Wild

I opened my box and found not only the envelope that held my twenty dollars, but another envelope that held another twenty dollars—the one that was meant to have been in my box at the Shelter Cove Resort, which I must have mispacked months before. It was all the same now. I’d made it through with my two pennies, and my reward was that I was now rich with forty dollars and two cents. I paid for my coffee, bought a packaged cookie, and asked the man if there were any showers, but he only shook his head as I looked at him, crestfallen. It was a resort without showers or a restaurant, there was a driving, drizzling rain, and it was something like 55 degrees out.

I refilled my coffee cup and thought about whether I should hike on that day or not. There wasn’t much reason to stay, and yet going back out to walk in the woods with all my wet things was not only dispiriting but possibly dangerous—the inescapable wet chill put me at risk of hypothermia. At least here I could sit in the warmth of the store. I’d been alternately sweating hot or freezing cold for going on three days. I was tired, both physically and psychologically. I’d hiked a few half days, but I hadn’t had a full day off since Crater Lake. Plus, much as I looked forward to reaching the Bridge of the Gods, I wasn’t in any hurry. I was close enough now that I knew I’d easily make it by my birthday. I could take my time.

“We don’t have showers, young lady,” said the old man, “but I can give you dinner tonight, if you’d like to join me and a couple of the staff at five.”

“Dinner?” My decision to stay was made.

I returned to my camp and did my best to dry my things out in between rain showers. I heated a pot of water and hunched naked near it, bathing myself with my bandanna. I took apart my water purifier, shook out the muck that the sandy-haired man had sucked up into it, and ran clean water through my pump so I could use it again. A few minutes before I was going to walk to the small building where I’d been instructed to go for dinner, the Three Young Bucks appeared, soaking wet and dreamier than ever. I literally leapt with joy at the sight of them. I explained to them that I was off to have dinner and they could probably have dinner with me too and I’d be right back to get them if they could, but when I reached the little building and inquired, the woman in charge was unmoved by their arrival.

“We don’t have enough food,” she said. I felt guilty about sitting down to eat, but I was starving. Dinner was family fare, the kind I’d eaten at a thousand potlucks as a kid in Minnesota. Cheddar-cheese-topped casserole with ground beef, canned corn, and potatoes with an iceberg lettuce salad. I filled my plate and ate it in about five bites and sat politely waiting for the woman to cut the yellow cake with white frosting that sat enticingly on a side table. When she did, I ate a piece and then returned to discreetly take another—the biggest piece in the pan—and folded it into a paper napkin and put it in the pocket of my raincoat.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d better get back to my friends.”

I walked across the wet grass, holding the cake very carefully inside my coat. It was only 5:30, but it was so dark and dreary it might as well have been the middle of the night.

“There you are. I was looking for you,” a man called to me. It was the ranger who’d given me my box and letters that morning. He was blotting his lips with a dish towel. “I’m talking funny,” he slurred as I approached him. “I had some surgery on my mouth today.”

I pulled my hood up over my head because it had started to rain again. He seemed slightly drunk in addition to having the troubles with his mouth.

“So how about you come to my place for a drink now? You can get out of the rain,” he said in his garbled voice. “My place is right there, the other half of the station. I got a fire going in the fireplace and I’ll mix you up a nice cocktail or two.”

“Thanks, but I can’t. My friends just got here and we’re all camped,” I said, gesturing to the rise beyond the road, behind which my tent and probably by now the tents of the Three Young Bucks were erected. As I did so, I had a precise image of what the Three Young Bucks were likely doing at that very moment, the way they’d be crouched beneath their raincoats in the rain, trying to eat their loathsome dinners, or sitting alone in their tents because there was simply no other place to be, and then I thought of that warm fire and the booze and how if the men went with me to drink with the ranger I could use them to help me dodge whatever else he had in mind. “But maybe,” I wavered, as the ranger drooled and then blotted his mouth. “I mean, as long as it’s okay to bring my friends.”