Chapter One

The Paperback Book

“Everything okay?” I ask.

“Wow! What a story,” she says, waggling the book in the air.

I smile. Yes, yes, that’s my daughter—the book lover.

Then her face takes on a more serious countenance as she asks, “Do you think maybe we could climb a mountain?” She clutches the book to her heart.

Now I remember. This is a story about a group of men who climbed Mt. Everest, and something went wrong—people died. I want to tell her that that’s why we read books: so we don’t have to do what we just read about; we live vicariously through the characters on the pages.

“You mean, climb Everest?” I say.

She shakes her head and I’m relieved. “Oh no. That’s too big, too far away. But I read about Pikes Peak on the Internet. It’s a famous mountain in Colorado. It’s over 14,000 feet, but not like Everest. So we wouldn’t need a passport—or oxygen. There’s even a live camera shot of the mountain, twenty-four hours a day, on the Internet.”

“Oh yes, I’ve seen Pikes Peak,” I say, reconsidering the obvious dangers awaiting young people on the Internet.

“Really?” She seems encouraged by that, prodded by that.

“Let me get this straight,” I start, leaning forward in my chair, where I’ve been minding my own business. “In that book you just read about mountain climbing,” I point to the one under her arm. “Doesn’t somebody die?”

“Eight people actually, but that was Everest. I’m talking about Pikes Peak. There’s even a souvenir shop at the top…with ice cream.”

“How’s a souvenir shop going to keep us from dying?”

“Come on, Dad. I read that there’s a trail you can hike all the way to the top, so we won’t need ropes or ice axes or crampons or a Sherpa or anything like that.”
I do a quick search of my memory, trying to recall if I’d ever heard of a CNN crew at Pikes Peak reporting about missing hikers, but I can come up with nothing. And what in the world is a Sherpa?

I’m not an outdoor adventurist. That’s what I’m thinking as I’m sitting there in my office chair minding my own business. I don’t run. I don’t lift weights. Sometimes, when I’m going out for an ice cream cone and the car keys are upstairs, I’ll sit at the bottom of the stairs and think long and hard about how badly I want that ice cream cone before I climb the 16 steps to the top. (I almost always go after the keys, that is, if it truly means getting an ice cream cone.) I’ve camped out in the woods a few times, but I can’t sleep without a pillow or a mattress or if the smallest pebble (or pea) is beneath me. I don’t like walking in the morning dew because it soaks through my shoes and makes my toes wrinkle. And when I brush my teeth, I can’t stand it if the water’s too cold. Oh, and I hate dirty hands.

But she seems so much older and bigger standing there in the doorway. Big and grownup. She looks a lot like her mother and I wonder where the little girl has gone. We’ve stopped marking her progress on the door casing, but that’s because we moved a few years ago. The new owners have probably painted over all that by now. With every yard sale, more little girl toys go away for a little as a dime apiece. Last week she had her first manicure. Time is taking her away bit by bit. Time is sneaky that way.

And there are boys. They call. They sit next to her in church and at school. When she has a party, she invites them. And there’s always a boy’s name scrawled on her notebook. Tray. Ronnie. Adam. Ryan. Sometimes I see where she’s scratched through a name, blackened it out with some permanency, but before long a new one appears. She’ll draw it out in great detail with block letters and shading and depth, probably missing out on valuable lessons in geometry and world history.

When she was younger we’d play The Pierce Family Show, using a big mirror in the living room as our TV set. Chera was maybe four or five, so I could hold her up on my hip and she could see herself. The show would start with some music: Badadadadadadumdumda. Chera would hang onto me as we’d burst onto the screen waving and smiling.

Me: “Hello, everyone. And welcome to the Pierce Family Show. I’m David.”

Chera: “And I’m Chera.”

Me: “And together we are—”

Both: “The Pierce Family!”
(More waving and smiling.)

Me: “We have a great show for you today. Don’t we, Chera?”

Chera: “That’s right.”

Me: Today we’ll be talking with a man…a man who [I think up something fast]…who lives at the top of a volcano! Isn’t that right, Chera?”

Chera: “That’s right.”

After we’d introduce our guest, we’d take a commercial break, mainly so I could set Chera down and stretch my back. I’d coif her hair with my fingers and pretend to touch up her button nose. And then I’d hoist her back on my hip and we’d countdown from five.

Me: “So here we are at the top of the volcano!”

Chera: “So what’s it like living at the top of a Volcano?” (Chera does all the interviewing because she holds the wooden spoon / microphone, and I play the guest)

Me: “Oh, hot. Very hot.”

Chera: “What do you eat?”

Me: “Hot beans.”

Chera: “What do you drink?”

Me: “Hot chocolate.”

And so on and so on. We’d go until the next commercial break. When we’d come back live after this second break, it’d be time to wrap up and put out a tease for next week’s show. And each week Chera would bring back the man who lives at the top of the volcano. We totally exhausted the poor man—we questioned him to death. Once we did interview a man who lived in a hot air balloon but Chera asked him if he’d ever seen the man who lives on top of the volcano.

I stand there thinking about how to answer my grownup daughter and realize how long it’s been since we’d played that game.

The little man who lives between my ears (no relation to the man who lives at the top of the volcano) suddenly pipes in. It’s just one mountain, David. And there’s a trail all the way to the top—and a souvenir shop! She’s your only daughter, for crying out loud! Your first born. She’ll be grown and out of the house one day. She’ll be a missionary in Mauritania and will write home to say how much she wishes she had a bed and some food. She’ll write cryptic notes because the bad guys will be reading all the incoming and outgoing mail, looking for infidels, and she’ll use code to say how much she misses the hills of Tennessee and that she sure wishes she’d climbed that mountain we’d talked about all those years ago, back when she was an innocent child of fifteen. But now she has too much to do in Mauritania before she moves on to Timbuktu. And the cat’s in the cradle with the silver spoon…

The little man can be cruel sometimes.

She stands in the doorway, leaning in, her eyebrows raised in hopeful anticipation. I suddenly think I should mark her height on the door casing. I could forever keep this moment. Instead, I do my best to be assertive: “I . . . er . . . well, I . . . ah . . .if there is some way to . . .ah. . . I guess we could always. . . you know. . . you’re sure there’s a trail?”

She nods, but her eyebrows stay put.

“ . . . If you really feel like this is something . . . you know . . . I mean, it must be a pretty good souvenir shop and all—”

“Are you saying yes?” Chera interrupts.

I blow out my response, like a hiss, almost in protest to what I’m consenting to. “Sure, why not. It’ll be fun.” Oh boy. Did I really say fun?

Chera squeals and runs down the hallway. “I’ll make a list of everything we need,” she calls back over her shoulder.

She runs like she always runs, hands tight to her chest and elbows flying out to the side, feet shuffling along the floor in small steps, barely coming off the rug. She used to run like that from my truck to her kindergarten class.

Like I said, I’m not an outdoor adventurist. The closest I’ve ever come to thinking about climbing a mountain before is thinking that I would never climb one. But I am a dad who is going to walk his daughter down the aisle one day and maybe walking her to the top of a mountain will help me with that.

But then I start to wonder again. What sort of things will we pack? Is something like this very dangerous? And does that souvenir shop really have ice cream?