Packing It In

I passed Jasper on the switchbacks like I always do, loudly and with commentary.

"Coming through," I called down at him. "Take your time, old man."

"I'm three years older than you," he said, hauling himself around the bend, red in the face.

"Older at heart. You hike like a man who reads the manual first."

He grunted something at me that I didn't catch and didn't need to. We'd been doing this for a year now, ever since the hiking meetup at Crescent Ridge where we got paired up on a beginner loop and I beat him to the overlook. He claimed the trail marker was misleading. He claims a lot of things.

The Lone Pine trail is no beginner loop. Six days, one big loop, a lot of elevation, and campsites spaced out just far enough to make your legs complain the next morning. I'd wanted to do it alone. Jasper invited himself the way he invites himself to everything, by showing up at the trailhead with a permit and a smug face.

"Race you to the creek," he said now, and I was already gone.

I took the switchbacks two at a time where they allowed it and one at a time where the drop-off made me nervous, and I hit the creek crossing a good three minutes ahead of him. I sat on a rock and drank water and looked smug, which is my best look.

"That doesn't count," he said when he arrived. "You had a head start."

"You watched me leave. You chose to finish your granola bar."

"That granola bar was strategic."

"Sure it was."

I dropped my pack on the bank and we filled bottles and didn't talk for a while, which is also part of the rivalry. Whoever talks first after a race loses. He always talks first.

"Your tent site is uphill of mine," he said, wringing out his socks. "I call the flat spot."

"You called the flat spot last time. Rotation."

"There's no rotation. You invented the rotation."

"I invented it and it's binding."

The first campsite sat in a stand of lodgepole pines with a fire ring and a bear box and a view of nothing in particular, which is how I prefer the first night. The air was dry and smelled like pine and dust, and the cold was already coming down off the ridge.

We got our tents up and I got a fire going while he messed with his stove. My fire was better. I want that noted somewhere.

It was around the fire that he started in on my pack.

"I've been meaning to say something," he said, pointing his fork at it. "That pack is ridiculous."

"It's a seventy-five liter. It's a normal pack."

"It's a duffel bag with straps. You've got stuff hanging off it in four directions. There's a camp shoe hanging off your hip belt. One shoe, Velma. Where's the other one?"

"Backup shoe. In case I lose one."

"Nobody loses one shoe."

"Nobody plans to, which is why I carry a backup."

He shook his head and ate his rehydrated noodles. "What's even in there? You must be carrying forty pounds of nothing. We're on a maintained trail. There's water every eight miles."

"I like being prepared," I said. "That's the difference between us. You carry the minimum and then borrow things from me. Who forgot a spoon on the Granite Loop?"

"That was a supply chain failure."

"Who's using whose spare spoon right now?"

He looked at his hand, where he was indeed using my spare spoon, and put it down with dignity and picked up a fork from his own kit.

"Point withdrawn," he said.

"Preparedness isn't ridiculous. It's how you get to be sixty-two and still outpace sixty-five-year-olds on switchbacks."

"You're sixty-two? I thought you were sixty-three."

"I'm sixty-two. My birthday's in March. You were at the trailhead thing in March."

"I brought you a cupcake at that thing."

"You brought everyone a cupcake. It was a cupcake buffet. It doesn't count as knowing my birthday."

He grinned at me over the fire. He's got a good grin, I'll give him that, though I'd never give him that out loud. Lean face, lean frame, more gray in his beard every trip. Sixty-five and still out here, which is more than I can say for most of the men my age at the meetup, who talk about their knees like they're war wounds.

* * *

After dinner we split a bag of trail mix, sitting on the same log because there was only one log and neither of us was going to sit in the dirt to prove a point.

"Do you ever eat the raisins?" he asked, picking through it. "I always pick out the raisins."

"You're a raisin coward."

"I'm a man who knows what he wants and it isn't raisins."

"Sure," I said. "Knows what he wants."

He chewed on that for a second, then said, "Speaking of which. You haven't mentioned any dates lately."

I threw a peanut at him. It bounced off his knee.

"What? It's small talk."

"It's nosy small talk. And there's nothing to mention."

