Clark Miller dangled from a rope off the side of a three-hundred-foot cliff. He wasn’t in a climbing harness. He was in some sort of antique carpenter belt made out of hundred-year-old leather and canvas. The leather was severely cracked like an ancient catcher’s mitt that had never seen saddle soap. The carpenter belt was fastened to an old-fashioned hemp rope, so worn by use and age that, like frayed barbed wire, it might cut the hand of someone who held it tight. Neither the belt nor the rope was ever used for climbing.

Clark Miller was panting like a dog might after a long run to fetch a bone. He even imagined froth from roiling saliva at the corners of his mouth. He wanted to mop the beads of sweat off his brow but dared not relinquish his death grip on the rope.

Worse, he was just dangling there, not in spectacular danger, while his best friend in life lay on a horizontal ledge that jutted out from the cliff all of two feet. Willow Barker was jammed on that ledge facedown unmoving one hundred feet from the top of the cliff, two hundred from the bottom, and fifteen horizontal feet from Clark Miller. She had left the feeble security of the rope, lost her grip, and had fallen, miraculously catching herself on the ledge and a rotted stump of an old tree that once, long ago, had grown there. Clark could see she had one arm around the rotted tree stump, which probably had saved her life. She had a beaten old carpenter belt around her waist, but it was no longer tethered, as his was, to the rope—and that was Clark’s fault.

“Willow,” Clark bawled, panic muffling the sound.

He thought he heard a groan but didn’t know if it wasn’t just the wind. Now he spotted a growing stain darkening the rock wall just below Willow. She would bleed to death.

Clark needed to rappel just about eight feet down to match Willow’s vertical position along the granite wall. The rope was jerry-rigged neatly through one of the carpenter belt’s tool loops. A slight reconfiguration enabled the tethered carpenter belt to move up and down the rope (slowly up and swiftly down). Clark found he could control the speed of his downward rappelling by yanking the rope horizontal as it ran through the carpenter belt. Way below at the end of the rope, still dangling some one hundred feet above the rocks, the rope was balled up into multiple knots as a precaution should he lose his grip. But recalling this provided little reassurance.

Clark was still fifteen horizontal feet from Willow and now at about the same vertical position. Somehow Clark managed to move his feet against the rock wall, propelling himself and the rope toward Willow. But he couldn’t extend far enough to reach her. He would have to walk the rope in the opposite direction and then swing toward her in an arc to even have a chance of reaching her.

As he did so, the rope and even the carpenter belt harness seemed to creak like a branch might when bent to its snapping point. He now stumbled along the rock wall toward Willow, feeling like some sort of marionette in a morbid puppet show, small in size and lifeless, but most of all with absolutely no control. As he stumbled he managed a great leap out from the rock, enabling the marionette string and the puppet to arc toward Willow.

But not far enough. Clark could not reach her.

He tried again, and he came closer this time. He could smell Willow Barker; he was so close. He could smell the blood, and the recognition of this froze the sweat on his skin. Coldness numbed his whole body, as he dangled helpless, frozen with fear. Clark felt fear for his friend and wallowing self-pity for himself. He was now certain of his best friend’s death. It would play out, this puppet show that he enacted, in terrible tragedy.

Suddenly he wanted to be there on the two-foot cliff edge, untethered to any rope, bleeding to death instead of Willow. Willow didn’t deserve this, but Clark did. Clark deserved it. Yes sir. Hadn’t he done this before? Hadn’t he killed someone else before?

Bingo. That was it. Clark Miller didn’t deserve to live, but my-oh-my how Willow Barker did. She had a destiny, and Clark only a fate.

Clark sprang into action, not to avoid his fate but to allow Willow’s destiny.  Adrenaline kicked in. He suddenly moved across the rock wall like he was born climbing. He would try a third time to swing over to Willow’s position, and this time he imagined control of the marionette. As he launched into the arc, springing with the full force of his legs, he knew he would reach Willow.

But as he swung out and toward Willow, he saw her arm tear out the tree stump by its rotted roots. Her body rolled out and off the cliff edge. Willow fell toward the abyss and the ungiving granite maze of car-size boulders below, which had fallen over the millennia just as she was now.

Something snapped in Clark Miller’s mind. There was nothing left, nothing left at all. In that single moment of terror, and of enormous folly, he had lost everything that ever was left of his life.

