July 3, 1986. A small group of humans bushwacks up the side of a mountain in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. It has been a day and a half since the group, comprised of five teens and two adults, left civilization behind. It has also been that long since they have had anything to eat.
They started the morning next to a creek at the bottom of the mountain and have been heading upwards ever since. The hiking, through underbrush so deep it sometimes comes to fourteen-year-old Bets Bromberg’s knees, is hard and boring. It would be a lot easier if she had just had some breakfast.
I should never have agreed to come here. At the time, fresh off getting caught making out with her boyfriend in the stairwell of her parents’ apartment building, three weeks of something called “Survival,” sounded better than being grounded for the entire summer. But nobody told her there wouldn’t be any food.
“We’ll eat when we eat,” Tim and Helene both say, as if they, too are starving. Bets is sure they are lying. For one thing, Tim and Helene are too damn cheerful to be as hungry as she is. There are other differences. The kids have awkward makeshift packs called “donut rolls” slung around them. The outermost layer of the donut roll is a stiff army green poncho with snaps along the edges; it doubles as a tent. Rolled inside that is a grayish brown wool blanket wrapped around everything else they have in the world: a spare pair of socks and polypropylene long underwear, a tin cup, wool hat and jacket. Each night the kids break down the donut roll into bedding and each morning they roll it back up again, lashing the ends together with white paracord. However, Tim and Helene have real frame backpacks and actual sleeping bags and share a pop-up tent. Bets is pretty sure Tim and Helene have food.
The five teens are supposed to learn some lesson from starvation, but so far no one has explained what that is. All Bets has discovered about herself is that when she hasn’t had any food for a day, it starts to be all she can think about. As they hike, memories of meals gone by tantalize her. Visions of bagels and Stella d’Oro Swiss Fudge Cookies dance in her head.
The group of seven stretches out along the mountain. As they climb, Tim and Helene trade first and last position, with the five teens between them. Josh and Jon, both 15, are athletic kids who easily keep pace with the leader, but Davie, a short, skinny 14-year-old boy, and Sally, an awkward 13-year-old with shiny black hair, are, like Bets, more of the last-kid-picked-in-gym variety. The three of them take turns being at the back of the group. Right now, Davie is up ahead, and Sally and Helene are somewhere behind Bets. When the group enters a dense stand of white birch, the trees are so close together that Bets loses sight of the rest of the group.
I could run away, she thinks. She looks around at an endless maze of trees. No, I can’t. I’m a lot more likely to get lost and die. Bets, Manhattan born and raised, is used to a manmade grid of neatly labeled streets and avenues. Here, a mass of undifferentiated wilderness surrounds her as far as she can see. The forest feels suffocating. She longs for a clearing, a vantage point that would orient her towards some sign of human civilization. I literally can’t see the forest for the trees, she thinks.
The mountain is steeper now, the way upwards little more than a scramble. She claws at bushes, planting her feet in small hillocks of grass. As she climbs, her foot slips in her new, uncomfortable hiking boots that are giving her blisters on top of blisters. For a terrifying moment she imagines herself tumbling down the slope, rocks and branches scraping at her as she falls. But she grabs hold of a small shrub and her feet find purchase on the mountain.
She pauses, her breath shaky with adrenaline, and looks up. Not too far ahead of her, the slope vanishes and she can see more sky – it has to be the top of the mountain. The promise of daylight, of perspective, gets her going even as her fear has her frozen in place. Her legs and lungs burn with exertion. She grasps at the roots of one last shrub and hauls herself up, anticipating sun and sky. Instead, she finds only a small plateau, just as thickly forested as the slope, which continues upwards after flattening out for a few feet. It was a false summit.
Tears burn the corners of her eyes. This. Is. Bullshit. She feels a wave of wishing she could go back in time and unagree to come here. But she can’t. She also can’t stay here. She has to keep going. She will. In a minute.
Bets leans against one of the white birch trees and slides down it to sit at the base. She wakes when her head lolls, frightened to realize she dozed off in the woods alone. She isn’t sure if she slept for a second or an hour. She struggles to stand but gravity has a stronger hold on her than usual; her exhausted muscles don’t quite lift. Bets slumps against the tree. One more moment of rest and she’ll get up. The strange downward pull of the spot is affecting her eyelids which droop despite her best efforts. Through half-open eyes she notices some marks on the bark of a nearby birch. A series of numbers in a column: 7, 19, 07, and a name: “Gullon.”
