“Found anything yet?” A breeze pushed over the patio. After spending a hot day on the docks, the temperature had melted to that perfect point of equilibrium it can hit in the summer dusk.
“Tourists can be really fucking stupid and shouldn’t be allowed to drive motorboats.”
Her eyes widened, mock impressed. “National Book Award, here you come.”
A sheepish sound burped out of me. “No, I don’t know. I just started realizing that I’ve never lived outside North Carolina. I’ve never really been anywhere other than on study abroad, and this seems like the time to do it. Broke it off with my college girlfriend, packed my bags… Maybe I’ll stay out here for a few years.”
She wrinkled her nose. “It gets old faster than you think. It attracts a lot of people with simplistic narratives and epistemologies who are nevertheless very impressed with themselves. Remember Lucy?”
How could I forget.
“She’s the textbook example. These folks work seasonal jobs and then spend all their time skiing and climbing—which is cool, don’t get me wrong. Part of why I came out here was to bag peaks and break my arm on a slope. But they’re the surf bums of the mountains. Not engaged with the world, just passengers who figure as long as the train’s running, what’s the point of paying attention to how it operates? Enjoy the scenery. It’s an attitude…” She paused and put her fingers to her temples. “It makes me insane. Lucy and I had it out about that while she was yapping bullshit about chakras. They ski down these beautiful slopes and don’t care about why the snowpack is vanishing beneath them.”
I didn’t know what to say to this, so I said, “Interesting.” And picked at a cuticle.
She bugged out her eyes again—what I’d come to know as a very Kate expression. “And the men—ugh!—they have a real fucking holier than thou attitude about it.” She lowered her voice. “ ‘Bro, I could never be one of those robots working in a cubicle all day. I gotta live for my maker!’ ” She smirked. “Jesus. Okay, I’m done with self-righteous monologues. Don’t let me sit here and yak at you, Tar Heel. Give me more of your deal. How ’bout that ex?”
The waiter came with our meals, sliding gleaming white plates piled high with photogenic Thai food beneath our conversation. I sped through my ex, Candace, and our amicable breakup that took her to Atlanta to work in finance. She pressed me for more: My older sister now working in Charlotte, my mother’s role in running charity golf tournaments, and then out came the family business. I could feel myself sounding so dull. I searched to change this narrative I could feel developing.
“I saw all my friends getting ready to keep doing the same things we’d been doing in Chapel Hill, and with Candace going to Atlanta, I saw what that path looked like and just wanted to try anything else. See where it goes with no expectations. And hey, I’m friends with a Macedonian guy, so I’m already feeling more worldly.”
I stared at the peaks of the Tetons, afraid to meet her bored gaze.
“Does all that sound so stupid?”
“No.” And when I looked, she was not bored. Her smile reached to her eyes. “You’re cute, kid.”
After that night, she really got into my head in that way a new person does, making you feel buoyant. After dinner we’d spent hours in a bar drinking cheap beer and pumping quarters into the jukebox until Kate said she had to go home, citing an early drive to Yellowstone the next morning for work.
“Was this like a onetime polite dinner thing or can I ask you out again?”
“I don’t go on dates,” she said, picking up her pint glass with a heartachingly small amount of beer left at the bottom. “And I don’t do boyfriends. The last time I had a boyfriend was in middle school.”
“What I’m asking is can we hang out again?”
“Sure. But we’re doing something fun next time.” She threw back the last of her beer, slammed the glass down, and straight up shouted in my face, “None of this bitch stuff!” before erupting into her husky giggles.
She suggested the Paintbrush Canyon-Cascade Canyon Loop, her favorite hike in the Tetons. It was just under twenty miles. She’d reserved a campsite on the Paintbrush and we’d finish on the back side of the Teton Range in Cascade Canyon. I wanted to leap right out of my skin and wave it around my head like a victory towel.
What I did not anticipate when we began the Paintbrush Trail, hiking up steep switchbacks, the path like a tunnel through the towering pines, was how goddamn exhausting this “date” would be. We set out at 9:30 a.m., Kate in the lead. Twenty minutes after that I’d broken my first sweat. An hour later, I’d stripped out of my flannel shirt and soaked through my T-shirt. I’d volunteered to take the first shift carrying the tent. Kate had warned me that it was heavy and that we should probably switch off every couple hours, but I’d planned to forge ahead the whole day with the yellow bundle strapped to the bottom of my pack. Two hours in, my shoulders and back were throbbing, and I was checking my phone to determine an appropriate time to let her take it. I’d caddied every summer for ten years. I’d thought I was in fine shape.
She finally suggested we break. I unstrapped my backpack and let it clatter to the dirt with relief.
“How you doing?” she asked, pulling an apple and a Clif Bar from her pack.
“You can leave me here for the wolves,” I gasped, then took a long pull from my water bottle.
“We’re doing about a four-thousand-foot gain. If this is your first hike since you got here, it’s probably not the best place to start. Just don’t collapse. I can’t carry you and the tent.”
As far as dates go, it didn’t have much to recommend it: one foot in front of the other, eyes set on Kate’s heels and muscular backside (okay, it had that going), trying to keep pace with her and feeling like an epic wuss, my legs, back, and shoulders burning. She took the tent and that helped a little on the next two-hour leg, but the dread settled in and stayed. What if I actually couldn’t finish this? We stopped around one thirty to eat again. Kate propped her bag on a rock and dug past a can of bear spray. She checked the trail map on her phone. I uncapped my camera, an expensive Canon EOS that had been another graduation gift from my mom. I snapped away at the woods, too tired to put much effort into it.
“Okay, we have a choice,” said Kate. “Our campsite, the one we reserved, it’s only about an hour short of the Paintbrush Divide.”
“Which is what again?”
“That’s like the peak of the hike. I’m kind of thinking we push on and camp on the divide. It’ll be windy as hell—not to mention illegal—but the chances a park ranger will come by are virtually zero.”
“And the upside?”
She squinted like, Um, should we start back at the ABCs? “We’ll see the sunset from the most beautiful place in Wyoming, which means it’s close to the most beautiful place in the world.”
Without a doubt, I did not want to do this. I was seriously wondering if I’d get altitude sickness and have to be rescued by chopper. Yet I sensed the test inherent in her suggestion. This wasn’t a test of my masculinity, but a test of how I dealt with being out of my element. Our every interaction felt like an exam, and now I wondered if maybe this woman was just too much for me. If she’d test me to collapse.
I forced a smile. “As long as you can carry me all day tomorrow.”
As we climbed higher, the trees disappeared, and soon the trail was nothing more than a dirt path cut into an enormous slab of sloping mountain, loose stones skittering down an abyss with every footstep. Huge patches of snow still covered the ground, and we could see the beaten, muddy trail of those who’d marched before us. We were ascending again, and my legs almost couldn’t comply. The burn shot from my hips down to my calves. My back and shoulders were on fire; the tent felt like an anchor. Perspiration again soaked my T-shirt and yet at this altitude the air was frigid, the wind icy, so I had my flannel and a windbreaker on, which only made me sweat harder. Even Kate finally looked like she felt it. Her tireless pace slowed. The back of her gray tank top was soaked through, and she stopped to pull her jacket on. If breathing was a chore before, now I felt a bit of terror at the conscious effort of each inhalation. I felt not just tired but ill. Sick to my stomach, sick in my head, dizzy, and diarrheal. I could only stare into the violet of the fading daylight and wait for it to pass.