“She didn’t die,” Clark Miller snorts more than says. He is slumped over in his office chair. A shine of perspiration glows across his forehead. “She didn’t die,” he repeats.

“Mr. Miller, are you all right?”

“What?”

“Clark, are you all right?”

Clark Miller looks up and sees a worried look on his office assistant’s face.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m OK, Heather. I’m fine.”

“You look awful,” Heather says. “Was it the telegram?”

“Yes. My grandmother died,” Clark says.

“Your grandmother?”

“Yes, my adopted grandmother,” Clark offers, understanding the confusion.

“I didn’t know you had an adopted grandmother.” And now there is something other than concern from his assistant.

“I didn’t remember until just now. I haven’t thought about it in quite some time.”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Miller. Is there anything I can do?”

“No thank you. What can anyone do?”

“You said she didn’t die when I came in?” She waits a moment for an explanation that Clark cannot not give.

“Wishful thinking. The telegram says otherwise.”

“Were you close?”

“No, no. I wasn’t.”

“What about the telegram? Will you need to send a reply?”

“Can you do that?”

“I’m not sure. We only do e-mail anymore. Didn’t even know telegrams were still sent.”

“If you knew Millcreek, you would understand the telegram,” Clark says and wonders at how easily that name came out. It almost seems to Clark like it should have been illegal for him to mention that name.

“Millcreek, sir?”

“Yes, the town where the telegram came from, the town where my grandmother lives…or lived.”

“I’ll give you a few minutes to collect your thoughts.” And with that, Heather, ever the professional, is out the door to move other immediate matters.

Clark Miller stares out the window and finds that New York City is still there. No one would ever mistake him for Donald Trump. But he feels the slow but steady improvements he has been able to make in his old, dilapidated neighborhood might in many ways be more important than anything Mr. Trump had accomplished. He is proud to have purchased and restored the building that now houses what he simply calls the Miller Company. The entire first three floors are a great improvement to the old orphanage they replaced, the one where he had come from.

The dream surprised him with its force. It was rather like being bludgeoned by a ball peen hammer. Clark Miller never had a waking dream before. Slowly, as his throbbing head regains some sense, he realizes why the dream hit with such force.

It wasn’t a dream.

It was a memory inspired by the telegram.

Being sixteen years of age is both exasperating and exhilarating in near equal measure. Peering over the edge of adolescence and being able to do what you want when you want for the first time is as intoxicating as the first taste of forbidden alcohol, and yet freedom seems impossibly far in the future. When the time comes, there is only false hesitation. The young hurl themselves forward as if shot out of a cannon, because neither patience, the bitterness of being unsuccessful, nor smothering responsibilities have been recognized or acknowledged much less explained to them by adoring parents. Yet youth will carry this blind exuberance forward to where it is needed so very badly, and to where it will be needed so very badly long after it has expired.

Clark Miller and Willow Barker made a pact long before they reached sixteen years of age. They would not enter into the girl and boy thing. They saw, even at the tender age of eleven, what the girl-boy thing could do to a friendship and they wanted no part of that. That would interfere with their adventures. When they were eleven, they made the pact in blood, and so it was; they were bound forever. Clark sliced his finger with the Swiss Army knife his grandparents gave him on the occasion of his eleventh birthday, and Willow, without hesitation, took the knife from Clark and did the same thing. They put their bloody fingers together, and swore never to become girlfriend and boyfriend. They also swore eternal friendship as equals. Willow insisted that Clark not treat her like a “girl,” meaning he was not to treat her as if she was frail or afraid, because she wasn’t. It was as simple as that. They agreed rather quickly that some girls were, but Willow had to argue her point for some time before Clark acknowledged that some boys were also. They celebrated their friendship as equal and fearless adventurers for whom no obstacle could stand in their way.

When they reached the age of sixteen, they found not only adventure in each other’s bravado but also a sort of retreat to a distinct and separate world that they had created for themselves. They played off each other’s daring, increasingly outdoing each other’s boasts. As sixteen-year-olds, the pair had already, in February, climbed up a frozen Chapman’s Falls, a thirty-foot vertical wall of ice, using boots, gloves, and an ice pick. Had they even looked, they wouldn’t have been able to find proper ice climbing gear anywhere near Millcreek or nearby Plainview.

They also took two pair of Broadmount wooden skis with bear-trap bindings, their manufacture dating to the 1930s in a place called Lake Placid, up to the top of Pike’s Peak, not the real one in Colorado, but the small one in Pennsylvania with the nickname. Clark found the ancient but still somehow elegant antique skis wasting away in the Millers’ attic.

