It was cool in the mountains in the late morning, so it didn’t really matter that the climate control system in the car wasn’t working. Gordon had recently bought the car used, and he was slightly proud of it. Some day he would need to have a few issues taken care of, but until then he simply cracked the window an inch to keep the air from getting too stale.
As he pulled onto the shoulder of the mountain road, Carlie put her phone away and reached for her backpack. At the hotel, Gordon had dropped in a few snacks that he had taken off the table near the restaurant door, assuming they were free provisions for guests like them, heading out to ex-plore the day.
A short walk up the road they found what they assumed to be the trailhead. There was a sign, but the paint had been weather-blasted and the plywood had decomposed into a substance that looked like the walls of a wasp’s nest. Gordon and Carlie filed past onto the narrow staircase and climbed into the woods.
The first section of “trail” wasn’t a single path but a spidery free-for-all. Hikers had branched out, looking for the shortest route to get ahead of others before the pinch up ahead and the awkward-ness of having to overtake slower parties.
Gordon and Carlie took different routes. Gordon was ahead, so it was really Carlie who chose not to follow. Now they seemed to be competing to prove who could find the most direct path. Gordon capitulated, slowing to let Carlie move ahead. There had been some awkwardness back at the hotel, and he was trying to be on his best behaviour. It was nothing too serious, but he felt that it wasn’t behind them yet.
Soon the trails merged. This part was easy going, except for the protruding rocks that threatened to trip you up or twist your ankle. Gordon glanced up from the ground briefly to try to read the back of Carlie’s head. What was this silent march all about? Was she dwelling on the test she had given him while they were still in bed, closing her eyes until he told her what colour they were?
The path descended slightly into a shallow valley where they trod over remnants of mud. Carlie felt the ridges through the thin soles of her shoes. A day or two ago this would have been quite a mess. Now it just crumbled a little beneath her weight.
While they were in a clearing, she listened. She could not hear the cars on the highway, at least not while they were walking, with the footsteps and the swish of fabric. If there were no trees, though, would she have been able to see? They were probably still laughably close to the flow of traffic, though it already seemed like they had entered another world.
Is that why they had set out from the hotel with a poorly Photoshopped brochure about local hikes?
The whole weekend had been a little “last minute”, spontaneous rather. She thought of it as Gor-don’s idea, but it had really been hers. She was the one who started to browse Google maps while procrastinating at the office. She was the one who sent the first link. She sensed that Gordon was inspired by the idea of driving through the mountains in the new car. The drive had been nice, yes-terday afternoon, longish but anticipatory and scenic. The walk around the lake hadn’t disappoint-ed. Dinner had been pretty good but a little over-priced, according to Gordon. Then love-making, a deep sleep in the mountain air, and this morning the stale whiff of boredom before Gordon found the brochure.
The process of choosing the trail had been a distraction, but now that they were on it, they didn’t know what they wanted from it. Was this exercise? Were they hoping to enjoy the regenerative ef-fects of nature, discover Instagram content, spot a falcon? The blurb about this particular trail men-tioned a rock formation that was “worth the effort”. Symbolically, it represented the end of the hike for most; however, near the top, there was a branching trail to a “precarious descent” that “hooked up with” the “piggy-back loop” of another trail that was accessible off a county road on the other side of the mountain.
Forging on to another trail actually intrigued Gordon, though he kept the idea to himself. There was no one to drive him from the other trailhead back to the car unless he and Carlie parted ways at the top and she returned to the car and drove around to pick him up. But that option was too danger-ous, selfish, and unfeasible to mention.
They followed a switchback that delivered them to the base of a steep climb. They took hold of sin-ewy trees for stability. It was time to abandon daydreams and focus on climbing. It was almost embarrassing, this heavy breathing, losing balance, having to try hard.
The climb was tricky, but not very high. Gordon pulled himself over the lip and took a few steps just to definitively conquer the obstacle. Turning back, he offered Carlie a hand, but she reached for a tree instead. After hoisting herself over the edge, she exhaled and stepped past him.
“That must stop a few people,” Gordon said.
