For the Hiker Lost in Acadia

by Carolyn Locke

Six days after you stepped foot on the path,
l look across Eagle Lake to Sargent Mountain
and all the hills between, try to imagine
what could’ve happened to you that day.

No doubt the wilderness called you,
as it called us today, into the bitter cold,
the biting wind, and thick gray clouds
promising snow by dark. No doubt

you believed in your own invincibility
as we all must if we’re to keep going.
And so what was your undoing?
Ice on a steep slope? A tall

and a broken limb? Heart failure?
Or did you merely lose your way?
A last phone call from the mountaintop, then
silence as snow fell through the long night.

You disappeared without a trace.
I want to believe in your final hours
you had no regrets, want to believe
you were where you wanted — even

needed — to be, and that you came
to rest peacefully beneath the snow.
Far ahead of me on the trail and so small
against these mountains he loves,

my husband disappears in the swirling snow.
With a catch in my throat, I tell myself
once more, Everyone deserves to live
and die on his own terms.