Sally packed devilled eggs-something she usually hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts-also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the boys, a half bottle of Mumm's for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for the occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones-a wedding present-out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing.
"Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme," Kent would say to Sally a few years later, when he was in his teens and acing everything at school, so sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.
"Don't make fun of your father," Sally said mechanically.
"I'm not. It's just that most geologists seem so grubby."
The picnic was in honor of Alex's publishing his first solo paper, in Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured largely in his research, and because Sally and the children had never been there.
They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road-having turned off the highway and then off a decent unpaved country road-and found a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. A sign was painted on a board and needed retouching: "caution. deep-holes."
Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?
The entrance to the woods looked quite ordinary and unthreatening. Sally understood, of course, that these woods were on top of a high bluff, and she expected a daunting lookout somewhere. She did not expect the danger that had to be skirted almost immediately in front of them.
Deep chambers, really, some the size of a coffin, some much bigger than that, like rooms cut out of the rocks. Corridors zigzagging between them, and ferns and mosses growing out of the walls. Not enough greenery, however, to make any sort of cushion over the rubble below. The path went meandering between them, over hard earth and shelves of not quite level rock.
"Oooeee," came the cry of the boys, Kent and Peter, nine and six years old, running ahead.
"No tearing around in here," Alex called. "No stupid showing off, you hear me? You understand? Answer me."
They said O.K., and he proceeded, carrying the picnic basket and apparently believing that no further fatherly warning was necessary. Sally stumbled after him faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby, Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black crevasses, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.
The lookout did not appear until they had followed the dirt-and-rock path for what seemed to her like half a mile, and was probably a quarter mile. Then there was a brightening, an intrusion of sky, and her husband halted ahead. He gave a cry of arrival and display, and the boys hooted with true astonishment. Sally, emerging from the woods, found them lined up on an outcrop above the treetops-above several levels of treetops, as it turned out-with the summer fields spread far below in a shimmer of green and yellow.
As soon as she put Savanna down on her blanket, she began to cry.
"Hungry," Sally said.
Alex said, "I thought she got her lunch in the car."
"She did. But she's hungry again."
She got Savanna latched on to one side and with her free hand unfastened the picnic basket. This was not how Alex had envisioned things. But he gave a good-humored sigh and retrieved the champagne glasses from their wrappings in his pockets, placing them on their sides on a patch of grass.
