Campfire Confessions

My name is Renee Patton, I'm thirty-four years old, and six months ago the woman I thought I'd grow old with packed her speaker, her jade plant, and half my heart into a Subaru and drove to Tucson. That's the backstory. You didn't come here for the backstory.

So anyway, in late September I rented a yurt.

Yurt seven, Whisper Pines Campground, way up in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest where the cell signal dies about twenty minutes before the turnoff. I'm a professor of environmental studies, which means I get the whole summer off to brood, and by September my department was sick of me haunting the hallway, so off I went. Off-season rates. A plywood palace with a plastic dome and a wood stove. Perfect for a woman who wanted to be alone with her misery and her grant applications.

Did I mention I'm trans? Doesn't come up much in my day-to-day, but it comes up in dating, so there it is, stated plainly like the paperwork says.

The first night, I built a fire like an idiot, smoked out half the yurt, gave up, and crawled into my sleeping bag around ten. And that's when I heard it.

Through the wall.

Now, these walls. The partition between yurt six and yurt seven is a single sheet of plywood with a two-inch gap at the bottom and, if you press your cheek to it, a knot hole about the size of a quarter. You could hear a neighbor clear her throat. You could hear a neighbor's alarm clock. You could, it turned out, hear a neighbor having what sounded like a genuinely excellent time.

"Oh, come on," I said out loud, to nobody. "Seriously?"

I'm not a prude. I want that understood. I've read Foucault, I've chaired a committee on body autonomy, I once gave a lecture on the politics of public bathroom access with a slide show. But it was ten p.m., I was heartbroken and cold, and the woman next door was moaning like the walls were made of rice paper. Which, to be fair, they basically were.

And here's the part I keep circling back to. Somewhere around the third or fourth moan, my annoyance changed lanes. My face got hot. My hand, which had been lying there like a dead fish, developed opinions of its own.

No. Absolutely not. I am a professional. I am in recovery from a three-year relationship. I am going to lie here like a stone and think about carbon sequestration.

Then she made a sound, low and long, and my body went "okay, fine, we're doing this" without consulting me.

I pressed my palm flat against the plywood. Just to feel it, you know? Just to feel that another warm human being was three feet away, alive and loud and not sad. And I tapped. Twice. Before my brain caught up with my knuckles.

The moaning stopped.

Dead silence. Then, through the wall, clear as a bell: "Did you just knock?"

I didn't answer. Obviously. I lay there in the dark like a corpse, heart hammering, thinking, she heard me, she absolutely heard me, I have tapped on a stranger's wall during her private time like some kind of feral raccoon.

"Huh," she said, and I swear I could hear the grin in it. "Night, weirdo."

I did not sleep well. I want you to know that. I lay awake until two rehearsing things I could have said, none of which I would have said, because I have pride the size of a national park and the emotional availability of a fire hydrant.

* * *

Morning fixed nothing. I made coffee on the little two-burner and took it out to the porch platform, and there she was, yurt six, chopping kindling in flannel and hiking boots like a catalog photo of competence. Brown hair in a braid, sleeves rolled, thirty-one, thirty-two maybe, and built like somebody who carried things for a living.

She looked up. I looked away. We were both extremely mature about it.

"Morning, wall-tapper," she called.

"Morning," I said to my coffee.

Great start, Renee. Truly, the department would be proud.

Her name, I learned from the campground board by the showers, was Stephanie Haines. Nature guide. Lead hikes, knew every bird, presumably could identify me by my footprint. She'd worked at Whisper Pines for six years and lived in the yurt most of the season. Everybody at the camp store talked about her like she was local royalty.

And me? I was the quiet professor in yurt seven who clearly had a stick somewhere anatomically improbable. Fine. I accepted the role.

That evening a note came under my door.

It was a page torn from a trail map, folded in quarters, and it said, in handwriting that looped with the frantic energy of a squirrel on a sugar high: "Tapping a lady's wall without at least buying her dinner? Where I'm from that's practically a proposal. S.H."