In her semi-dreaming state, Bets imagines a boy, he’d be Gullon, walking through these Montana woods and making those marks. July 1907 — the same month as now, but seventy-nine years earlier. A figure wearing a wool cap and short pants appears in her mind. The boy would live nearby, in a one-room log cabin Bets conjures from images in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. Perhaps, she thinks, Gullon made the markings one day when he was checking his traps. She supplies him with a limp rabbit hanging from his belt. The boy in her mind looks at his belt in surprise and on seeing his improved situation vis a vis dinner, winks at her before heading up the mountain.
Which is also the direction that Bets needs to go. How is it possible that Helene hasn’t passed her in all the time she was sitting down? Bets wonders. Panic flutters in her chest. Could she be lost? What if she is so lost, she stays that way until dark? Fear of being alone overnight in the woods gets her up and moving. Bets finds the rest of the group waiting for her at the side of an old logging road, a light tan scar that switchbacks up the mountain.
“I thought I was going to have to go back and drag you up here,” Helene says cheerfully, as she was making was a joke, but she isn’t. Yesterday, Sally sat down and refused to continue. After several hours of negotiation, Tim grabbed her by the back of her jacket and dragged her for about twenty yards until she agreed to start hiking. Sally wasn’t really hurt. Her screams were more fear and outrage than injury. However, Jon and Josh, frustrated by the hours her tantrum had forced them all to wait for her, laughed while Tim dragged her. They said her new nickname was “Sled,” and were still calling her that a day later.
“I don’t know how I didn’t pass you. Thought you might have run away,” Helene says.
“I just sat down for a minute. On the little plateau. You didn’t see me on the way up?”
“Nope,” Helene says, her tone conveying that she thinks Bets is lying, but she doesn’t press it further.
Helene leads the group up the logging road. At first tall pines on either side are too high to see anything, but after a while, it opens onto a clearing. What Bets sees there grinds her hopes of escape into dust; nothing but mountains all the way to the horizon, without a sign of human occupation. No town or highway or even a curl of woodsmoke from a fire in the distance. Only sky and the tops of trees. There is nowhere to run away to. Now, Bets is sure that coming here was a mistake, but there is nothing she can do about it.
It is easier to hike on the road, but it is much hotter. The sweat pours down Bets’s neck and makes the “donut roll” rub against her shoulder.
“Helene, are we going to get some food soon?” Bets asks.
Helene shrugs, same as she’s been doing for the past day. The shrug makes a white-hot bolt of anger course through Bets.
“You probably have food you’re eating when we’re asleep,” Bets accuses.
“Nope.”
Helene’s smug tone makes Bets want to take a rock and smash Helene’s brains in, then rummage through her pack. She wants to do it so bad it amazes her that she doesn’t act on it. So this is what it feels like to want to hurt someone. Bets is a stranger to physical altercation. With no siblings, this is the first time she has ever felt her blood pound in her ears, seen the world narrow to the target of her anger. But even hungry Bets is not a head-smasher.
To distract herself from the heat and her hunger, she thinks back to the woods, how it was there cooler, and about Gullon. Her imagination fleshes him out, transforming a blurry impression of a face into a specific visage, with a pert, upturned nose, mischievous blue eyes and a mop of sandy brown hair. She makes him taller than herself, but not by a lot; he is, like her, fourteen years old and has not had his growth spurt. His lean frame has a wiry solidity and an athletic grace. When her mind has taken Gullon from a blurry idea to a fully rendered boy, she sees her creation look down and admire his new limbs, pleased by his appearance.
Bets is a fanciful child but also a practical one. She knows she made Gullon up but she wonders if he, or a boy like him, could have really existed. How long do birch trees live? She thinks back to the forest. None of the tall white trees had been much wider around than her thighs. While she wasn’t exactly a tree expert she did know from the giant redwood slice on display at the Museum of Natural History that trees got bigger with age. It seems unlikely that the marked tree was old enough to have met Gullon, and the boy who had existed for a few minutes in her imagination disappears, leaving a stab of grief. He had been something to think about besides hunger and anger towards her parents for making her go to this wilderness survival training in the first place.
Bets wants to be wrong about the trees. Helene is a smug jerk but she seems to know things about the forest world they’re in. She told them about collecting the papery moss that hangs in the forest for tinder and pointed out where there would have been blueberries if the bears hadn’t already eaten them all. She hates talking to Helene but she wants Gullon back more.
“Helene, do you know how long birch trees live?”
“A long time, I think. Maybe 80, 100 years. Some of them get 60 feet tall.”
Gullon flickers back to life and she feels as happy to see him as an old friend.
