Free Long Way Gone by Charles Martin Page A

sounded more like me than her. Then two more girls just like her. Several of those songs did really well.”
    The trajectory of Daley’s career had turned sharply downward about this time, so I kept digging. “What happened to the last album?”
    She leaned her head back against the headboard. “The industry changed. I was sick for about a year. Fighting an infection in my throat mixed with a weariness I just couldn’t shake. I’d had some injections in my vocal cords to help me meet my obligations. That didn’t help. All I wanted to do was sleep. Felt like my bones were tired. It was all I could do to open my mouth, but the notes that came out were lifeless.”
    For so long I’d wanted to know what had happened after I left Nashville. Now I did. For twenty years she’d walked the earth thinking Sam was the benevolent uncle, not holding a grudge, believing she’d simply been the talent who couldn’t make it in records. Sam had been the good guy who felt guilty for “mistakenly” shooting me. It’s why he brushed the whole thing under the rug. Never pressed charges for a crime he’d claimed was committed. Further, he’d protected Daley and her career—or so she believed.
    When she looked in her rearview mirror, she saw a very different history from the one I’d lived. In her mind, I’d rejected and abandoned her. Cut and run. Sam had stuck around to patch up the pieces.
    It was the one possible scenario that had never occurred to me.
    She smiled as a tear rolled out the corner of her eye and then along the line of her nose. She clutched her legs tighter to her chest. “I used to look for you in the crowds.”
    I opened the window, pulled the curtain, and laid an extra blanket across her feet. “Up here the mountains sing a sweet song. It’ll rock you to sleep.”
    She was asleep before I shut the door.
    I added wood to the fire and then grabbed a towel. Then I walked up to the creek, stripped under the moonlight, waded in up to my ears, and soaked until the frigid cold felt warm.
    Given snow runoff, the water temperature in the creeks and streams in and around Buena Vista remains slightly below thirty-two degrees in winter. Add to that the flow of the water, which brings more of that cold across your skin at a faster rate, and it’s like packing a body in dry ice. Up here, on the back side of Mt. Antero and Mt. Princeton, where Boulder Mountain, Mt. Mamma, Grizzly Mountain, Cyclone Mountain, and Mt. White all run together, an odd phenomenon occurred. A deep, high-walled bowl developed—what my father affectionately called God’s Shaving Basin.
    Regardless of the August heat, that bowl held snow year-round and has for as long as anyone can remember. Chances are good there’s snow in there from fifty years ago. Whatever the case, the snowmelt from God’s Basin feeds into Baldwin Lake and Pomeroy Lake. To get there, it runs through a natural funnel in the rock, creating a waterfall of about ten feet and landing in a second basin just above our cabin. Dad named that one God’s Cereal Bowl. I guess he was hungry when he named it. The creek spills out there in a showering spray that’s tough to stand under, given the pressure and the cold. It feels like needles piercing your skin. The Cereal Bowl is about the size of an average swimming pool and filled with delicious six-inch trout that dart around the rocks and to my knowledge are found nowhere else in the world. The freezing cold water overflows its edges and then begins its roller-coaster descent into the valley, where it eventually bleeds into the Arkansas River.
    The value for me was that God’s Basin created a consistent flow of water that was technically colder than ice and just a hundred feet out my back door, no matter how hot the air happened to be in summer.
    The first thirty to sixty seconds were the most painful. After that, I never really felt much. Truth is, after five or six minutes, my mind started telling me that I was warm.

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