“A trip,” Harry had emailed their friends.  “We’ll be back around mid-August and we’ll keep in touch in between.” He didn’t use the word “vacation.”  Since he and Sarah had each retired, he wasn’t sure the word was appropriate.  Vacation from what?  He and Sarah were still the same no matter where they were.

Trips couldn’t be as last minute as he remembered they’d been when he and Sarah were young parents.  He’d been lucky to get a room at an overpriced motel in West Yellowstone for two nights in August after calling six in a row.   And the flight into and out of Idaho Falls had been a chore to book on line.  Then the car rental.  That was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, one was too big, one was too small, and the just right one was …. Well, it would have been easier just to drive all the way.

He was thankful that the flight was uneventful, except for the brief summer storm when rain pinged in crazy angles off the airplane wing and the coffee shuddered in paper cups.  Sarah was calm through it, smiling as she looked out through the airplane window, looking as if she were on the bumper car ride at a children’s amusement park.  

Geography and geology were always interests of hers, on the periphery of her primary focus, Impressionist art history, and the contrast between the softness of a Monet and the hardness of anthracite had bemused him.  And her fluency in German and commitment to the poet, Rilke…another endearing quirk.

Why they had never been to Yellowstone was a mystery.  It was the most active geothermal area in the world on a dormant, not dead, volcano, with over one-thousand earthquakes a year.  Why had they never gone when the girls were little?  Or when they’d gotten to college age?  It didn’t matter, he told himself.  What mattered was that they were here now. 

The seat belt light went out and they stood up, assuming the slightly bent posture that permitted them to stretch without bumping their heads on the ceiling panels.  Paying not to have to carry luggage on board with them was another annoyance but the upside was he could just focus on Sarah for now.  

He took her hand.  “Got your purse, honey?’  

She nodded and patted it.  The small beige travel bag, pint-sized bottle of water tipping ever so slightly forward and down, was over one shoulder.  

He leaned over. “Let me?”  He picked up the strap and dropped it down again, bandolier style across her neck. He pushed the water bottle firmly down into its pouch. Then he grabbed his black laptop bag.

The car was a white Ford Fiesta.  Safe enough, Harry thought, and no visible scratches or pings that the rental company could get him on.  Anyhow, it was covered by his Visa and his car insurance.  And gas, he noticed, was a good twenty-five cents a gallon cheaper in Idaho than in California.  

The drive from Idaho Falls to West Yosemite took them past towns whose buildings were lifted from a 50’s movie set, main streets full of dust and of windows with “for lease” signs.  How did the people in these small towns, villages really, manage?  What was that brown-eyed, blonde teen-ager who took his money for one vegetarian and one turkey six-inch Subway sandwich (“Hold the mayo, no onions, thanks.”) doing?  He hoped it was just her summer job, and she was off to college, any college, even a community college, come fall.  

When he was home, he struck up conversations with all the young people who served him in any capacity.  “What do you really want to do?” he’d ask.  Sarah used to think it was intrusive and patronizing—yes, he remembered she’d used that particular word.   But he’d seldom been disappointed in the responses.  “I’m in college part time…”  “Had to drop out because of money but I’m going back….” “I play the sax in a band. This is my day job.” 

“Look,” he’d once said to Sarah in a paroxysm of frustration, “who at twenty-two for God’s sake wants to be a waiter his whole life?’  But maybe here, in this stretch between Idaho Falls and West Yellowstone, that was what people wanted to do at twenty-two.  Or maybe they thought about what they wanted to have, more than what they wanted to do, without the fierce longing to become adults that he and Sara had felt at that age. 

He glanced at Sarah.  She had her forehead pressed against the side window, looking out, reminiscent of the airplane ride.  

“How’re you doing, honey?” he asked.

She turned and smiled at him, a reddened pressure mark just above her right eyebrow.  “Fine.” 

 Her smile creased both sides of her face into pleats of skin.  Her lips were dry, an artifact of airplane-air. Her hair was more salt than pepper and cut pixie style.  He missed her long hair, but she had told him that long hair on middle-aged women made them look as if they didn’t want to grow up let alone old.  She’d gotten soft, almost doughy, in the last year, although the doctor’s scale still showed her at 122 pounds and 5 feet 4 inches in height. Always pale, she was near white, not a tan line to be seen.  They both needed to be out in the fresh air more.

