The Mountain Story
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 16, 2017 2:19 PM | Last Updated: April 19, 2017
Lori Lansens
On his 18th birthday, Wolf Truly takes the tramway to the top of the mountain that looms over Palm Springs, intending to jump to his death. Instead he encounters strangers wandering in the mountain wilderness, three women who will change the course of his life. Through a series of missteps he and the women wind up stranded, in view of the city below, but without a way down. They endure five days in freezing temperatures without food or water or shelter, and somehow find the courage to carry on.
Wolf, now a grown man, has never told his son, or anyone, what happened on the mountain during those five days, but he can't put it off any longer. And in telling the story to his only child, Daniel, he at last explores the nature of the ties that bind and the sacrifices people will make for love. The mountain still has a hold on Wolf, composed of equal parts beauty and terror. (Knopf Canada)
From the book
My boyhood home on Old Dewey Road stood among similar clapboard bungalows in the older, grimier section of Mercury, upwind of Michigan's largest rendering plant, with the train tracks near enough that I could tell passenger from freight by the way the house shook. A year and a half after my mother's accident — that's what we called it — my father briefly got sober and painted the entire house, inside and out, a dark, flat blue. Drowning Man Blue. Frankie said it was a tribute to Glory. She loved the colour blue.
From The Mountain Story by Lori Lansens ©2015. Published by Knopf Canada.