Trail's Edge

Let me tell you about the worst idea I've had in years, and I once tried to learn kiteboarding at thirty-four. See? The trip has scrambled my brain already and we haven't even made camp yet.

The idea was this: take my girlfriend Ariel, who had never in her adult life slept anywhere without a solid door and a functioning thermostat, on a three-day backcountry hike in Greyrock National Park. She would love it, I told myself. It would bond us, I told myself. I am an outdoor trainer. I do this for a living. How hard could it be to share the thing I love most with the person I love second most?

Very hard! It turns out it can be very hard!

I should have known this already, because my ex taught it to me the slow way over two years: you cannot push someone into your world and expect them to thank you. Amara, my climber ex, pushed me into ice climbing once. I hated every frozen minute of it, and I resented her a little for months afterward, and we eventually laughed about it, but only years later. So you'd think I'd have learned. You'd think! But no. I saw Ariel watching my trip photos with that soft hungry look she gets, and I said "come with me next time," and before I knew it I had booked permits for the Greyrock backcountry like some kind of evangelist.

Ariel is twenty-eight. She's a graphic designer, she does yoga, she once backpacked across Portugal with a roller suitcase. I want the roller suitcase noted as a warning sign I ignored.

And now it's day one, late afternoon, and I'm watching her try to hang a bear bag from a branch fifteen feet up, and she has been at it for eleven minutes, and I am having feelings.

Not good feelings! Well. Mixed feelings. That's the honest version, isn't it? I'm standing here with my arms crossed like some park ranger of the soul, watching this gorgeous woman throw a rock tied to string at a branch for the eleventh time, and half of me wants to take the bag from her and do it myself in one throw, and the other half is watching the way her shirt rides up when she winds up, and thinking things a ranger would definitely write me up for.

The rock sails wide again.

"Trish," she calls, without turning around, "I can hear you judging me."

"I'm not judging," I lie. "I'm admiring your persistence."

"You're doing the exhale thing. The one where you breathe out through your nose like a disappointed horse."

Okay, that's fair. I do have a disappointed-horse exhale. Amara named it too, which should tell me something about myself, namely that I have been doing it for at least six years and possibly my whole life.

"Want me to show you a trick?" I call back.

"I want you to let me fail with dignity!"

That made me laugh, I'll give her that. She winds up again, this narrow wiry woman with ink on her forearms and her hair in a messy braid, and this time the rock clips the branch, and the rope snags, and the bag actually goes up. She cheers. She does a little jump. I cheer too, because what else can you do when the person you dragged into the woods conquers a branch?

The trouble started around mile six, if I'm being truthful with myself, which I try to be on the page even when it makes me look bad. Ariel slowed down. That's not a crime, obviously, she was carrying a pack for the first time in her life, of course she slowed down. But I kept pace in front of her, because that's what I do, I set pace, it's my whole professional identity, and every time I looked back and saw her thirty feet behind with her face all pinched, I got this itch between my shoulder blades. And instead of stopping and asking how she was doing, I said things like "almost there" and "just past that ridge," which are the two most hated sentences in all of outdoorsmanship, and I knew that, and I said them anyway.

Twice she asked how much farther and I rounded down. Rounded down! Me! The person who teaches wilderness ethics workshops!

By the time we got to the campsite beside the creek I was professionally ashamed of myself and pretending not to be, and Ariel was quietly furious and pretending even harder, and we set up the tent in a silence you could have used for soundproofing.

So there we were. Greyrock National Park, a campsite under old-growth cedars, a creek going by loud enough to talk over, which is why I like these spots. Water noise covers awkward pauses. It also covers other noises, but we'll get to that later or we won't, depends how the evening goes.

Ariel got the stove going, because I taught her that on the porch at home and it stuck, and then she got the water filtering, and then she stood there holding the filter hose and looking at the tent like it owed her money.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Ariel."

"I said nothing, Trish!"

See, when she uses my name like that, flat and clipped, it means something is very much wrong. I let it go anyway, because I was still smarting from the horse thing, and I busied myself with the food bag, and we ate rehydrated pasta in tolerant silence like two coworkers at a sad office lunch.

Then the light went. It goes fast under the cedars, faster than you'd think, and I noticed Ariel had stopped eating and was just pushing noodles around her pouch with her fork, and her shoulders had crept up around her ears.

"Hey," I said, softer. "Talk to me. What's going on?"

She looked at the trees, and then at the tent, and then at her boots, and when she finally spoke her voice came out small, which it almost never does, because Ariel is the loud one, the confident one, the one who argues with contractors.

"I'm exhausted," she said. "Like, bone tired. My shoulders are shredded. And I know you rounded the distances down, by the way, I did the math on the map while you were filtering water, so don't even."

I opened my mouth to defend myself and closed it again. Guilty as charged!