“Yeah.” Carlie pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. She located the path and proceeded forward. The ground was even and free of rocks and roots, for a stretch at least. She gazed up at the branch-es and leaves. She thought she might name them, but she didn’t know trees, other than birches and maples. On more than one occasion she had decided to learn but hadn’t yet.
The path snaked gently. Walking single-file, they fell into a rhythm. The tension between them eased, at least for a moment. It frustrated him how often she emanated anger, inexplicable anger. He tried to tell himself that he wasn’t the true cause, although he did feel it aimed at him. It was un-fair, he thought, and at times he wondered how much longer he could take it. But then, like now, it would pass, and in hindsight seem almost insignificant.
Carlie was thinking she would potentially get into hiking. It was like yoga or tai-chi, one of those activities that brought the mind and body into unison and didn’t do harm, relatively speaking. She shared the idea with Gordon.
“Absolutely,” he said. A few seconds later he added, “Especially if you don’t drive to the trail.”
She lengthened one stride in order to place her foot beyond the edge of a protruding rock. She said, “Yeah,” but distractedly. She enjoyed the sensation of being nimble. Jogging on this path could be fun, especially here where it was not too technical. She wasn’t currently what you would call a runner, but she had a physical affinity for running. Twelve or more years ago, in phys. ed. class, she finished the 3k run near the front of the pack and people said she should do track or cross-country. She wasn’t interested but had a premonition that at some point later in life she would run.
The path again dipped into the valley, and they stepped through dried, corrugated mud. A tree had fallen, and someone had cut out a two-meter section of the trunk to clear a way through. The bark had sloughed off or had been removed. Absent-mindedly, Gordon slid the palm of his hand over the wood as he passed. It was smooth and cool. The touch was too brief. He reached out and let the leaves of a sapling brush against his fingers. Out of the corner of his eye, through the foliage, he saw a rocky peak in the distance. “I think that’s where we’re going?” he said.
They were advancing through a stand of young trees. The air was cool on Gordon’s skin. Perhaps it was the smoothness of the wood that had heightened his sense of touch. He wondered how alone they were. There had been another vehicle parked at the trailhead, a beige mini-van, but they had seen no one. He took two long strides and touched Carlie on the shoulder. She looked back at him. The colour of her eyes: did it matter which word you chose? Most eyes were not “brown”, “blue” or “green” anyway. They were some mineral assortment. Carlie’s contained a significant portion of emerald but also flecks of other minerals he couldn’t name with colours resembling rust, orange peel, charcoal, and blue Mr. Freeze.
Instead of touching her bare shoulder, he slung his arm around her, backpack and all. She offered him a smile and circled her arm around his waist. They took a few steps side-by-side, but the path was narrow, so Carlie let go and Gordon dropped back.
“We have a good pace going,” he said.
“I can slow down for you if you can’t keep up,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to climb again soon. We’ve got to get up to that ridge.”
It was similar to the first climb but significantly higher. Much of the time they were scrambling on all fours, as the dry earth crumbled underfoot.
When Carlie reached the top, she knelt over the edge to look for Gordon, but he wasn’t behind her. At some point, they had apparently diverged onto different routes. She ducked through the brush along the edge of the ridge, failed to find him, and turned back. He was waiting for her.
“Where’d you go?”
He shrugged and asked playfully, “Where’d you go?”
They could not see it yet, but they were actually very close to the end. The path was pebbled here. It almost looked as if it had been landscaped. The “trees” were short, crooked, almost vine-like. It was brighter and the air was different. In anticipation, they lengthened their strides. Twenty meters further they emerged onto a rocky precipice. It was like a stage of smoothed rock, slightly domed, and out near the end was the boulder, which looked vaguely like a huddled rodent.
About four meters from the sloping edge, they came to a stop. To take in the view they had to turn their heads and twist their bodies. They could see where they had been and far beyond.
“I didn’t see the other path,” Gordon said.
Carlie stopped squinting into the distance and looked at him.
“To the other path,” Gordon said.
Somehow this annoyed her, because she had been looking for it too.
