One Today
One
Today
Deep in the Colorado mountains, through flower-freckled meadows and up the rough spine of the Sawatch Range, there’s a walking path.
Fewer than two feet across, just enough dirt to frame your boots and the stray toe print of a yellow-bellied marmot or a hare.
In some places the grass has grown long enough to kiss your ankles.
In others, the high western sun bakes the landscape arid and assessing, so it’s only you out there on the microscope of the trail.
The sign has an arrow carved unceremoniously into its eastern edge.
Two swipes of a utility knife. If you follow its point off the path, picking your way through the lodgepole pines along the goat trail left by everyone before you, the mountain will slope you sure off of it and settle you straight into town.
High Street, falsely named, is the longest and lowest point in Cloud Basin: a sort of valley we all spill into.
The trail uphill on one side, the rest of us uphill on the other.
Its wooden boardwalk storefronts are open mostly sunrise to sunset, except at Christmas, when Lenore’s doors stay unlocked for hot chocolate while her husband picks out “Silent Night” on the piano in the diner’s front window.
That’s mostly locals, anyway; by winter our hikers have long cleared out.
There’s the Outfitter, for new gas canisters and cheap rubber camp sandals (yours will be worn through by the time you get here).
And there’s the post office, painted fresh white every other spring and connecting us to a world that still exists—hard as it feels to believe that here—off the trail.
If you follow High Street through town, past all this and around the north corner of Latherly Launderette, you’ll come to a flight of stone stairs.
Made by two sets of hands and with a lot of backbreaking effort, if the photographs I’ve seen are any indication.
It’s forty-three steps up the hill, through a stand of quaking aspens.
You get the view when you hit the last one.
A wide log building with a sloped roof and a bell trussed to the front screen door. The mountains spread like a banquet in all directions around it, yours for the taking. And a painted sign nailed to the porch post: The Bunkhouse.
Around the wide, creaking porch—past the packs hanging on hooks, and the laundry line clipped heavy with wool socks, and the sounds of steel pots from the kitchen—is a row of rocking chairs.
Mismatched, pitching gently in the wind.
The group of them face the valley and the trail that cuts it like a snake through grass.
This is where you can watch people take the same steps you took to get here. This is where you can always find me.
“Lilah?” Cooper sounds distracted, though that’s usually the case these days. He elbows open the screen door and cranes through it to find my eyes. “Phone call for you at the front desk.”
Sammy’s set on my brother’s hip, a toy pickup truck parked halfway in his mouth. He looks just like Cooper at that age: sunflower-blond with dark, perceptive eyes.
I close the notebook in my lap. Killing the lights on the western tanager I’d been drawing there—or trying to, though the feathers are all wrong. “It’s my day off, Coop.”
Sammy smiles at me around his truck. I smile back, and Cooper takes a step onto the porch to get a better look at me.
“You want me to tell them to call back?” He doesn’t change the inflection of his voice: something I’ve always loved about Cooper, so steadfastly non-alarmist. But there’s unease in the way he’s looking at me. “New York number.”
We stare at each other. Down the porch, a hiker finishes bandaging her blistered feet and ducks into the house behind Cooper, through the held-open door. Sammy watches her go.
“Is it—” I stop before the name. It’s one I try to keep out of my mouth, for the bittersweet taste of it.
“No,” Cooper says. Sammy drops his truck and Cooper scoops it off the porch before he can start crying.
He only looks back at me when the truck’s settled firmly in his son’s hands.
“But we know he’s out here on the trail.
It could be related, I don’t know. I can tell them to call back tomorrow if that’s what you want. ”
I run a finger along the rounded edge of my notebook. I only know one person from New York, and last any of us heard he’s about halfway down the trail. Should hit Cloud Basin any day now, if he keeps pace or plans to stop here at all.
In my silence, Cooper decides for me. Another thing that’s usually the case, these days. “I’ll tell them to call back.”
“No,” I say, surprising both of us. He’d already started to turn inside, one hand bracketing the doorframe to pull it shut behind him. His light eyebrows rise as he waits. “I’ll take it.”
