Borderline Hostile

The trip was supposed to be my reward. Thirty years of numbers, spreadsheets, quarterly projections nobody read, and then retirement, and then Patagonia. I had planned it for eight months. I had a laminated checklist of thirty-one bird species, color coded, because I am a man who laminates things and I stopped apologizing for that around age forty.

I am fifty-two now, single, never married, and my sister's kids have my number and no interest in using it. The last text I got from either of them was a birthday message in March that read "hbd uncle anton," lowercase, no punctuation, and I thought about it for two weeks. My big final project at work, the forecasting model I'd built over nine months, got rejected by the review board in April with a one-line email. "Directionally inconsistent with current strategy." Nine months. One line. So when the trip got ruined too, I took it personally, because at some point a man has to notice the universe is sending him a message.

The universe sent Fiona Abbott.

I met her at the El Calafate bus station at seven in the morning, four days ago now, and I disliked her inside ninety seconds. She was loud in the cheerful way, the way people are loud when they have never once worried that a room might not want them. She was forty-eight, built like a climbing rope, tan from decades of sun, and she wore an ultramarathon hat with the race logos of four continents stitched around the brim. She carried her pack like it weighed nothing and talked to strangers like they had been waiting all morning for her.

Then Taylor Bower walked up to the two of us with a clipboard and a face like a man delivering bad weather.

"Okay, so, small problem," Taylor said. Taylor is twenty-eight, local, drives the transfer route to El Chaltén, and has the calm of someone who grew up two hours from anything. "The agency double-booked the last Jeep. One vehicle, two bookings, you two are the bookings."

"That's absurd," I said. "I reserved in January."

"So did I," Fiona said, and she smiled at me, which I did not enjoy.

Taylor shrugged. "I don't fix the system, I just drive. So. You share the Jeep, or one of you waits three days for the next van. Those are the options."

Three days in El Calafate. Three days of my carefully sequenced itinerary collapsing, of missed trailheads, of condors circling above me without me there to log them. I looked at Fiona and she looked at me and we both did the math out loud, which was how I learned she had a schedule just as rigid as mine and a personality much better suited to defending it.

"I'll share," she said, "if he can keep up."

"I've climbed in the Andes," I said, which was true, twenty years ago, once.

"Sure you have," she said.

So we shared the Jeep. Taylor loaded our packs, gave us both a look I can only describe as professional pity, and pointed us north onto the Ruta 40. Gravel, sky, scrub, wind. No cell service, no towns, nothing for hours. Just the three of us and the dry brown immensity of Patagonia going by.

For the first hour, Fiona was quiet, which I mistook for mercy. Then she saw my checklist.

"Is that laminated?" she asked, leaning over from the passenger seat.

"It's a species log," I said. "It's organized by habitat zone."

"You laminated your vacation."

"Paper disintegrates in the field. Wind, rain. Lamination is basic preparation."

She laughed. Actually laughed, head back, loud, in the enclosed space of a Jeep cab, while Taylor drove and pretended the radio was fascinating. "Basic preparation," she repeated. "You know what I prepared for my last race? Nothing. You run until you stop. That's the whole method."

"Which is why you needed four continents' worth of hats to prove it," I said.

She turned in her seat and looked at me, and I want to describe that look accurately, because it was the moment the trip changed character. It wasn't offense. It was interest. Like a fisherman feeling a tug on a line he'd mostly forgotten about.

"Oh, he's got teeth," she said to Taylor. "The spreadsheet has teeth."

"I heard," Taylor said, to the road.

The flat tire came an hour later, in a valley so empty it looked like the world had been deleted and only the background remained. Taylor pulled over, got out, and started working the jack with the unhurried air of a man who has changed a hundred tires in a hundred identical valleys. Fiona climbed out after him and, instead of helping, began walking the shoulder of the road, picking up rocks.

I watched her for a while through the window. She was building something. A line of dark stones arranged across the gravel in a deliberate pattern, spaced at intervals, angled inward.

"What are you doing?" I asked when I got out.

"Trail marker," she said, placing another rock. "If the Jeep dies out here and we walk, we leave a sight line. Old habit."

"That's pointless. We're with the vehicle. Taylor is changing the tire. Nobody is walking anywhere."

"Right now nobody's walking. On a whiteout you'd give your left arm for a line of rocks."

"Which is why I carry a GPS, a compass, and a paper backup map. In waterproof sleeves."

She straightened up and looked at me over the row of stones, wind pulling at that ridiculous hat. "Anton. Honest question. Do you think you could survive one night out here without your gadgets? Just you, your body, whatever it does."

"That's not a serious question."

"It's completely serious. One night. No laminated anything. I bet you'd cry by midnight."

"I have spent a fair number of nights in the field."

"Then prove it. There's a refugio stop ahead. Tonight counts. One night, no checklist, no GPS, no little color-coded system. You last it, I'll admit a spreadsheet can hike."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you admit the hat has four logos because I earned four logos."

I should have said no. I want that noted by any fair observer of my life. I should have said no, and instead I heard myself agree to a bet I hadn't defined, against a woman who had spent her forties doing things to her body that most militaries don't require, and I got back in the Jeep feeling as though I had just signed something without reading it.

The refugio was a low stone building at the edge of nowhere, a roadside stop for trekkers with a stove, a dining table scarred by a decade of knives, and a wind that never fully stopped. Taylor went inside to sort the rooms and came back out with the expression of a man who has done all he can.

"So," he said. "Two rooms left when we booked, but a Dutch group came in an hour ago and took them. There's the bunkroom. Two beds. Door sticks a little. I'll be in the dorm wing with the staff."

"Fascinating," Fiona said. "The universe keeps doing this."

"The universe does nothing," I said. "The Dutch do this."

The bunkroom was exactly as advertised, namely cramped, cold, and honest. Two