The Lodge

I had been up at the lodge for a week when mom called. I sensed immediately that something wasn't right. She kept asking pointless questions. Stalling. Never a good sign. Finally, she came out with it: "Sarah is in town," she said with a sigh of sorts. I knew what this meant, of course, and I had to restrain myself. My silence was, however, telling and mom launched into a variation on the old "Sarah is your sister, after all" theme. This confirmed my fears: Sarah being in town wasn't a problem for me as such, nor a very interesting event, so the only reason mom called about it was that my sister had expressed an interest in coming up to the lodge.

"It will only be for the weekend," mom said, "and the place is more than big enough for the two of you. She won't get in your way, I promise. I will tell her that you're busy writing." She sounded so nervous that I had no choice but to calm down some, and act like a grownup. "Alright," I said. "But I'm bound to ask this, mom..." Another sigh, heavier than before. "...how is she? I mean, you have seen her, right? Not just talked to her on the phone?"

Mom hadn't seen her. Only talked to her on the phone. I felt my anger rising again. "Look," I began, sharply, but mom cut me off: "She sounded fine. She really did. It wasn't...like that. I talked to your aunt Mona not long ago and she said that Sarah was doing great: She has taken up her art again, and has a commission from someone." Right. A commission. I'm pretty sure mom didn't believe it herself, but she wanted to, so I said nothing. A testimony from aunt Mona was worth exactly nothing too. She was the most gullible person in the state of California. I knew that from personal experience, but that's another story.

Well, perhaps she was alright. Or alright enough. Everything else notwithstanding, the fact that she had called mom in advance was actually a good sign. If the idea was to crash at the lodge indefinitely, with God knows what company tagging along, she would have just gone -- without telling anyone. That was my reasoning, and as it turned out, I was partly right. As for the rest of it, mom had a point, of course. The place was huge. An odd structure built as a hunting lodge by my grandfather: Kitchen and living room on the first floor, two small bedrooms on the second. But the basement was huge, with multiple rooms, resembling an underground army barracks of the sort favored by survivalists. It even had a "secret" exit through a tunnel which ended up in the woods behind what used to be the outhouse. So there was space enough, certainly.

I stepped down from the porch and strolled a few paces towards the dirt road. It was pleasant outside, the air smelled sweet and had that peculiar, almost tasteable wetness to it I was so fond of. A few clouds were gathering on the darkening horizon as I glanced westwards, but they looked harmless enough. Then I realized I hadn't asked mom precisely when Sarah planned on arriving. She would take the bus, of course. She didn't have a license. But the last regular bus had already passed the stop at Pine Creek. She could, conceivably, have opted for the Greyhound -- but that would mean she had to ask the driver to make an unscheduled stop, and she would arrive well after midnight, which struck me as a strange and inconsiderate thing to do, even for her. As I was pondering this I heard a noise rising from somewhere downhill. An engine.

It's common enough that people take the wrong exit. The next one, about half a mile further north, takes you to a parking lot overlooking the lake. That's the one you want, if you're out on a family trip -- or if you're headed to one of the numerous cabins in the Lake Booth area. The lodge isn't part of that whole setup, though. It's much older. When my grandfather had it built, sometime in the late 1930s, it was the only building for miles. And the dirt road stops right here. Beyond, there's nothing but barely walkable footpaths. If you want to go to the lake, you take the next exit. But from time to time people take the wrong one.

The engine sound grew louder and soon a vehicle came crawling up the last stretch, stopping right in the middle of the dirt road, about thirty yards or so from where I was standing. It was a Volkswagen van -- a hippie van, as they used to call them. And the person emerging from the driver seat was -- indeed -- a hippie.

She was past fifty by my assessment, with an abundance of graying brown hair, parted in the middle and streaming down her back -- way past her waist by the looks of it. She was dressed in a loose gown which left the exact shape of her body almost entirely to the imagination. Her feet were bare -- not even sandals (if she had been wearing anything, it would have been sandals, undoubtedly).

She looked haggard enough from a distance, but her skin was healthy, and she had a set of perfect teeth - which she now bared as her mouth opened in an altogether pleasant smile of greeting. Looking at her a bit more closely, the first impression of general haggardness wasn't positively driven away, but if it remained, it did so in a significantly modified form: It was obvious that she had once been very pretty, and someone who has once been very pretty often still is, when all is said and done.

"The others decided to hike up," she said. I vaguely sensed the truth of the matter, but partly because it was vague, and partly because I didn't want to acknowledge it, I proceeded with my normal routine: "If you're going to the cabins, you're better off taking the next exit -- can't drive any further from here, you see."

But she wasn't going to the cabins. She was going to the lodge. And "the others" she had referred to were Sarah and someone else. I knew this just by looking at her face, she didn't have to explain herself, and somehow she -- on her part -- must have reached this conclusion too, because she simply started back to the van, where she shortly after began dragging a large, bulky bag out of the backseat. My only, faint hope at this point was that "someone else" wasn't a whole bunch of hippies -- or worse. That van looked capable of carrying a whole commune.

I felt both annoyed and -- not least -- awkward, standing there looking at the hippie woman as she struggled with the bag, so I did the only thing which made sense at the time. As I helped her with the cargo (in addition to the bulky bag, there was a sizable rucksack, a plastic suitcase, and multiple smaller items) she quickly but very amicably apprised me of the situation. Her name was Molly, she said, and she and the others were friends of Sarah from San Francisco. The others, happily, were not a commune but only two people, whose names she gave but whose gender I could not determine. They were artists, so she said, and had decided to come up here in order to do some photography.

