“I just mean that it isn’t—” We came around a bend in the trail and Mom sucked in a gasp that stole the complaints right out of her mouth. “Oh, Oscar!” was all she could say, but not in a Mom-like voice at all. It was the voice of someone who wore petticoats and ribbons in her hair.
The scene we’d stepped into looked more like Rivendell than Oregon. Columns of ice glowing the grey of glaciers hung down the rock wall beside the trail like curtains. A chunk of ice the size and shape of a soccer ball glittered like a diamond in the dirt at the edge of the path. Behind it all, a waterfall sprayed a sparkling mist into the glade. It was the kind of place where a fairy might live.
“Look out!” I barked. “A waterfall is like rain, but without the clouds to warn you. Don’t get too close.”
“It’s beautiful!” Mom said, still in that ooey-gooey strawberry-shortcake voice. “This must be what enchantment feels like.” If she were a cartoon, hearts would have popped in her eyes and floated like bubbles out of her head. Instead, only leftover sunbeams sparkled in the little hairs escaping from under her hat.
“Careful,” I said. “You never know what curses Oregon is trying to lure you into.”
“Oh stop!" She turned and kept walking up the trail with the dopey, twitterpated look still on her face. “Oregon is fine. I don’t know where you got that crazy idea.”
The spell broke around the next bend. A curious wad of white dirt peeked out from the trees beside the trail. I tried not to let on that I saw it, but couldn’t keep the spring out of my step, nor could I stop my tail from wagging.
Intrigued, the white dirt crept closer to the trail. It stayed in the shadows at first, but grew into bigger, bolder blobs as we walked. It covered more and more of the space between tree trunks until it was butting right up against the trail. Finally, it reached a curious finger across our path.
“Here we go again. The Oregon curse,” Mom said, hopping over a gritty speed bump of white dirt that was so packed it was starting to turn clear. “You called it, Oscar.”
Seeing that Mom was no threat, the white dirt got even more daring. The next time, it crossed the trail in a glowing lump as tall as me and almost as beautiful. I rolled in it as Mom tromped around the edge where it wasn’t as deep, muttering and swearing the whole time.
When we rounded the next bend, the white dirt took over. At first there were enough bootprints to make a trail, but with each step, there were fewer and fewer prints to follow. By the time the white dirt was up to my chest, there was only one set of bootprints left in on the crusty ground.
Each bootprint was farther apart than a Mom-pace. Still, Mom stretched and teetered so she never had to take a step that someone else hadn’t taken first.
Beside her, I used a different technique. I sprung gracefully out of each step and landed in a poof of white like a magician appearing in a puff of smoke.
Without warning, the bootprints Mom was following stopped short. She looked at the tree trunk a step away from the tip of her nose. She looked at the white dirt around her. The prints turned in an about-face and went back in the direction we’d just come from before they disappeared under my last snow angel.
“Dog doo!” Mom pulled out the Witch for advice. “Dog doo!” she said a second time.
“What are you doing all the way over here?” the Witch asked.
“Dog doo!”
“If you have to poop, you can do it here,” I told her. “The white dirt melts into a toilet bowl before your eyes like magic. Try it!”
Mom held out the Witch at the end of a long arm and squinted as if she were taking aim. Like a gunslinger surrounded by a pack of bandidos, she turned the the arm in a slow circle. When it stopped, she looked up to see where the Witch was pointing. She took a step in that direction and swung her arm again.
I watched her closely, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. I cocked my head and the picture fell into place. She looked just like those guys who bring long wands to the beach to search for buried treasure. She must be prospecting for potatoes!
“Does the Witch have a potato-detecting app?” I wagged.
“GPSes are accurate to within 3 feet." She took aim for her next step. “We can follow the trail by following the map on my phone. I’m determined to keep going, even if I have to check every damned step,” she told the Witch like an oath.
A few long and careful steps later, the bootprints reappeared. With them to guide us, Mom only had to check every few steps. Most of the time. Every once in a while, she looked at the Witch, made an angry noise, and stomped away in a different direction until the bootprints found us again.
I stopped decorating the forest with snow angels and stayed closer to Mom so she wouldn’t wander off. The white dirt swallowed the bottom half of her leg with every step. Every so often, when the bootprints abandoned us, the white dirt would forget itself and let Mom stand on top for a moment before sucking in both legs in one gulp. The bottoms of her pant-legs grew furry with white dirt as the springs drained out of mine.
I was starting to wonder if these bootprints really knew where they were going. I looked up to check a few steps ahead and spotted a real, live yeti lumbering through the trees just a few steps away.
He was coming right for us!
“Did you make it to the lake?” Mom asked the Yeti.
“Sure did,” the indomitable snowman said. He pinched at his bulging bug eyes and slid them on top of his shaggy head to show human eyes in the usual place underneath. “It’s about half a mile ahead.”