The group hikes until the sun slips below the mountain behind them, making camp in the middle of the road. Bets and Sally snap their tarps together, use paracord and sticks to prop it into a tent shape. Tim drags some stones from the side of the road into a circle and heads off into the underbrush, returning with an armful of sticks. Josh and Jon, having already mastered the magnesium and flint metal matches, light the fire. Helene shows Bets, Sally and Davie how to do it again. And again. The three teens struggle with the task, tears of frustration stinging their eyes. The smell of woodsmoke makes Bets’s stomach growl. Her thumbs feel enormous as she strikes the flint with the back of her folding knife, trying to direct the spark. Helene only allows them to give up when it is too dark to see the thin curls of magnesium glinting in their nest of dry moss and leaves. They all sit up for a while, watching the embers dance. The mountain chill freezes their backsides while they think about other fires that roasted hot dogs and marshmallows.
Bets wakes up shaking, her body wracked with convulsions from the cold which has seeped up from the ground and into her bones. Also she has to pee. The demands of her bladder compete with her fear of leaving the meager warmth of her tent and Sally’s body. All at once, she feels overwhelmed by the prospect of another day identical to the previous two. Endless hours of hiking and dreaming of food — it was too much. She wanted out.
I wish I could make my heart stop. I wish I could just die. Death would have the added benefit of showing her parents what a huge mistake they made by sending her here. But she can’t control her heart and her bladder reminds her that it exists too. Well, if I can’t die I don’t want to piss myself.
She sticks her head out of the tent and is sure she is dreaming. There, in a cupped leaf, is a half-eaten Snickers bar. She looks around at the other tents. No one else is awake yet and no one else has candy. This must have belonged to Tim or Helene, who dropped it during the night. I knew it, Bets thinks. What liars! She picks up the candy and is about to duck back inside the tent when she remembers Sally. If Sally sees what she has, she will have to share it. But she can’t eat it out here without risking getting caught plus there is the fact that she still has to pee, kind of urgently by now. Bets shoves the whole half a Snickers bar into her mouth and stuffs the empty wrapper down her pants. Her eyes bulge as she chews, nearly delirious with joy as the sweet chocolate fills her mouth, the sticky nougat clinging to her teeth. She swallows hard just as Tim comes barreling out of his tent.
He looks around, wild-eyed. Shit. Bets knew right away that it must have been Tim’s Snickers bar. Tim would never believe he dropped it. If he sees her eating it, she is sure to face the consequences of stealing. By now the little group of tents has come to life, everyone crawling out of their tents, starting the process of breaking them down and forming them into the “donut rolls” for the day’s hiking. Tim starts to speak but stops short. Bets can tell he realized he can’t accuse someone in the group of stealing his candy without admitting that he and Helene have their own food. His head disappears back into his tent. Bets walks off to pee, and when she buries the wrapper she feels a small warm smile deep inside her.
When everyone is packed up, Tim, in a very bad mood, leads the group off the road, this time heading down the mountain. Bets thinks that going down should be a lot easier than going up, but the slope is very steep and hours of inching downwards, grabbing at shrubs to keep from sliding have changed her mind; both are awful. Her knees ache. The blisters on top of blisters have popped, making each step painful.
Suddenly, her shrub-handhold pulls free and Bets’ nightmare is realized, she is sliding down the mountain, the deep layer of leaves doing little to protect her bones from rocks and roots underneath. Her slide becomes a freefall for several feet before she lands, hard, resuming her out-of-control tumble on impact.
“Ooof,” she exclaims as she slams into a tree, which halts her fall.
She moves her wrists and stretches out her legs; nothing is broken. But the fear of the fall has left her shaky and scared.
“Goddamnit,” she shouts. Her words echo off the trees. Bets puts her head on her knees and for the first time since her parents told her she was going to this Survival program, sobs.
When she looks up, there is Gullon. Not in her imagination – he is there, three dimensional, and sure bathed in kind of a funny opalescent glow but definitely real.
“Gullon?” Bets asks.
“At your service,” he says.
At least Bets thinks “says” is what he does. It is possible that his words just appear in her mind. She is awake but there is a dreamlike roundness to her thoughts, a feeling that sharp, pointed questions about the physics of Gullon’s arrival would be inappropriate.
“I can’t do this,” she confesses. “It’s too hard. I’d rather just die.”
“I know,” Gullon says. “I have a way out. Take my hand.”
Gullon reaches down and Bets grabs hold of his real, if still sort of glowy, hand. When she stands up it is as if the pack has no weight and her legs are not at all tired.
“This way,” he says, and Bets sees a narrow footpath winding along the side of the mountain.
Gullen’s hand is warm and solid in hers as they emerge from the woods into a bright clearing surrounding a circular quarry hole bored deep into the mountain. Sheer granite walls rise around a pool of water that reflects the brilliant blue sky so that the water seems colored an otherworldly cerulean blue. Gullen moves behind Bets. It feels natural for him to kiss her neck, his lips nuzzling her ear.