"And," she went on, and here her voice did the small thing again, "it's going to get fully dark soon, and I've never been somewhere actually dark before. Like real dark. City dark is not dark. I don't know what to do with it. I'm kind of scared, okay? There. I said it. Your girlfriend is scared of the dark like some big baby."

"You're not a baby," I said.

"I feel like one."

And I don't know exactly how to describe what happened in my chest at that, except that all the irritation went out of me at once, like somebody had pulled a plug. She'd carried a thirty-pound pack for nine miles for me. She'd hung a bear bag. She'd eaten rehydrated pasta without complaint. And she'd been quietly terrified the whole time and hadn't said a word until now, because she didn't want to disappoint me, because I'd been doing the disappointed-horse exhale every time she slowed down.

God, I'm a piece of work sometimes!

I scooted around the fire ring and put my arm around her, and she leaned into me, all tense muscle and trail stink, and I said, "I'm sorry. I pushed you into this and then I pushed you down the trail too. That was wrong and I knew it while I was doing it."

She snorted. "You do the horse thing, for future reference."

"Noted. Anything else for future reference?"

"Yeah. When I say how much farther, I want the real number, even if it's bad. Especially if it's bad."

"Real numbers from now on. Scout's honor!"

"Were you even a scout?"

"For three weeks. It was the sash that interested me."

That got a laugh out of her, finally, a real one, and I felt her shoulders come down off her ears. The dark was coming on for real now, the blue kind first, and I pointed out that the creek would keep talking all night, and that the dark out here isn't empty the way city dark is. It's crowded, actually. Owls and mice and whatever else. You're never alone in it, you just can't see your neighbors.

"That's either reassuring or a horror movie premise," she said.

"Both. That's the beauty of it."

She looked up at the first visible star, then back at me, and I saw something in her face I couldn't quite read, something between fear and appetite, and it did things to me that I will admit to freely since this is my own story.

"So," she said, "you're saying the dark is crowded?"

"Completely crowded."

"Crowded enough that nobody would hear anything?"

The question hung there. "Crowded enough that nobody would hear anything?"

I want you to understand my state at that moment. I had one hand on her knee, a belly full of rehydrated pasta, and a girlfriend looking at me like I was dessert she hadn't decided on yet. And what did I do? The trainer in me took the wheel. Because of course it did.

"Well, sound carries a little by the creek," I said. "But generally, yeah, you can make all the noise you want out here."

"Generally," she repeated.

"Wind direction matters. Owls don't gossip."

"Trish. That was supposed to be flirting. You gave me a conditions report."

I opened my mouth. I closed it. She was right! I had given her a conditions report! Who does that? Who takes a question like that, a question with obvious promise in it, and answers it like a park ranger? Me, apparently. Me with my trail numbers and my bear bag technique and my rounded-down mileage.

"Okay, wait," I said, and she was already standing up, brushing pine needles off her rear, and I could tell from her posture this wasn't going where I'd hoped. "Ariel, hold on."

"No, you know what? Let me just say it, because I've been chewing on it since mile six." She pointed her fork at me, which is less threatening than it sounds and more threatening than it sounds, both at once. "You know what today felt like? It felt like a client weekend. Like I'm some corporate group you took up Greyrock for team building. 'Hydrate, Ariel.' 'Watch your footwork, Ariel.' 'Ten more minutes, Ariel, promise.' Was any of that real?"

"That's not fair," I started.

"Isn't it? You rounded the distance down twice. Twice. Who rounds down twice? A trainer with a client who's about to quit, that's who."

The fire popped. Somewhere across the creek something small went about its small business. I sat there holding my pouch of noodles like it could defend me.

"It's not the same," I said, and even I heard how weak it came out. "I teach groups, yes, but you're not..."

"Don't you dare say you forgot I'm your girlfriend. That would be worse."

"I wasn't going to say that."

"Then what were you going to say?"

Honestly? Nothing good. My whole mouth was a stack of draft versions and every one of them was wrong. So I said the true dumb thing instead. "I wanted you to have a good trip. I wanted you to love it the way I love it, and every time you slowed down I panicked a little, and panicking trainers do what trainers do, which is push. That's it. That's the whole ugly machine."

"God." She flung her arms out at the whole forest. "Do you hear yourself? You even apologize in curriculum."

She spun away from me and stood at the edge of the firelight with her back to me, and I watched the firelight move on the ink of her forearms, and I thought, here it comes, she's going to tell me she wants to go home, she's going to ask how fast we can hike out in the morning, and I was already doing grief math on the tent site fee and the shuttle, when she turned around.

Her face had changed. I don't know how else to put it. The anger was still in there but it had shifted into something with more current running through it.

"I didn't come here to be managed, Trish," she said. "You get that, right? I have a job. I manage contractors. I don't need a second job being your slowest client."

"No. Okay. No managing."

"Good." She took one step closer to the