“This is nice,” she added, pointing out the window.  “Farms.  Look, a cow.”  The scenery reminded him of the farms and town he would set up for his model train set when he was ten.  Years ago, Sara would say, “Look, girls, there’s a cow.”  Years ago.

West Yellowstone was there for the tourists.  There was no other reason for its existence.  Gas stations, motels, restaurants, and souvenir shops. This was an accretion of creature necessities and unnecessities, layered up to the entrance gate to the park.  Parents standing in line with children out the door at the 31 Flavors ice-cream store, everyone in shorts and tee-shirts.  Everyone looked hot, deflated, as if the hours before 4:30 PM had conspired against them somehow.  Maybe it was just the altitude, he thought to himself, 7500 feet up, people get tired.  Not used to it.  He’d have to remember that for himself and Sarah.  Neither of them should be drained, especially not her.

“Sarah….”  She turned, her green eyes graying next to the white hoodie framing her face. 

“Yes?”  

“Are you hot? Hungry?”  Conversations had become questions.  Are you hungry, yes or no.  Are you hot, yes or no?  A penny for your thoughts.  Do you have any?  Do you remember them?  He must have sighed.  She put her hand on his thigh, a touch so light it was barely there.  

“A little.”  

“What?”

“Oh, a little hungry, I guess, Harry.”

Room 124 was serviceable, air- conditioned, with a print of a photograph of Old Faithful doing its thing. White, over-washed towels in the bathroom along with a half-roll of toilet paper.  An almost new blue shower mat lay rolled next to the tub.  He unrolled it, put it down on the tub floor, and stepped on it, feeling the little pressure cups latch firmly onto the surface.  “Okay,” he thought, “okay.”

 In the fifteen minutes that it had taken him to pull in, check in, get the keys, and move in, cumulus clouds scuttled over.  Cloud names he’d never forgotten from his one class in Meteorology, his senior year in college, the summer before he met Sarah.

He checked out the window.  Cumulocongestus, a mass takeover of the blue sky.  Dark grey, almost black, cumulonimbus. He and Sarah were in for a good, old fashioned, summer thunderstorm.  That would freshen the air, exciting, never scary for her.  

“Woow,” she’d say to the girls when they were little.  “Look, look at that lightning.  Count, one, two, three…Okay, so?”

“Four miles, mommy,” Stephie would reply.  

“My turn, next,” said Terry.  

Maine, that was the trip to Maine, when they stayed at the farmhouse bed-and- breakfast.  The girls woke at seven, unsure what to do without a television set to turn on.  Stephie was frightened by the half-a-dozen chickens, when they crowded around her in the yard looking for food.  Sarah lifted her up high, then Stephie’s legs grappled her mother’s waist and her arms wrapped around Sarah’s neck, as she half-laughed and half-sobbed.  How old was Stephie then?  Four or five, he guessed.  He shook his head slightly, as if to gently knock the date loose from wherever it was.  

“What’s wrong?”  Sarah looked at him, her nose slightly wrinkled up, the gesture suggesting that his inability to remember bothered her by osmosis.  

“Do you remember…”  He stopped, tried hard to restart the sentence, umm’ed, then plunged ahead.  “When we took the girls to that farmhouse in Maine, Stephie was frightened by the chickens.  That was their first thunderstorm.  You taught them how to count to see how far away the lightening was.”

Sarah smiled.  “Maybe.”  She was trying to engage him, he could tell.  She kept smiling and nodded.  Did she want him to keep going?

“So, I couldn’t remember how old they were.  I mean Stephie was little enough for you to pick her right up.”

“Five and seven.  It was the summer before she entered kindergarten.  And Terry was worried about going into third grade.  Some teacher she didn’t like, I think.  Or she thought she didn’t like her.  I mean, she’d never had her before.”  Sarah gave her “really” shrug.  

