That's the main reason you're in such a hurry, isn't it, Brian? Not because you can't stand the thought of maybe seeing Karen following some guy up the trail like a good little engaged girl should. That was one of the problems with hiking alone--the only person you had to listen to was yourself. "I don't even know her," he said out loud.
Unzipping a pocket on the side of his pack, he pulled a personal stereo tape player and flipped the lid open to make sure a tape was in it. Satisfied, he clipped it to the edge of the right-side, front pocket of his shorts and hung the headphones around his neck. Swinging his pack to his shoulders, he fastened the quick-release on the waist belt. After a moment of shifting and shrugging to get the forty pound pack settled, he began weaving his way through the rocks toward the main trail, giving a wide berth to the area he knew Karen and her friends had to be camped in.
Don't want to see her making his breakfast either, do you? "Leave me alone," he said.
He was almost to the trail when a movement a few yards off the trail caused him to turn. Karen leaned back against a large boulder, her hands tucked behind her like she'd been caught stealing cookies. She was wearing a baggy, navy blue wool sweater and charcoal fleece pants. Her hair was plaited in a loose French braid.
"Oh . . . 'morning," Brian said. "You're up early." Sheepishly, she pulled her hands out from behind her back to reveal an orange plastic spade and a thin roll of toilet paper. "Caught me," she replied, obviously embarrassed to look him in the eye. "Thanks for not coming by a couple of minutes sooner. You're getting a pretty early start yourself," she said, deftly shifting the focus from herself. "Do you always hike alone?"
"Well . . . " What was the best way to say it? "I lost a hiking buddy a few years ago and I just haven't been able to make the space for a new one yet." He hoped the answer would satisfy her.
"Hmm. Okay." She cast a glance to one side and raised her eyebrows to show she knew he was leaving something out on purpose, but would respect his privacy. There was something else going on, he realized; she was acting odd, keeping her face turned slightly away from him. "I never met anybody named Buck before," she said. "Is that your real name?"
"No, my real name's Brian. I just tell all the girls 'Buck' 'cause it goes with my rugged image." He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes to see how she handled the jest. He thought he detected a quick roll of her eyes, but he wasn't sure.
"What do you listen to?" She nodded her chin at the tape player hanging from his pocket.
"What? Oh . . . different stuff," he shrugged. "Some country . . . oldies. Stuff like that."
She leaned over to peer through the window on the lid of the player. "What's in there now?"
He pretended not to remember and made a show of flipping up the lid as if any old cassette he found there was good enough. "Umm . . . just some John Denver."
"Far out," she deadpanned.
Brian's eyes narrowed. "Are you making fun of me?"
"I'm sorry," she laughed. "I love John Denver, really. He's perfect for this." When she laughed her face turned toward him and he saw it--a thin, crooked white scar running out of the hairline of her right temple down toward her ear lobe. It almost looked like a lightning bolt tattooed on the side of her head. It was the scar that caused her eyes to seem so subtly out of place, and her smile to be slightly crooked; it had pulled the side of her face almost imperceptibly out of line. He hadn't seen it the night before because her hair covered it.
She realized he had noticed the mark and her smile faded. She turned her head to the left and gave him the full view. He realized that she had actually trimmed the hair on her temple to reveal more of it. "What do you think?" she asked. "It's the latest thing in the outdoor look."
Unsure of how to respond, he hitched his pack higher. "It's, uh, it's nice. I gotta get going," he said. "You guys have a good day." He left her with a nod and picked up the Pacific Crest Trail where it began to cross the short ridge that hemmed Chicken Spring Lake to the west.
He started up the rocky switchbacks that climbed through scattered foxtail pines. That's one weird girl, Brian. "Tell me about it," he replied. As he zigzagged across the hillside, he replayed the scene in his mind. What was the deal with that scar? Was it from some accident? It didn't look like something reconstructive surgery couldn't fix. But instead of opting for that, she'd actually gone out of her way to show it off. Maybe her insurance company wouldn't pay for plastic surgery and she had trimmed the hair short to display the scar as a protest. He smiled. That was something he could appreciate. He wished now that he'd taken the time to ask about it after she turned her head and gave him a full view. A weird girl, true, but an interesting one. It was probably just as well he walked away from her. She was engaged and besides that, she'd already touched on a painful subject: his reason for hiking alone.