They engaged a race to the bottom that started on the count of three. Though they had no idea at the time, this type of ski race was called a down-mountain race, which predated what would later evolve into downhill ski racing. A down-mountain race was much more interesting and more dangerous than downhill ski racing. The racers started at the top and had to finish at a designated point at the bottom. That was it. No turn gates or designated route, no groomed snow, no ski lifts, no ski resort, no ski trails. Nothing sugar coated. Just racers and the mountain.

On Pike’s Peak there were no ski trails. And, of course, neither had ever skied before. Willow and Clark barely got to the bottom intact. Clark looked as if he had been in some sort of wrestling match with a polar bear; such was the tattered nature of his clothing and the amount of snow that still hung from it in clumps. He suffered numerous falls and had bruises up and down his knees and hips. Willow looked no better, but she could give that broad smile of hers because she waited for Clark to finish. She could gloat.

They had also, under the pretense of learning to drive, used the Barker sedan on the nearby Plainview Speedway, an oval dirt track that had long ago given way to age and disinterest and had been replaced by a newer track at nearby Langford. They each took ten trips around the beaten and uneven track, awarding the honor of winning to whoever had the fastest single lap. Willow’s father never quite figured out why the alignment suddenly pulled the car sharply to the left. With Willow learning to drive, her father figured the question was better left unanswered. There would be many such bills to be paid associated with growing up, and so long as no one was injured, Willow’s dad would count himself lucky. Had he found out about the track, Willow and Clark would have paid. And oh, by the way, Clark won that event.

Then there was the tractor race across the O’Sullivan field that ended in a draw because they never really established a finish line.

Later there also was diving in the Oaskee gorge. Willow won that competition with a dive from a tree limb above the cliff that formed the gorge. It was the boldest, most creative stunt yet, and so Clark merely bowed to the gods of courage in appreciation. Like a queen, Willow playfully knighted the bowing Clark who kneeled before her. Though he later would make the dive several times, Clark acknowledged Willow as the winner and truly admired her courage and ability to take their adventures to the next level.

Clark estimated the top of the gorge to be about a forty-foot dive, and he made it after two other dives from lesser heights. Each time he was merely matching the dives that Willow made. Willow’s final dive was from fifteen feet above the top of the gorge. Clark would not have thought of diving out of the trees. So he had to tip his cap in deep admiration. Of course, Willow didn’t have to take her sweet time coming back up to the surface after the dive. She took so long that Clark dove in after her to try and find her. He was not exactly in a panic, because he thought she was playing with him, but he had to look just to be on the safe side. When he couldn’t find her anywhere under the water, a bit of panic did set in—only to be replaced with relief at the sound of laughter coming from the shoreline where Willow was taking it easy and having a good old time watching him look for her.

It was at this time though, when they were sixteen, that there was one too many dares, and the dares were taken up once too often. This was when the adventures stopped, forever.

Willow had topped Clark with the dive from the tree above the gorge. She was the reigning queen and, even though each of them would dive several times more from that very spot in equal displays of courage and youthful daring, it was Willow who reigned, because she had made the dare with the highest degree of difficulty.

Until Willow’s sixteenth birthday.

Clark systematically studied the geography of the area for miles around to determine exactly what the possibilities were of finding some stunt that might be more daring than the dive from the tree above the gorge. Meanwhile, Willow was exalting in her glory as the reigning queen of dares. She reminded Clark of her glory pretty much every day and pretty much every time she saw him, and every time it drew a smile on her face from ear to ear, and every time, after his initial praise of her creativity and daring, it made Clark feel less than equal.

“What’s a matter, big boy?” Willow would say in a high-pitched voice that might have suited Marilyn Monroe or Mae West. She would bend her knees and wiggle her behind a bit, and then a mock squeal would follow. “The King is dead. Long live the Queen.” As she walked away, off to class, the squeal would be heard again. She was good, this Willow Barker. She could fly from a tree at the top of a gorge and she could go to class and knock down straight As. She could also put a spur in a guy’s saddle that would turn him into Evel Knievel.

And then, she could draw.

