High Country
Chapter One
Would you like baked potato or pommes frites with that?"
Anna asked politely.
"Can't I get French fries?"
"You bet." Anna wrote: "NY strip w/PF-well done," on
the pad.
As the mom and dad at table twenty-nine coaxed suitable orders
from a five- and a nine-year-old with hearts set on pizza, Anna
let her eyes drift up to the two-story windows enclosing the end
of the dining room. Beyond their comforting reflections of safety
and warmth stood granite boulders the size of houses. They in
turn were dwarfed by ponderosa pines with trunks eight, ten,
twelve feet in diameter and these made toylike by the sheer and
towering cliff that served as a backdrop. The bones of Sierra
Nevada, glistening with half-melted ice, held Yosemite Valley in
the rockbound embrace of a ruined Shangri-la, a place where
only the youth of the mountains was immortal and people grew
old at an alarming rate. On a misty December afternoon the evergreens
showed black against the streaked gray of rock: forbidding,
dangerous, and, to Anna, utterly seductive. It was as if, should she
leave the warm gold and russet of the grand Ahwahnee H ... read full excerpt from High Country ebook
