“Coming
events cast their shadows before”
-Thomas Campbell
These
days, frantic though they were, were filled with happiness and hope. We finally
felt we were seeing the sun after so many cloudy months.
We were. But we failed to notice the deep shadows at the edge of the clearing. There were signs and portents, some almost supernatural, of the tragedy ahead of us which we were on course for, like a train headed full throttle into a brick wall.
First,
there were things like some of the events in the news of 1999, most notably the
shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which 20 people
were killed.
One night while I was at work, I was studying the Russian Grammar book which I still had from my third year of college.
Just flipping through the Russian/English glossary, my eye caught the Russian word trup.
I had never seen that word before, nor ever really studied the glossary in the textbook. I looked at what the word meant in English: “corpse.”
A chill passed down my spine. The name of the woman who handles adoption paperwork for the INS's New York City office where we sent Cyril’s paperwork was named Lois Troupe, pronounced the same way. This is as unsettling to me now as it was then.
Throughout the summer, I had thought that our pet cockatiels’ reproductive habits were bringing us luck. Every time one of the females laid an egg, we noticed, we would soon hear news that our process had moved one step closer to completion. We carefully collected them into a bowl and put it on our coffee table.
But I should also have noted, as I only did later, that none of those eggs they laid had ever been fertilized.
It wasn’t just me.
Throughout most of 1998 and 1999, Daniel had been preoccupied with a quest of his own — making the Catskill Mountain 3500 Club. Since we moved to the area, he had rediscovered hiking as an interest and a way of exercising, and found a goal to work toward in climbing all 35 peaks of the Catskills that exceed that height, whether they had trails or not, and then redoing four over in the winter.
I didn’t really see the point of just walking up a hill, but it was how he kept focus through all of this and it was good exercise, which he needed.
He had kept at it more or less for a year and a half, using every free weekend he could find, and by early November he had finished all but one.
So, the Sunday after getting our court date, he figured the time was as good as any to finish it up, and set out to climb Cornell Mountain near Phoenicia, in the center of the Catskills.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s a difficult trip of almost five miles from the nearest parking lot, requiring that you go over another mountain on the way and work your way over some difficult rock ledges.
Dan had to do it alone as none of his usual hiking partners, people who had hoped along with him to be part of this experience, were able to accompany him.
He wasn’t able to start till noon, and the weather wasn’t ideal, but four hours later he was finally there, drinking cocoa from a thermos in a small clearing 3,860 feet above sea level, musing on how much his life was about to change and thinking about one day, when Cyril was older, bringing him up here and telling him about this day.
On the way back down the sun set and it grew dark, with two miles yet to cover to the parking lot. Not to worry — Dan put on his headlamp on.
But he still managed to lose the trail, and decided to bushwhack down through the woods to the road. However, not too long after that the batteries ran out. He was all alone in the dark woods on a cloudy night, surrounded by the scratchy silhouettes of bare trees, the air awash with the smell of dying leaves and distant fires.
With little light, he nervously sidestepped along, working his way across two streams, through trees blown down a few months before by Tropical Storm Floyd, and descending steep slopes in total darkness.
He wondered at times if he would ever make it out, although he always knew he would. When he finally got back to the car, what should have been an occasion for joy was reduced to mere relief.
He thought at the time that it was just a mildly amusing coda to his story. Little did he and I know that we had just lost the trail ourselves and were descending into a dark valley of our own from which, at times, it would seem there was neither light nor the possibility of a way out.