The Complete Where Dreams - Volume 1 of 2

JANUARY 1-3

Before Cassidy had felt even a little normal after yesterday’s outing, it had required a very long, very hot bath and most of an afternoon curled up in front of the gas fire. The drenching rain had caught her halfway back to the car. Her suede jacket was a ruin and her leggings had defended her for thirty seconds, at most.

This, at least, she knew how to solve. REI may have expanded into a national brand, but their flagship store was just a few blocks from the Seattle Times where Jack was an editor. She should have set up a lunch date, they hadn’t seen each other in a week, but she couldn’t find the energy. Not the best of signs, but she’d think about that later.

The underground parking garage was a collection of small, ratty cars that should never have seen the light of day and a fleet of Toyota and Honda hybrids. She parked her dad’s five-year-old Jetta and glanced around for the inevitable parking level reminders. “Evergreen.” She wasn’t on level “2,” she was parked on a tree. And there was no sign of an elevator anywhere.

The small exit sign indicated that the garage was in no way connected to the store.

She went back outside and clambered up the walkways and bridges over an artificial waterfall that was actually quite impressive. It roared and splashed, even had spray. She could smell the damp mist on the morning air as she hiked up concrete stairs spiraling through the trees.

The elevator, when she finally found it, was outdoors as well and wholly unused. Apparently everyone who came here was so damn outdoorsy that they took the stairs up above the waterfall. She stabbed the button for the top level. Rapped it twice more for good measure.

The glass elevator stopped on a wide concrete veranda that afforded a view out over downtown Seattle and the older buildings of the Denny Regrade. It was a magnificent view of the city. Though Puget Sound would soon be gone as Seattle continued its growth, Queen Anne Hill would be visible for decades to come.

A latte vendor tended his outdoor stall and a crowd clustered about pretending it wasn’t thirty-six degrees and drizzling on the second of January. They were clearly all certifiable. Being born and raised locally had not provided her with the die-hard, outdoorsman independent spirit that was still de rigueur in Seattle.

She raced through the foyer doors. A greeter smiled and asked if she needed any help. Cassidy assured her she was okay. It was warm inside and buying clothes was one thing she could handle.

A shout drew her attention upward. A twisted rock some forty feet high soared upward at the end of the lobby. A woman was falling—Cassidy let out a scream to match the climber’s just as a safety rope jerked tight and the climber swung brutally against the stone.

Then Cassidy heard the woman’s laughter over the pounding of her own heart.

A man clung to another face. “Quit goofing around, Teri. You fall on El Capitan and we’re going to let you go.”

“Gimme a break, Tom. I slipped is all.”

Cassidy hurried through the main door, resisting the hesitancy about grabbing the nasty ice axes that served as door handles.

Maybe she did need help, like help packing a moving van and getting back to New York. Or at least with the vast arrays of equipment that spread before her in every direction. To her left was a rack of backpacks big enough for her to climb into, each with a thousand straps. To her right were more sleeping bags than she’d seen since her one Girl Scouts’ camp-out.

“Keep moving, Cass.” Books, energy bars, silvery packets marked “stroganoff” and another “ice cream.” Even as she watched, someone selected a half dozen packets and put them into a basket. She moved on and entered a world of kayaks, with nothing but canoes and bicycles beyond. To her right, skis and snowboards. A bit farther, boots.

Boots!

She needed boots, good start. She’d work from the bottom up. A plan of attack, excellent. It still took her some exploring to discover these were all ski boots and that walking boots were up on the massive mezzanine level.

Once there, she moved across the plank flooring and entered the racks of boots, but it didn’t smell like it should. There was no canvas and fine leather of Nordstrom or Saks nor the mellower tang of Gucci, not even the smooth sweetness of Armani. There was a heaviness like saddles that had hung too long in a tack room. Manly boots doing manly things.

Reaching the end of the boot aisle, she faced the wall of individual boots waiting for their mates. There wasn’t a single manufacturer she recognized. Neither Anne Klein nor Kenneth Cole walked here. These all had tough, outdoorsy names: Vasque, Montrail, Ugg. Even the women’s boots were from these companies marinated in testosterone.

“Can I help you?” Cassidy turned, and an incredibly fit girl who looked no more than nineteen confronted her in a little green vest and a white turtleneck. This time she’d take the assistance.

“I need some new boots.” Her three-hundred dollar Weitzman’s had dissolved on the trail back to the car. She’d lost a heel when it got stuck between two rocks. As she prowled about the park in the driving rain seeking the right parking lot among the forest, the leather had actually separated from the sole. She’d done the last hundred yards with the broken boot in her hand, her sock-covered foot squishing with freezing mud, and the other leg two inches longer at the heel. It was amazing she hadn’t gotten frostbite or something.

“Do you know what kind you want?”

Again she faced the wall. They all looked the same, with brown tops and black rubber soles. But she knew how to handle that as well.

“The best.”

“What kind of hiking are you doing?”

“That matters?”

The girl was really polite. Not at a Nordstrom personal shopper level, but she managed to hide any disdain she was feeling from her perfect, teenage face.

“Oh, yes.” She pointed at the one pair with a four-hundred dollar price tag. “We just sold eight pairs of those to a women’s team who are taking on the seven summits challenge.”

“The seven summits?” Cassidy had entered not only another world, but they spoke a different language here.

“Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstenz Pyramid, and Everest. I’m forgetting one. Hold on. Don’t tell me.”

As if Cassidy might have a clue what she was talking about.

Her blue eyes searched about. “Oh, and Vinson. I always forget Vinson.”

