The mountain came out over the Elbe train
The fog sat on the road the whole way up. We had spent the night dispersed-camped over in Gifford Pinchot forest country, on the Mount St. Helens side, close enough that we kept promising Big and Little we’d get to the crater in the morning. We didn’t. We ran out of morning. St. Helens stayed a place on the map we drove away from, and I’m still a little sore about it. You point the day at a mountain and then the day spends itself somewhere else.
The somewhere else was Elbe, which is about four buildings and a train. We rode the Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad out of the depot there, the line that runs between Elbe and Mineral, and it turned out we were going to end the whole day at Mineral anyway, so the train was just the slow version of where we were already headed.
The sky was still socked in when we pulled out. Then, maybe fifteen minutes on, it broke. Mount Rainier came out clean over the trees, the whole 14,410 feet of it, snow and all. It hides behind cloud more days than not, so a clear look is a thing you take when it’s handed to you. Big saw it first and didn’t say anything, just pointed, which is how you know it landed. Little wanted to know if it was still a volcano. It is.
We rode most of it in the open-air observation car, wind and diesel and the smell of cut grass coming through, which is the only way to ride a train if they’ll let you. Late, too late to do much with it, we figured out the seatbacks flip. If there are four of you and you want to look at each other instead of the back of a head, you throw the backrest over and the two benches face into a little booth. We built ours with about ten minutes of track left. Erika said we’d know for next time. She says that a lot, and she’s usually right.
Back in Elbe there’s a fruit stand by the road. We bought white peaches and yellow ones, and they were so ripe they’d gone past fruit into something closer to a water balloon. You bit in and it ran down your wrist to your elbow. Little ate hers over the gravel so the mess had somewhere to go. Big ate two and asked for a third.
Then Scaleburgers, a burger shack that has been sitting in Elbe doing one thing well for a long time. Little ordered the Lite. Erika got the Legal and did not explain the joke to anyone. The milkshakes were cold and the burgers tasted like someone had made them that minute, which after a drive and a train is most of what you want out of a place.
We drove the last stretch to Mineral Lake in the evening to post up for the Fourth. Out on the water a crew was setting the firework barge, and when they saw Big and Little watching they waved them over and walked them through it. How the shells sit. How the whole thing goes off now, over wifi, a phone talking to a barge in the middle of a lake. Big asked what happens if the signal drops. Little asked if she could push the button. The answer to both was no, kindly.
The lake is quiet now. It won’t stay that way.