Yes sir, she could draw. Her drawing, to a young Clark Miller, was in a different league than anything they shared between them. An A in art, which was not any kind of required course and not really even a curricular option but more an extracurricular activity, did not begin to describe Willow Barker’s talent. By the time she was almost sixteen, she had caused quite a stir. Plainview High had added a legitimate art class with a legitimate art teacher in response to her talent alone—this for the first time in Plainview High’s history. Willow, during her sophomore year, not only was a student; she helped teach the class.

Willow Barker drew the Oaskee Gorge.

This was after the diving competition they held there. When she first showed Clark the picture, he thought it was done as a self-congratulatory prize and to rub a little more salt in his gaping male-ego wound. But he saw her eyes when she handed him the drawing. There was a set to them, a focus that needed no words behind them. She wanted a reaction, an opinion. She wanted a mature assessment, something from a good friend.

Clark Miller looked at the drawing and nearly fell backward. They were at Five Forks, by the Laramee Pond, their favorite meeting place. It was the fall of their junior year, but not October yet. The dive had taken place in August.

The drawing, even to Clark’s rather unimaginative sensibility, was beautiful. But it was more than beautiful in how it captured the sharpness of the steep gorge walls and the bursting water spray of the falls. It was a memorial beyond anything a photograph might fetch. It was an event at a place and time that seemed to join the two of them. It was a binder.

Clark looked at his companion, his eyes narrowed and focused, in a place where words were difficult but feeling genuine and deep. Willow smiled back with understanding. Clark’s gaze returned to the drawing for closer inspection. This time he saw it, the tree up above the gorge, above the waterfall. This time he saw the space and branch that had supported Willow on her dive. This time he saw the feint tracing of a person in that space, perhaps preparing to dive. No one else who might look at the drawing would notice the faint tracing of a person in that tree. But Clark did.

“It’s you Clark,” Willow said. “It’s you and it’s me.”

“It’s the best thing I ever saw.” That was all Clark said. Maybe that was all that could be said. Maybe that was the best any critic could do. Willow could see in his eyes that he meant it.

Perhaps the drawing had affected him more than he would ever have admitted. Perhaps it was the dive of Willow’s from the tree. Clark couldn’t rightly say, but he knew he needed something big.

Something really big.

That’s all Clark had to find. Something bigger than anything they had ever done. Something that could never be topped. Something to stop Marilyn Monroe and Mae West forever. Something that would immortalize Clark Miller and Willow Barker, because that’s what Willow’s drawing had done.

There was a problem though. Willow had a date.

Plainview High School was having a sweet sixteen dance for the junior class, and it happened to be scheduled on Saturday night, which also happened to be Willow’s birthday. Now, while Willow and Clark had this pact among themselves about no girl-boy thing ever developing, the pact did not exactly extend to other kids, although, Clark thought, the pact was not specific on that point. So it seemed it was legitimate for Willow to accept an offer to attend the dance.

But, somehow, Clark never expected it would happen. He never expected Willow to actually go to a dance. He never really thought about asking anyone to the dance and he imagined Willow felt the same way. A dance seemed for sissy folk, for other normal kids that needed normal things, or for the parents who needed normal things for their kids. A dance was not an activity for the likes of Willow or Clark, who somehow seemed a cut above such things.

But when Willow accepted an invitation to attend the dance, things changed.

It was Willow that accepted an invitation to the dance.

That gave the notion of attending a dance, and even dating, legitimacy. And, in turn, it gave Clark the notion that Willow would not be his own personal tour guide through life forever. There was, for the first time, a sense of loss, a loss of innocence perhaps, even a sense of growing up, and a clear sense that things were about to change a lot.

So in the early fall of their junior year, Clark wanted to make a grand presentation to Willow of the greatest dare of all time. They would meet, as always, at Five Forks. This time Clark sat waiting triumphantly for Willow in his grandfather’s Chevy Impala, a big old clunker of a car that the Millers never used because it didn’t run. Clark had been given some leeway with the old Impala, and he had the freedom to use it almost as if it was his, provided he could restore it to good running condition. He couldn’t spend any money, just good old sweat equity, and if he could get the thing running, he would then have to keep it in good running condition. Clark had picked up a few mechanical skills from hanging out down to old Smith’s garage, just two blocks but most of the length of Main Street away from the Miller home. So, over the last year, working here and there at it, acquiring parts sometimes from wrecked cars at Smith’s, or sometimes hitching a ride in to Plainview where there was a huge junkyard, Clark managed a large restoration project.