“Vinson?” Kilimanjaro, Denali, and Everest were the only ones she’d ever heard of but she finally got the idea. The highest peaks on each continent. And a team of women were going to climb them in those boots. The ones perched smugly right there on the wall glaring down at her for daring to enter their presence.

“Antarctica. Nearly five thousand meters. I like to read about it, but I’d never be crazy enough to try it.” The girl was terribly cheerful, which would be irritating if it weren’t so genuine.

“I, uh, won’t be climbing Vinson.”

The girl laughed, “Everest either?”

“Nope.” She joined in the laugh and it felt good.

“Heavy backpack?” The girl inspected her from the black leather jacket down to her Josef Seibel heeled, leather loafers, but was nice enough to keep her thoughts to herself as Cassidy was demoted another level.

“Nope.”

“Walks around Greenlake?”

“A bit tougher than that.” Slogging uphill through the mud and the moss, definitely a bit tougher than the three-mile, paved jogging path.

“Light hiking, but the best?”

“Yes, that sounds good.”

The girl reached out and unerringly grabbed a boot that looked just like all the others. She excitedly launched into a long description, but after Cassidy heard the word “waterproof,” she tuned out the rest. That would teach the stupid mud to mess with a veteran shopper.

Most of the other items fell to similar tactics. She became better at it as item after item filled her basket. On the second floor “light hiking” linked with “cold weather” had gotten her a lecture about skipping polar fleece and going with the traditional layering of silk socks under wool. Including “year round” had added long underwear of Merino wool. “All weather” had added waterproof yet breathable pants from some company named by aliens, Arc’Teryx. Or maybe they were a dinosaur. But the price was the highest, over two hundred dollars, so they must be the best.

She threw in a black PolarTec fleece jacket with no one’s help at all. But the waterproof jackets were impossible. Even asking for help didn’t clarify the mess. The selection was larger than Saks designer racks and apparently each jacket had a different feature that made it particularly wonderful. She finally walked away when she learned that they all stopped at the waist.

Cassidy wanted something longer and warmer. Thankfully she knew right where to get that. Michael Kors had a beautiful, knee-length, down-filled coat in this year’s line. He didn’t make it in black, but there was a brilliant red one that would look great. That would make it easier to tolerate the massive damage she was doing to her shopping budget with clothing she’d wear only twelve times in her life. Eleven, she’d already been to the January lighthouse.

The basket was getting heavy. This was nuts. There was over a thousand dollars in there. Of course her agent had just e-mailed her about the London Times picking up her column in their Travel section with a query about a wine-only column in the Sunday edition; she was going international. Cassidy would justify this splurge as a proper celebration.

Back on the ground floor, she passed close to a counter covered in a nest of electronics. She was nearly attacked by an overeager boy who looked so healthy he’d probably climbed Vinson before his fifteenth birthday. With his eyes closed. Backwards.

“I see you’re going out in the weather,” she followed his glance to her basket. On the top were the red fleece watchcap that she’d chosen because it would match the Kors coat and the heavy gloves that she’d reluctantly chosen over the nice pair of sheepskin ones. “All weather” and “waterproof” had combined for the win there.

“Yes, I am.”

“Going off the beaten path at all?”

The two hours she’d spent slogging through the muddy forest of Discovery Park answered that clearly for her.

At her nod, the boy nearly exploded with joy.

“You’ve just gotta have one of these!” He waved something at her too quickly to focus on.

“What is it?” As soon as he stopped waving it about she saw the price tag of three hundred dollars and prepared to walk away.

“GPSs.” At her blank expression, he launched ahead. “Global Positioning System. These toys tell you exactly where you are. See?” He punched a couple buttons and a pair of numbers appeared. Numbers a lot like the ones she’d been unable to decipher on the outside of her dad’s lighthouse envelopes.

“Then you can key in your destination, latitude, then longitude. We’re west so we’re minus.”

So that was what the numbers on the envelope were, latitude and longitude. She felt stupid for not figuring that out, not that there was any reason she should have. She’d never seen coordinates in decimal form before. This whole REI experience been an adventure like Hansel and Gretel, always searching behind herself to see just where she’d dropped all of those IQ points she’d had before she walked through the doors. But hey, now she knew where Mount Vinson was. Or was it Vinson Mountain? Massif? She looked behind her, but didn’t see anything on the floor.

He continued stabbing at the keys like a pro then turned it to her. “And there you go.”

The tiny screen connected a green dot to a red one by a thin wandering line of red.

“The nearest Starbucks coffee. That’s your route. How you get there.”

She inspected it more carefully and could see that the line followed the streets of a tiny map. He tapped it and it zoomed in. A bright arrow pointed toward the front door.

“Do you have one of those that would show,” she clamped down on her tongue for a moment, “parks and other such places?”

He waved it at her again. “This is it. Look. I’ve loaded in Washington State detail and the National Parks and the Blue chart. This is really cool. Look.” More button pushing and he turned it back to her.

It showed a map in tan and white with tiny numbers on the white.

At her blank look, he rambled on. “Blue chart. Water. The blue stuff. It has all the coastline info.”

“Like lighthouses?” It slipped out before she could stop it.

“You bet!”

She’d clearly been labeled as a tourist.

“Did you know we have one right here in Seattle city limits? Here it is over in Discovery Park. Shows the water depth.” He aimed a ragged fingernail—probably broken while wrestling a grizzly bear for food—at one set of numbers. “There’s the lighthouse and how often her light flashes. Then you just toggle it like this and, bang, there’s the park and most of the trails. The maps are pretty good even down at that level. Hit this button and you get the topo overlay so you can see which trails go up and which ones down. It’s just the best.”

That last did it for her.