Trucks start to stack up behind me, and I search frantically for a place to pull over. A pale sliver of a turnout appears, on the edge of the cliff above the river. I glance at the line of cars behind me. I jerk the wheel, and my car drops off the road, juddering on the dirt. My hands are sticky with sweat. My heart pulses.
I stop the car, yank up the parking brake. I flinch as I envision the brake snapping, the inevitable slide to the river below. Even on flat ground, I picture the land giving way. And I race headlong into the river. I know about the Klamath River from Episode 15: a muddy brown color; Episode 43: so strong that when people drown, their bodies are swept all the way to the ocean. My body will wash up along the shore, hundreds of miles away from here.
I wait for my heart to stop racing, give up and check the parking brake again.
I stick one white, chalky Dramamine between my teeth. In Episode 13, you said you took two Dramamine a day just to get to and from high school. But still you got dizzy; you still felt sick. Eventually, you said, I realized it wasn’t worth leaving the ranch.
Fountain Creek Guest Ranch, the place you grew up. They offer fishing, horseback riding, breathtaking vistas, but most of all, they offer isolation. You grew up in a place where no one else lived.
Episode 18: I could hear myself think, which wasn’t always a good thing.
Episode 34: I will never not know what it’s like to enjoy my own company.
Your life was idyllic, until a local girl—a girl just like you—disappeared.
Episode 1: When bad things happen in a small town—I don’t mean to say it’s worse. I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s experience. But there were twenty-three kids in my entire school. And then there were twenty-two.
Nothing truly bad has ever happened to me, and I envy you this, a clear reason: my life changed when, things fell apart when. I break a sweat and think it must be my fault.
You became fascinated, first by her disappearance, and then by the disappearances of others: local, national, global. You researched, you became a part of the true-crime community and then you started your own podcast. You wanted to make a difference. You wanted to save someone. You wanted to save everyone.
Episode 14: When I think someone somewhere might hear this . . . when I think anyone anywhere can access it . . . Yes, I don’t have the audience of Dateline or even My Favorite Murder, but the thing about a podcast is, anyone anywhere can listen. And maybe you will be the one to find someone who is missing. Maybe you hold the key to the evidence that will solve a murder. Maybe I can be the reason someone is saved.
You broadcast from your house on your parents’ land: a yellow house with a red roof drawn in lines so idealized, it could be a Disneyland attraction.
I found the ranch website online. It bragged that it was a “family-run business.” I saw your picture, you for the first time, and you looked exactly like I thought you would. You looked like me.
Below me the Klamath River is fast and brown. Above me the mountains are piled with trees. From Episode 1, I know that they are firs, pines, oaks, maples, madrones, spruce and manzanitas. I recognize this world from your pictures, but I am not prepared for the sheer majesty of it, the car-commercial, Reese Witherspoon–in-Wild, Instagram-is-not-enough expanse. I’ve never been anywhere like this. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t even know it existed.
I think, oddly, how excited you would be, if you were here with me, diving into your own disappearance, solving your own mystery. I take a deep breath, and I plug in my phone and press play. Your voice fills my car, gravelly but discreet, breathing mystery.
I release the parking brake, start the engine and pull back onto the road. I pass a strip of highway dedicated to Dear Mad’m, and I remember you told me her story (Episode 19). Dear Mad’m was an eighty-year-old woman who moved to a primitive cabin on the Klamath in the nineteen fifties to garden, hide from cougars and write a book. She decided her life wasn’t over, but to do that, she had to leave behind the world that told her it was. She had to come here.
I am sailing, inspired, when the road curves and I don’t slow fast enough and the car slides and my stomach lurches. And suddenly I’m absolutely sure I am wrong about everything.
You’re not missing; you just logged off. I will arrive at your yellow house and find you there, and I will say, Hey, I was just in the area, longtime listener. And you will stumble backward, afraid. And when your next episode goes out you will say:
Episode 85:
This morning my psycho stalker showed up at my house, as if she was in the neighborhood. I think she wants to kill me. If something happens to me, her name is Sera Fleece.
She is your typical loser/burnout. You know the type. She thought that if she hit certain markers, made the right achievements, her life would pedal itself, would speed off so she could just relax, satisfied, achieved. But instead it kept asking her to drive it; it kept sputtering, breaking down, falling apart. She dropped out of college when she got married. Then she was pregnant; then she wasn’t. Her husband left. And she had to start over again. So she got a job but it didn’t pay enough. She found another guy but he didn’t love her enough. So she got another job that paid less, an apartment that charged more. She found a guy who loved her less, and another one who loved her even less after that. Every year was less, so she cared less and less.
And then she stopped caring completely. And then she came looking for me.
My hands are shaking as I pull into another turnout. It’s like you can hear my thoughts, wherever you are. It’s like you are watching me. I see vultures circling up ahead, in the space between two mountains. And I wonder if they are here for you or me. I wonder how you would tell my story, if I disappeared.
* * *
—
I have gone too far. I missed the turnoff for the ranch, somewhere between the spins and the trees. I have the mile marker (63), but the numbers don’t match, and now my phone screen is a wheel, circling around a lost signal.
You warned me about the phone service. Per Episode 7: There is no cell phone service, none, from Eureka to Yreka except for one huge turnout above the Klamath, just south of Happy Camp, where one network (Verizon) gets service some of the time. On any given day there is at least one car parked out there on the edge of the cliff, with the sky overhead, and the signal invisible, somewhere above, so the seeker holds their phone up to the sky.
I was prepared. I took screenshots of the directions on Google Maps. I wrote down the mile marker number, but I still missed your parents’ ranch. I know this when I reach Happy Camp. There are low buildings scattered inside a wide river basin, a self-pump gas station, a bear with a dial that tells me there’s always a chance of a fire. A sign reads Welcome to Happy Camp: Home of Outdoor Family Recreation above a picture of a silver steelhead the size of a shark.
I pull into a deserted parking lot and debate where I should go from here. I could turn around, focus harder, seek out the mile markers as the road twirls, or I could ask for directions.