Trail Rules

I got the tent up in about twenty minutes, which felt like a personal record considering I had not slept in a real bed in six months without checking my phone first, and I stood back in the late afternoon light and looked at the little dome of green nylon sitting there under the pines and felt almost proud of myself for getting this far. The campsite was at the far end of the loop past the last water pump, the kind of spot the booking site warned you about, no shade before noon and a scramble down to the creek, and that was exactly why I had picked it, because after Jerry left in the spring I decided I was done sharing anything with anyone for a while, including campsites. I am thirty-four years old and I had spent four years with a man who folded my maps for me, and now the maps were mine again and crooked and I liked them better that way.

I unpacked the rest of the bag with the kind of focus you only get when you are trying not to think, sleeping pad, stove, the little bag at the very bottom that I set down a little too fast, and I was crouched over the cooler deciding whether the beer went in the creek or the shade when a voice came from behind me and nearly made me drop the whole thing.

"Nice guy hitch on that rainfly, most folks get that backwards."

He was standing at the edge of the site in a ranger uniform with his hands loose at his sides, mid-thirties, sandy hair going grey at the temples, and he had the easy look of a man who had already said the same thing to forty campers this week and meant it every time anyway. His name tag said Steve.

"That's because I did it backwards," I said. "Then fixed it. Twice."

"Well, it looks right now, so you win." He nodded at the site the way you nod at a well-set table. "Quiet season. You picked the best week we get all year, honestly. Cool nights, warm days, and you could shout your name off the Ridge Loop and nobody would hear you but the squirrels."

We talked for a few minutes the way you do, where I was from, was I out here alone, did I have the bear canister, and I told him I was alone on purpose and I had the canister and yes I knew about the food storage rule, and he laughed and said most people knew about the rule and ignored it anyway, and that got him going on the subject of rules, which he clearly found funny in a tired professional way.

"Everybody who comes up here writes themselves a rule," he said, leaning against the fire ring post. "Hikers write down twenty miles a day and do eleven. Fishermen swear they'll pack out every lure they drop and lose four. And the campers, well, the campers are the worst. Quiet hours at ten, lights out by eleven, and every single one of them is up past midnight whispering around a fire they swore they wouldn't light. People love making rules they can break. It's the breaking they like. The rule is just the gift wrap."

I liked him immediately, maybe too much, and I felt that looseness you get out here where nobody knows you and the trees do not gossip, and before I could stop myself I said the thing that had been sitting in the back of my head since the parking lot, or honestly since the packing, when I had stood in my bedroom holding that little velvet pouch and asking myself what exactly I thought this trip was for.

"So what if I made some," I said. "Rules. For myself. Out here. Wrote them down and everything, and then we'd see."

He raised an eyebrow, but he was smiling. "We?"

"I don't want to be alone doing it, that's the point, that's the whole point of the trip being a failure so far." I waved a hand at the site, the empty fire ring, the tent, the bag sitting there with its shameful little pouch in it. "You're here, I'm here, the season's dead, and you clearly like watching people break rules professionally. So. Paper and pen. Five rules, no stakes, nobody owes anybody anything. If I keep all five I get to gloat. If I break them, well."

"Well," he said, and he drew the word out like he was testing the weight of it, and then he went to his pack and came back with an actual little notepad, the kind with the waterproof pages, and I decided right there that the forest service was overpaying him.

We sat on the cooler lid and the log and worked it out, and it took a while because he was serious about it in a way I had not expected, asking me what I actually wanted and what I actually didn't, and I found myself saying things out loud that I had never said to anyone, not even to Jerry in four years, and Steve just wrote them down and read them back and did not flinch once. He told me plainly what he was up for and what he wasn't, and I said the same back, and we agreed on all of it before anything happened, and that part mattered to me more than I could explain to him yet.

The rules came out like this, in his tidy ranger handwriting, numbered.

One, no loud noises, nothing the next campsite could hear, except there was no next campsite, which was the fun of it. Two, keep your clothes on at all times. Three, stay on the marked trail. Four, no touching each other. Five, nothing finishes before sunset, and sunset that week was at seven forty-one, he checked.

He read the list out loud and I felt my face go hot at rule two and rule four in particular, sitting there in ink, and he tore the page free and handed it to me like it was a permit.

"You keep this," he said. "Ranger's copy stays with the ranger. Any rule you want gone, say so, and it's gone, no questions. Any time you want the whole thing