Wild

“What is?” I asked, turning to him, though I knew.

“Everything,” he said.

And it was true.

19 THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

The next morning the sky was clear blue, the sun shimmering on Olallie Lake, views of Mount Jefferson framed perfectly to the south and Olallie Butte to the north. I sat on one of the picnic tables near the ranger station, packing Monster for the final stretch of my hike. The Three Young Bucks had left at dawn, in a hurry to reach Canada before the High Cascades of Washington were snowed in, but I wasn’t going that far. I could take my time.

Guy appeared with a box in his hands, sober now, breaking me out of my contemplative trance. “I’m glad I caught you before you left. This just came,” he said.

I took the box from him and glanced at the return address. It was from my friend Gretchen. “Thanks for everything,” I said to Guy as he walked away. “For the drinks the other night and the hospitality.”

“Stay safe out there,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the building. I ripped open the box and gasped when I saw what was inside: a dozen fancy chocolates in shiny twisted wrappers and a bottle of red wine. I ate some chocolate immediately while pondering the wine. Much as I wanted to open it that night on the trail, I wasn’t willing to lug the empty bottle all the way to Timberline Lodge. I packed up the last of my things, strapped on Monster, picked up the wine and the empty box, and began to walk to the ranger station.

“Cheryl!” a voice boomed, and I turned.

“There you are! There you are! I caught you! I caught you!” shouted a man as he came at me. I was so startled, I dropped the box on the grass as the man shook his fists in the air and let out a joyous hoot that I recognized but couldn’t place. He was young and bearded and golden, different and yet the same as the last time I’d seen him. “Cheryl!” he yelled again as he practically tackled me into an embrace.

It was as if time moved in slow motion from the moment that I didn’t know who he was to the moment that I did know, but I couldn’t take it into my consciousness until he had me all the way in his arms and I yelled, “DOUG!”

“Doug, Doug, Doug!” I kept saying.

“Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl!” he said to me.

Then we went silent and stepped back and looked at each other.

“You’ve lost weight,” he said.

“So have you,” I said.

“You’re all broken in now,” he said.

“I know! So are you.”

“I have a beard,” he said, tugging on it. “I have so much to tell you.”

“Me too! Where’s Tom?”

“He’s a few miles back. He’ll catch up later.”

“Did you make it through the snow?” I asked.

“We did some, but it got to be too intense and we came down and ended up bypassing.”

I shook my head, still shocked he was standing there. I told him about Greg getting off the trail and asked him about Albert and Matt.

“I haven’t heard anything about them since we saw them last.” He looked at me and smiled, his eyes sparkling to life. “We read your notes in the register all summer long. They motivated us to crank. We wanted to catch up to you.”

“I was just leaving now,” I said. I bent to retrieve the empty box I’d dropped in the excitement. “Another minute and I’d have been gone and who knows if you’d have caught me.”

“I’d have caught you,” he said, and laughed in that golden boy way that I remembered so vividly, though it was altered now too. He was grittier than he’d been before, slightly more shaken, as if he’d aged a few years in the past months. “You want to hang out while I organize my things and we can leave together?”

“Sure,” I said without hesitation. “I’ve got to hike those last days before I get into Cascade Locks alone—you know, just to finish like I started—but let’s hike together to Timberline Lodge.”

“Holy shit, Cheryl.” He pulled me in for another hug. “I can’t believe we’re here together. Hey, you still have that black feather I gave you?” He reached to touch its ragged edge.

“It was my good luck charm,” I said.

“What’s with the wine?” he asked, pointing to the bottle in my hand.

“I’m going to give it to the ranger,” I replied, lifting it high. “I don’t want to carry it all the way to Timberline.”

“Are you insane?” Doug asked. “Give me that bottle.”

We opened it that night at our camp near the Warm Springs River with the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife. The day had warmed into the low seventies, but the evening was cool, the crisp edge of summer turning to autumn everywhere around us. The leaves on the trees had thinned almost undetectably; the tall stalks of wildflowers bent down onto themselves, plumped with rot. Doug and I built a fire as our dinners cooked and then sat eating from our pots and passing the wine back and forth, drinking straight from the bottle since neither of us had a cup. The wine and the fire and being in Doug’s company again after all this time felt like a rite of passage, like a ceremonial marking of the end of my journey.