He’d seen it thousands of times; that little moue of exasperation with the girls, him, life.  Still, it was better than the “whatever” Terry used so often in her teens only to have it picked up by Stephie in her pre-teens.  Though neither girl used it anymore; no, they were women now, all concern and suggestion when they talked to him on the phone or Skyped them both.  

“Great.”  It was great.  He smiled back.  Engagement with Sarah.  He should ask her something else, he thought.  “Ahhh, how did the teacher thing work out?”

Sarah’s face clouded over, like a toddler before a tantrum.  “I don’t remember, Harry.”  She paused and took a deep breath.  She held up a finger.  He waited.  She let her breath out slowly.  “Okay.  But I do remember that kindergarten worked out fine, just fine.  Are the girls calling tonight?”

“We can call them any time.”  Harry patted his cell phone. Then he realized he hadn’t turned it back on after getting off the plane.  No wonder he hadn’t had a call from Terry yet.  Overcoming a slight incline of reluctance, he took the phone off airplane mode and watched three bars come up on the screen.  No escape from cell phone towers, even here. 

“Meantime, let’s try to get some dinner.”  He had tensed up with the expectation of a conversation and the disappointment.  Beer would help.  “Better we put on those all- weather jackets we brought.”

Harry pulled Sarah’s new purple jacket from the side pocket of her suitcase and shook it out. Purple was now her favorite color, in a changing array of new favorite things, like sweet gooey desserts, which she had never liked before.

He grabbed his windbreaker, held the door open for her, and they found their way to the sidewalk. The same families who’d been in shorts and tee shirts an hour before, now had all varieties of Yellowstone sweatshirts and faded jeans on.  The temperature had dropped maybe twenty-five degrees, not unheard of, he reminded himself, for night above 7000 feet.  There was a brisk, damp breeze and a piney rain scent.

The rain that began as they walked to the restaurant filled the sidewalk cracks in less than a minute, falling in fat, soft drops. Both of them competently slipped the hoods out from the collars of their jackets and over their heads.  

They ate early, before 5:30, which was how Sarah liked it now, even though it was still 4:30 for him, California time.  Dinner was remarkable only for Sarah’s disinterest in any dessert.  He dallied over his Coors, then ordered another one.  A Dodgers and Rockies baseball game was on the flatscreen in the bar, and he glanced at it with desultory interest.  She smiled at every child she saw and they smiled back.  That hadn’t changed.  By the time they left the restaurant, the rain had stopped and the sky was clearing up.  

His cell phone played the opening of “When I’m Sixty-four,” Stephie’s idea of programming the “right song, Dad” when she gave it to him for his sixty-sixth, actually, birthday.  “Terry” showed up on the screen.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said when he raised it to his ear.

“Hi, Dad.  Is everything okay?”  Terry asked in a single, non-stop breath.

“Of course.”

“You haven’t answered the phone until now.”  Slightly accusatory, in that “You are fifteen minutes late, young man” parental voice she had acquired.  From whom?  Neither he nor Sarah had used that tone.  Much?  No, not at all.  It wasn’t needed.

“Sorry.”  He didn’t feel like explaining.  “But we are fine.  Just ate.  Walking along back to the motel.”

“How’s mom?”

“Fine.”  Hadn’t he just said that?

“Dad,” her voice was wheedling now.  “Sometimes your ‘fine’ is just not, well, specific enough.  I mean, like, ‘How do I look in my prom dress?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘How’s the weather?’ ‘Fine.’  You know…”  Her voice trailed off, sadly spent.

“Yes.  Okay.  Your mom, and I can put her on the phone right now if you want, is smiling, walking after a nice summer shower and a decent meal.  We will go back to the room and watch a little TV and then I’m sure she’ll go right to sleep, and I’ll read for a while.”  Miffed, he thought he sounded miffed.  Or professorial or distant.  

He handed the phone to Sarah.  “It’s Terry.”

“Terry?”  Now Sarah sounded like another person who didn’t believe him.  “Hi, baby girl.”

