2. Dawson
two
Dawson
She talks.
I knew she would. Most people do, at first, when they’re full of nervous energy, too much silence, the mountain feeling bigger than they expected.
They talk about work, about the drive up, about other hikes they've done that are nothing like this one.
They stop by the second day. The altitude gets them, or the effort, or the particular quality of the quiet up here that doesn't feel like an absence once you've learned to hear it.
She talks about a podcast she listened to on the drive up.
She talks about the hotel and I don't respond but she doesn't need me to.
She talks about the wildflowers on the south-facing slope, wanting to know their names, and I tell her: paintbrush, arnica, valerian.
She repeats them back in the wrong order and then correctly and then in a made-up sequence she describes as more aesthetically pleasing.
I check the trail ahead and say nothing and find that I don't mind.
By afternoon she's stopped talking about things and started talking about nothing, which is different. Observations without purpose. The way the light comes through a gap in the ridge.
A marmot watches us from a boulder and she says, “He has strong opinions about us”, and I glance back and she's looking at the marmot with genuine consideration, like his opinions matter and she's trying to determine what they are.
She's fit enough. Not a hiker, her form is wrong in ways she'll feel tomorrow, but she has endurance and she's not a complainer, and those two things matter more on a three-day trip than any amount of gym fitness.
I've had people in better shape quit at noon on day one.
She's been moving for six hours and her only concession to effort is that she's stopped finishing her sentences when the trail pitches steep.
I slow the pace on the hard sections before she has to ask. She doesn't notice, or she pretends not to, and either way is fine.
Camp is a flat shelf above the treeline with a fire ring I built three seasons ago and a view of the eastern ridge that goes pink at sunset. I've camped here forty, fifty times. I know which rocks are stable and where the wind comes from and exactly how long the fire takes to catch with wet wood.
I drop my pack and start pulling stakes.
"Can I help?" she asks.
"Sure." I hand her the tent bag.
She opens it with confidence. Studies the poles.
Attempts to connect the first two sections and gets the third one in backwards and stands there for a moment holding a tent pole that is technically connected but structurally incorrect, with the particular expression of someone who's too proud to ask but also clearly aware that something is wrong.
I take the pole, reverse the section, hand it back.
"I did sports in school," she tells me. "Volleyball. I always got stuck with setting up the net. This is somehow harder."
"Different geometry."
"Is that your polite way of saying I'm doing it wrong?"
"You were doing it wrong. Now you're not."
The tent goes up crooked. I adjust two stakes without comment and it's fine.
She stands back and looks at it. "Good enough?"
"Good enough," I say.
She seems unreasonably pleased about this.
I make the fire while she changes her socks and I hear her from inside the tent saying something that might be directed at me or might be directed at the sock.
"What?" I call.
"I said I read that you should never eat near your tent because of bears."
"That's car camping."
Silence. Then: "So there are bears."
"Black bears. They're not interested in you."
"That's either reassuring or insulting."
I get the fire started. She comes out of the tent with different socks and a fleece and her hair has escaped whatever clip she had it in and she's pushed it back from her face with both hands and left it approximately where it landed. I look at her for longer than I need to and then at the fire.
She sits on the flat rock I always use. Pulls her knees up. Looks at the eastern ridge.
The sun is going down behind us and the light on that ridge goes from white to yellow to a deep amber that changes every few minutes, and she watches, not reaching for her phone, not narrating it, just watching.
Her face goes quiet. The thing she's been carrying since the trailhead this morning doesn't go away, but it shifts. The effort of it relaxes. Whatever exhaustion and anger she’s been hiding comes closer to the surface.
She looks young. She looks real.
I have a rule about clients. It's a good rule. I've never broken it. And, as beautiful as she is, there’s no way I’m stopping now.
I put more wood on the fire and shake the thought of what her kiss would be like from my mind.
"How long have you been doing this?" she asks.
"Guiding? Twelve years."
"Full time?"
"Since I was twenty-four."
She considers this. "So you just decided on the mountains. That's the plan."
"That's the plan."
"There was no other plan?"
There was. Engineering. Two years of a degree I finished in my head and never finished on paper, in a city that never once felt like the right size. I don't say any of this. "No."
She nods slowly like she's doing the math on something. "I envy that."
"What."
"Knowing. Just knowing what you want and doing it."
"You don't know what you want?"
She laughs ruefully. "I knew what I was supposed to want. I was very good at that."
I look at her across the fire. She's looking at the coals, not at me, and the amber light is doing something to her face that I notice in a detached, factual way, the way I'd note the temperature or the direction of the wind.
She's beautiful, when with mud on her cheek that is smeared but not successfully wiped off.
"You'll figure it out," I say.
She looks at me for a moment. The ruined edge of the laugh is still there but something warmer is next to it now. "How do you know?"
I look back at the fire and shrug. I don't have an answer that belongs in the guide-client category, so I don't give one. I reach for the camp pot instead. "Hungry?"
"Desperately."
I make dinner. She sits on the rock and watches and at some point the watching turns into the comfortable version, which is different from the polite version people do in the first hour when they don't know what to do with their hands.
She asks what's in it and I tell her and she makes a sound of genuine interest when I say the chilli flakes are from a woman at the Silver Ridge market.
She's not comfortable with the quiet. I notice that.
Some people settle into camp silence easily — they've been waiting for it all day.
She's not one of them. She reaches for her phone twice out of habit, both times remembering before she gets it out, both times redirecting her hands to her bowl or her sleeve or the middle distance.
The third time she catches herself she makes a small noise of irritation and tucks both hands under her thighs like she's solving the problem architecturally.
I don't say anything. It's not my business.
I hand her the bowl and she wraps both hands around it and says, "Thank you, Dawson," with her full attention on the meal, and I go back to my side of the fire.
My rule is a good rule.
I don't look at her again for the rest of the night.
I don't need to. I can already tell it won't help.