“Jump, Bets,” he says. “I’ll be down there at the bottom, I promise.”
Bets’ mind filled with a blur of short scenes or moments, more like collections of sensations than distinct memories: in a flash she knows that down there feels like every good feeling in the world, all the happy birthdays, all the puppies, every delicious chocolate cake she’d ever tasted. She just has to jump.
“I came to you because you’re special, Bets,” Gullon says. “You called me to you. Your fear, your hunger. You’re meant for me, Bets. You’re meant to be my wife.”
She is so tired of hiking, tired of being hungry. The water sparkles below. It was far enough down that a jump might knock her out, but what if it didn’t?
“I’m afraid it’s going to hurt.”
“If it does, it won’t be for long,” Gullen says. “It wasn’t for me.”
“What do you mean?” Bets asks.
“Here. Put your forehead against mine.”
Bets does and it is as if an extra awareness floods into her mind. A series of images appear: winter on the mountain, a log cabin filled with smoke from an open fire. Bets is hot, burning up like there was a furnace inside of her but at the same time shivering. She is also aware of being hungry, not like she has been on Survival but a collapsed-in sort of ache.
“Are you sick?” Bets asks Gullon, “Didn’t your parents ever feed you?”
“It was harder to live out here on the frontier than they’d expected,” Gullen said. “They also weren’t very nice people.”
All Bets-in-Gullon feels able to do is lie on the floor near the stove, but a hand lifts her up by the back of her shirt. “If you’re not dead yet, go out and check the traps,” a voice says. “Pa is even sicker than you are, and there’s nothing to eat.”
The snow outside is deep. Bets feels the cold damp tug at Gullon’s worn shoes with every step. The blanket of white has left the area landmarkless, but Gullon knows these woods and starts up the mountain towards a bowl-shaped depression, where the quarry would be one day. Now the mountain just looks punched. Gullon has set traps in a bramble along the edge. He is always careful to keep away from the sharp, crumbling edge of the crater, but the storm has blurred the landscape, hidden the bramble completely. Gullon believes himself to be several feet from the edge but instead takes one step into what turns out to be nothing but snow. It collapses underneath him. All Bets-in-Gullon sees is the world tumbling white and falling snow and white again and falling snow. Then a crack! as his body strikes a large boulder that will later alert prospectors to the presence of valuable minerals in the earth at this spot in the mountain.
Gulen returns Bets to July and the present year and she looks into what is now the quarry.
“See? Just a moment. And then you can stay here on Gullon mountain with me forever.”
Bets looks into the dazzling blue water of the abandoned quarry. She wants to believe her death will be quick and painless followed by an eternity with her…beloved? The word appears in her mind. She realizes that she loves Gullon. She feels a sense of not belonging to this world, of being meant, in some way, for this exact fate. But she can’t help picturing herself not dying but breaking an arm or a leg and being stuck in the water, looking up at those sheer rock walls. She imagines treading water, hurt, fighting to stay afloat, knowing that when she tires she will drown, sinking to the bottom of the quarry along with the bones of countless animals who misjudged the edge.
She thinks about Colin, the alive boyfriend her parents sent her here to forget about. She also thinks about her parent. She wants to hate them but probably they didn’t know how bad this was going to be. They would be destroyed if she did not come home. She can’t jump. Bets feels ashamed of herself. If she really was the rebel she pretends to be, she would jump. But she can’t.
She shrugs Gullon’s mouth off her neck and backs away from the edge. His round blue eyes become black slits as she puts distance between them.
“What are you doing?” he hisses. “Jump, Bets. Jump and be with me. I came to you because you needed me. Because I could tell that you are special. That you and I are meant to be together forever.”
“I can’t. It’s not that I want to keep hiking. I don’t. I’m just…I’m not ready to die. I’m not jumping, Gullon,” she finished.
“Ah well, you win some, you lose some.” Gullon shrugged. He no longer seemed angry, or even to care very much about Bets. He gestured through the forest. “Here, go back that way to meet your group.”
His change in attitude confused Bets, hurt her feelings.
“I thought you wanted me to come with you.”
“I tried it. You said no. That’s how it goes sometimes. I get more than I lose, I’ll say that.”
“So you’ve done this before? I thought you said I was special.”
“Yes. And sure, I said that, but I lied. This is what I do. I get lots of people to jump. Truth is, any strong feeling, and I can latch on. Even good ones. You’d think I’d lose against happy people, but sometimes those are the ones who go over the easiest. People are weird, that’s the one thing I’ve learned.”
