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gwyllionTitle: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue
Author: gwylliondream
Genre: AU
Pairing: Alma/Ennis, Ennis/Jack
Rating: NC-17
Words: 60K in 16 chapters
Warnings: Major character death (not Ennis or Jack), child abuse, religious persecution, homophobia, under-aged non-consensual kissing and groping, indecent exposure, attempted rape, unreliable narrator.
Summary: Ennis and Jack thought they had seen the last of each other when they parted ways on a windy day in Signal. They were wrong. Some people thought Alma would have remarried after her divorce. They were wrong, too.
A/N: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue was written for NaNoWriMo 2012.
“Calling Me Back to the Hills” was written by Earl Shaffer, poet and friend.
Thanks: My deepest thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morrobay1990 for answering my veiled pleas for a beta over on DCF. She provided incomparable support during the 30 days of NaNoWriMo, from brainstorming, to cheerleading, to prodding, and to writing a passion-filled scene in her own inimitable style, which I happily included. Thanks to my wonderful DCF co-mod lawgoddess for audiencing this fic and giving it a thorough beta job. Thanks to soulan both for traveling to Salida to research the terrain at the foothills of the Rockies and for vehemently disagreeing with me years ago when I insisted that Alma Beers-Del Mar would never have remarried after her divorce from Ennis. If not for that spirited argument, this fic never could have been.
Dedication: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue is dedicated to Andy, for whom the hills called.
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters. No disrespect intended. No profit desired, only muses.
Comments: Comments are welcome anytime, thanks so much for reading.
To the best place of all where I know I belong, where the water falls, tumbles, and spills
Alma woke when the door slammed shut. Her eyes blinked open and adjusted to the early morning light that drifted through the slats of the Venetian blinds. In the driveway, the engine of the family car roared to life, disturbing the quiet Sunday morning in Riverton.
Alma wished that her mother would have woken her before the family left for breakfast, but it was too much for her to hope.
Sunday morning breakfast at Miller’s Coffee Shop before church was a Beers family tradition that began when Alma was young. As the matriarch of the family, Ann Beers had always dressed her daughters in their Sunday best for the breakfast gathering . The Beers girls always matched, Ava’s dress a miniature version of Alma’s, despite their six year age difference. There at Miller’s, the girls would dip triangles of toast into the gooey yellow yolks under their mother’s watchful eye while their father perused the Sunday paper. A typical Riverton family, they had spent Sunday mornings this way for as long as any member of the Beers family could remember.
Alma pulled the covers off and sat up in bed, that mattress creaking as she moved. She shoved her feet into the worn slippers that she had dug out of a cardboard box the night before and wandered into the kitchen in search of coffee.
Alma supposed she was lucky that her parents let her spend the night in their home at all. Her mother expected her to set a good example for Ava, and they didn’t mask their disappointment that Alma had failed in her primary duty as an older sibling. Alma had fought for long years to fulfill that expectation in her mother’s eyes, but her efforts failed. Like snow melting in a sunny field, the intent was there, but it never managed to stick.
It didn’t take long for Alma to search through the familiar pantry to find what she was looking for. The door to the cupboard closet creaked when she opened it. The high-pitched whine seemed more insistent than it had in her childhood. Alma averted her eyes from the splintered wooden paddleboard that hung inside the door. Instead, she concentrated on unscrewing the lid from the jar of Sanka, dropping two teaspoons of the granules into her porcelain cup. She stood at the sink while the water ran from the tap. When the steam rose from the faucet, she tested the heat with a flick of her finger.
She glanced at the boxes that were stacked in the hallway, the clutter that her mother couldn’t wait to have out of her way, permitting its presence for only one night while Alma found new accommodations. Left jobless and homeless by an electrical short that set her apartment and workplace on fire, Alma had pushed dimes into the slot of a payphone outside the smoldering Riverton Laundromat until she found someone who would help her put a roof over her head. She packed her possessions as quickly as she could while her landlord looked on. She carted them to her parents’ house in the back of a taxi. The stacks of tattered cardboard boxes undoubtedly interfered with the image of her daughter that Ann had cultivated over the years. Instead of growing bright with promise, the image had tarnished and dulled like an old mirror with a cast of gray behind the glass.
Alma's shoulders tightened as if they could cage her beating heart that threatened to melt and seep out from between her ribs.
