"What do you tell them?"
"Nothing." He starts walking. "Not my job to tell them anything."
I follow him, and there is nothing to check, nowhere to look, no social media to scroll, no messages to refresh. The man ahead of me knows nothing about who I am or what I left behind, and for the first time since I watched Tyler's video on a stranger'sphone, that feels less like a loss and more like something I can breathe inside of.
I put my head down and I walk.
two
Dawson
Shetalks.
I knew she would. Most people do, at first, when they’re full of nervous energy, too much silence, the mountain feeling bigger than they expected. They talk about work, about the drive up, about other hikes they've done that are nothing like this one. They stop by the second day. The altitude gets them, or the effort, or the particular quality of the quiet up here that doesn't feel like an absence once you've learned to hear it.
She talks about a podcast she listened to on the drive up. She talks about the hotel and I don't respond but she doesn't need me to. She talks about the wildflowers on the south-facing slope, wanting to know their names, and I tell her: paintbrush, arnica, valerian. She repeats them back in the wrong order and then correctly and then in a made-up sequence she describes asmore aesthetically pleasing.
I check the trail ahead and say nothing and find that I don't mind.
By afternoon she's stopped talking about things and started talking about nothing, which is different. Observations without purpose. The way the light comes through a gap in the ridge.
A marmot watches us from a boulder and she says, “He has strong opinions about us”,and I glance back and she's looking at the marmot with genuine consideration, like his opinions matter and she's trying to determine what they are.
She's fit enough. Not a hiker, her form is wrong in ways she'll feel tomorrow, but she has endurance and she's not a complainer, and those two things matter more on a three-day trip than any amount of gym fitness. I've had people in better shape quit at noon on day one. She's been moving for six hours and her only concession to effort is that she's stopped finishing her sentences when the trail pitches steep.
I slow the pace on the hard sections before she has to ask. She doesn't notice, or she pretends not to, and either way is fine.
Camp is a flat shelf above the treeline with a fire ring I built three seasons ago and a view of the eastern ridge that goes pink at sunset. I've camped here forty, fifty times. I know which rocks are stable and where the wind comes from and exactly how long the fire takes to catch with wet wood.
I drop my pack and start pulling stakes.
"Can I help?" she asks.
"Sure." I hand her the tent bag.
She opens it with confidence. Studies the poles. Attempts to connect the first two sections and gets the third one in backwards and stands there for a moment holding a tent pole that is technically connected but structurally incorrect, with theparticular expression of someone who's too proud to ask but also clearly aware that something is wrong.
I take the pole, reverse the section, hand it back.
"I did sports in school," she tells me. "Volleyball. I always got stuck with setting up the net. This is somehow harder."
"Different geometry."
"Is that your polite way of saying I'm doing it wrong?"
"Youweredoing it wrong. Now you're not."
The tent goes up crooked. I adjust two stakes without comment and it's fine.
She stands back and looks at it. "Good enough?"
"Good enough," I say.
She seems unreasonably pleased about this.
I make the fire while she changes her socks and I hear her from inside the tent saying something that might be directed at me or might be directed at the sock.
"What?" I call.
