1 Three Cousins in a Car Sometimes adventures start with a big boom or a mysterious letter or a knock at the door--and sometimes they simply begin at a little after six a.m. in the back seat of a very crowded car. That car wasn''t moving yet, but it was already jam-packed with backpacks, sleeping bags, snacks, legs, and various moods. Not a spare cubic inch anywhere for anything extra--Amy had not even been allowed to bring her stuffed seal, Sealy, and she did feel a little bitter about that, because she liked having a friend along she could tell stories to during the day and then lean against, like a soft and comfy pillow, when it was time to close her eyes and snooze. But Amy was only eight and unable to make the world bend in the direction she preferred, whereas when her sister, Vivian, got her mind set on something, that something had a fair chance of happening, so here they all were. That tells you what you most need to know about how Amy was feeling: no Sealy, no stories, no soft plush coziness. But three cousins had just been sardined into the back seat, and that meant there were at least three moods, not just one.

Vivian, for instance, was as full of anticipation as a lightning bug is full of shine and fire, even though she was stuck in the middle seat, which she usually hated. But her mother had just pointed out that her cousin, Owen, and his dad (Vivian and Amy''s uncle) had come all the way from the East Coast for this trip, so it wouldn''t have been fair to make Owen sit in the middle, would it? "Oh, hey, that''s okay, Aunt Judy," Owen had said. He didn''t really care where he sat. It was one of the many things these days that turned out not to matter as much as they used to. This was Viv''s big adventure, however, and no measly middle seat was going to mess with her joy. She had darted into that car without even the ghost of a fuss, then leaned over and grinned up into her mother''s surprised face. "Come on , everyone!" she said. "We''ve got to get there !" "There" in this case was Campsite A46 on the River Loop of the campground in Sequoia National Park! Which was really almost the actual trailhead! Where everything glorious would start! And it was now only six hours away! Vivian was practically made of exclamation points right now.

(By the way, eleven is a good age for exclamation points. Vivian''s family had decorated her birthday cake this past year with two of them, big and bold: !! ) "Have so much fun, all of you," said Vivian and Amy''s father before he closed the backseat door. He wasn''t coming along, and he was perfectly happy about that (since he didn''t like tents). "You all keep your feet dry, and if you see a bear, remember you''re to turn right around and march yourselves back home." "Ha ha! Bye, Greg!" said the two grown-ups who, unlike Vivian and Amy''s father, liked tents and didn''t mind bears--and who, when they were little, used to go on rafting trips and walking trips and even snowshoeing trips with their equally adventurous parents. Now one of those adventurous siblings had grown up to be Owen''s father ("Uncle Mike" to the girls) and the other one to be Viv and Amy''s mother (Owen''s "Aunt Judy"), and they were as excited about taking the cousins into the mountains as Vivian was to be going. "So!" said Vivian as the car finally pulled out of the driveway and everyone was still waving goodbye in the gray morning light. "How''s the weather look, Uncle Mike? Are we still dodging the rain?" "Looks like it," said Uncle Mike.

"Storm eventually threatens, but not until we are safely back in civilization." "Oh, let''s not ruin the morning with talk about civilization," said Vivian and Amy''s mother. "Not when our adventure''s just starting. You have your headlamp, Owen, don''t you? And you tested the stove?" "Yes, sure, of course," said Owen, who had tested everything. "And you aren''t going to let your cousins starve?" "Don''t think so," said Owen, designated cook for the coming mission, at least the part of it that the adults wouldn''t be along for. (They were supposed to hike up as far as Twin Lakes with their parents, but then it would be just the cousins on their own for a whole day and night. Owen was amazed the parents had agreed to this adventure, but then again, Vivian''s powers of persuasion could be mighty.) Cooking was something Owen had always loved in the past and still liked very much even now.

That''s how Viv had roped him into this whole plan: It''s so great! I''ve got them almost talked into it! We''re going to go backpacking ON OUR OWN! I told them you would do all the food stuff! We just have to take Amy along, that''s all, but that''s okay, I guess, if it means they''ll let us camp on our own. You''ll like it, right? Thinking up things to eat that are super tasty and fun to cook way up in the mountains? You can invent new recipes. And making lots of lists? You like making lists! It''ll be science! And math! Even more than Owen liked cooking, he liked Vivian''s way of being alive: all ambition and dreams and enthusiasm. He was twelve, only nine weeks older than Viv, but those nine short weeks between August 3 (Owen''s birthday) and October 7 (Vivian''s birthday), plus Owen having ended up a grade ahead due to some test he took in kindergarten that had apparently impressed and alarmed his parents and teachers, meant he was already on his way into eighth grade in Massachusetts, while Vivian was only just now about to start sixth grade--the first year of middle school in California. This amounted to a significant reversal of their babyhood schedules and timetables: Vivian had learned to walk about four months earlier than Owen. There were lots of old videos of Vivian trying to climb up the outsides of staircases while crawling Owen looked up at her in awe. And other videos of Vivian toddling over to crawling Owen and trying to pull him up to his feet; toddler Vivian doing a toddler somersault and screaming in delight while Owen tried to use the edge of the couch to shift his position to vertical: unsuccessfully forty-three times in a row , and then finally, success! (Baby Owen, by the way, beaming, turns toward the camera: "Fohty-fwee!" he says, because he had been counting all along. Even as a baby, Owen had thought of large numbers as steady, sturdy friends.

Something you could hang on to. Something you could use to pull yourself up from the floor.) To tell the truth, Owen still could hardly turn a somersault today, although Vivian could certainly now count not just to forty-three but to any number anybody needed. She still had that gift for creating adventures. And when the cousins got to see each other, Vivian grinned as if an adventure without Owen would not be the sort of adventure she most wanted to have, and that meant a lot to him. Who at school would have believed him if he told them his younger girl cousin going into only sixth grade was the closest thing he had to a best friend anymore? So he never talked about his cousins at school. Who would he have been mentioning something like that to, anyway? By now they had been driving for an hour, and outside the window, the gray of the world had already melted into color, mostly the yellow brown of hillside grass, and sun glinted on the tall windmills that stretched along the top of the hills to the right and left of the highway here. The world seemed a strange place.

Some of the windmills weren''t even turning, and he wondered whether they had been broken somehow, or whether-- And suddenly something grabbed every one of the people in their car and flung them forward and to the left, so that the seat belts dug into all of their bellies, and there was the loud noise of everybody shouting out at once and of Aunt Judy blasting the horn with one hand while hanging on to the steering wheel with the other. They were bumping over the rougher asphalt at the edge of the highway, and then they were back where you were supposed to drive, and it all had happened in only a second or so. That''s how life is, sometimes: sudden.