His grandfather did not help at all, partly because Clark did not ask for his help, and partly, which Clark never understood, because his grandfather wanted the project to be Clark’s and Clark’s alone. But the stern warning, “Now son, this is your project, and it will succeed or not as you see fit,” echoed for some time in Clark’s mind, especially during the last several months when it seemed he would never get the old Chevy to run. His grandfather, Clark was aware, could see his frustration on many more than one occasion, and yet he never came over, and he never offered advice.

When Clark finally found a slight crack in the distributor cap and got a call from the junk yard up in Plainview that an old Impala had been towed in and he was welcome to the distributor cap if he would come up and take it out of the wrecked car, Clark was fairly trembling. After he had installed it, the big, old, good for nothing car, he thought for sure, would finally roar to life after this last of a multitude of fixes. And when it finally did slowly sputter and quiver to life, blowing an enormous smoke cloud out the exhaust, Clark had never felt prouder. It was exactly the effect that Clark’s grandfather wanted for the young man. It was exactly why he never lifted a hand to help or offer advice around the dinner table. It was Clark’s challenge, and it was Clark’s achievement. When the car stabilized after ignition and began almost to purr harmoniously, Clark stepped out of the car and jumped and raised his clenched fist to the air. Problem was there was no one there. His grandfather stood up from where he was mending several boards across the front porch. A smile was drawn across his face, and he winked knowingly at Clark.

But Clark didn’t see the wink and interpreted the smile as a frown, the more common of his grandfather’s normally invariant expressions. So his triumph was celebrated alone and, though the decision was not a conscious one, he would never invite his grandfather for a ride in his Chevy Impala, and he didn’t have to worry that his grandfather would ever ask for one.

But on Saturday he would ride out to Five Forks to meet Willow in his new Chevy on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday, and they would celebrate, as much his triumph as her birthday.

Clark got to Five Forks early because he wanted the Chevy Impala to be sitting there waiting for Willow. Willow would come by bike, as they always had. Clark wanted her to see the Impala and realize that it meant freedom. They would no longer be bound by the geometry of Millcreek and their farming parents, who had to raise their children up very early on in their lives to meet tight schedules necessary to make a passable living, and where the obligation to fulfill this role was inescapable.

But a car meant precious moments away from this.

Clark sat behind a shade tree. He suddenly heard some sort of yelping from down the road that led to town. It was Willow on her bike. She had seen the Chevy and realized that it was now, at long last, road worthy, and she was sprinting toward this magnificent accomplishment.

“You did it,” Willow hollered as she jumped off her bike in wonderment at the large piece of red metal that sat like some sort of lost and unapproachable dream. Willow gave Clark a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Happy birthday,” Clark said. “And for your birthday present, the gift of wheels.” Clark motioned with his hand and bowed toward the vehicle as if he were a magician who had made the car appear out of thin air, which, in some ways, was an accurate description.

“It’s beautiful, Clark. The best thing I’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t, of course. It was old and in desperate need of new paint, the seats were worn through, the fenders were banged up pretty bad, and the convertible top was frayed full of holes and unusable. But there was little rust, and some of the chrome still shone brilliantly in the beautiful Saturday morning sun. But most important, it ran. Clark ignited the thing, and it roared to life, still in need of a muffler.

“Next Saturday I’ll pick you up, and the next Saturday after that and every Saturday from now on.”

“It’s a deal,” Willow replied and jumped into the car without resorting to opening the door. Clark admired Willow for a moment in the passenger seat of his new car, the very first passenger and a special one at that. She was athletic and trim and moved with the ease of a gymnast. She had Irish brown eyes belying her German ancestry, which was not all that uncommon for it had been more than two centuries since the Irish and Germans had settled this part of the country after the war with Britain for independence. Her shoulder-length hair was brown but still sun streaked and sandy, left over from the summer sun, and her freckles still prominent,  waiting for the shadows of winter to hide again. She was pretty, for sure, but it was her boundless energy that was too compelling to ignore.

“Come on,” Willow implored. “Where’re we going?”

Clark jumped in smoothly as if he had been driving the car all his life. He put the car in gear and left a patch, some smoke, and a trail of dust behind them.

“Blue Sky,” he said. “That’s where we’re going. Blue Sky.”

Willow was smiling ear to ear. Her hair flowed behind her alive from the wind, both of the teenager’s spirits buoyed by the moment, a moment of passage, a moment of history making.

A moment of attainment.