K.E. and Laurie would be there in less than an hour.
~~~
The Rocky Mountains divide the western part of America in two. From Antelope Wells on the Mexican border to Montana’s Glacier National Park, the peaks of the Rockies form a barrier that can only be crossed through an occasional low pass, a break in the unrelenting terrain. The peaks rise like the spine of a book that has been forgotten and left facedown to be picked up and discovered another day.
For millions of years, the mountains rose from beneath their shallow sea, forced by the laramide orogeny before they were sculpted out of stone and earth by glaciers that came and retreated with the ice age. The melting seepage parted high on the divide, where their flow made a choice for the Atlantic or the Pacific. The life-giving water gushed into strong rivers that fertilized the valleys with till. The enriched soil hosted a wealth of minerals and a feast of vegetation on which fur-bearing animals could feed.
Only thousands of years later, did the humans inhabit the valleys at the foot of the range.
First the Indians, then the explorers came, Coronado, MacKenzie, Lewis and Clark—setting out from the civilized east to discover a fortune in the west. They crossed the great continental divide and traveled the western side of the overturned book to the Pacific. Then, the modern day explorers came, those who used the mountains and peaks for recreation to escape their workday lives, their pain at the loss of dear ones, and the shadow of war. The passes are crossed more frequently nowadays, by those who seek to write their story upon the pages, and by those who venture beyond the barriers of ancient geography.
The range is narrower than it is long, going from a mere seventy miles wide in some areas, to more than three hundred miles where the range spreads open in broad plateaus rimmed with peaks on their horizon. So rises Colorado’s Front Range, the uplifted crust of the planet between New Mexico and Wyoming. The settlements made there in the age of discovery grew into cities. Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins provided job opportunities and homes for those who chose to dwell in the shadow of the mountains to the east of the book’s spine. The residents would write their tales and leave their footprints on the peaks that rose from flat plains.
Mt. Elbert, the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains, drew those who sought solitude and those who would challenge its flanks. As the population grew in Colorado, so did the numbers of modern day adventurers and the land managers who would keep them in check, Forest Rangers who sought to protect the forest from the interests that would decimate the land’s wealth by stealing her minerals, harvesting her trees, or destroying the landscape in an inferno caused by a single match.
The forest was wise unto herself. She had the power to regenerate and regrow, but with man’s influence, her resilience dwindled, and her confidence wilted.
~~~
Snow was still falling in huge wet flakes when Jeff arrived at Ennis’s backcountry cabin an hour after sunrise, along with Dana and Ken from Twin Lakes, and a half dozen RMSAR volunteers from surrounding forest divisions. Their vehicles had made it down the unpaved road to within a mile of the trailhead before the snow became too deep to negotiate. The men had to use snowshoes to travel the rest of the way. They walked single file, taking turns in the lead as they beat down a narrow trough in two feet of fresh snow on their way to the cabin. Ennis greeted the team members, donned his winter gear, and joined the line as they snaked around the back of his home and started moving up the trail.
Each member of the team carried their own personal gear, food, and extra clothing, in addition to pieces of equipment for the rescue. The extra gear, including rope and a rescue toboggan, seemed much heavier as the team began to ascend in earnest. Their progress was slow in the poor visibility, and as they gained elevation and reached the open expanse of the upper mountain where trees could not grow because of the harsh conditions, a sense of wariness about triggering avalanches washed over the team. Although each man performed his task as if the victim were still alive, no one really believed Davis had survived the night.
Eventually, Ennis rotated to the lead position in the line. He gazed through his fogged goggles. There were no colors visible, except the incessant white of the surrounding landscape. He planted his right snowshoe and sunk into the deep untracked snow as he brought his left foot up, sending loose powder flying into the air. Stepping with his left foot, he brought his right foot into the air, before plunging into the snow again. He continued along in this manner, one step at a time, until he was exhausted and had to step aside and relinquish the lead spot.
Ennis retreated to the side of the trail, gasping for breath, and Dana who trudged behind him, took the lead. When all the men had passed Ennis, he joined the end of the line again. They traveled this way for hours, the most difficult lead position rotating through the men.
“How ya doin’ there, Ennis?” asked Jeff when they traded off, his strawberry blonde hair escaping his hat’s hem, the only way Ennis could identify Jeff as the rescuer.
“Not too bad,” Ennis replied.
