a backpack bulging with her sketchpad and pencils, her laptop—she was working on a couple of speeches—eight spare fully charged computer batteries, an iPod, and some books. She’d thought of taking an iPad, but she was old-school about reading and loved the feel of books, even their smell. Besides, she didn’t want to be reliant on batteries for everything. The shack had no power. That was not something the Fish and Wildlife Service rangers were prepared to budge on, not even if she paid for the line to be taken up there.
AS the helicopter skimmed across the tips of the mountain range, there was something ethereal about the white-dusted clusters of fir and eastern hemlock streaking below her. The word “privileged” did come to Isabel’s mind; she knew there were precious few in the world who had their own mountain peak, let alone could access it in this style, especially if they’d come from where she had.
From the jumpseat, Isabel thought she caught the pilot’s worried lips in the windshield reflection. She followed where she imagined his eyes were looking down and saw the landing pad at Roget’s Peak, high ground that was normally flat bare rock clear of scrub about 200 feet east of her shack. She was guessing but, judging from the build-up against the walls of the shack, it looked like the landing pad was under three or four feet of snow. The crew were discussing alternative landing strategies since there were no snow ploughs or salt spreaders up here. Isabel switched on her helmet speaker to hear the two men debating whether it was dry enough to blow the snow away or whether they should drop everything in by cable, including Isabel. She didn’t meddle but was relieved when they voted for the first choice.
The pilot shifted the chopper into a hard 30-degree tilt and she watched the snow shoot out in a wild sweep arcing back into the trees away from the shack. He held the slant steady for several minutes, but when the surface snow had blown off and they reached the denser packed mass, he added small vertical adjustments, tilting up and down a few degrees each way, manoeuvring the helicopter in a fan-wave rhythm. When her tongue-in-cheek welcome sign—Shade’n’Froid—poked out of the snow, he swung a 180-degree turn and, with a similar technique, cleared a path toward the shack taking care to keep clear of the trees.
Isabel jumped onto the cleared landing pad. “Cold isn’t the word for it,” she said, pulling her cap down over her ears and crossing her arms over and whumping her gloved hands to her shoulders several times.
“Good thing we got no wind.”
The unloading was swift; it needed to be. The men refused Isabel’s offer to help them carry the boxes up to the shack, insisting she climb back inside their machine and wait till they did their security check on the shack.
“I’m not entitled to Secret Service any more, you know,” Isabel joked.