Wild

After a while, we each turned abruptly toward the darkness, hearing the yip of coyotes more near than far.

“That sound always makes my hair stand on end,” Doug said. He took a sip from the bottle and handed it to me. “This wine’s really good.”

“It is,” I agreed, and took a swig. “I heard coyotes a lot this summer,” I said.

“And you weren’t afraid, right? Isn’t that what you told yourself?”

“It is what I told myself,” I said. “Except every once in while,” I added. “When I was.”

“Me too.” He reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder and I put my hand on his and squeezed it. He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again.

When we were done with the wine, I went to Monster and pulled out the ziplock bag that held my books. “You need something to read?” I asked Doug, holding The Ten Thousand Things up to him, but he shook his head. I’d finished it a few days before, though I hadn’t been able to burn it because of the rain. Unlike most of the other books I’d read on my hike, I’d already read The Ten Thousand Things when I’d packed it into my resupply box months before. A densely lyrical novel set on the Moluccan Islands in Indonesia, it had been written in Dutch and published to critical acclaim in 1955, but mostly forgotten now. I’d never met anyone who’d read the book, aside from the college writing professor who’d assigned it to me in the fiction workshop I was enrolled in when my mother got sick. The title hadn’t been lost on me as I’d sat dutifully reading it in my mother’s hospital room, attempting to shut out my fear and sorrow by forcing my mind to focus on passages I hoped to refer to in the following week’s class discussion, but it was useless. I couldn’t think of anything but my mom. Besides, I already knew about the ten thousand things. They were all the named and unnamed things in the world and together they added up to less than how much my mother loved me. And me her. So when I was packing for the PCT, I’d decided to give the book another chance. I hadn’t had any trouble focusing this time. From the very first page, I understood. Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.

“I think I’m going to turn in,” said Doug, holding the empty bottle of wine. “Tom’ll probably catch up to us tomorrow.”

“I’ll put the fire out,” I said.

When he was gone, I ripped the pages of The Ten Thousand Things from their gummy paperback binding and set them into the fire in thin clumps, prodding them with a stick until they burned. As I stared at the flames, I thought about Eddie, the same as I did just about every time I sat by a fire. It had been he who’d taught me how to build one. Eddie was the one who’d taken me camping the first time. He’d shown me how to pitch a tent and tie a knot in a rope. From him, I’d learned how to open a can with a jackknife and paddle a canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake. In the three years after he fell in love with my mother, he’d taken us camping and canoeing along the Minnesota and St. Croix and Namekagon rivers practically every weekend from June to September, and after we’d moved north onto the land my family had bought with the proceeds from his broken back, he’d taught me even more about the woods.

There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered.