Trail Gratitude

My name is Shauna Snow, I'm fifty-two years old, and until last Friday I had never in my life been exactly where I was standing at dusk, which was two miles off the Lost River Trail in the Blue Range of Oregon, staring at a big canvas tent with a fire going in front of it and a man walking toward us with his hand already out.

I'd earned every one of those two miles the hard way, and by the last half mile I was wheezing like a woman twice my age, so when Robbie put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and steered me the last half mile of trail I let him, because his palm was warm through my jacket and because I'd have followed that man anywhere, which is a thing I've thought many times over thirty years and never once said out loud.

"Almost there," he said. "See the smoke?"

"I see it," I said, between breaths. "I see smoke, I see trees, I see my whole life flashing."

He laughed at that, the same easy laugh he's had since we were both twenty-two and briefly a couple in college, back before either of us knew what we were doing, and we'd broken up so gently that neither of us ever really left, we just changed rooms, so to speak. He's fifty-three now, a little gray at the temples, still walks uphill like it's a hallway.

The man from the fire reached us before we reached the fire. He was maybe forty-four, weathered, with a short beard and the kind of calm you see in people who spend their whole working lives outdoors.

"You'd be Robbie," he said, shaking his hand. "Ricky Thompson. And this is Sophia."

A woman came around the fire then, forty-seven, I'd learn later, dark hair in a braid, sleeves rolled up like she'd been splitting wood, which maybe she had. She shook my hand and said, "You made good time on that last section. Most people come in a half hour slower."

I liked her instantly for that, because she was talking to me like I was somebody who had done a thing, and lately at the dental office I mostly get talked to like I'm furniture that flosses people.

"I'm kinda proud of myself," I admitted. "I'm Shauna, by the way. Nobody's said my name in a sentence since Thursday."

"Well, Shauna," Ricky said, and the way he said my name was different, slower, like he was trying it out, "sit down. Robbie says you like tea, and I made tea, so the system works."

We sat on the stones around the fire pit and Sophia handed me a tin mug that smelled like mint, and the evening got itself organized around me while I caught my breath. Wind in the pine needles. Water somewhere behind the tent. Robbie talking trail talk with Ricky about the switchbacks on the ridge, and Sophia refilling mugs without being asked, and me just sitting there feeling my pulse come down and thinking that this alone was worth the drive out from Portland.

Ricky had told us the camp rules over email, of course, and Robbie had told me the general shape of the weekend over coffee two weeks ago, but knowing a thing in your head and sitting next to it while it warms its hands at a fire are two different animals, and I was nervous in a way I couldn't quite point at.

"Shauna," Ricky said, after a while, "can I tell you what tonight is, out loud, so we all know?"

"Please," I said. "I'd honestly rather know than wonder."

"Sure." He settled back on his stone and looked at me, and this is what I mean about his eyes, they don't slide around, they just land on you and stay. "Tonight, there's no agenda except what everybody wants. Four people, a tent, a fire. The intent we all came here with is touch, and pleasure, and whatever level of that feels right to each person. Nothing has to happen. Nobody is going to grab anybody. Every step gets asked about, every yes is a real yes, and any no stops everything cold, and that holds all night no matter what."

"Wait," I said, holding up a hand, "every no stops everything? Even just one no?"

"Even one," he said. "One no, everything pauses, we talk, we figure out what the no was about. It's not complicated, it's just discipline, and it's the whole job."

Sophia spoke up from across the fire. "I've worked with Ricky six years and I've never once seen him rush anybody. I've seen him sit on his hands for an hour while a guest decided. That's the kind of man you're dealing with."

"And Robbie?" I looked over at my oldest friend, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "You're sure about me being here?"

Robbie put his mug down and turned so he was facing me square. "Shauna, I have been with men and women over the years and every one of them knew exactly what they were getting, because I say what I want and I ask. What I want for you is to find out that this stuff doesn't end at fifty, that your body is still yours and still hungry and still allowed. You told me in June, on that dumb porch in Bend, that you thought your whole life of that kind of thing had passed you by, and I've been chewing on it ever since. This is me saying you're wrong."

I didn't have anything to say back right then, so I drank my tea, and the fire cracked, and Sophia quietly put another stick on it like she was giving me room.

"Can I ask something sorta personal?" I finally said to Ricky.

"Ask anything you want."

"You and Robbie, how do you two know each other?"

Robbie laughed before Ricky could answer. "She's gonna get there anyway, might as well let her."

"Fifteen years ago," Ricky said. "Robbie was thirty-eight, I was twenty-nine. He booked a solo trip, we got caught in rain, he shared my camp one night. We've been friendly ever since. He comes back most years."