“All right,” Cooper says. He doesn’t tell me to be careful, or ask if I’m sure. He only holds the door for me as I step into our house.
The drift of voices inside is a balm for my nervous system: the familiar background noise of my entire life. Hikers talking in their rooms with the doors left open, hikers exchanging gear in the long hallway, hikers in their bare feet making for the showers with towels slung across their shoulders.
“We’ll be in the kitchen,” Cooper says, “if you need me.”
When I look back, he has both arms wrapped around Sammy. That’s my brother: a life preserver of a person. Something circled around me that’s kept me afloat for every one of my twenty-eight years.
“Thanks, Cooper.”
He nods, and leaves me in the dark-paneled hallway. I can see the reception desk from here: through to the front of the house, old landline phone set off the receiver in the middle of our guest register. Is it— No. It won’t be him when I answer, which is enough to get my feet moving again.
It’s warm in the house, July breeze breathing through the screen in the front door.
There’s never been air-conditioning at the Bunkhouse, where it’s cool enough by nightfall even in midsummer to get decent sleep.
Cooper and I talked about putting it in when we took over from our parents.
But there wasn’t money—when had there ever been?
—and more to the point, what thru-hiker really needed air-conditioning after sleeping for weeks in the dirt?
The only place in Cloud Basin with reliable climate control was Latherly; if you wanted manufactured cool during the summer, you had to pay in laundry.
Everywhere else we turned on a fan and waited for the sun to go down.
I tuck in behind the reception desk. The Bunk’s entryway is a scrapbook of a room: the Polaroid wall of grinning hikers who’ve stayed with us on repeat visits, the taped-up collection of postcards we’ve been sent from around the country and the world.
The homemade sign in my mother’s steady hand: You’re Walking With Nature, Not In It.
She always describes thru-hiking as an extended visit in someone else’s home.
Nothing’s up to you out there in the woods, and especially not on a long-distance hike.
The High Rocky Trail takes three hard months if you’re quick.
Plenty of people drop off before reaching Cloud Basin halfway through, and Mom spent a lot of her time here talking those who hadn’t into sticking with it.
My whole life, the Bunkhouse has been a sought-after, midpoint refuge: hot showers, soft beds, real food. And my family.
I pick up the receiver. “The Bunkhouse, this is Lilah Fariday speaking.”
“Lilah, hey.” The voice sounds relieved, though entirely unfamiliar. “It’s Jay Singh. You might not remember me. We met at Abel’s funeral.”
I wet my lips. On the front porch, a pair of hikers dangle their feet over the rail as they examine a trail map. I watch their legs swing, back and forth, through the screen door.
“Jay,” I say. It’s the apex of summer, and the aspens in our front grove are a rich green. Jay Singh exists in a different world. It’s unnatural that he could be here in this one with the same trees I’ve looked out at all my life. “I remember.”
“Okay,” Jay says. “Yeah, I didn’t know—”
When he stops, I think how true that must be.
Every unknowable thing between me and the only person he could be calling about.
What happened at Abel’s funeral, and what happened after, and so very much more what happened before.
Memories so intangible that even to me, even now, sometimes I’m sure I made them up.
“I didn’t have your number,” Jay tries again. I picture him, four years ago, in his grieving black suit. “I’m sorry to call you at work.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I live here, too.”
“Right.” Jay clears his throat. He wasn’t a nervous person when I met him. “Right, I knew that.”
In the quiet before he speaks again, I look at my mother’s sign.
I let my gaze fall beneath it, over all those smiling Polaroids—all those people who were so happy to have made it to us—until they land where they always do.
On the photos that I seek out like a tongue to a sore tooth: a pain I can’t stop worrying.
The pictures of him I’ve never managed to take down.
“Look,” Jay says, finally. “It’s about Emmett.” There it is, that name. I close my eyes to keep the room from swaying around me. “Is he with you?”
My eyes startle back open as if I could see the question take shape, or make sense of it that way.
“Is he there?” Jay tries again. “With you?”
“Of course not.” That was the promise: Emmett would never be here with me again.
Jay exhales like he’s drowning—a last, panicked reflex before the end. And then he says, “He’s missing.”