MAN ON A LEDGE
A tale of desperation and redemption, plays out high above the California desert, in Lori Lansens’ The Mountain Story. Books,
The Mountain Story is an open letter from a father to his son as he heads off to college — and it’s life-changing as the hero of the saga, Wolf Truly, recounts a harrowing tale of despair and desperation, redemption and renewal in the guise of a survival story. It’s gruesomely epic, recounting in detail the odds its protagonists overcome during five days lost on a mountain ledge high above Palm Springs.
For most of us, thoughts of the glamorous California desert resort evoke images of palm trees, pools and Beverly Hills princesses burnishing their tans. In contrast, author Lori Lansens presents us with a very down-market version of the fabled hometown of Sinatra, Bob Hope and countless other Tinseltown stars.
When Wolf Truly and his deadbeat dad Frankie arrive in Palm Springs from Michigan, they move in with Frankie’s sister at a turgid trailer park named Tin Town. Kriket Truly and her sprawling brood of kids, all apparently sired by different men, add fresh lustre to the hackneyed pejorative “trailer park trash.” In one particularly appalling moment, Wolf has his face rubbed in the feces of the infant son of his bully boy cousin, Yago, as his punishment for refusing to clean up the toddler’s mess. But the misery of this scene contrasts mercifully and magically with the backdrop where most of the action of this novel transpires: the awesome grandeur of Mount San Jacinto where, as Lansens notes, you move from the climate of Mexico to that of Alaska as you ascend to its peak.
Wolf Truly’s initial reason for taking the tramway up Mount San Jacinto was to find a spot to jump to his death on his18th birthday. His suicide mission is prompted by the despair he felt at a freakish accident that left his best friend, Byrd, comatose. Though not literally his fault, Wolf felt responsible because he made the toxic concoction that harmed him from a plant indigenous to the mountain. Among the recurring themes of this novel is the mountain’s awesome beauty and bounty, on the one hand, and its destructiveness and imminent sense of danger on the other. Wolf had been warned of the dangers of the red weed early in the narrative, now he’s discovered that you toy with nature at your peril.
Fate intercedes on Wolf’s self-destructive mission when he encounters three women in the tram, Nola Devine, her daughter, Bridget, and granddaughter, Vonn, themselves on a mission to inter the remains of Nola’s late husband Pip on San Jacinto’s Secret Lake. But in one ghastly mishap after another, the four end up marooned on a ledge of the mountain.
Over the course of five days, Wolf and the three women experience one misery after another — hunger, frostbite, hypothermia, circling vultures, rapacious coyotes, poisonous snakes, ever lurking mountain lions — which, at times, seems maddeningly unrelenting. But one keeps turning the page to check if things can get any worse. And they invariably do.
But what makes this book masterfully redemptive is what transpires over the course of this horrendous ordeal: The loving bond created between Wolf and the three women, and the loving bonds restored between the three generations of the Devine women. At the book’s outset, rabidly dysfunctional rather than rapturously divine best characterizes the relationship between them. Intergenerational backbiting is almost as deadly as the snakebite one of them eventually incurs. But their near-death experience rekindles the love lurking beneath the surface and in a final expression of their profound commitment to one another an ultimate sacrifice is made. That, arguably, is the novel’s climactic moment.
The hero of this narrative is himself reborn emotionally over the course of his ghastly ordeal on San Jacinto Mountain. For a guy once on a mission to end it all, Wolf Truly morphs into man with a passion for life, soon to become the father of the son for whom this engrossing saga of renewal and redemption is written. With The Mountain Story, Lori Lansens has written an epic work suffused with raw emotional power and resonance. Robert Collison is a Toronto-based writer and editor.