For the next several minutes, Sarah nodded, walked and occasionally uttered “Umm,” “Okay,” and “Really?”  Terry was, he guessed, just talking to fill the time.  She had no children, but could chatter about the phlebotomy lab she oversaw, the techs and nurses as if she were writing a soap opera.  He noticed she didn’t say much about her husband, Dennis, ever.  Not even when he asked her directly, which was rarely.  He worked hard at letting his adult children be adults.  And they should continue to let him be an adult since he’d been one for decades and felt he’d had a lot of practice at it.  He’d try to share that with Terry the next time.

Sarah grabbed his jacket sleeve with the urgent grip of someone about to lose her footing.  But instead of tripping, she shoved the phone back into his hand as he reached out towards her.  She shook her head back and forth so hard her upper torso moved with her.  

“What?”  He could see tears forming at the edges of her eyes, like more rain.

“Mom!”  He heard Terry’s voice and put the phone back to his ear.  

“Stephie and I have talked about this.  Really, it would be so much better if you and Dad just sold the house and moved closer to one of us.”

            “This is Dad,” he said.  “Mom just gave the phone back to me.  Terry, honey….” He paused.  As man living among women, avoiding female eruption was ingrained. “Ahh, this is a bad time to discuss that.  And it’s our decision, your mom’s and mine.”  He could hear Terry breathing.  Meantime, Sarah’s head stopped shaking but she continued to cling to him, the pressure of her body bringing them both to a full stop on the sidewalk.  

A family of five moved around them, the mother, furled umbrella in one fist, holding onto the hand of the youngest, like she were pulling a wagon, as the little girl tromped through the puddles.

“Goodbye, Terry.  We’ll talk to you tomorrow.”  He turned the phone off.  Sarah let go of his arm and he wrapped it around her, trying to change clinging to hugging. She calmed; he could feel her heart beating as she relaxed against him.  

“It’s okay,” he said.

“My home is what I know,” she said.  On what he thought of as her bad days, Sarah would sit in the family room on the couch for hours, unless he got her up and moving.  Or she would walk around the kitchen opening and shutting the drawers and cabinets as if trying to rememorize the location and contents.  He asked her once.  

“That is what I’m trying to do,” she laughed, then bit her lip and returned to the living room.

They continued the walk back to the motel in silence.  He thought about the Viagra in his toiletries bag.  Sex was still a good way to connect.  Breath, skin, nipples, tender juicy parts.  If she wasn’t still upset, Sarah would enjoy it too.  He tried giving her hand a squeeze to see.  “Shall we celebrate our first visit to Yellowstone?” he asked.  In response, she squeezed back.

But, by the time they got back to the motel, unpacked, and watched the tail end of CSI-Miami, he could see the grayish blue shadows under her eyes, as if her face was turning to ash from her eyes down.  He turned off the TV.

“I’ll just read awhile,” he said.  Five pages, or whatever they called them on Kindle, later, he looked over and she was sleeping.  Laying on her back, her lips slightly parted, gravity tugging back on her face, smoothing out the fault lines, she looked fifty, at most.  That seemed young to him now and far away from this end of days. 

But the medication gave her bad dreams and left her feeling “unslept” she said.  “Unslept.”  He had mulled that over, looked it up in the dictionary, but it was not there under the “u’s.”  Neologism was under “n;” neologism for an invented word. And just yesterday he’d read an article suggesting that the medications were targeting the wrong symptom, that those tendrils in her brain, which he thought of as like a jellyfish engulfing a small pearl, were only a sign, a portent, and not a cause, of Alzheimer’s. He and Sarah would talk to Dr. Fiskel about it when they got back.

Harry wondered why neurologists went into that field, when there was nothing they could do but say, “We think right now that it’s just mild cognitive impairment and not Alzheimer’s.  Yes, at sixty-two she’s a little young for it but….”  And “No, it’s not inevitable that it’ll be Alzheimer’s.”  And “What are the chances?”  Shrugging, palms up, “Keep an eye on her, but don’t count symptoms every day…”  Meaning what?  Count symptoms once a month on a specific day?  He was happy he’d spent his life as an architect, with plans, and specifications, and the knowledge that the building would stand on the ground where he could look at it, if he wanted to.  No one ever came into his office wondering how it was that they were seeing a geriatric specialist.  