"Nothing at all? There was that guy you were telling everybody about in the spring. What was his name, Dennis? Dev?"

"Pablo. And that's over."

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened. That was the problem."

He waited. He's good at waiting, I'll say that for him. The fire popped and I ate two raisins out of spite.

"He was nice," I said finally. "Just not built for me."

"Built for you?"

"I like a big man, Jasper. Big all over. Pablo was a lovely person and he weighed less than my pack."

"That's a weird way to measure a person."

"It's a completely honest way to measure a person, for what I was after. He tried hard. Nothing against him. But you can't fake mass, and I'm not going to pretend I wasn't counting the seconds until I could go home and stop making polite noises."

Jasper went quiet. I'd surprised him. We talk about a lot of garbage on these trips, food and weather and other people's divorces, but not that. Not what I want in bed.

"Well," he said. "Good for you for knowing what you want."

"Do you know what you want?"

"Out of trail mix, yes. Fewer raisins."

"I'm asking about your life, not the raisins."

"I know what you're asking." He tossed a cashew in his mouth. "I don't date much. I got out of the habit. The meetup is my social life and I'm at peace with that."

"That's the saddest thing anyone's ever told me at a campfire."

"It's not sad. It's efficient."

"It's sad and efficient. Both things can be true."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and threw a raisin at me, which I caught and ate, because I'm not a coward.

The cold was settling in hard now. We let the fire burn down and I could feel it in my fingers first, the way it always gets me. Five more nights of this. Five more days of him.

"Big all over, huh," he said, standing and kicking dirt over the coals.

"What?"

"Pablo. You said big all over." He picked up his boots and headed for his tent. "Just cataloging information. Goodnight, Velma."

"Don't snore into my tent wall."

"I never snore. I breathe with purpose."

I crawled into my tent and into my bag and lay there a while in the dark, listening to him fuss around out there, zipping and unzipping things. My pack sat in the vestibule, fat and ridiculous, full of everything I carry and one thing I hadn't planned to say out loud on this trip.

I'd brought it anyway. I like being prepared.

I woke up to a sound like God shaking a bag of gravel.

At first I thought it was rain. Then I heard the tick of it on the tent fly, hard and round, and I sat up. Hail. Real hail, the size of grapes by the sound of it, hammering down in the dark.

"Velma," Jasper shouted from downhill. "You awake?"

"Hard not to be."

"How bad is it over there? Any water coming in?"

I felt around the floor of my tent with my hand. Dry. "I'm dry. How are you?"

There was a pause, then a word I won't repeat, followed by, "I've got a river coming through my vestibule. My bag's fine but my pack is swimming."

I got my headlamp on and unzipped the door a couple inches. The hail had gone white across the whole campsite, an inch of it already, still coming down in ropes. The temperature had dropped so fast the air felt like a slap.

"Get in here," I said.

"It's your tent. I'm not crowding you."

"Jasper. Your gear is floating. Get in here before we're both wet."

He came up the slope in his boots with his sleeping bag under one arm like a sack of feed, and I held the door flap open and he poured himself in. The tent is a one-person. I've had it eleven years. With the two of us and his bag in it, there was no room to do anything but sit.

"Cozy," he said, dripping on my floor.

"Sit on your bag. Don't touch mine, you're soaked."

"I'm not soaked, I'm distinguished."

The hail kept coming. It got louder for a while, then turned to sleet, then to a plain cold rain that hissed on the fly. Neither of us was going back out in it. My tent had been pitched on the flat spot I'd claimed under the rotation rule, which I will never stop mentioning, and the ground stayed solid, so we sat shoulder to shoulder in a six-foot tube of nylon and listened to the storm work us over.

"This is the worst weather I've seen on this trail," he said. "And you were here for the June blowdown."

"The June blowdown was wind. This is personal."

"It came out of a clear sky. I checked the forecast at the ranger box this morning. Clear for four days."

"Then the forecast was wrong and I'm blaming you."

"Why you?"

"You're the one who read it."

He laughed and his shoulder shook against mine. It was cold enough that neither of us moved away.