Читать книгу Magdalena Mountain - Robert Michael Pyle - Страница 10

The yellow Karmann Ghia left the road at forty-five. Its tires never scored the soft tissue of the tundra. It simply flew over the edge, into the mountain abyss.

A lookout marmot shrilled at the sight. A pair of pikas, young of the year, disappeared beneath their rockpile as the strange object passed overhead. Clearing the stony incline, the doomed auto glided over the rich mountain turf. Its shadow fell across a patch of alpine forget-me-nots, deepening their hue from sky to delft, then passed over a pink clump of moss campion. A black butterfly nectaring on the campion twitched at the momentary shading. Such a shift of light often signaled a coming storm, sending the alpine insects into hiding among the sod or stones. But this cloud passed quickly, so the sipping butterfly hunkered only briefly, then resumed its suck from the sweet-filled floret. A bigger black form took flight when the bright intruder entered its territory. The raven charged the big yellow bird to chase the interloper out of its airspace, succeeded, and resettled.

As the slope fell away toward the canyon below, more than keeping pace with the glide path of the Ghia, so fell the yellow missile. Sky whooshed aside to make room for it, otherwise there was no sound but for three shrieks on the alpine air: a nutcracker’s alarm scream; the whine of the engine, gunned by the foot glued to the Ghia’s floorboard; and a third, muffled by the glass, growing into a hopeless wail.

The thin alpine air parted before the plummeting car, smelling of green musk, of the great high lawn that is the Colorado mountain tundra. The perfumes of a hundred alpine wildflowers filled the grille of the Ghia. Soon the sweet mingled scents would be overcome by the rank fumes of oil and gasoline mixing with the terpenes of torn evergreens as the grille split against pine and stone. But the rider smelled nothing.

The air took on a chill as the projectile left the sunny upper reaches, crossed over timberline, and entered the shade of the upper forest. Never once had it touched down since takeoff, nor could it fly much farther. Gravity never ran out, but the earth rushed up at last to meet it. All the elements of the alpine earth—mineral soil, bare stone, grass, sedge, herb, shrub, and solid trunk of ancient limber pine—mingled with the yellow metal when the Ghia went to ground. Soft parts met hard. Granite tore rubber. Branches smashed glass and pierced the cloth upholstery. The engine block escaped its mounts and flew a little farther before shattering against a boulder and coming to rest as shiny shrapnel in the streambed far below. The blow that tore the motor free, ending its long scream, ripped the driver’s door from its hinges. That other shriek was loosed into the general clamor. Then nothing.

Almost nothing remained from this unplanned event to disturb the day up above, where it began. The nutcracker returned to its snag, the marmot to its post, the raven to its rock. The black butterfly nectared on, then flew. The forget-me-nots still flowered low against the ground. Not even the green verge of the road betrayed anything amiss. Only a black rubber streak in the roadway gave away the launching spot. Even the golden-mantled ground squirrel whose mad dash across the asphalt had started it all lay not dead on the shoulder, but basking on a boulder nearby in the late-summer sun, unabashed by her close call.

Of the steaming yellow mass among the trees and rocks a thousand feet below, no one knew a thing. Bumblebees investigating the yellow spatter on the slope found battered, barren steel instead of woolly sunflowers. The Karmann Ghia’s aberrant track would never be repeated. And for all the difference it made to the mountain, it might never have happened at all.