Abandon

THREE

T

hey spent the first two hours climbing out of the canyon on a trail that switchbacked through a forest of old-growth Engelmann spruce. Abigail found herself near the back, between Emmett and Lawrence, trying to come to terms with the emaciated air.

At a break in the trees, she peered down and saw the road they’d taken out of Silverton, just a twisting brown thread eight hundred feet below. The sound of the stream had faded into a sustained hiss. The next time they stopped to rest, she’d lost the stream altogether and there was no wind, only the thud of her oxygen-starved heart banging in her ears.

At midday, they crossed a stretch of open country, the grasses dry and yellowed, littered with achromatic midsummer blooms of columbine, lupine, and Indian paintbrush. Abigail could see a subgroup of the San Juans—the mountains tan in direct sun, gray in the shadow of clouds, with rags of old snow high on the peaks. The sky shone neon blue.

Scott led them to the entrance of a broad valley. They came into a forest of ponderosa, plenty of space between the trees, sunlight pouring onto the pine-needle floor of the forest. As they climbed, the occasional spruce appeared among the ponderosa. The pines dwindled. Then they moved through a pure stand of spruce again. Abigail realized they hadn’t been following a trail since breakfast.

In the early afternoon, they arrived at a small lake, and Scott told everyone to shed their packs. Abigail leaned hers against a rotten stump. Without the weight, she felt like she might float away. She knelt down on the shore and splashed water in her face. The arctic shock of it stole her breath. She sat on the grassy bank and drank from her water bottle. Tall spruce trees rimmed the bank, and the surface of the lake sent back a perfect reflection of the trees and the sky. The water glowed a deep green. She looked through it down to the lakebed, saw a cutthroat motionless among the pastel-colored stones.

Jerrod came over and brought her a bagged lunch—sandwich, apple, Clif Bar.

“How you holding up?” he asked.

“Feel like I’m breathing through a straw, and my hips hurt from the pack.”

“I’ll adjust the straps again before we leave. You’re doing very well.”

She shielded her face from the sun and looked up at Jerrod. She liked his face. She could tell that beneath the beard he was handsome, taller than Scott, even more well built. But she wondered about the scars, two bare patches curving up from the corners of his mouth in the shape of crescent moons. Staring at him, she wished she could see his eyes again. They seemed different—she’d noticed it at the trailhead before the sun came up and drove everyone into sunglasses. They reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, their density and depth, like they bore some great burden beyond the intake of the present.

Jerrod left to take Emmett and June their lunches. Abigail unwrapped her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. She ate, watching the llamas graze the bank.

They made camp at eleven thousand feet in a glade just spacious enough to accommodate five tents. They were only a few hundred feet below the timberline and the forest had transitioned into a withered-looking collection of blue spruce and alpine fir, crippled by years of extreme winters. Scott insisted that everyone change out of their wet clothes to avoid hypothermia. Within half an hour, they raised the tents. The guides showed everyone how to inflate the Therm-a-Rests and arrange their gear inside the vestibules.

With still a few hours of light left, Abigail emerged from her tent, bundled in long underwear, fleece pants, a vest and parka. Emmett and June stood watching Jerrod construct a campfire ring from a pile of rocks. Lawrence snored in his tent. Scott dug through a giant compression bag filled with what Abigail could only hope was real food, not that granola-bar shit.

She walked up to him, said, “I need to use the ladies’ room. What do we do about that?”

“I haven’t unpacked the toilet yet.”

“Really? You have a portable—” His grin stopped her.

“You’ve never spent a night out in the woods have you, Abigail?”

“No.”

“Well, no worries. There’s a bathroom behind every tree.”

She smiled seductively and raised her middle finger.

Abigail found a bit of privacy behind a blue spruce. The air nipped her bare ass. The ground steamed. She glanced at her watch—6:30 P.M., still on Manhattan time, and it made her homesick to think of Viv and Jen. Any other Sunday, she’d have just finished working out and showering, in a mad rush to meet them for cosmos at the Zinc Bar. But so far, this trip had been nothing like she’d expected. The thin air, the cold, ten fucking miles, and the hardest still to come. She thought she’d be in her element out here, but she hated everything—the Clif Bars, the smelly, bitchy llamas. And there was something about the light beginning to fade and no warm bed to climb into that depressed the hell out of her. I’m a city girl. If there was ever a question. While she squatted there, she gazed back down the valley. That open country they’d crossed several hours ago lay golden in the late-afternoon sun, and as she pulled up her pants, she saw it. A few miles below, perhaps at the lake where they’d stopped for lunch, a column of smoke rose out of the forest. As she walked back toward their campsite, she felt glad to have seen it, relieved to know they weren’t completely alone out here.