He found it hard to distinguish between Sarah’s anxiety over her symptoms and the symptoms themselves.  Sometimes how she didn’t remember, how she no longer could finish a long book—she the rare books librarian at the College of Fine Arts—left him gasping around the corner from her as if he had run three miles to catch her. How he missed hearing her describe books and the process of reading them.  

“Well, that was like a long Australian crawl.  Read a sentence, come up for air, read a sentence, come up for air,” she’d say of a thickly written book.  Or “You just skate through this; she writes like she is laying down a smooth glassy surface over the world she creates.”  Rilke had been her favorite poet, and she had returned to his poems again and again, often reciting her favorites to him so that he, too, eventually had lines memorized.  

Now, her vexatious worry-beading thoughts went over and over the same insignificant lapse of memory that anyone could have had at her age or his.  “I meant to turn on the dishwasher before we went to bed last night,” she’d say, tearing up over morning coffee.  “I meant to do it and I didn’t.”  

That caused him to speak in a bitter tone, his “drop dead” voice she had named it, feeling the roughness of the words in his vocal cords like sand.  He regretted those events for days and wondered if he should be the one on anti-depressants.

Both of them woke at 7:30 with the sunlight slipping in between the drapes and the wall and drifting over their faces.  The sky was sharply blue, as if it had been poured out of a paint can.  

After a cup of coffee brewed in the room and a bran muffin from Starbucks that they shared, Harry tucked Sarah into the car.  “Hold this,” he said as he handed a carefully folded Triple-A map of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons to her.  “It’s a big park.  Lots to see.  I thought we’d start at the Lower Geyser Basin and work our way over to Old Faithful by eleven or so.  Stop at the Old Faithful Lodge for lunch….”  He’d always wanted to see that building, one of the first in the national park series by Robert Reamer, allegedly designed when he was drunk.

The half-mile walk to see the Fountain Paint Pot and the other geothermal features, even on the wooden boardwalk planks, exhausted Sarah.  She gripped her Canon Sure Shot like a talisman.  “Phew,” she said when the earth’s burps released gassy smells.  At the Celestine Pool, they paused to consider the fool-heartiness of the young man who, in 1981, dove in to save his dog, only to die himself of severe burns.  

“But,” Sarah said, “what we do to save what we love.  That’s the theme of so many books and songs.”

“The song about that would have to be country-western,” he said.

“Even in country-western, I don’t think there are many songs about guys dying to save their dogs.”  Her laugh lines tugged up smartly around her mouth then sagged again.

They rested in the car, both doors open to the pine scented air and the shush of cars going by.  

“Before we go to Old Faithful, we have to see Grand Prismatic Spring,” she said.

“Honey, you are awfully tired already.”

“We will never be here again.  I….”  Her voice trailed off.  He waited.

“I have to fill up the growing empty spaces.”  She pointed to her head, then lifted her other hand and made the twirly motions with her hands that, when they were children, had meant someone was crazy.  “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza…” she sang monotonally.  

“Stop.”  He felt hurt, as if someone were making fun of his wife, someone he thought he knew but didn’t quite recognize.  

Sarah patted his thigh.  “It’s okay,” she said.  “The trip is good.  What I needed.”

Leaning over, she kissed his cheek softly.

The spring was grand, he admitted. It was large; the boardwalk went on and on. The center of the spring was intensely sapphire, surrounded by emerald, and fading to gold at the edges. He had never seen such colors in nature outside of gemstones. Steam rose all around them, fogging his glasses and the camera lens, as if they had stepped into a sorcerer’s world, full of dragons and mysterious entrances to treasure caves.  Sarah stopped to take a picture and, from five steps away, maybe less, he could not find her.  He grabbed the glasses from his face and rubbed them with the border of his tee shirt.  Then he could just make her out and stepped forward to grab her hand before he lost her again.

Sarah took picture after picture, not caring about the steam.  He asked her and she waved her hand, “Effects, effects.  And I can get a thousand pictures on camera.”  He exchanged a picture of them for a picture of a young couple near them.  Their’s on the newest I-Phone, with the newest case. Then he and Sarah watched the Excelsior Pool as it discharged four thousand gallons a minute of boiling water into the Firestone River.  

