6. Beck
six
Beck
The tree is bigger than it looked from a distance. It came down sometime in the last storm, judging by the still-green needles. It's taken out enough of the trail corridor that we'll be here a while.
Russ walks the length of it, considering angles. Tessa and Dani are already pulling gear off their packs. Ivy drops her pack against a rock and starts assessing the debris field like she's done this before. She probably has.
“Is this the part where I'm supposed to admit you work harder than we do?” I ask her.
She doesn't stop moving. “You can wait until lunch.”
Once the saw work starts, the rest of us go to work on everything the saw leaves behind.
Limbs. Brush. Chunks of trunk too big to move alone but too small to need the saw again.
It's not glamorous work. It's just constant.
Drag, lift, clear, repeat. And do it uphill half the time.
I've done plenty of physical labor in my life.
This finds muscles I don't normally use.
Nolan is dragging a limb toward the pile when he stops next to a patch of low vegetation crowding the trail edge. “Should I clear this too?”
Ivy glances over without breaking stride on the branch she's hauling. “That stays. It's not blocking anything, and it holds the bank together on that side.”
“How do you know it holds the bank together?”
“Because I've watched what happens to this section when it isn't there.”
Nolan looks at the plant like it just earned his respect. He moves on to the next pile.
I hear the exchange and don't think much of it until it happens again twenty minutes later, this time about a stretch of trail that needs regrading versus one that doesn't. And again after that, about whether a section of exposed root is a hazard or just ugly.
Ivy doesn't stop working to explain things. She just explains while she works, like the two activities were never separate to begin with.
I've watched Ivy in a lot of settings over the last two days. The crew house. Mercer’s in Timber Creek.
Alder Lake. The Grangers' kitchen. This is the first time I've watched her work, and it's different.
Not because she's a different person. But because this is clearly where her expertise is evident.
Somewhere past the tree, we hit huckleberries. Nolan spots them first. “Can I eat those?”
Ivy glances over. “You're asking before you ate any, right?”
“Yes.”
She confirms what they are, tells him what to look for if he's ever doing this without someone who knows, and goes back to work.
Nolan eats one. A few minutes later he's eating another one. Then a few more after that. By the time we've moved another fifty yards down the trail, he's developed what can only be described as a foraging habit.
“Nolan,” Ivy says, without looking up.
He looks up, mouth full. “I'm learning.”
“You're eating.”
“Hands-on learning.”
Tessa laughs somewhere behind us. Ivy shakes her head and keeps working, which I take as her deciding this battle isn't worth fighting.
A little farther on, Nolan stops in front of a different plant, clusters of dark berries hanging low on reddish stems, looking pleased with himself. “These too?”
“No.” Ivy's answer comes fast and sharp enough Nolan takes a step back. She walks him through it. Different leaf shape, different stem, different everything if you look closely. Baneberry, she tells him, and not the kind of mistake you get to make twice.
Nolan studies the plant like it personally offended him. “I'm starting to feel like this forest has trust issues,” he says.
Trevor laughs loudly enough that Russ looks over to check nothing's wrong. Ivy just points him back toward the pile of brush he abandoned in order to go inspect poison.
I like watching her do this. Not because she's showing off. She isn't. She barely seems to register that anyone's paying attention to how she answers these questions. She's not trying to showcase her knowledge. She just has it, and it comes out whenever someone needs it.
A while later, Nolan struggles with a knot holding a coil of rope to his pack, twisting it into something worse every time he tries to fix it.
“Here.” I take it from him, work it loose in about ten seconds, hand it back. “Figure-eight. Won't jam on you like that.”
“Thanks.”
We break for lunch in a stand of shade near a spot Ivy must have known would be here, because she led us straight to it without checking a map. Everyone drops where they land.
I sit near Ivy. She's got dirt on her forearms and a scrape along one knuckle she hasn't seemed to notice.
She's eating like someone who spent the whole morning burning through calories she intends to replace immediately.
It's a small thing, but it fits everything else I've noticed about her today — no wasted motion, no self-consciousness, just doing what the day requires and moving on.