I stared at it for a full minute. Then I got a pen and wrote, under it, "I was knocking to complain about the noise. The walls are inadequate. R.P."

I slid it back under the gap and went to bed feeling like I'd won something.

The reply came at breakfast. "Inadequate? Honey, those walls are structural."

The notes kept coming. She'd leave them under the door at random hours, always teasing, always signed with that smug little "S.H." I answered maybe every third one, curt as a parking ticket, and then I'd lie in my sleeping bag re-reading them like they were peer reviews of my soul.

"Your tap had rhythm. Three slow, two fast. Very seductive. Very Morse code for 'I'm lonely.'"

I wrote back: "It was Morse code for 'the walls are inadequate.'"

She wrote: "Sure it was, Professor."

How did she know I was a professor? Later I found out she'd gone through my recycling, which was sitting outside my yurt, and found a discarded syllabus. I was outraged for a day and secretly flattered for a week. I contain multitudes.

The glimpses didn't help. Through that knot hole, if you pressed your cheek to the plywood, which I did more than once, and yes, I know how that sounds, you could see the strip of her yurt between the wardrobe and the stove. I saw her stretched out on her cot reading. I saw her dancing badly to something with a lot of banjo. One night, a few nights after the first, I saw her silhouette in the lamplight with her hand between her legs again, and this time I didn't pretend I wasn't watching, and this time she was facing the wall, and this time, when she came, she said, clear enough to cross a sheet of plywood, "This one's for the professor."

I don't think I breathed for a month.

I tapped the wall. Three slow, two fast.

She tapped back. Then a note appeared under my door before I'd even gotten my breath back: "You watched. Admit it."

And here's where my pride and my loneliness had their big collision. Because I could have written "I did no such thing" and kept the whole arrangement going for another season, two strangers orbiting each other through a quarter inch of lumber, safe and stupid and starving.

Instead I wrote: "Yes. And you performed. Admit that!"

There was a long pause. Long enough that I regretted it, long enough that I got up twice to check whether the note had actually gone through. Then paper whispered across the plywood gap.

"Finally," it said. "Door's unlocked, Professor. Your move."

I sat on my cot with that page in my hands and my heart doing something my cardiologist would disapprove of, and I thought, this is the exact moment where letting someone in gets you hurt. And then I thought, six months, Renee. Six months of cold beds and grant applications and rehearsing witty things to say to a woman who isn't there.

I put on the flannel I'd bought at the camp store because I'd left all my good clothes in the city. I brushed my hair. I looked at myself in the little aluminum mirror and said, out loud, like a lunatic, "You can still turn around."

I opened the door of yurt seven.

She was standing on her own porch, leaning against the post, wearing the flannel and the smirk and absolutely nothing I could argue with.

"Took you long enough," she said.

"You slid the note under ten minutes ago."

"Yeah, and you spent eight of them staring at yourself in the mirror. The gap goes both ways, honey."

Oh, I liked her. That was the problem. I liked her immediately and completely, and I could feel the whole careful structure of my rebuilt life wobbling on its posts.

"Hi," I said. "Renee Patton. I'm the rude neighbor with the inadequate walls."

"Stephanie Haines. I'm the loud one." She stuck out her hand, formal as a job interview, which made me laugh for the first time in about five months. "So. You want to come in, or are we gonna keep paying postage on notes?"

I stepped across the gap between the porches. Three feet, maybe four. Shortest trip I ever took that changed everything.

Her yurt smelled like cedar and woodsmoke and someone who actually cooked meals instead of microwaving them, and I stood there on the doormat feeling out of place and awkward. "Nice place," I said, because I am a professor and therefore a genius under pressure.

"It's identical to yours, honey."

"It feels bigger."

"That's because you're finally inside it instead of eavesdropping on it." She flopped onto her cot, patted the space beside her, and I sat down like the cot was a deposition. We talked for two hours. Actually talked. About the park, about her six years leading hikes, about my divorce-adjacent breakup and the Subaru that drove to Tucson with my speaker in it. She laughed at the right parts. She asked real questions and waited for the answers.