"Oh," I said, and then, because it was apparently that kind of night, "well, good for you both."

Sophia snorted into her mug and Ricky grinned, and just like that the lump in my chest was about half the size it had been.

"Here's what I'd tell you, Shauna," Sophia said, leaning forward, elbows on her knees. "I'm forty-seven, I've got two grown kids, and I spent about a decade thinking desire was a room I'd already moved out of. Then I spent a few nights around a fire like this one and found out the room was still there, it just needed somebody to say the door was open. So when I look at you sitting there all wound up and apologetic, I'm not judging. I'm recognizing."

"That's," I started, and stopped, and started again. "That's exactly what it's like. Apologetic. Like I owe the world an apology for still wanting stuff."

"You don't," Ricky said, simply. "You never did."

The light was nearly gone by then, just the fire and a purple sky through the trees, and Sophia said she should show me where the cots were and where the stream was, and Ricky said the two of them had laid out a cot for Robbie and me in the big tent, no assumptions, plenty of space, and if anybody wanted to trade arrangements at any point in the night they could just say so.

"Want to walk with me?" Sophia asked, getting up. "I'll show you the stream so you don't wander into the brush at two in the morning like some guests I could name."

"Ricky," Robbie said, warning in his voice and a grin in it too.

"I said some guests, Robbie, I did not name names."

I got up and followed her, and I have to tell you, whoever's reading this, that my legs were shaking a little, but not from the hike anymore, and for the first time in longer than I want to admit, the shaking felt like something good coming instead of something bad.

We didn't go far, just twenty yards down a soft path to where the stream ran shallow over flat stones, black water and silver in the last light, and Sophia pointed with her chin and said that's your left-hand landmark, tent is the other direction, and I nodded and looked at the water and didn't move to go back right away. She didn't rush me. She just stood there with her hands in her pockets and let me look at the stream like it was the most interesting thing either of us had ever seen, and after a while she said, quietly, "You want to say something. I can tell. You've got the same face my daughter gets when she's building up to ask for a raise."

I laughed, which surprised me, because I hadn't laughed in a while. "It's that obvious?"

"It's that obvious."

So I looked at the stream instead of at her, and I said it, out loud, for the first time to anybody. "I came here to say thank you. To Robbie. Thirty years of friendship, thirty years, and he never married either, and he never once made me feel weird about it, and every Christmas he drives down from Seattle with too many presents and fixes whatever's broken in my kitchen, and I wanted to give him something back. Something big. And I didn't know how. That's the whole truth of it, I didn't know how to thank a man after all those years without it turning into something either of us would have to run from."

"And so he arranged for you to thank him here, in a way where nobody has to run."

"Yeah. Well. When he told me about this weekend, over coffee two weeks ago, I was so mad I spilled half my cup. And then on the drive home I realized I was mad because he'd seen through me before I'd seen through myself." I kicked a pinecone toward the water. "Is that crazy?"

"That's not crazy," Sophia said. "That's probably the sanest thing anybody's said at this camp all season."

We walked back to the fire, and Ricky and Robbie were talking trail beta, some ridge, some water source, regular guy stuff, and it made the whole thing feel almost normal for a few minutes, four adults around a fire in late September, and I sat down on my log with my tea gone cold and thought, okay, Shauna, you said it, the thanks, now what. Because I had walked two miles with shaking legs and said my piece to the stream, and there was still a whole night ahead of me and no script for any of it.

Ricky must have read that off me too, because he said, "No agenda tonight. That's in the rules I emailed you. If the night ends with everybody asleep by ten, that's a complete success, and I mean that literally, I've had trips like that and they were good trips." Then he stood and stretched and said he was going to check the woodpile, which was clearly a polite fiction, because the woodpile was ten feet away and stacked like a fortress, and he left the three of us by the fire.

"He does that," Sophia said. "Gives people air."

"Is he gone long?"

"Long as it takes. Sometimes twenty minutes, sometimes an hour. Once, forty minutes in the rain, just letting a guest cry it out." She turned on her log so she was angled toward me, easy, nothing squared up or confrontational about it, and the firelight moved on her face. "Can I ask you something now, since you asked me stuff?"

"Fair's fair, I guess."

"When you think about tonight, and be honest with yourself if not with me, what does your body want? Not what you should want, not what you're embarrassed about wanting. Your body."

I sat with that for a second, and it was a hard question, because I'd spent so long not asking my body anything that it had sort of stopped answering. "I don't know," I said, and then, because she just waited, patient as the