“Looks like the weather might break soon and we’ll get some visibility,” said Jeff.
“Not a moment too soon,” Ennis said, sensing the white sky lightening through his goggles.
“What do ya think about you and me handin’ off the gear to the others so we can strike out faster?” Jeff asked.
“I’m up for it, if you are,” Ennis replied.
“Ok bud, we’ll see what Mother Nature has in mind,” Jeff said as he retreated to the back of the line.
Ennis respected Jeff’s no-nonsense attitude. He was good at prioritizing what needed to be done, taking care of the problem and worrying about whose toes he stepped on later. For this reason alone, he was one of Ennis’s few friends. Jeff and his wife were among the handful of people who made an effort to visit Ennis when he was stationed in the backcountry. What do ya expect, Del Mar? Gonna have a goddamn pot luck with a house full a company when yer livin out in the middle a nowhere yer whole life? Not likely.
It was no secret that Jeff had a deep respect for Ennis and his desire for solitude. Ennis had made it clear that if there was one man to staff a remote firetower or live in an outpost miles from the nearest road, it was him. Over the years, Ennis had proven that he was intelligent enough to make the right decisions, and he was level headed enough not to mind living like a hermit for most of the year.
Jeff was used to dealing with employees who burned out after a short stint in the field. He’d have to reassign them to a position at the main headquarters, where they could interact with the public on most days.
An employee like Ennis only came around once in a career. Jeff assumed that Ennis’s divorce must have hit him hard.
~~~
Author: gwylliondream
Genre: AU
Pairing: Alma/Ennis, Ennis/Jack
Rating: NC-17
Words: 60K in 16 chapters
Warnings: Major character death (not Ennis or Jack), child abuse, religious persecution, homophobia, under-aged non-consensual kissing and groping, indecent exposure, attempted rape, unreliable narrator.
Summary: Ennis and Jack thought they had seen the last of each other when they parted ways on a windy day in Signal. They were wrong. Some people thought Alma would have remarried after her divorce. They were wrong, too.
A/N: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue was written for NaNoWriMo 2012.
“Calling Me Back to the Hills” was written by Earl Shaffer, poet and friend.
Thanks: My deepest thanks to
morrobay1990 for answering my veiled pleas for a beta over on DCF. She provided incomparable support during the 30 days of NaNoWriMo, from brainstorming, to cheerleading, to prodding, and to writing a passion-filled scene in her own inimitable style, which I happily included. Thanks to my wonderful DCF co-mod lawgoddess for audiencing this fic and giving it a thorough beta job. Thanks to soulan both for traveling to Salida to research the terrain at the foothills of the Rockies and for vehemently disagreeing with me years ago when I insisted that Alma Beers-Del Mar would never have remarried after her divorce from Ennis. If not for that spirited argument, this fic never could have been.Dedication: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue is dedicated to Andy, for whom the hills called.
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters. No disrespect intended. No profit desired, only muses.
Comments: Comments are welcome anytime, thanks so much for reading.
To the best place of all where I know I belong, where the water falls, tumbles, and spills
Alma woke when the door slammed shut. Her eyes blinked open and adjusted to the early morning light that drifted through the slats of the Venetian blinds. In the driveway, the engine of the family car roared to life, disturbing the quiet Sunday morning in Riverton.
Alma wished that her mother would have woken her before the family left for breakfast, but it was too much for her to hope.
Sunday morning breakfast at Miller’s Coffee Shop before church was a Beers family tradition that began when Alma was young. As the matriarch of the family, Ann Beers had always dressed her daughters in their Sunday best for the breakfast gathering . The Beers girls always matched, Ava’s dress a miniature version of Alma’s, despite their six year age difference. There at Miller’s, the girls would dip triangles of toast into the gooey yellow yolks under their mother’s watchful eye while their father perused the Sunday paper. A typical Riverton family, they had spent Sunday mornings this way for as long as any member of the Beers family could remember.
Alma pulled the covers off and sat up in bed, that mattress creaking as she moved. She shoved her feet into the worn slippers that she had dug out of a cardboard box the night before and wandered into the kitchen in search of coffee.
Alma supposed she was lucky that her parents let her spend the night in their home at all. Her mother expected her to set a good example for Ava, and they didn’t mask their disappointment that Alma had failed in her primary duty as an older sibling. Alma had fought for long years to fulfill that expectation in her mother’s eyes, but her efforts failed. Like snow melting in a sunny field, the intent was there, but it never managed to stick.
