------------------------------------------------------------------------
She was waggling a registration slip for the park in the air, a little yellow thing the color of the leaves. You were supposed to pay by dropping two dollars into the registration box at the trailhead and then posting your registration slip in the front windshield of your car before you started hiking. Almost no one actually did this, but I had a soft spot for this particular trail, a favorite of Ellie’s and mine, and so I always made sure we left our two dollars. We took turns paying, and it was Ellie’s turn this time. I had paid all in dimes and nickels last time, to both of our amusement.
“Do you have a dollar?” she asked. “I only have one.” Somehow, the way she said it made it not a question.
I felt like rolling my eyes, but I restrained myself and pulled out my wallet, rifled through the assortment of old receipts mixed in with my bills. I had a dollar, but I almost told Ellie I didn’t. Why would I do something like that? It’s just a stupid dollar. I just didn’t want to give it to her. Teach her a lesson for forgetting her money for what suddenly seemed like the thousandth time. Or was I just being childish in return to what I perceived as her irresponsibility?
Now I was annoyed at myself instead of her. I felt like I was being petty, but on some level, it seemed like it would feel good to make her pay for the registration. After all, it was her turn. I sighed and pulled out my dollar, handed it to her, still not sure why I was doing it. Or why I cared so much that I was doing it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. I had hoped my one-man argument had gone unnoticed. Apparently I was more transparent than I thought.
“Nothing. Can we just get going?” I tried to make this sound as amiable as I could.
“Yeah. Put this in the window.” Her voice was that artificially light tone, the tone that meant she was letting me get away with something just because she was too tired to drag it out of me. That was good enough for me at the moment. She tore off the edge of the registration slip, and I stuck it to the windshield from the inside, locked the car up and turned back to the trailhead. I caught sight of her up ahead, already heading around the first bend and up the hill.
I followed quickly, determined to catch her for whatever reason, scuffling my boot heels the whole way so she couldn’t help but hear me coming. I pulled alongside her quickly enough, then slowed down to keep pace, ignoring the feeling of her eyes burning into the side of my head and watching my own shoes, waiting to see which one of us would crack, or if we’d get all the way to the top of the hill without saying anything. My money was on the latter. Ellie was stubborn, I was apathetic. The race was on.
The trail up to the summit—which itself was more of a plateau than a peak—was a series of increasingly steeper switchbacks, and as we started up the first hill, I found myself following Ellie’s pendulum ponytail again. She’d surged ahead of me while I was watching the parking lot fall away to our left. This time, I was happy to leave her up there. I have a neurotic compulsion to micromanage every hiking experience, and being able to see everyone else involved ahead of me is a lot easier than having to repeatedly look behind me to make sure nobody has died, or fallen off a ledge. And died.
Regardless of circumstances, I was still far short of the point of wanting Ellie to fall off a ledge. To be entirely fair, I had started out a long time ago holding her to a set of standards that she simply couldn’t have met—it wasn’t that these standards were extreme, necessarily, only that she wasn’t the person that I thought I needed. And, of course, it was all too easy for me to make that her fault.
All of these wonderful realizations would come later on, however. For now, I was angry and chasing her up the second switchback now, in a hurry, paradoxically, to get to the top, so that we could get back to the bottom and I could go home. Once upon a time, I had really enjoyed the weekends; getting away from my job was almost an impossible proposition in general, but occasionally spending a day outdoors with Ellie was the one way to guarantee that there wouldn’t be papers, or proposals, or gradebooks or attendance sheets on my mind for awhile. Somewhere along the line, though, the sheer weight of pretending that things between us were still as they had always been had crushed the free, diversionary spirit of our outings. Now, I was obligated to come along hiking when asked because to decline would mean skirting all-to-close to the truth: that things had changed. It was the same reason that Ellie still expressed “interest” in my writing, and why I accepted her false interest as genuine even though I knew better.
Third switchback. This one is particularly nasty in the sense that even the turn that leads into this switchback from the previous one is on an incline, so that you don’t even get the brief, but appreciated break that results when you at least get to make the turn on a flat patch of ground. Ellie pivoted military-style and stomped off up the trail without breaking stride. I was bewildered at her annoyance. I was the one being drug along here. Of course, it would never occur to me until much later that in this, as well as in many other situations, her frustration may well have been born of the same mother as mine—she didn’t want to be here, but wanted even less to tell me the truth.
I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, bending over and resting my palms on my knees like I had as an outfielder, years ago. Ellie continued on ahead. I let her. I wouldn’t have normally had this much trouble with the climb; thanks to the excellent location of the second-story loft we’d been renting for the last two years, I was able to walk both to work and to downtown on a daily basis, even during the winter. Generally, I had been in the best shape of my life for the last two years. Specifically, I had started smoking cigarettes lately as the pressure of the end of the semester had settled in, and it was hard to breathe in the chilly-for-April air.
I tried to catch my breath for a moment while shuffling my feet at the edge of a small patch of half-melted snow that must have been, judging by the configuration of rocks and trees around it, in the shade constantly for the last week since the snow had stopped falling. When my lungs still refused to cooperate, I straightened up and looked out over the boulder in front of me, through the trees that were just starting to show green needles thirty or so feet up their thin paper-peeling trunks. Beyond the trees was the rolling ocean of earth known as the Palouse, still covered by patches of snow in places, where the rises were pronounced enough that the fall between them was kept from the rays of a wan early-spring sun. Everywhere else it was the color of dead earth. Soon, maybe even in a matter of weeks, spring would take hold in earnest and the colors would change, the snow would melt, and the wheat which would eventually bend in the autumn wind would start sprouting in various greens. But not yet. Not today.
Ellie was almost out of sight at this point, around the next switchback. I could hear what I assumed was Emma and her entourage coming up behind me, a hill or so away. I didn’t really want to become entangled in either of these distractions, so I blew one more breath out in another cloud of steam and tromped off up the hill.
I only got a few steps before realizing that the shoestring from my right boot was whipping against my ankle with each step. Groaning at yet another distraction, I knelt down and was unsurprised to find that the reason the shoestring had come undone was because there simply wasn’t much of that shoestring left. I had had these hiking boots, gaudy green-and-gold as they were, for years, and they had been on all sorts of adventures with me. I had barely survived some of those adventures in one piece; it seemed unfair to hold my shoestring to a higher standard. I tied knots in what was left of both ends of the string so that it couldn’t slide completely out of the eyelets, and tucked the leftover string into the side of my boot. This hike was maybe two miles long, and I doubted my little equipment failure would give me any serious trouble in that amount of time.
By this time, Emma and company had caught up to me, and I decided to stay hunkered down in the hopes that they would simply pass by. I don’t normally have problems talking to strangers, but the cold and Ellie were making me defensive, and I just wanted to be ignored. Too bad for me.
“Hey!” A voice that could only have been Emma’s exploded right next to my ear. I almost fell over on my side. I turned in terror to see a face no more than six inches away from mine: chubby child cheeks with cold-flushed dimples, curly hair sticking out of a knit wool hat bearing running deer in too many colors, and bright blue eyes that saw past my apparently insignificant angst.
No comments:
Post a Comment