The Darkest Time of the Year

by MARY ARDERY

In December’s pale pre-dawn light, I woke 
early to piss, the pressure too strong to stay
snug in my sleeping bag. On the rainfly, 
a rough layer of frost like white sandpaper
scraped my hand when I zipped it behind me.
Claire stood a few paces away, arms limp
at her sides. I said her name and walked toward her,
rustling up the earthen smell of damp leaves,
but she didn’t move. Any darker outside
it would have felt like a horror movie—
the way she stood staring at nothing
I could see, nothing she could see.
Catatonic, the therapist had diagnosed,
but the field directors had still ordered us
to the trail. We were camped in a grove
of dying hemlocks, their needles sickly
from the woolly adelgid blight, a wan
mauve color that should have been green.
I put an arm around Claire’s shoulders,
her red fleece a sieve from embers she hadn’t
felt burning through. Gently, I steered her
to sit on a fallen log near the cold fire pit.
I left to piss and returned to her hunched,
eyes incarnadine like she’d been rubbing them
but she was beyond most voluntary movements.   

Later that morning, the group awake
and waiting for the pot of water to boil,
we smelled an unmistakable human smell.
I dug plastic gloves from the first aid kit.
The lead guide cleaned Claire up, bagged
the soiled clothes, then told me to stay
with the group while she hiked off
to call base camp, demand an evac.
We shouldn’t be out here, she whispered to me,
anger sharp in her voice to mask the fear,
with someone who can’t control her ins and outs.
It was the day before the winter solstice.
I needed more light in the job, but also
it sounded unbearable, more time in the day.
Without talking, the women broke down
their tents, collapsing the poles and folding
them into themselves with the familiar
clicking of metal on metal. We walked
along the deserted Blue Ridge Parkway, 
already blocked off for the season,
to meet the van as close as it could come.
Our first steps on the wet black road,
we left sloppy footprints from thick mud
sludged on our boots. Heavy work
to lift each one. Above us, an off-season 
rainbow bled across the swollen clouds,
its colors bright against the gray sky,
its optimism insulting. Four months in 
with winter only beginning, I was ready 
to send for a rescue mission. A helicopter 
to swoop down and carry me far away 
from these bleak woods, their groves of
dying hemlocks only spreading, only spreading.