Gordon, himself, was a little torn. He wanted to admire the view and inspect the premonitory but he also wanted to scoot back down the path and figure out how they had missed the other trail. It didn’t have to be right away, though. He would soon find out: they had to go back that way. He sat down on the rock, stretched out his long legs, and crossed them at the ankles.
“Do you want to eat a little something?”
Carlie shook free of the backpack and practically dropped it at Gordon’s feet. He reached in, found a granola bar, and tossed it to her. He also fished out the bagels and a container of yogurt, which he peeled open. As he looked over his shoulder, he noticed Carlie. “Where are you going?”
He thought he heard her say, “Nowhere.” When she was twenty meters away, he got up to follow. He knew where she was going, but he tried to be nonchalant. By the time he reached her, she was on her way back, with a decidedly innocent expression on her face.
“Did you find it?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
She flung her arm backward. “Just there.”
Gordon walked to where they had emerged from the bush. About ten meters along, the path veered to the left. That was where they had come from, but now that he was not focused on reaching the premonitory, he saw two narrow strips of pebbled path that ran on each side of a thin, delicate tree. Looking more closely, he realized that the two strips merged. The tree was growing in the middle of the path.
He found Carlie standing near her backpack, looking away from him. He pulled the warped bro-chure out of his pocket and looked at the map. It was hand-drawn, it seemed, lacked detail, and wasn’t made to scale, but it did have a dotted line in more or less the same location as the newly discovered path.
“That’s it,” he said.
Gordon waited for some response, but Carlie just chewed her granola bar and looked out over the tops of the trees. “Too bad we didn’t have someone to give us a lift back here from the other trail-head,” he added. “Could be cool.”
“Could just do it,” Carlie said, turning back around to face him, more or less.
“We’d have to walk both ways. It could be dark by the time we get back and we don’t have water or much food.”
Now Carlie was looking off in another direction, not at him. “I guess,” she said.
He was hoping she would say, “You should go. I’ll drive around and meet you,” but instead he said, “You could do it.”
“And leave you?”
“I actually wouldn’t mind driving over there to pick you up, but splitting up is probably a bit dan-gerous.”
Carlie swallowed and looked down at the last third of her granola bar. She peeled back the wrapper to prepare her next bite.
“Don’t you think?” Gordon asked.
“I guess,” she said, as she cracked a piece of granola between her molars.
On the return, she was so quiet that he said, exploratorily, “One of us should have done it.” The only reply was footsteps and light breathing, so he added, “But that would have been irresponsible: to split up.”
“Yeah. There was no way. Not today.”
“You’d have to start early, bring a lot of supplies. Do it as an out and back.”
She had nothing to add. Her unwillingness to help save the moment--the day in fact--irked him, but he tried not to think about it. He tried to enjoy the walk, but the return held less mystery.
Carlie was thinking of the future. Maybe she would start running this week. She pictured trail shoes, firmly laced, and undulating trails. She was striding between trees, alone, pushing herself, breathing freely.
Inspired, she started to jog. A few seconds later, Gordon pulled up beside her and said something like, “Extra energy?” to which she replied, in a gasp, “Yeah,” before picking up the pace. Gordon fell behind but stayed on her heels as they snaked through the trees. Carlie sped up.
Gordon’s footsteps quieted as he fell back but then grew louder again. He was at her heels breath-ing heavily. He tried to laugh. “Is this a race?”
“No,” she said, but it was.
They reached the car red-faced and panting, though trying to hide the extent of their exertions. Ra-ther than resting in the open air, they stepped right into the car. As he pulled onto the road, Gordon had a premonition that, as a couple, they would always teeter on an edge between happiness and resentment.
Carlie sighed and opened her window. “You really have to get your fan fixed,” she said.
“I know,” he said, admitting it fully, even sympathetically with no defensiveness or wounded pride. She looked over and gave him one of her determined smiles with the squinty eyes, holding it until he could glance over and see, which he did. And then he turned his eyes back to the road, which was narrow and curvy.
Definitely some orange peel, he thought, but he would need another look to confirm the Mr. Freeze blue.