River’s End by Nora Roberts

Author:Nora Roberts [Roberts, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

The Forest

Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare.

— George Meredith

Seventeen

He was surprised he remembered it so well, in such detail, with such clarity. As he drove, Noah caught himself bracing for the sensory rush as he came around a switchback, heartbeats before his field of vision changed from thick wood and sheer rock to stunning blue sky painted with the dazzling white peaks of mountains. It was true that he’d driven this way once before, but he’d been only eighteen, it had been only one time. It shouldn’t have been like coming home after a trip away, like waking up after a dream.

And it had been summer, he reminded himself, when the peaks were snowcapped, but the body of them green with the pines and firs that marched up their sides to give them the look of living, growing giants rather than the cold and still kings that reigned over the valleys.

He’d done his research, he’d studied photographs, the brochures, the travelogues, but somehow he knew they couldn’t have prepared him for this sweep, for the contrasts of deep, silent forest and wildly regal peaks.

He continued the climb long after he passed the turnoff for River’s End. He had time, hours if he chose, before he needed to wind his way down to the lowlands, the rain forest, the job.

Choices again. And his was to slip into a pull-off, get out of the car and stand. The air was cold and pure. His breath puffed out, and had little knives scoring his throat on the inhale. It seemed to him that the world was spread out before him, field and valley, hill and forest, the bright ribbon of river, the flash of lake. Even as a car grinding into low gear passed behind him, he felt isolated. He couldn’t decide if it was a feeling he enjoyed or one that troubled him, but he stood, letting the wind slap at his jacket and sneak under to chill his body, and studied the vast blue of the sky, with the white spears of mountains vivid against it like a design etched on glass.

He thought perhaps he’d stopped just here with his parents all those years ago, and remembered standing with his mother reading the guidebook.

The Olympic Range. And however vast and encompassing it seemed from this point, he knew that at lower elevations, in the forest where the grand trees ruled, it didn’t exist. You would walk and walk in that dimness, or clatter up rocks on the tumbling hills and not see the stunning scope of them. Then you would take a turn, step out on a ridge, and there it would be. The vast sky-stealing stretch of it snatching your breath as if it had sneaked up on you instead of the other way around.

Noah took one last look, climbed back in his car and started down the switchback the way he’d come.

The trees took over. Became the world.

The detour took him a little more than an hour, but he still arrived at the lodge by three in the afternoon.

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