The trail gives us one more problem before the day's done. A section farther along has washed out worse than expected, drainage clogged, dirt cut through in a channel that's only going to get worse with the next storm. Russ crouches at the edge of it, frowning.
“This wasn't here last month.”
“Runoff's been bad this spring,” Ivy says. “There's a spot about a quarter mile back that does the same thing. We rerouted the water there two summers ago.”
“Can we make the same fix here?” I ask.
She looks at the channel, at the slope above it, at where the water's clearly cutting through. “Close. The grade's different here.”
I walk the edge of it, looking at it the way I'd look at a fire line, thinking about where we’d prefer the water go versus where it's currently going. “If you cut the drain here instead of there, you're working with the slope instead of against it.”
Ivy looks where I'm pointing. Considers it. “That could work.”
It takes the rest of the crew and the better part of two hours, but it works.
Rock, debris, a rerouted channel, a trail that isn't actively eroding itself into the hillside anymore.
No one person did it. Everyone helped. I'm starting to understand, that's how it goes out here. Nobody solves anything alone.
By the time we're hiking out, I'm tired in a way that comes from a full day of physical labor that isn't the labor I’m used to. Different muscles complaining than the ones I know how to argue with.
Ivy falls into step beside me. “Well?”
I know what she's asking. “I'll give you Monday.”
“Generous.”
“Don't get used to it.”
She smiles but doesn't say anything else.
Back at the crew house boots come off by the door in an increasingly chaotic pile.
Somebody wins the shower argument through sheer speed rather than seniority.
Dinner is loud, fast, and involves more food than should reasonably disappear in twenty minutes.
Someone makes a giant pot of pasta. Someone else burns garlic bread, but nobody complains because we're all too hungry to care.
After dinner, Tessa produces a deck of cards like she's been waiting all day for an excuse.
“There's no TV in this house,” Tessa tells me.
“There's no reliable Wi-Fi either,” Dani says, not looking up from dealing. “Except sometimes, right by the porch window, if you hold your phone at the correct angle and pray.”
“That's a real thing?”
“Cassidy got two bars there once. We still talk about it,” Trevor says.
Cards, it turns out, fill the gap just fine.
The game is simple enough to play half-focused but complicated enough to argue about, which seems to be the requirement for a house full of exhausted people who still want to hang out with each other.
Ivy plays like she plays everything else.
Focused, a little ruthless, unbothered by Reid's increasingly desperate attempts to read her face for tells.
“You're bluffing,” he says.
“Prove it.”
He can't. He never can. I'm starting to understand this about her too.
Somewhere in the third round, Tessa says, “We're going dancing Friday.”
“We haven't even gotten to Tuesday yet,” Dani points out.
Tessa lets out a long breath. “I'm aware. Thinking about Friday is how I make it through the week.”
Nobody seems surprised by any of this. Apparently Friday nights at some bar in Timber Creek are a known quantity around here. Country music and dancing and whatever else happens when this crew gets a night off.
“Can you line dance?” Tessa asks Nolan.
“Define line dance.”
That gets a chorus of groans loud enough Nolan visibly reconsiders his answer.
“I've been to a bar before,” he says. “I've seen it happen.”
“Watching doesn't count,” Dani says.
“How hard can it be?”
The reaction to that is immediate and unanimous, several people talking at once about how hard it can, in fact, be, until Nolan holds up both hands in surrender.
“Somebody's going to have to teach him,” Reid says.
“Cassidy,” Tessa says, like it's obvious.
Cassidy looks up from her cards. “Why me?”
“Because you're good.”
“That's not a reason to punish me.”
Nobody backs down. Cassidy's apparently teaching Nolan to line dance, whether she signed up for it or not.
Nobody asks me.
I keep my eyes on my cards and don't offer anything. Across the table, Nolan's still trying to explain why watching a bar full of strangers line dance from a barstool counts as prior experience. It doesn't. Cassidy's going to have her hands full.
Friday might be interesting.