They were on their way to some kind of festival, or gathering, the name of which she also gave (it meant nothing to me), and would be moving on to that destination on Sunday. The last bit of info was music to my ears, and I calmed down to a considerable extent. I was even capable of greeting Sarah with something approaching cheerfulness when she arrived, flanked by two figures who were both odd enough at first sight: She introduced the male on her right as Shade, and the female on her left as Mist. Nothing surprising about that. The only thing mildly surprising was that Molly was, simply, Molly -- and not, say, Lady Moonbeam.

Shade was a teenage boy, as it seemed, of very small stature, with short, dark hair (practically a crew cut, which struck me as unusual) and a deep tan. He was skinny, a veritable waif, with uncommonly feminine features: Not a trace of facial hair save a faint shadow on his upper lip. He could have passed for a girl -- and not a bad looking one at that. He wore shorts (or cutoff jeans, to be precise), a baggy coat and a pair of sturdy hiking boots.

Mist was taller than Shade, but not much. She had long, almost jet black hair, not quite Molly's hippie mane, but just as freely flowing. Like Molly, she wore a loose fitting gown of some kind, complemented (I noticed with some amusement) by a pair of leather sandals. Like Shade, she had a deep tan, seemingly -- either that, or she was naturally dark skinned. Her features didn't contradict the latter notion -- she could be Polynesian, I thought, or possibly Native-American.

Both Shade and Mist looked very young -- considerably younger than Sarah. And Molly was old enough to be their grandmother by the looks of it.

As for my sister, she seemed alright -- or at least sufficiently so, as I saw it. The last time I'd had any dealings with her she was coming down from a heroin trip, and compared to that -- well, she was fine. She was stoned -- no question about it, I could smell the weed from ten feet away -- but that was "fine" in her case. There were no obvious signs to worry me. She seemed happy, for whatever that was worth, mildly buzzing from the weed more than being totally out of it.

While the others were busy unpacking and settling in downstairs, I took my usual seat on the porch. I sat for a while, pondering whether it would be worth it to ask Molly about Sarah's status as far as substance abuse was concerned. I decided against it in the end. I had no idea how well they actually knew each other, for one thing. Asking Sarah directly was entirely out of the question. I had done that on a couple of occasions before, and she had always reacted badly. Sharing the lodge with these people was an annoyance to begin with, so throwing an antagonistic Sarah into the mix was clearly a bad idea. It was just for the weekend. And a moderately stoned - and presumably occupied with whatever it was the group did - Sarah wasn't that hard to handle for a few days. I fetched myself a beer from the fridge, lit a cigarette and settled down.

Almost an hour passed. I was slightly puzzled by the fact that nobody had emerged from the basement. I was half wondering what the hell they were doing down there when someone finally appeared. It was Shade. He stepped right past me and jumped up to take a seat on the bannister. There was something so wildly out-of-synch with his appearance that it took me some seconds to process it. He was still wearing his heavy boots but both the baggy coat and the cut-off jeans were gone. What he now sported was a faded t-shirt and what can only be described as bikini bottoms. He looked perfectly ridiculous. Or, to be precise, he would have looked perfectly ridiculous - like some kind of girly man from a prison movie - if he had been a "he". But he wasn't. Or she wasn't. Shade was a girl.

The baggy coat had concealed a pair of breasts that weren't very big but more than big enough to make it obvious that she wasn't a boy. I felt oddly embarrassed, even though I hadn't said or done anything to indicate that I was mistaken about her gender. I looked at her more closely and immediately felt even more embarrassed: Her attire, while certainly more fitting for a girl, was nevertheless outrageous. The hiking boots looked huge on her while both the t-shirt and the bikini bottoms were a couple of sizes too small by the looks of it. Shade was - clearly - a girl who didn't worry about her bikini line. An impressive bush was on display on all sides of the tiny piece of fabric. She had a thick treasure trail too, stretching from the main wilderness all the way up to her belly button. And she was sitting there on the bannister with her heels planted between the planks, legs spread wide open, in what looked like a deliberate display of all that hair. I got the distinct impression that she was trying to make me feel uncomfortable. It was a provocation of some kind, and it was a hostile one: She wasn't "teasing" me in a sexual sense. At least that's what I thought at the time.

I regained my composure soon enough, something I'm luckily very good at. I drained my glass and asked her, as casually as I could, whether she was going swimming. She smiled ever so slightly but said nothing. Then she sort of nodded in the direction of the table. There was nothing on it other than my empty beer glass and my cigarettes, so I assumed that it was the latter she hinted at. I picked up the packet and threw it to her. She eased one out and placed it between her lips. I got up and lit it for her. She didn't seem to mind that gesture, I noted.

"Want a beer?" I said as I moved towards the door. She hesitated a moment before nodding. I brought back two cans and gave her one. She opened it and took a sip. "You don't talk much," I said, sitting down and opening my own can. Slight smile again. Not quite as hostile, though, that last smile. Perhaps she was, in her own way, warming to me. Any further interaction between us was prevented, however, by Sarah: She came up the stairs, singing, nothing less. Her mellow high had obviously taken a turn for something more ecstatic.

To be continued...