“Boiling water,” he said, shaking his head.  

“Hmmm,” she replied.  He looked over.  Her eyes were closed and she wobbled slightly.  “I’m good,” she said, as if sensing his troubled gaze. 

He had planned to be at the Old Faithful Inn before noon, so they could eat and rest.  But it was almost one by the time he had found a place to park and they slowly threaded their way to the grand porch and then into the building.  The seven-story lobby was large enough to swallow most of the tourists who, like Sarah, pointed and shot their way around the cavernous fireplace. Harry found a spot open on a bench and sat, admiring the log rafters and the immensity of the space.  The sense that he was in an enlargement of an Austrian fairy tale woodcut bothered him; there was something not quite American about this quintessentially American setting.  

Sarah returned to him and sat down.  Before the now they both lived in, she would have come with four other tourists, made temporary friends.  “Let’s just get some junk food and move on,” she murmured.

He foraged and returned with pre-wrapped, refrigerator-cold tuna sandwiches, two small, slightly soft Macintosh apples, and two Neapolitan ice-cream sandwiches in chocolate wafers. They ate on the porch.  The lettuce in the sandwiches was wilted and mayonnaise dripped onto Sara’s jacket.  He passed her two napkins.  After the ice cream, she licked her fingers.  

The sky was a deep blue but at a distance he could see graying clouds.  Cumulonimbus were moving in.  They would have enough time to go to Old Faithful and then return before it rained.

Sarah walked with purpose, as if seeing Old Faithful was some event to which she had been invited and was now in danger of missing.  And, Old Faithful erupted barely two minutes after they were in good viewing range.  She raised her camera along with hundreds of other tourists and shot her pictures.

“Back to the car,” Harry said.

“We have time.  Let’s walk to the other geysers here,” Sarah replied, pointing to the boardwalk that led past Old Faithful.  “I don’t want to be one of those…you know…came for Old Faithful, saw it, and left sorts.”

Harry looked at the sky.  It was still blue right above him.  The air was still, clear, and sharp; only his breath moved in and out.  But cumulonimbus clouds surged at the edge of the horizon. 

The whole Old Faithful adventure had taken thirty minutes from the porch at the Inn until this. Surely they had a good hour before the afternoon rains came. “Okay.” He was pleased that Sarah wanted to explore more of the park’s features.  Her cheeks were a light pink and her eyes focused on the path ahead.

“The Main Loop it is,” he said, taking her hand.  “We can see the Chromatic Pool and the Castle Geyser.”

“First, the Castle Geyser, then the Chromatic Pool,” Sarah laughed.  

They walked easily on the boardwalk.  Although Sarah expressed sympathy for the bison who had once fallen into a geyser, causing the area to smell like beef stew for weeks, Harry said her feelings were misplaced.  “What about the geologist who lost his feet when he stepped into one of these overheated acid baths?” he asked, pointing to the third sign they had seen warning, in vivid cartoon characters, of the dangers of stepping off the wooden planks and onto the treacherous ground.

The breeze picked up, ruffling Sarah’s hair, and cooling them both.  The sun slipped momentarily behind a cloud then reemerged.  They paused to admire the Castle Geyser, the oldest geyser in the park, spurting every 13 hours out of an edifice of its own making, a huge sandcastle-like structure.

“Thousands of years,” Sarah said.  “That’s how long it takes to build this structure drip by drip. It’s endless or close to it.  Not us.”  

Harry nodded, squeezing her hand.  He never knew exactly how to respond to intimations of mortality.  He did not know if he was afraid of eternity or death; not being him was not something he could grasp.  He would always be him until he wasn’t, but what was that?  

Sarah freed her hand from his to pull up the zipper of her jacket.  The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees in the last twenty minutes.  Harry looked up.   Clouds slammed into the space above them in a display of blackening Cumulocongestus.

“Your face is crinkled,” Sarah said.  She’d used that phrase since their second date.

“We need to hurry up.”