He could just see himself telling her all about it as she made sympathetic noises and looked at him with those eyes. "Yeah, my dad and I used to go backpacking together all the time. He was probably John Denver's biggest fan and we always listened to his music on the way to wherever we were headed. Then Dad had a massive stroke and laid in bed drooling for a week before he had a bigger stroke and died." Perfect conversation stopper. Then Karen would've stood around hemming and hawing until she could make a graceful exit and run back to her fianc? Or worse, she would've felt like she gouged open an old wound and needed to patch him up before she could let him go. Better to be rude and get out before the gouging got worse. Brian could live with it as long as he didn't have to talk about it. The unexpected death of his father in the summer of Brian's 23rd birthday had left him unsure and angry. During the weeks and months following the funeral, Brian felt a tension growing that finally boiled over one night at work. He was a waiter at a Marie Callender's. That night every table and booth in his station was filled--'slammed', they called it--and he was getting behind in his orders. Customers were tugging at him and complaining, and the manager was riding him. Suddenly Brian found himself clutching a counter in the break area, gasping for air, panic-stricken. He couldn't force himself to go back out on the floor and finally the assistant manager told him to go home.
Even the simple task of driving home overwhelmed him; Brian's mother ended up coming to get him. She tried to get him to go to the therapist she'd been seeing, so he could talk about it. The thought of talking about "it", especially to a complete stranger, made him even more upset. How could he talk about "it" when he wasn't even sure what "it" was? The next morning he called the restaurant and quit, then he stuffed his backpack with gear and clothes and headed for the Sierras.
The first trip without his father had been the hardest for Brian. For one thing, he kept imagining he could hear his father's steps behind him on the trail. When he reached a spot with a view or the top of a pass, he caught himself listening for a whistle of appreciation from his father. Another thing he hadn't anticipated was how difficult the nights would be. His state of mind was easier to deal with during the daylight hours, just as a physical pain was more bearable by day. But at night, when it was just Brian and the dark, the pain seemed to multiply. The first two nights he had lain awake for hours, sometimes crying, sometimes just staring at the tent fabric around him. But with each trip into the mountains he felt a release. He had friends that also enjoyed backpacking, but somehow it felt unfaithful to his father's memory to hike with someone else. Sometimes, when he hiked alone, Brian could almost feel his father there with him. It never happened when he was with somebody and he was afraid, afraid he would lose contact with his father. He didn't try to psychoanalyze the moments when they came; he accepted them, and trusted the peace they seemed to bring. He'd tried to tell his mom about it, but she just didn't get it. She kept wanting him to see her therapist.
Even now, just the thought of talking about his father's death bothered him.
The picture of Karen, with her scarred profile, came back to him. She seemed almost proud of it. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to know what tragedy had left her with it. In fact, he could scarcely stop thinking about it. What was it about it that got to him? He knew attractive girls back home; he'd even dated some since his father's death. Why this strong pull toward a girl he didn't know, a girl with some odd fixation for facial deformity? Ah, he realized, maybe that's the key. She was a mystery, and maybe more importantly, she knew nothing about him. The girls he'd dated back home all knew what had happened to his father and in the back of his mind he wondered if part of the reason they went out with him was out of pity. Maybe that was the reason none of the relationships went beyond a date or two; he didn't want to be a "mercy" date. Maybe something inside of him was drawn to Karen because to her he was just another guy.
What is this, the "Wilderness Psychology" show? the voice in his head asked him. "Maybe," he said. "Now, go away."
The steady uphill grind of the rocky switchbacks brought him back to the present. Off to his left the mountain fell away to Big Whitney Meadow, a vast bowl of sandy ground covered by thin patches of grass. Now a meadow in name only, it had been over-grazed by sheep late in the 1800's, and was still recovering. Brian thought it ironic that one of the sheepherders who accompanied the devastating flocks into the Sierras was the father of the environmental movement, a Scotsman named John Muir.
The trail continued through the open forest of foxtail pines as it followed the contours of the dry mountain slopes. The gnarled trees were relatively short, with thick trunks, enabling them to withstand the fierce Sierra windstorms that swept the range in the late fall and through the winter. The twisted limbs on many of the trees tended to point in one direction, as if they had been frozen during a hurricane, a testament to the wind's power. Brian traversed the barren plateau of Siberian Outpost and by midday dropped into the lush, green canyon of Rock Creek. The foxtail pines of the plateau had given way to towering lodgepole pines, which thrived in the lower, damper canyon. He passed a number of campsites strung along between the south side of the creek and the trail before choosing the last one where the trail crossed the creek on a fallen tree. After setting up his camp, he spent the rest of the afternoon fishing the green pools of the rushing, pine-shaded creek.
That night Brian roasted his catch of golden trout over a small campfire, giving each a sprinkling of lemon pepper. Afterward, with a Marine Band harmonica that used to belong to his father, he alternated between making music--at least what he liked to think of as music--and contemplating the painful mysteries of love. Having little success in either endeavor, he crawled into his tent for another restless night.
