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“God, this place is amazing,” Lucky said in a reverent voice. “I could totally live here year-round.”
“It’d be cold as fuck,” I warned with a chuckle.
He shrugged and kept walking ahead. His steps were practically silent on the smooth dirt of the narrow path. “I like the cold. But more than that… I like the hush of fresh snow and that feeling of solitude that comes in wild places in the dead of winter.”
I looked over at him in surprise. “I would have thought you’d miss the social stuff. If you lived in a place like this, you’d go stir crazy, wouldn’t you?”
He shook his head and smiled, throwing his arms out to the sides and spinning around like Maria from The Sound of Music. “Hell no. As long as I have an internet connection, I always have friends with me. Look at this place. It’s gorgeous. If I lived someplace like this, I could be social for a while in a cozy cabin by the fire and then head out on a winter adventure. Snowshoeing, skiing, ice climbing… you name it, I want to do it. As long as I have good gear…” He shrugged again. “I’m happy.”
I pictured Lucky hanging from an icy crevasse by nothing but a single ice axe, and shivered. “Jesus,” I muttered. “Tag’s going to have to rescue you one day.”
“Nah, I’m safe. I love an adrenaline rush, but I don’t have a death wish.”
That was good to hear, although I wasn’t sure how he defined the difference between the two.
I pointed to a little cluster of yellow wildflowers hidden under the edge of a nearby rock. “Sagebrush buttercup,” I murmured before continuing on. “What do you want to do after graduation?”
“This,” Lucky said immediately. “I mean, not admiring wildflowers, although I’d like to do that too,” he said with a grin. “But I’d like to do alpine search and rescue. Hopefully I can find a job here in the Rockies, but if not, they’re always hiring in other areas. Alaska, the Cascades. Even the Grand Canyon has need of rope and rigging paramedics.”
“I thought you wanted to become a doctor, like Jake?” I asked as we continued walking. I remembered clearly how he would ask my brother question after question when he was younger.
“I did. Until he hired me part time to help in the clinic. I was bored to tears. I realized very quickly I can’t stand to be inside all the time. I had more fun working for my dads’ outdoor adventure program. At least then I could be in the wilderness.”
I leaned down to grasp a particularly good skipping rock and slung it out into the still water. It hopped across the surface, setting off ripples along the way. “Why not stay home and take over their program?”
Lucky searched for his own rock to skip and then stepped even closer to the water’s edge and sank into a squat before whisking it out across the lake.
He paused before he made his admission.
“I need the rush.” He glanced up at me as if to judge my reaction. “Hanging on to that rock the other day scared the shit out of me, Zach. But I have to admit, it made me feel alive. Situations like that remind you how fragile life is, you know?”
I thought back to some of my missions. I’d had the exact same feeling. Part of the reason I’d pursued search and rescue in the first place was that same visceral reminder of how close we are to being lost, how immovable nature was and how small we are in comparison.
“I know exactly what you mean. I remember coming back stateside after a search and rescue mission overseas. There’d been a landslide, and I was part of a US military team sent in to help with airborne SAR.” I watched Lucky step over some rocks embedded in the trail and stop to point them out to me wordlessly so they wouldn’t trip me up. “Thanks. We spent hour after hour pulling people out, trying to rescue as many people as we could before the expected rains started again and destabilized the area even more. It was literally a life and death race against time. I remember my heart pounding in my chest, my palms sweating on the stick, the steady cadence of the spotter’s voice in my ear, and the unexpected shaking hands of my co-pilot.”
We stopped to watch two hawks dip down over the water before flying away.
When Lucky started on the trail again, I continued my story. “Our crew saved over a hundred people that day. But we lost seven before we could get them to safety. A total of two thousand people died or went missing in that natural disaster. And I’ll never forget walking off the airplane in the Atlanta airport and looking around at all of the happy, clean, healthy Americans jetting off to business meetings, visits to grandma’s house, fancy vacations, and wherever else, just… like nothing would ever touch them. Like there hadn’t just been this incredible natural disaster that had wiped out entire towns and ruined so many people’s lives forever.”
