10. Beck
ten
Beck
Afew years ago, most of this hillside burned.
The evidence is still here for anyone paying attention.
Blackened trunks stand scattered through the trees like exclamation points, snapped off partway up, bark dark and brittle.
But underneath them, everything else is coming back.
Grass. Young pines barely knee-high. Shrubs filling in the spaces where shade used to keep them out.
Sunlight reaches parts of this hillside that haven't seen it in decades.
It's not a dead forest. It's a forest in the middle of figuring out what comes next. I can hear it in the way insects work through the new grass, in the birds that have figured out the burned snags make excellent perches. Everything's just getting on with it.
We're out here for trail assessment today, which is a considerably gentler assignment than Saturday.
Walk the trail. Clear what's small enough to clear by hand.
Check drainage. Flag anything that needs a saw or heavier equipment later.
Mostly, we're just walking, which after this week feels like a mercy.
Ivy's in front of me on the climb, and she's wearing shorts today instead of her usual work pants, which is a fact I notice and then spend an unreasonable amount of time continuing to notice.
Her legs are, and I mean this as an objective assessment, a genuine hazard to my concentration.
Strong, tan, moving easily up a grade that's got most of the group breathing harder than they'd like to admit.
I've seen these legs before. I sat underneath them at Alder Lake, her knees braced against my shoulders while we took down half the crew in the pool-noodle war. My brain thinks it’s relevant information because it keeps bringing it up. I try to focus on the trail.
It mostly works until I remember yesterday, the volleyball game, the ball that came straight at Ivy and somehow got past her because she wasn't looking at it.
I could have sworn she was looking at me right before it happened.
I'm still not sure. It seems like the kind of thing a smart man leaves alone.
The crew spreads out along the trail. Trevor and Cassidy pull ahead.
Nolan lags behind, still limping slightly from yesterday's volleyball game.
Reid disappears somewhere in the middle distance with Tessa.
Eventually, Ivy and I end up walking at roughly the same pace, which isn't a coincidence exactly, but isn't a conscious decision either.
“How are the shoulders?” I ask.
“Terrible. You?”
“I'm choosing not to think about it.”
“Solid strategy.”
We talk about yesterday for a while. Nolan's redemption jump. The volleyball game. Whether Dani's scoring system for the rope swing has any actual logic behind it or whether she just makes it up as she goes.
“She's making it up,” Ivy says. “But don't tell Nolan. He thinks there's a system.”
“There's no system?”
“There was never a system.”
We keep walking. A little farther up, Ivy slows.
There's a patch of flowers growing up through the burned ground, tall stalks of pink and purple, thick enough they've turned a whole section of hillside a different color than everything around it.
“Fireweed,” she says, before I ask.
I look at the flowers, then at the blackened trunks standing around them. The name makes sense as soon as she says it.
“It's one of the first things that comes back after a burn,” she says. “The seeds need bare, disturbed ground and full sun to really take off, which is what a fire leaves behind. So while everything else is still figuring out what happened, this shows up and takes over for a while.”
“Until the trees catch up.”
“Until the trees catch up. Then it fades back and waits for the next disturbance.”
Her interest in it makes me want to keep asking questions just to keep her talking.
We walk on for a while, the fireweed thinning out behind us, the trail climbing into a stretch of trees that haven't burned at all.
“Where did you grow up?” she asks eventually, once we've moved past the flowers. “I feel like I've never asked you that.”
“Depends what year you're asking about.”
She glances over, amused. “That's not an answer.”
“My dad was Air Force. Career. I was born in Colorado, but we moved every couple years.”
“Like where?”
“Everywhere. Germany for a few years when I was a kid. Alaska after that. A couple bases stateside I barely remember. My parents ended up back in Colorado after my dad retired, so that's the closest thing to a hometown I've got.”
“Germany,” she repeats, like she's trying it out. “What was that like?”
“Good. We were near Ramstein. I picked up some German, mostly from other kids on base.
My dad took us all over on weekends, when he could.
I ate more schnitzel than any nine-year-old from Colorado had any business eating.
Alaska after Germany. That one I remember even better.
Middle school, mostly. My dad was stationed near Fairbanks.
That's where I learned to ski, chasing kids down hills that had no business being that steep for a bunch of twelve-year-olds.”
“That explains a few things.”
“Ski patrol didn't come out of nowhere.”
That gets a laugh out of her. “Did you like it? Moving around that much?”
I think about it, because it's a fair question, and it deserves an honest answer.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did. You get good at making friends fast, because you don't have the luxury of taking your time.
You learn not to get too attached to a house, because you know it's not permanent.
New place always meant something exciting was about to happen.
I never really minded when the orders came. It's just how things worked.”
It's more than I usually say about any of it. I'm not sure why this trail, this conversation, made it come out so easy. “What about you?” I ask. “I know your parents live about twenty minutes from here. Is that where you’re originally from?”
“Yep. I lived in Larkspur my whole life until I went to college in Missoula. Boring, compared to Germany.”
We keep walking. Somewhere in the next stretch of trail she tells me about how she started doing seasonal work here, first summer right out of high school, and how it turned into something bigger than a summer job somewhere along the way.
Wildlife biology. Grad school. A thesis she's finishing up this year.
“What's it on?” I ask.
She gives me the actual explanation, about postfire vegetation recovery patterns and how they affect wildlife habitat use in the years after a burn, more detail than I need but not more than I want.
I ask a follow-up question, about whether that's connected to what she just told me about the fireweed. She stops walking and looks at me.
“Are you actually interested in this?”
“I'm interested in what you're saying.”
Then she keeps walking and talking, and I keep listening, all the way until Reid calls back to us about a downed tree blocking the trail ahead.
We spend the next thirty minutes clearing it, dragging pieces off to the side, the conversation naturally on pause while everyone works. By the time the trail's clear and everyone's moving again, Ivy and I end up walking together again.
Another patch of fireweed shows up a while later, smaller than the first, tucked against a fallen log.
“Fireweed,” I say, before she can.
She looks at it, then at me. “Look at you.”
I like that she sounds pleased about it.
The trail eventually opens into a longer, easier stretch, and the conversation drifts toward what comes after this.
Ivy doesn't know what she'll do once she finishes her master’s program.
Somewhere in Montana, maybe. Timber Creek, if the right opportunity exists.
Somewhere else if it doesn't. She says it without much worry attached, like it's simply a question she hasn't answered yet, not a problem she's dreading.
“What about you?” she asks. “After fire season?”
“Ski patrol. Same as always.”
“Where?”
“Don't know yet. I'll see what's open. Could be Montana. Or Colorado. Maybe Alaska. Wherever makes sense.”
She takes it in stride, no more worried about my future than I was about hers a minute ago.
Farther up the trail, Nolan trips over a root and manages to make it look like an intentional dance move, which earns him applause from Cassidy and a look of deep skepticism from Reid.
Ivy laughs, pulls ahead a little to check something on the trail surface.
I end up behind her again, same view as this morning.
Her legs are still spectacular. That hasn't changed. But somewhere over the last few miles, between fireweed and Ramstein and a thesis about vegetation I never expected to find interesting, I’ve discovered there’s a whole lot more about her I’m attracted to than just her legs.