Where Dreams Are Born

JANUARY 1-3

He sputtered and spat as Angelo pointed the boat’s bow back into the wind.

Russell retrieved the sheet and hauled it back in, and leery of Angelo, passed it several times around the winch as he did so. Russell grabbed the winch handle and ratcheted in the last few feet of line.

”She’s bigger than Dad’s Julia.”

“Duh! That jib, the sail that’s so much smarter than you, has more area than both of hers.”

True. He’d bought a big boat. But she flew so sweet that he knew he’d made the right choice. And only a nut would try crossing an ocean in a twenty-eight footer. He’d looked at a sixty-five footer, but it was more boat than he wanted to wrestle with. That really would need two people and heaven knows you couldn’t count on two.

Melanie had been some serious kind of pissed. And that was before he’d decided to stay in Seattle past a few days to visit Angelo. Now she wasn’t even speaking to him; at least he didn’t think she was. He’d dropped his phone overboard and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.

Russell looked back at the lighthouse.

“You know they wanted to automate her in 1979. The lighthouse keeper begged them to let him keep running it, at least until her hundredth birthday. On her centenary in 1981, the keeper climbed up to the outside of the light and sprayed a bottle of champagne over her. Legend has it he also danced a hornpipe up there.”

“A good choice for the January lighthouse.” Angelo pointed ahead. “Where are we going?”

Russell ducked low to peek under the sail. The western shore of the Sound was a half-dozen miles off. Some rain was moving in, but they were dressed for that. It was too perfect a day to turn back for the marina yet. He waved ahead.

“Thatta way. The isle of Tortuga.”

“Aye, Mon Capitaine.” They both laughed. Nothing like a good pirate movie quote when you were off sailing. The crazed French accent made as much sense from his short, Italian friend as it had from a tall, English Basil Rathbone.

Russell let the main out a bit to get better air flow across the upper third of the sail and then headed forward to inspect the boat under way. The tail end of the jib halyard had slipped free and was snaked all over the deck. He checked aloft. The halyard ran clean up to the top of the mast, over a pulley at the top and down to the top of the jib sail. Damn that was a tall mast. Sixty-five feet from water to masthead, sixty from where he stood on the cabin roof. He looped the line into a neat hank and hung it back over the cleat. The lines would have to be routed back to the cockpit so that he could single-hand her in rougher weather. That meant longer lines. He glanced aloft again.

“Well, I’m gonna have to climb you someday. Just like a six-story walkup back in Manhattan, so I should be okay.” He didn’t feel so certain as he watched it whipping back and forth across the sky each time she leapt over the next wave.

He made an inventory as he walked forward. New hatches, these were old and leaking despite their layers of duct tape. Most of the rope rigging would have to go. Some of the wire too.

His heel found another of the squishy spots in the decking. He’d have to rip off the bubbled fiberglass covering from the whole deck and deal with any rot under there. And the bowsprit definitely needed safety lines—the sprit stuck six feet over the emptiness of heaving waves. That would take some thinking.

A thirty-five pound anchor rested in the split and worn mahogany of a deck chock. The Julia’s anchor weighed fifteen. When he’d unearthed the Lady’s sixty-pound storm anchor under the forward bunk with another twenty-five pounds of chain, he felt a little humbled.

Leaning against the taut jib sail for support, he edged out onto the slender bowsprit. He grabbed hold of the wire forestay that rose from the tip of the sprit and soared to the top of the mainmast—fine for Puget Sound, not up for an ocean crossing. He added, “make it a double stay,” to his mental list.

Then he got his face into the air ahead of the sail. The wind roared in his ears. The bow sliced the waves below his feet laying twin white curls of water to either side. The air was so fresh and so clean it was impossible that it was the same stuff that he’d breathed every day in New York. Here it was in his face, in his hair—in his soul.

It was the most alive he’d ever felt and he never wanted it to end.

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 sticky mud to mess with a veteran shopper.