It didn’t take long for Alma to search through the familiar pantry to find what she was looking for. The door to the cupboard closet creaked when she opened it. The high-pitched whine seemed more insistent than it had in her childhood. Alma averted her eyes from the splintered wooden paddleboard that hung inside the door. Instead, she concentrated on unscrewing the lid from the jar of Sanka, dropping two teaspoons of the granules into her porcelain cup. She stood at the sink while the water ran from the tap. When the steam rose from the faucet, she tested the heat with a flick of her finger.
She glanced at the boxes that were stacked in the hallway, the clutter that her mother couldn’t wait to have out of her way, permitting its presence for only one night while Alma found new accommodations. Left jobless and homeless by an electrical short that set her apartment and workplace on fire, Alma had pushed dimes into the slot of a payphone outside the smoldering Riverton Laundromat until she found someone who would help her put a roof over her head. She packed her possessions as quickly as she could while her landlord looked on. She carted them to her parents’ house in the back of a taxi. The stacks of tattered cardboard boxes undoubtedly interfered with the image of her daughter that Ann had cultivated over the years. Instead of growing bright with promise, the image had tarnished and dulled like an old mirror with a cast of gray behind the glass.
Alma's shoulders tightened as if they could cage her beating heart that threatened to melt and seep out from between her ribs.
K.E. and Laurie would be there in less than an hour.
The Rocky Mountains divide the western part of America in two. From Antelope Wells on the Mexican border to Montana’s Glacier National Park, the peaks of the Rockies form a barrier that can only be crossed through an occasional low pass, a break in the unrelenting terrain. The peaks rise like the spine of a book that has been forgotten and left facedown to be picked up and discovered another day.
For millions of years, the mountains rose from beneath their shallow sea, forced by the laramide orogeny before they were sculpted out of stone and earth by glaciers that came and retreated with the ice age. The melting seepage parted high on the divide, where their flow made a choice for the Atlantic or the Pacific. The life-giving water gushed into strong rivers that fertilized the valleys with till. The enriched soil hosted a wealth of minerals and a feast of vegetation on which fur-bearing animals could feed.
Only thousands of years later, did the humans inhabit the valleys at the foot of the range.
First the Indians, then the explorers came, Coronado, MacKenzie, Lewis and Clark—setting out from the civilized east to discover a fortune in the west. They crossed the great continental divide and traveled the western side of the overturned book to the Pacific. Then, the modern day explorers came, those who used the mountains and peaks for recreation to escape their workday lives, their pain at the loss of dear ones, and the shadow of war. The passes are crossed more frequently nowadays, by those who seek to write their story upon the pages, and by those who venture beyond the barriers of ancient geography.
The range is narrower than it is long, going from a mere seventy miles wide in some areas, to more than three hundred miles where the range spreads open in broad plateaus rimmed with peaks on their horizon. So rises Colorado’s Front Range, the uplifted crust of the planet between New Mexico and Wyoming. The settlements made there in the age of discovery grew into cities. Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins provided job opportunities and homes for those who chose to dwell in the shadow of the mountains to the east of the book’s spine. The residents would write their tales and leave their footprints on the peaks that rose from flat plains.
Mt. Elbert, the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains, drew those who sought solitude and those who would challenge its flanks. As the population grew in Colorado, so did the numbers of modern day adventurers and the land managers who would keep them in check, Forest Rangers who sought to protect the forest from the interests that would decimate the land’s wealth by stealing her minerals, harvesting her trees, or destroying the landscape in an inferno caused by a single match.
The forest was wise unto herself. She had the power to regenerate and regrow, but with man’s influence, her resilience dwindled, and her confidence wilted.
Snow was still falling in huge wet flakes when Jeff arrived at Ennis’s backcountry cabin an hour after sunrise, along with Dana and Ken from Twin Lakes, and a half dozen RMSAR volunteers from surrounding forest divisions. Their vehicles had made it down the unpaved road to within a mile of the trailhead before the snow became too deep to negotiate. The men had to use snowshoes to travel the rest of the way. They walked single file, taking turns in the lead as they beat down a narrow trough in two feet of fresh snow on their way to the cabin. Ennis greeted the team members, donned his winter gear, and joined the line as they snaked around the back of his home and started moving up the trail.
