I thought about it for a few steps before I answered. The honest version was not the influencer answer. The influencer answer would have been the rhododendron, or the wildflowers, or the way the light at golden hour flatters my complexion.
I gave him the real one.
“I pulled up satellite imagery before I left home. I saw the creek bend at the spot where my tent is now. I saw it had three flat tent spots and a fire ring and a clear sightline back to the trail, so anyone coming in from the road would be visible before they got to me. I picked it because I could defend it from a chair.”
He stopped walking.
He turned around on the trail and looked down at me. I was two steps below him, hands on my hips, breathing harder than he was.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s not the answer I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Something about how the pictures will look online.”
“I’m not like most influencers.”
“I know.”
He turned and kept walking.
We came out onto a granite outcropping maybe twenty minutes later.
It was wide. It pushed out from the ridge like the prow of a ship, and the view fell away to the south in layered ridges that went on as far as I could see. There was a flat slab of rock big enough for two people to sit on, and a small pool of water collected in a hollow of the granite from the last storm, and not another human anywhere in sight.
I didn’t reach for my phone.
I wanted to. The brand would have lost their minds. The light was incredible. The ridges were incredible. I was wearing their flannel tied around my waist and I was having a good hair day and the slab of granite was a post—a series of them—a whole reel I could have shot and edited and queued for the week.
I didn’t reach for my phone.
I sat down on the slab and pulled my knees up and looked at the view.
Spencer sat down next to me and pulled two sandwiches out of the soft cooler. Wrapped in waxed paper, tied with butcher’s twine. He handed me one. He pulled out two bottles of water and set one next to my knee.
We ate.
“This is where I come,” he said, “when I need to think about something.”
I nodded. I didn’t say anything.
After a while he said, “Satellite imagery. Sightlines. Defensible position. Who taught you all that?”
“My grandmother.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When I was nine. She’d been a Forest Service surveyor for forty years. She taught me to read contour lines on her kitchen table with a USGS quad and a pencil.”
“She still living?”
“No. She’s been gone for about four years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s been long enough that I can talk about her.”