“Half a mile!” Mom moaned.
“You can’t even see the lake, though,” the Yeti said, like that was supposed to make it better, not worse. "It’s still frozen and covered in snow. I’m sure it’ll be there if you come back in a few weeks.”
“Come back?” Mom practically wailed.
“The snow can’t last long in this weather,” the Yeti told her in a there, there kind of voice. “Two weeks, no more.”
“We come from a far-off land called California,” I told him. “Our Wagon can’t get here without being attacked by someone at a gas station. And Mom’s allergic to clouds. She says that if we ever escape Oregon, we’re never coming back again for as long as we live. For safety.”
“We’re just visiting from California,” Mom translated. “It’s a long drive.”
The Yeti’s eyes went cold when he heard California and he slid his bug eyes back down. “Enjoy your hike,” he called over his shoulder as he walked away, leaving a backward set of bootprints beside the ones we’d been following.
Mom’s face pulled tight like an arrow ready for takeoff and aimed at the double line of bootprints ahead. “If that guy made it to the lake, that means his tracks will take us there, too.” She stuck out a leg and aimed it at the next bootprint. “Come on, Oscar. Let’s conquer our last challenge.”
You aren’t supposed to come home from a quest without learning a lesson. As I helped Mom stumble through the snow, I turned to her and asked in a life-coachly way, “Have you learned something from your trials?” Maybe Mom would tell me the moral of the story so I wouldn’t have to figure it out myself.
She gave me a look out of the corner of her eye. “Are you going to say something about following in someone else’s footsteps?”
“What do you think?” I asked wisely.
“I guess we started this trip wanting to blaze our own trail, and that didn’t work out so well... Ah truck!” Her paw slipped sideways through the white dirt and she tipped over like a potato truck, scattering water bottle and Witch onto the ground.
“Don’t forget all the lessons you learned from other people along the way,” I said. “Like the vet who told you not to take me to the vet anymore. Or the turtle who taught the Witch how to remember mapps. Or that nice man at the gas station who taught you how to find your keys using a coat hanger.”
Mom pulled her hand out of the white dirt and shook it. Sparkling flakes of magic flew off of her skin as drops of water. “Give me some credit. You also have to be wise enough to know what advice to take.” She shook more white dirt off the butt of her pants and aimed the next step. “Remember when the bridge was out? It would’ve been a disaster if we’d tried to cross.”
“I don’t remember anyone telling us to cross.” I didn’t remember seeing anyone that day.
“It was on the sign. It said, Proceed at your own risk. What’s that if not a dare?”
All of a sudden, the trees disappeared and we stepped into a scene from a different story.
We were standing in a giant stadium, only instead of bleachers, there was a collar of craggy mountains staring down at us. They were so impossibly tall that it hurt my neck to stare back. A million, billion Oscar fans could have gathered to cheer for our accomplishment if the bleachers weren’t too steep to sit on.
I left Mom behind and ran toward center-stage to begin the work of covering the entire valley in snow angels. But I only make it a few steps before Mom squawked behind me.
“OSCAR!”
When I looked back, she was bearing her teeth like someone trying to decide whether to run to help or run away.
“What?” I asked without turning all the way around, just in case she was messing with me again.
“There’s a lake under there somewhere. If the ice is as rotten as this snow...”
“Don’t you talk about the love of my life like that!” I barked.
“I just mean that if you fall through, it might be hard to get you out. You don’t want to accidentally go swimming again, do you?”
I wasn’t going to fall for that trap twice. I backed up until I was next to Mom again. Just in case. “What now?”
“I guess we just enjoy the feeling of accomplishment and hope we can come back someday.” She looked around for somewhere to sit, but white dirt covered everything.
“But you said we’d never come back to Oregon again,” I said. “Shouldn’t we celebrate by... um...” But I didn’t know how you were supposed to celebrate a win except by feeling like a winner.
“Maybe I was wrong.” Mom looked up at the tippy-tops of the mountains against the cloudless sky. "I mean, now that we know we can live out of the van for as long as we want, there’s no reason we can’t come back.”
“What about the gas station problem?”
“There’s still so much to see. We’ve got to get back to Idaho somehow.” She shrugged. “And didn’t I promise you we’d go potato picking someday?”
“You sure did!” I wagged.
Mom pulled the Witch out of her pocket. “What say we go to a fancy campground tonight to celebrate? The kind that’s only 1001 feet from schools or playgrounds so that there’ll be a Starbucks nearby? We can order takeout from Denny’s for dinner!”
“Where are we going to find a place like that all the way out here?” I drooled.
“Let’s see," Mom woke up the Witch and her face scrunched. “Right. No cell service. Another thing that will be better when we get back to town.”