Each member of the team carried their own personal gear, food, and extra clothing, in addition to pieces of equipment for the rescue. The extra gear, including rope and a rescue toboggan, seemed much heavier as the team began to ascend in earnest. Their progress was slow in the poor visibility, and as they gained elevation and reached the open expanse of the upper mountain where trees could not grow because of the harsh conditions, a sense of wariness about triggering avalanches washed over the team. Although each man performed his task as if the victim were still alive, no one really believed Davis had survived the night.
Eventually, Ennis rotated to the lead position in the line. He gazed through his fogged goggles. There were no colors visible, except the incessant white of the surrounding landscape. He planted his right snowshoe and sunk into the deep untracked snow as he brought his left foot up, sending loose powder flying into the air. Stepping with his left foot, he brought his right foot into the air, before plunging into the snow again. He continued along in this manner, one step at a time, until he was exhausted and had to step aside and relinquish the lead spot.
Ennis retreated to the side of the trail, gasping for breath, and Dana who trudged behind him, took the lead. When all the men had passed Ennis, he joined the end of the line again. They traveled this way for hours, the most difficult lead position rotating through the men.
“How ya doin’ there, Ennis?” asked Jeff when they traded off, his strawberry blonde hair escaping his hat’s hem, the only way Ennis could identify Jeff as the rescuer.
“Not too bad,” Ennis replied.
“Looks like the weather might break soon and we’ll get some visibility,” said Jeff.
“Not a moment too soon,” Ennis said, sensing the white sky lightening through his goggles.
“What do ya think about you and me handin’ off the gear to the others so we can strike out faster?” Jeff asked.
“I’m up for it, if you are,” Ennis replied.
“Ok bud, we’ll see what Mother Nature has in mind,” Jeff said as he retreated to the back of the line.
Ennis respected Jeff’s no-nonsense attitude. He was good at prioritizing what needed to be done, taking care of the problem and worrying about whose toes he stepped on later. For this reason alone, he was one of Ennis’s few friends. Jeff and his wife were among the handful of people who made an effort to visit Ennis when he was stationed in the backcountry. What do ya expect, Del Mar? Gonna have a goddamn pot luck with a house full a company when yer livin out in the middle a nowhere yer whole life? Not likely.
It was no secret that Jeff had a deep respect for Ennis and his desire for solitude. Ennis had made it clear that if there was one man to staff a remote firetower or live in an outpost miles from the nearest road, it was him. Over the years, Ennis had proven that he was intelligent enough to make the right decisions, and he was level headed enough not to mind living like a hermit for most of the year.
Jeff was used to dealing with employees who burned out after a short stint in the field. He’d have to reassign them to a position at the main headquarters, where they could interact with the public on most days.
An employee like Ennis only came around once in a career. Jeff assumed that Ennis’s divorce must have hit him hard.
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Great Background
Date: 2013-01-14 03:43 am (UTC)Re: Great Background
Date: 2013-01-14 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 08:52 am (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 10:37 am (UTC)I'm intrigued by the reference to K.E. -- it makes me wonder if the part about Alma takes place before she actually meets Ennis.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-14 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 12:34 pm (UTC)Paula
no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 03:07 pm (UTC)I'm glad Ennis has a friend.
Thanks for sharing!
no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 06:10 pm (UTC)Christina
no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 07:40 pm (UTC)That´s so brilliant!
Love this story. But I have a strong dislike for Mrs. Beers already. Seems like life really sucks for Alma. :(
Cheers, Clara
no subject
Date: 2013-01-16 02:36 am (UTC)I haven't seen you in an age! I hope everything is going wonderfully for you. It's so good to see you here. Thanks so much for reading! Don't be a stranger!
no subject
Date: 2013-01-18 10:24 am (UTC)Thank you
Lorna
no subject
Date: 2013-01-19 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-18 11:19 pm (UTC)This process of a mountain rescue is very interesting as well, as is the history of the place. You know how much I love it when environment is part of the story! :D
Looking forward to Chapter 3!
no subject
Date: 2013-01-19 02:37 am (UTC)Glad you like the rescue. It is based on a RL rescue that I am very familiar with.
Thanks so much for reading!
no subject
Date: 2013-01-20 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-20 07:16 pm (UTC)