And then at some point she looked at me and said, "Can I kiss you? Because I've been wanting to since note number two and I don't want to spook you."

"You've been wanting to since note two? Note two was the wall complaint."

"Yeah. That note had real mouthy energy. So? Yes or no, Professor?"

"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes!"

And she kissed me, slow and warm, one hand cupping my jaw like I was something worth being careful with, and I made a noise into her mouth that I will take to my grave. Then her hand slid to my waist and I felt my whole chest seize up, six months of rust and one bad memory ganging up on me.

She felt me stiffen and pulled back immediately, both hands up. "Okay. Stop right there. We're done!"

"I'm sorry, it's not you, I just..."

"Hey. No sorry. You say stop, we stop, that's the whole rulebook." She grinned. "Besides, I've waited this long through a plywood wall. I can wait through an actual door. I'm patient as a river, baby."

"You are not patient at all. You tapped back on my knock in under four seconds."

"Okay, I'm patient as a river in a hurry." She walked me to the door like a gentleman, and on my own porch she said, "Goodnight, Renee Patton," my full name, like a toast, and I floated back into yurt seven and didn't sleep a wink.

* * *

Here's a thing nobody warns you about with thin walls. They work both ways in every direction, including the embarrassing ones.

A few nights later I came back from a hike, sweating through my sports bra, and I wanted out of those clothes more than I've ever wanted anything. And here's where I made my error. I left the door cracked open for the breeze. A crack, maybe four inches, dusk light, and my back half-turned to the wall side of the yurt while I peeled the bra off over my head.

I didn't see her. But I heard it, through the partition, a low whistle and then a muffled "oh my god" that she did not whisper quietly enough. I froze with the bra in one hand like a quiz show contestant.

I finished changing anyway. Slowly. What? I said what I said. Then I sat down and wrote a note, because apparently that's our language now. "Did you just see me change?" Under the door it went, across the gap, under hers.

The reply came back in twenty minutes. "See is a strong word. The knot hole is the size of a quarter. I saw a quarter's worth. And I want to note, you look good without the professor coat. S.H."

I sat there holding that stupid note, thirty-four years old, blushing like a woman in a shampoo commercial. Then I wrote back: "The knot hole is being repaired. Effective immediately. R.P."

"You can't repair a knot hole, it's a KNOT. Also your sports bra is gray with a little pink bow and I have thoughts."

Deep thoughts about my sports bra. The woman had never seen my face fully lit and she was already reviewing my underwear through a hole in a wall, and the worst part, the absolutely humiliating worst part, was that I liked it. I liked being seen. Six months of being invisible to one specific person and here was a stranger cataloguing me through a quarter of plywood like I was worth the effort.

* * *

Then came the rain. Early October in the mountains, and when it comes, it comes like it holds a grudge. Three days of it, hammering the canvas, the whole campground mud and drip. Nobody hikes. Nobody does anything. We were both prisoners, yurt six and yurt seven, with nothing between us but plywood and pride.

Day two of the rain I sat at my little table grading, because I'm on sabbatical and old habits eat you alive, and I could hear her through the wall, pacing, banjo music, the occasional creative curse word when her stove smoked. The cabin fever was coming off her in waves I could practically feel.

And I don't know what possessed me. Loneliness, probably. Or courage, which is the same chemical wearing a nicer coat. I reached over and tapped the wall. Three fast, one long. Our new rhythm. It meant, in our private little telegraph, something like hello, I'm here, I'm thinking about you, don't make it weird.

She tapped back instantly. Three fast, one long. Then three fast, one long. Then three fast, one long, faster each time, like she was winding up, and I was laughing alone at my table, and then came a full-body thud against the plywood, hard enough that my coffee mug skated an inch across the table and a coil of my notes slid off the edge.

"You animal," I shouted through the wall. "That's structural."

Her voice came right back, delighted, muffled but