“What about you,” I said. “On vacation, too? Kids of your own?”
“Nawp, nawp.” I heard his voice change a bit. Or maybe it had been like that before and I just hadn’t noticed. “I’m here permanent. Live over in Kalispell, about a half hour from the western edge of the park. I run my own company, actually, lead adventure tours of the backcountry. Some fishing, some horse, some canoe. Heck, licensed in hot-air balloons, haven’t had the opportunity to do much of that. And in my free time, do volunteer work in the park, trail maintenance and the like.” He pointed back behind the Visitor Center. “If you’ve hiked the Highline, you’ve seen some of my handiwork: reinforced cable wire so you don’t go tumbling. Just for heavy wind. Just in case.” His smile was easy and generous. “And no kids,” he said, holding up his hands, thick, muscular.
“Wow,” I said. The wind was picking up. Somewhere around that moment, I realized I was going to have to reassess Scully here. What I mean is, he wasn’t the guy I’d always assumed he’d become. I hadn’t really thought about him over the years, but in my not-thinking, punctuated with the occasional thought, he’d become someone else. An engineer, like me. Or a lawyer. Or maybe gotten his M.B.A., gone into business. It was assumed. I didn’t need to consult an alumni directory or Google him to confirm it. Maybe I’d bump into him at the twentieth, and he’d be Old Scully, “Skulky,” junior partner at his firm, or head of Public Relations. He’d have a wife with a tan that you couldn’t miss even under reunion lighting. Maybe I’d have a brief, drunken flirtation with her. He’d have a kid, maybe two. One of them would want to talk internship.
The guy in front of me quite simply wasn’t the right Scully. It was someone who had begun as Scully but whose life had diverged imperceptibly from Scully’s at some point, two vectors departing from a single node. An old professor of mine, O’Connor, had explained this sort of thing best: “Shooting an arrow at a razor blade,” he’d said, “and hitting it dead-on.” I pictured O’Connor with his crazy beard, sketching it out while standing amid the chalk and all the equations.
“Did you say the Highline?” I said.
He pointed. “A ten, maybe twelve-minute walk from here to the trailhead. That’s where the catch line is. If you haven’t done it, I highly suggest we do. No pun intended,” he said. Maybe my face showed reservation. He added, “Don’t worry — it’ll hold ya!” His laugh was puffed out with air, like an accordion. I’d kind of thought of Scully as being mildly asthmatic.
What bothered me most was not that I had to revise my initial impressions, but that I couldn’t find any trace of the old Scully here, as if he’d been wiped utterly away. I wanted something — the grade grubbing, the carping about the special treatment of athletes on game days, the boasting about his dad’s trips to Singapore and Hong Kong — that I could fix onto, attach to the guy that I remembered. And none of it was there. It was like he’d just thrown the old Scully over the side of a cliff.
“Hey, why don’t we go check out that trail of yours?” I said. “Hey, kids, Scully helps to build the trails here in the park. He’s like a ranger.” I looked at Lena. “We can take a few minutes to see the trailhead of the Highline Trail, no?”
Lena looked a bit confused. She said, “These guys need food.”
“Oh, I’ve got stuff,” declared Scully. “They like granola bars? The chewy kind?” He offered a thumbs-up, and when I returned it, he said, “Wait right here.”
Scully handed out the chocolate chip and the peanut butter bars, and we set off through shrubbery and scruff. The whole family was chewing as we followed the trail through its downward dip, passing through a meadow. I’d pinned a compass to my shirt pocket, and now watched the needle bobbing in the general direction we were headed. We were surrounded by mountains — two to our left, one behind, and a ridge straight ahead. Above that was a giant pile of rock shards culled together. Behind it lurked a mountain that resembled a skyscraper. It felt as if they’d been designed by some architect, even the ice field mimicking a sheet of glass.
Lena was looking down, pointing to the wildflowers that dotted the grass with yellow and orange-red. She said, “Those are glacier lilies. That’s Indian paintbrush.”
Scully said, “Right you are. Pretty good for a bunch of city slickers.” Kelly skipped off the trail and reached down to grab a handful.
Gently, Scully called, “Hey, you don’t want to pick those.”
She looked at Lena, who, in turn, looked at Scully, who shook his head.
“No, honey,” said Lena to Kelly, pulling her by the sleeve back onto the trail.
Kelly looked like she was about to cry, and Scully leaned over, patted her head, and said, “It’s okay. Just that the growing season here is real short, so our meadows are real delicate.”
We moved together. I watched the backs of Emmett’s sneakers, flashing red bulbs. Each of his steps looked like a potential stumble. We stopped to watch mountain goats on the side of a hill; they seemed unperturbed by the steepness, well over forty-five degrees. Scruffy, absorbed only by the next mouthful, they barely noticed us. “Yes, they’re eating an early dinner,” said Lena to Emmett. Then she turned to Scully. “It’s amazing that they can walk up there.”
“These goats love the extreme angles.” He indicated this with his hands. “That’s how they protect ’emselves. Occasionally, they’ll use those horns, too, mostly with one another. Sometimes you’ll see them square off.” His brought his fists together as he added, “Mostly the males, during mating season.”
“Typical,” Lena snorted.
Scully laughed, like she’d gotten at some secret about him. “There’s one spot in the park, though, where there’s a salt lick. It’s up on the side of a moraine, practically vertical. They go crazy over there. All bets are off. You’ll see males knocking females out of the way. Even kids are fair game. No pun intended.” He smiled again, glancing at the kids. “Yeah, salt makes ’em go nuts. Heck, they’ve been known to lick unsuspecting hikers.”
Lena turned to him, and she must’ve looked confused. He held up his arm, which was glistening, and said, “Sweat. Yum, huh?”
“Aha,” she said. Then she started asking him a lot of questions. “Speaking of hiking,” she said, “what are these hikes you organize?” She asked him about his adventuring, about backcountry camping. “The only way to go,” I heard him say. She looked back and smirked at me, then said loudly, “I don’t know about backcountry. Maybe when I’m an old woman. Getting him to take a week off to go car camping has been an ordeal.” She turned back to Scully, and pretty soon I heard her talking about rock climbing and surfing. I’d forgotten about her surfing. For a moment, I thought he was going to put his arm around her, give her a consolation hug, slip her a brochure.
Now, no matter how I’ve depicted myself up till now, I’m not the type to backpedal from what’s on my mind, even at the risk of ruffling some feathers. I listened, like I always do, staring at the little green patches on Scully’s pack. But at some point when the trail opened up just a bit, I eased myself forward next to him so that we were in a line. “Scully,” I said. “I have to ask. What happened to the guy I knew from high school? This,” I said, giving him a double solid open palm on the shoulder, “is all well and good. I mean, you’ve done quite well for yourself. But. .” I paused. What was I getting at? “What happened to the Scully I remember? You know, the grade grubber, the guy who made a stink about the way athletes got coddled. The guy who used to tell us he would follow in his father’s footsteps and beat the pulp out of the Nikkei. No offense, Scully,” I added.