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The sweeping peaks get closer as I move further up the mountains. The trail I’m heading for this afternoon is one of my favorites, and it follows a really pretty creek that rushes down a series of cataracts for about an hour before opening up into a meadow.
Given the daylight, I probably won’t make it the full way up to the meadow, but I’ll get as far as I can.
I park, put on my boots, grab my backpack, and take one look at my phone. There’s no signal over here: I lost that pretty much immediately after I left town.
No point to the phone, so I leave it.
The first mile of the trail dips down into a narrow canyon, following the creek as it rushes between rocks. It’s wet from the spray, and lush beds of wild roses and raspberries line the trail. I let my fingers trail over one of them, admiring the colorful columbines and shooting stars that nod in the breeze from the rushing water.
God, I love it here.
The trail opens up and crosses a flat part in the stream. I nimbly dance over a log that someone pushed down to serve as a bridge, before finding myself on the soft, somewhat hollow feeling ground again.
There’s nothing to prove, up here. No one to judge me or ask me why I don’t want to go to a party or get drunk. No one who thinks I’m weird for choosing to stay home and read instead of going out with other people my age.
It’s peace. That’s what I feel every time I’m out in nature. Peace.
I love animals and I love nature, but I’ve never been really good at the whole… human side of things. I love my parents, and I visit them regularly, but they never really understood why I wanted to be so far removed from society.
They love all the things that civilization gives them. They enjoy chain restaurants and fast food and the fact that a little robot will deliver them pizza if they want.
I don’t care about any of that.
It used to hurt. Absently, I rub my chest as I think about the loneliness that I felt so often growing up.
I don’t usually feel it here.
Maybe that’s why the man earlier bothered me so much. He reminds me of all of the beautiful, rich, civilized people that I grew up with. People who made fun of me, that I never quite understood how to manage.
Yeah. He reminded me a lot of men who wouldn’t bother to look at me twice, and it brought up all the feelings that were associated with the memory.
Men like that weren’t, in my experience, interested in people like me.
In women like me.
Still, I think as I step over a particularly crusty-looking log, It would be nice to have someone like that look at me twice.
Just once.
There are quite a lot of downed trees in this area. I have to study the trail for a minute to figure out where to pick between them to follow it. There were a lot of avalanches last year, so it makes sense…
A grunt behind me catches my attention.
Ice skates down my spine.
Slowly, I turn.
When I look down the trail, my fears are confirmed.
There’s a bear.
I’m not necessarily afraid of bears. Usually, if you’re far enough away, they’ll leave you alone.
The problem is that this bear is looking at me with far too much interest.
Please don’t be a female. Please don’t have a…
The very clear bleat of a bear cub to my right makes my heart skip a beat.
