The Night We Weren't Ourselves

I drove up to Redwood National Park on a Friday afternoon in late August, twenty-four years old and tired in a way that sleep wasn't going to fix, and I think a big part of it was that I'd spent the whole summer swiping through dating apps like they were going to hand me a life if I just kept scrolling. I'm a middle school science teacher, which means I spend ten months a year being enthusiastically pecked to death by seventh graders, and by August I usually need trees and silence more than I need food. So I threw my old tent and a cooler in my Corolla and drove four hours north to Redwood National Park, and when I pulled into the campground loop and saw the little lake glittering through the trees, I actually said out loud to nobody, "Okay, yeah, this'll do."

The campground was half empty on a warm Friday, which suited me fine. I picked a site near the water, wrestled the tent up in about twenty minutes, which for me is a personal record, and then sat in my camp chair with a beer, doing nothing, which is harder for me than it sounds. My sister thinks it's hilarious that a guy who teaches earth science for a living can't sit still in actual earth, and she's right, but I'm working on it.

There's a communal fire pit down by the lake, one of those stone rings in a clearing where the camp hosts do evening talks, and around six I wandered down there with another beer and a bag of marshmallows I had no real plan for. That's where I saw her, sitting on the far log with a paperback in one hand and a beer in the other, a woman with her boots off and her feet up on a cooler, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that had clearly given up fighting the day. She looked up when my boot crunched on the gravel, and I did that thing where you wave with the hand holding the beer and nearly launch it.

"Smooth," she said, and grinned at me.

"I meant to do that," I said. "That's a controlled pour, actually. Very technical."

She laughed, and I want to tell you, that laugh did something to my whole evening. There were four other empty logs in that clearing and every one of them was a perfectly reasonable choice, and instead I heard myself ask, "Is this seat taken?" while already sitting down on her log like an idiot.

"Nope," she said, marking her page with her thumb. "I rented it for the whole evening, but I'm feeling generous."

Her name tag was still clipped to her shirt, the park service kind, and I nodded at it. "You work here? Because I've been breaking rules all day and I'd like to know how much trouble I'm in."

"Day off," she said. "And this is my last weekend before I transfer to a district up in Oregon, so honestly, arrest yourself. I'm not getting paid."

We did the normal small talk for a while, where are you from, what do you do, is the fishing any good in that lake, which neither of us knew the answer to. I told her I was a teacher, she told me she was a ranger, and it was fine, it was pleasant, and it was also exactly the same conversation I'd had forty times that summer, the one where you stack up your facts like little bricks and build the same wall every time. Name, job, where you went to school. I could feel myself doing it, going on autopilot, and I could see her kind of doing it too, and there was this moment where we both sort of ran out of script at the same time and just looked at the fire ring like it might say something.

And I don't know where the idea came from, honestly, except that maybe it came from all those app dates where I knew a stranger's whole résumé by the second drink and still felt like I knew nothing about them. I looked at her and said, "Okay, this is going to sound weird, but hear me out."

"Oh no," she said, grinning again. "Those are famous last words around campfires."

"Let's pretend we're strangers," I said. "Like, actually. Fake names, fake stories, fake jobs, the whole thing. We clearly already broke the ice, so let's just smash it and start over. I've spent all summer meeting people the normal way and it's been garbage, so what's the worst that happens? We tell each other lies about ourselves for one night and never see each other again?"

She took a long pull of her beer, looking at me over the top of the can, and I braced for her to make an excuse and go back to her book. Instead she set the can down and stuck out her hand like we were closing a business deal.

"Deal," she said. "But I get to be someone glamorous. Hi, I'm Vera. I'm a foghorn technician, which is a real job, and I make my living keeping lighthouses honest."

"Leo," I said, shaking her hand, and her grip was warm and sure. "I'm a bass player in a band that's about to make it, which is what I've said every year since I was twenty-two, and I'm between apartments, which is a nicer way of saying I live above a yogurt shop."

"A foghorn technician," I repeated, delighted. "That's so specific. What does a foghorn even need?"

"Attention, mostly," she said. "They get neglected, out there on the points all winter, nobody checks on them, and then they start moaning wrong and the whole coast thinks there's a ghost."

"See, this is already better than real conversation," I said. "Real me is a science teacher and the most exciting thing that happened this week was a kid eating a magnet."

"Real me checks permits and yells at people about bears," she said, and then she waved her hand like erasing a whiteboard. "Nope. Gone. Vera doesn't yell about bears. Vera doesn't even think about bears."

We roasted marshmallows and made up whole lives for ourselves. Leo had toured with a band called something terrible, I think she invented the name The Wet Socks, and Vera had once been stuck on a foghorn platform for three days with nothing but canned clam chowder and a paperback romance she refused to describe. The sun went down behind the redwoods and the fire got low and orange, and somewhere in there I realized I hadn't thought about my phone or my apps or the school year in two hours, which for me is basically a religious experience.

At some point she tucked her legs up under her on the log and looked at me sideways and said, "Okay, Leo, your turn. Tell me a secret. Strangers are supposed to tell each other things they'd never tell anyone they actually know."

"That's a trap," I said.

"Obviously it's a trap," she said. "Take the bait anyway."

So I took it, and I told fake-Vera something that was true for real me, which was that I'd been single for two years and I wasn't sad about it exactly, but I was starting to worry I'd gotten comfortable being lonely, that I'd built my whole little quiet life and now just inhabited it instead of living in it. She didn't laugh at that. She nodded slow, poked the coals with a stick, and said, "Yeah. I know that feeling. Vera knows it too," and there was a little pause where I was pretty sure we both knew we weren't really talking about the foghorns anymore.

The camp host came by around ten and mentioned quietly that quiet hours started at ten, smiling at us like he'd seen this exact fire a hundred times, and Vera looked at me with her eyebrows up in a question she hadn't quite asked yet.

"Your site or mine?" she said, casual as anything, and my heart did a thing I'm not proud of.

"Mine has a tent I put up in under twenty minutes," I said. "Yours?"

"A hard-sided pop-up with actual cushions," she said. "Vera splurges."

I doused the fire with the competence expected of a responsible adult, because I am one, mostly, and we walked the dark path back around the lake together, her flashlight beam swinging ahead of us, and I remember thinking, this is either the dumbest thing I've ever done or the smartest, and I honestly couldn't tell which, and for the first time in a long time I didn't really care.

The path around the lake was dark except for the swing of her flashlight, and the redwoods made a kind of hush overhead that made our voices feel smaller and closer, like the forest was leaning in to eavesdrop. She kept the beam pointed ahead of us but every so often it would drift over and land on my feet, and she'd laugh like she'd caught me doing something.

"You walk as if you have never trusted a trail in your life," she said.

"I'm just watching for roots," I said. "Real Leo twisted an ankle in Sacramento once and finished the show sitting on an amp. Leo is careful now."

"Leo sounds like a liar and a coward," she said, and I laughed loud enough that a frog somewhere stopped doing its thing out of what I assume was disgust.

Her site was the one just past the loop, and the pop-up was exactly what she'd promised, a hard-sided little box with a canvas roof and, when she popped the latch and flipped it open, an actual mattress with actual cushions piled at one end and a wool blanket folded with military corners at the other. She clicked the little battery lantern on and the whole thing filled up with warm light, and it was somehow both the smallest room I'd ever been in and the most inviting.

"Okay, house tour's over, that was it," she said, waving at the whole interior. "Vera lives modestly because Vera spends all her money on lighthouse parts."

"Respectable," I said, and then, because my hands didn't know what to do, "where do you want me? There's like four square feet of floor."

"You're not standing on the floor all night, sit down, God," she said, scooting to the far end of the mattress and patting the spot next to her, and I want you to know that I, a grown man of twenty-four who manages thirty seventh graders daily without flinching, sat down on that cushion like it was wired to something.

She handed me the last beer from her little cooler, which was warm in the way only the last beer of a cooler can be, and we clacked the cans together like it was champagne.

"To Vera and Leo," she said. "May their whole lives be fake and their night be real."

"That's actually beautiful," I said. "You should write greeting cards in your fake spare time."

"Vera has a fake side hustle, yes," she said, settling back against the cushions, and her shoulder came to rest against mine, not leaning exactly, just resting there like it belonged. "So. My turn for a secret. Because you went first and now we're even."

"Fire away," I said, and took a sip of the sad warm beer.

"I transferred to Oregon to get a fresh start after a brief thing with a guy I kept running into," she said, and I felt my real eyebrows go up, and she saw it and held up a finger. "Ah, no. Nobody scary, nobody dramatic, nothing juicy. Just a guy I dated for a minute and then kept running into at the ranger station until I wanted to scream. It was amicable. It was so amicable I wanted to die. But the point is Vera would never run. Vera stands her ground on her foghorn platform with her clam chowder and her dignity."

"So Vera's braver than real you," I said, and she looked at me sideways and didn't smile, which told me I'd landed somewhere true, and then she did smile, crooked, and stole the beer out of my hand.

"Vera is a fantasy I'm having about myself, sure," she said. "Aren't you? Leo the touring bass player? That's a fantasy with a bass attached."

"Leo has stage presence and a skincare routine," I admitted. "Leo's got his life together. Leo would never eat cold quesadillas over the sink at eleven at night."

"Oh my God, the sink quesadilla," she said, delighted. "That's the realest thing you've said all night. Don't break character again, it's destabilizing."

"Sorry. Leo eats sink quesadillas too but artistically."

We traded the can back and forth like that, and somewhere in there my hand ended up on the cushion between us and her hand ended up next to it, not touching, just close, both of us pretending very hard that we hadn't noticed. The lantern made everything the color of honey. Through the canvas I could hear the lake doing its slow lap thing against the shore, and I thought, this is the kind of night you can't plan, you can only stumble into it like an idiot with a tent he put up in under twenty minutes.

"Okay, question game," she said. "We're strangers, so we get to ask things you can't ask people you know. I ask, you answer honest or you lie beautifully, either one counts. Deal?"

"Those are the only two options?"

"Those are the only two options in the whole world," she said. "Here goes. What's something you want that you've never told anybody?"

I looked at her, at this stranger with the dark ponytail and the name tag from a job she wasn't doing today, and the honest answer and the beautiful lie were sitting right next to each other in my chest and I couldn't tell which one came out.

"I want to stop overthinking and feel something real," I said. "Like the day hasn't already been written. I've been planning lessons and grading things and going to bed at a reasonable hour, and I'm good at it, and nobody's ever accused me of being spontaneous in my entire life. My sister thinks it's hilarious that I can't sit still, except that's wrong, I sit still constantly, that's the whole problem."

She was quiet for a second, and then she said, "Well. Look at you. Sitting in a stranger's pop-up at midnight with a warm beer and a fake name. Something's happening to you right now, Leo."

"Is that what this is?" I asked, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

"That's what this is," she said. "My turn to answer one, since you asked yours with your face instead of words. What I want is one night where nobody knows who I am or what I'm supposed to be. Where I'm not the ranger with the clipboard, I'm just a woman at a fire who told a cute science teacher, sorry, a cute bass player, a