Chapter 1 #2
I keep going the way I always keep going, which is without regard for anything except the next frame.
I find a clearing where the trees open up and the ridge is visible.
The late afternoon light is doing something to the rock that I will never be able to describe to anyone who wasn’t here to see it.
Gold isn’t the right word. Amber isn’t the right word.
It’s the color of the last hour before the sun drops behind the peaks.
The color that exists for twenty minutes and then is gone for twenty-four hours.
I’m here and my camera is here and I shoot until my hands are steady only because of muscle memory.
When I finally lower the camera, the sun is behind the western ridge.
The shadows are long. The air has cooled. I’ve been shooting for five hours without stopping and I’m standing in terrain I don’t recognize with no trail in any direction.
I check my phone. The screen is black. I hold the power button.
Nothing. Dead. Not dying, not warning me, not giving me one last chance to check the GPS.
Just dead. Because it was at forty-one percent this morning and I’ve been out here for eight hours and I never checked it because I was shooting and when I’m shooting, the phone doesn’t exist. The solar battery pack is dead too, because I had it buried in my bag all day instead of clipped outside where it could charge.
The camera batteries are full. Both of them. Because those I charged.
I stand very still and do the math. The trailhead is east. I came north and then west, I think. The cairn I left is somewhere behind me but “behind me” is a direction I can’t identify with certainty because I wasn’t tracking my turns. I was tracking the light.
I’m not panicking. I’ve been in remote terrain before.
I’ve navigated back to camp in Iceland with a dead phone and a paper map and it was fine.
But Iceland had roads every fifteen miles.
This mountain has trees in every direction and no road that I can see and the light is fading and I am, if I’m being honest with myself in the way I try to avoid, lost.
Not “turned around.” Not “exploring.” Lost.
I dig the satellite phone out of the bottom of my pack.
The yellow case is scratched and Claire will have opinions about that.
I power it on, wait for the signal to acquire.
Nothing. The canyon walls on three sides are blocking the satellite line.
I’d need a clearing with open sky, and the terrain ahead is dense forest and steep rock.
I try twice more, moving uphill. Nothing.
Claire is going to be insufferable about this.
I do the smart thing. I head downhill, because water and civilization are both downhill.
I look for trail markers. There aren’t any.
I try to orient by the sun but it’s behind the ridge now and the sky is a flat, unhelpful gray-gold.
I walk for an hour. The terrain changes again.
The trees are older here, bigger. The ground is less traveled.
There’s a fence line, old wire strung between wooden posts, and beyond it the forest has the look of land that belongs to someone.
Maintained, not manicured. Someone cleared this path. Someone lives here.
I should stop at the fence line. I should respect the boundary. This is private property and I’m trespassing and I know better.
But it’s getting dark and my phone is dead and there’s a structure through the trees, a building, and a building means a person and a phone and a way to reach Marissa before she calls the National Guard.
I climb through the fence.
The property is stunning. Even lost and increasingly aware that I’m going to have to explain this to five women who will never let me forget it, I can’t stop looking at it.
The light through the old-growth pines. The ridgeline beyond the clearing, catching the last of the day.
A canyon view through a gap in the trees that makes my chest tight.
I note it. I can’t help it. My brain is already framing the shot.
I hear him before I see him. Footsteps. Heavy, unhurried. Not an animal. A person who knows exactly where they are on this land, which is one of us.
He steps out of the tree line and the first thing I see is that he’s not wearing a shirt.
The second thing I see is that this is a problem.
He’s carrying a splitting axe in one hand, the handle dark with use, and his chest and shoulders are sheened with sweat.
He’s been working. Chopping, hauling, something that involves the kind of sustained effort that builds the kind of body I’m looking at right now, which is broad and hard and tan and not something I should be cataloging this thoroughly given that I’m trespassing on his property at dusk.
My photographer’s brain doesn’t care about context.
It files the image: the line of his shoulders against the trees, the flat plane of his stomach, the way the low light catches the sweat on his collarbone.
Professionally relevant observations. Completely professional.
Wait. I know him.
The bar. The corner booth. Three weeks ago, during the reunion trip.
I’d spotted him across The Burning Tree, alone in a booth with a beer and an expression that said “do not” in fourteen languages.
I walked over because his face had the kind of bone structure that makes photographers do stupid things.
I asked if I could take his photo. He looked at me like I’d asked to set his house on fire.
Said one word. No. I walked back to my table, completely unbothered and slightly impressed.
Jasper.
He recognizes me too. I watch it happen. His eyes go from my face to my camera gear to the dead phone in my hand. His expression doesn’t soften. It gets worse.
“You’re on my property.”
“I know.” I take a breath. “I’m lost.”
“Lost.”
“I was shooting on the backcountry trail and I went off-trail and my phone is dead and I can’t find my way back to the trailhead.
” Every word costs me something. I don’t need rescuing.
I don’t need help. I have been to remote places.
I once navigated a river canyon in New Zealand with nothing but a compass and a granola bar and I was fine. I am always fine.
I am not fine right now.
He looks at the sky. Orange and purple at the edges, going dark.
“The trailhead is three hours east. You’re not making it before dark.”
“I can try.”
“You can try and break an ankle on the switchbacks and then I’ll have to come find you. In the dark. On terrain you’ve already proven you can’t navigate.”
I want to argue. I want to tell him that I can navigate, that I’ve navigated harder terrain than this, that the reason I’m here is because I’m good at my job, not because I’m careless.
But he’s right. The terrain between here and the trailhead is steep and unfamiliar and doing it in the dark is genuinely dangerous and I know it and he knows I know it.
“Do you have a phone I can use? I need to reach my friend. She’s expecting a check-in tonight.”
“No. Practically no signal up here.”
“Radio?”
“At the cabin.”
I stare at him. He stares back. He is not happy. I am not happy. This is the least happy two people have ever been while standing in what might be the most beautiful piece of land I’ve ever seen. The irony is not lost on me.
“One night.” He says it like I’ve personally insulted him, his mountain, and every decision he’s ever made that led to this moment.
“Fine,” I say. “One night. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
He turns and walks. No “follow me.” No “this way.” Just turns and walks, and I follow because there is nothing else to do.
The trail through the trees is narrow and well-worn and he moves through it like a man who could walk it blind.
The last light catches the ridge above us and the color is extraordinary.
Copper and rose and the deep blue of a sky not ready to give up.
My photographer’s brain screams. The composition is right there.
His back against the trail, the ridge behind him, the dying light.
The broad line of his shoulders against the sky.
He has the kind of jawline that would photograph beautifully if he’d ever stop scowling long enough to let someone try.
I’m not going to tell him that. I’m going to radio Marissa from his cabin so she doesn’t send a helicopter, sleep somewhere on this property that isn’t inside his house, and be gone at first light. That’s the plan.