A light boom reached them.  The air dampened.  Sarah looked up.  “Another summer storm.”

“Come on, darling,” Harry said, taking her hand again and pulling lightly as if trying to dislodge a caramel stuck in a can.  Sarah took two steps forward and then shuddered.

“Are you cold?”  Harry began to shrug off his jacket with one hand, still holding onto her with the other.

Sarah shook her head.  “A little scared.  I can’t…”

Harry tugged again and she took another step.  “Sarah, you have to walk with me.”  He used his firm voice, resurrected from dealing with little daughters.  “Come, now.”

Sarah’s voice now had the edge of tears, damp like the air around them.  “I’m spoiling this.”

“You’re not spoiling this.  The storm is spoiling this.”  He tugged harder.  The rain advanced towards them, a dark curtain interlaced now with flashes of lightning and booms.  Harry counted five lightning strikes across the horizon of the storm, a witches’ cauldron of electricity.

Sarah began to walk.  He grabbed her around her shoulder, trying to hurry her without tripping her up.  Ahead another pair of tourists began to run along the boardwalk, laughing as they gained ground towards the Lodge.  He and Sarah had a good quarter mile to go, he calculated.  Even last year that would have been fifteen minutes at a fast clip, less at a trot.  Now, he didn’t know how long it would be.

A Chinese gong of a thunderclap made them both jump.  Then, to their left side, a bolt of lightning slashed to the ground, and they were again inside the gong, this time instantly.

Harry looked around.  He and Sarah were the tallest objects around. They could not get off the boardwalk, because the ground was treacherous.  A bench sat a few yards away, but it had metal legs.  Harry could not remember whether that would be a good place or not to hide under if lightening hit.  He’d never been a scout and hated camping.  But this was how those Eagle Scouts had gotten killed last summer, lightening. He thought he’d been told that they needed to be low, lower than anything around them, lower than a bench or a bush to not be scorched to a cinder.  

Sarah shuddered against him, still walking, her lips sucked under her teeth, her breath too rapid.  “Hold on,” he said.  

The rain hit them from behind, as if a garden hose was turned on full blast, the wind forcing the water almost parallel to the ground.  Suddenly, Harry’s jeans were soaked through from his thigh down.  Without a conscious decision, he hugged Sarah from behind.  “Down,” he said, “down on the boardwalk.”

Sarah went to her knees.  Harry knelt at her back, loosening his grip on her.  “Lay flat,” he whispered in her ear.  Sarah pillowed her face in her arms, lying now with her stomach flat against the wooden planks.  He stretched out next to her, his arm again over her back, her mouth next to his ear.  Her body pulsed with shivers, but her breath was warm and moist.

“You,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.  

“You are not,” she started, again.  

“I remember this Rilke,” he murmured, his voice joining hers.  “Not surprised by the force of the storm—You have seen it growing.” 

Then, he heard only the rain drops hitting the wood planks with the sound of a timpani and the shush of Sarah’s exhalations in his ear.  The wet penetrated to his stomach in slow, iced fingers of water.  It was not an eternity until the rain stopped, but it felt damned long to him.

Harry tilted his head to the right and up, tortoise-like in his movement.  The water from the brim of his hat dribbled onto his left arm through the defeated material of his all-weather jacket.

The clouded sky was an exhausted tone of grey streaked with white.  The walk-way planks had been installed with the barest tilt, so the rainwater slipped off in silence.  Harry admired the engineering thoughtfulness.

Like layers of insulation stripped away, the thinning clouds allowed the sun to steam into the air, still hidden but felt.  The light cleared the landscape around them, returning depth of vision and dulled, but recognizable, colors in the pine green vegetation and rusted red-orange mineral deposits.  

Harry tapped Sarah on the shoulder.  She sat up, hat askew, looking as wet as she would have been had he tossed her in a pool.  Standing, Harry offered his hand, but she tapped it away, moved to all fours, and then became upright.

Looking back the way they had come, Harry said, “Still no eruption at Castle Geyser.  Let’s go back to the car.”

Sarah nodded.  Together they walked in the direction that the tourist arrows pointed.