Gullen started getting all transparent in this way that Bets knew he was about to disappear.
“Hey, before you go, I have to ask – were you ever real, or just something I made up in my head?”
“If that’s the last thing you want to know, you’re asking the wrong question,” he said. And was gone.
How could that not be the right question? Bets never figured that out.
July, 2023.
It has been over three decades since Bets left Montana. Which took her two years longer than expected.
The day after Bets said no to Gullon, the five teens sat in the middle of the dirt logging road for a therapy group where it was explained that the point of the starvation had been to “break them down” so the program could “build them back up.” Starvation, exhaustion, disorientation – all techniques common to torturers as well as people running therapy programs for kids. But after the group, they had received food, in the form of peanuts, raisins and a bag of flour to make ashcakes. Following the three-week Survival trip, Bets spent two years at a boarding school run by the Survival program folks called Clark Creek Academy. When she was finally allowed to leave Montana, Bets had left the state and never looked back.
But now, at 51 years old, Bets is writing a book about the Survival program and the school, an expose focused on two cultish headmasters who ran Clark Creek during and after Bets’s time there. She isn’t sure what made her decide, a few years earlier, to quit her job at a large bank, go back to school and get a MFA in writing. The book just wanted to get written, is how it feels to her.
She applied for and received a grant to go back to the place where it all happened. For this whole week, she is staying in the Rimrock Lodge, where parents would stay when visiting their kids. Clark Creek itself closed after a student suicide that took place under the second headmaster, the one after Bets’s time. Most of the buildings are gone. Bets had come up with something that sounded good in a grant application, but after a day spent exploring the grassy meadow where the school used to be, she feels frustrated and ashamed. There is nothing to see here, she is wasting the money.
She sits at the bar and orders an Amaretto on the rocks, her mother’s drink. She tastes the sweet liquor, watching the Clark Fork River tumble outside the window. A man comes in and sits on the stool next to her. She ignores him, as a single woman at a bar does. But then he speaks.
“I’ll have a Budwiser,” he says.
The sound of his voice makes her head turn instinctively. He sees her glance at him.
“Sorry, do I know you?” he asks.
“No, no, my mistake sorry,” Bets says, remembering she doesn’t know anyone for five hundred miles. She turns pointedly back to the window, embarrassed.
Over the river the sky was black and the window reflected the room. Bets surreptitiously examined the man’s profile in the window. He was about her age, with sharp, high cheekbones, an upturned but attractive nose. She’s not sure why, but Bets decides to have another Amaretto.
“So, who did you think I was?” the man says.
Bets turns to face him. “I’m not even sure. I don’t know anyone around here. I’m doing research. For a book.”
“Ah. Well, I’m from here. Grew up in Kalispell, moved to Trout Creek when I got sick of all the hustle and bustle.”
Bets laughs at the thought of Kalispell being “hustle and bustle.”
“I’m from New York,” she says, “but I did a three-week survival trip in The Bob. We thought we explored the whole thing. Turns out they just had us hiking up, down and around one mountain. Gullon Mountain, I think it was.
At the name, Bets’s new friend looks shocked.
“Gullon Mountain? Now that takes me back. No one has called it that in a generation,” he says. “That was our old family land. We came out here and staked a claim to it back when you could do that kind of thing, but we were ready to let the government have it when they wanted to make the whole area into wilderness area back in the 1940’s. My great grandpappy said that mountain was cursed, ever since his brother Henry fell off a ridge and died. The family moved to Kalispell not long after that. It’s been part of the Bob Marshall for almost 70 years. You won’t find that name on a map.”
“Henry?” Bets asks. “That was your great-uncle? Not Gullon?”
“Gullon was the family name. Henry was my great grand-uncle. I’m Hank. He was just a boy when he died, didn’t leave any kids. Where did you hear that name, anyway.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Bets says, “I think it just appeared in my head.”
“Well, I’d better be heading home,” Hank says “Real pleasure to meet you.” Hank smiles at Bets and she feels a rush of familiar pleasure, a sudden warmth in all of her cells.
“Same to you,” she says.
Then Hank, and the feeling, are gone. Bets finishes her drink and goes back to her room. There on the pillow, sitting on top of a bright green leaf, she finds a half-eaten Snickers bar.
It takes her a moment to decide, but she feels a sense of girlish glee as Bets shoves the whole thing in her mouth in one bite, smiling as the chocolate and nougat fill her mouth. She swallows. A decision is made somewhere in her she forgot existed, has not seen since before Survival and Clark Creek. The motel door shuts behind her with a click. Bets crosses Highway 200 and after a few steps, is engulfed by the forest.