Like so many mornings after a torrential rainstorm, the day broke awash with brilliant sunshine and fresh air. Though the sun had warmed the tin room to the point where I’d grown hot in my sleeping bag, the wretched position in which I’d finally fallen asleep had morphed into borderline comfortable.
I gazed at the cot above me expecting to see the impression of Pia still sleeping there, but it was flat. To my left, Rachel’s bed was empty too, her bedroll neatly tied. I was relieved to see Sandra still bundled in her red sleeping bag, head tucked down. Like Pia, she was a natural-born sleeper.
Led by aromas of French toast and coffee, I climbed up the hill across grass flattened by the night’s downpour. In the distance, our destination: smoke-blue mountains obscured and then revealed by morning fog. I felt equally pulled and repelled. What did the mountains care about our plan to climb them, rafting the waters that divided them? They had eternity before us, and eternity after us. We were nothing to them.
• • •
We swung out onto the main road—Sandra, Rachel, and me crammed in the backseat—and drove about twenty minutes or so before Rory turned sharply onto an unmarked dirt road not much wider than his truck. Up in front, he and Pia kept up a lively conversation the rest of us weren’t privy to with the radio blaring and the roar of the engine. I watched her demonstrate some point with her long, elegant hands, then laugh. His white teeth flashed as he smiled at her, his strong arm resting on the open window.
We three sat in silence, bumping along so hard my teeth were chattering, feeling the main road recede as the forest came at us fast. Branches reached out and scraped across the windshield, snapping back behind us. The road decayed into two muddy grooves with grass down the middle, and the truck bounced so violently in deep ruts I thought the engine would fall out.
“You ladies all in one piece back there?” Rory called to us.
Rachel said we were, barely, just as a long green branch popped into my open window, dragged itself across my chest, and disappeared behind us. I didn’t think the road could get any narrower, but it did, until I didn’t see any difference between what we were doing and driving through the woods. Rory drove fearlessly and too fast.
We came to a break in the trees where the sky could breathe in, then rolled into a field of wildflowers, waist-deep heather, and clover. Rory barreled through the tall grasses, freeing a knot of blue butterflies that swirled up in a purple twist. Wild rhododendron and laurel bushes crunched under the wheels and clawed at the undercarriage. He never slowed down.
The land dipped down farther and there was the sensation of falling forward into something we shouldn’t. I smelled mud and water. Cat-o’-nine-tails taller than the truck hammered at us. The wheels caught in some kind of suction and the engine ground louder than it should have for how fast we were going until we dropped down hard on the back left wheel and stuck there, me piled up on top of Rachel and Sandra. We were scared but couldn’t help laughing as we disentangled ourselves.
“Shit,” Rory said, smacking the wheel. “This wasn’t a swamp two weeks ago.”
The truck groaned and sank a bit more. Wedged in my seat, I watched a dragonfly maybe four inches long hang in the air a foot from my face, a masterpiece of color and construction. It examined me with thousands of black eyes before it helicoptered away.
Rory manhandled the wheel and lead-footed the gas. The wheels whined as they turned, digging us deeper. He turned to Pia. “Can you drive a stick?”
“Sure.”
We laughed. Pia could pilot a plane. Rory jumped out of the truck with the grace of a much smaller man, pushed his way through the weeds, and disappeared behind the truck. “On three!” he yelled.
Pia installed herself in the driver’s seat and took over. Several unsuccessful attempts to free us later, Rory made his way to where we sat clumped in the backseat. He draped his heavy forearms over the window, face, hair, and clothes more mud than anything else. “Hate to ask, but I could really use some muscle back here.”
Rachel opened her door, the corner of which wedged into the muck and high swords of grass because of the way we were pitched. Her hiking boots sank into a foot of mud; it flowed up over the tops of them, flooding them with carbon-black ooze. Sandra tumbled out after her, laughing and cursing, then turned back to me with a questioning look.
“Let me know if you need me,” I said with a weak smile, picturing snakes and other evil creatures that lived in muck.
I felt them heave into the back of the truck as Pia revved the engine, cursing and slapping at the dashboard. We surged half a foot, maybe, far from what we needed to get out of that hole. I sat in a ball of shame, loathing my fearful nature, a sudden headache pounding behind my eyes. More groaning and pushing, some heated discussion, then Sandra’s face in my window, coated in black mud. She smiled, her teeth and the whites of her eyes gleaming.
“Wini, hon, I think this might be an all-hands-on-deck sort of deal.”
The mud was up past her knees, almost up to her shorts. Shuddering, I pushed open the door and lowered my legs into it, never losing eye contact with her. She grabbed my hand and together we Frankenstein-stepped to the back of the truck, the hum of insects constant around our ears.
“On three!” Rory grunted, and Pia gunned the engine as we all leaned into the cold, immobile bumper. Sheets of slime shot back, covering every square inch of us; I tasted it in my mouth, felt it clogging my ears. I stood with the others, spitting, coughing, and laughing at the sight of each other. Baptized in primal ooze, a weird joy flooded me; the inception of a new kind of freedom. It was only earth, water, decayed plants and animals. We came from it and we were all headed back someday.
Rory rested his hands on his narrow hips. “Sorry about this, but, you know, shit happens.”
“Let’s keep going!” Pia yelled from the front, and we put our shoulders back into it. Each time more mud slammed back at us, but nothing was budging and the truck only sank deeper.
Pia sprang from the cab. “We need to put something under the wheel.”
She began to gather reeds and long grasses; we all did, Rory helping with a knife he carried. We put together a mat of stalks and branches and wedged it under the tire. The wheel turned once, then caught, and the truck leapt forward and up, as if flying into the morning sky.
• • •
We drove a few minutes more after the swamp, passing a hillock of twisted apple trees and the blackened carcass of an abandoned truck. Ancient stone walls crisscrossed the fields, at places in stunning shape and in others more piles of rocks than anything else. Once I thought I saw something dark and lumbering dissolve into the forest, but I couldn’t be sure; at the time I chalked it up to a play of shadows from passing clouds or simply my skittish imagination.
Rory eased the truck up and over a crest of shale and loose rocks, nosed it into a stand of white birch that skirted the forest, and killed the engine. Silence had its moment before woodland sounds started up again, a whir of insects and the rustle of unseen creatures among trees and undergrowth.
“I never felt so disgusting in my life,” Sandra said, shifting in her seat in her filthy clothes. We laughed, and dried mud cracked and fell in chips off our faces and onto the backseat.
Like a lost tribe of mud people, we followed Rory to a stream just outside the truck, really only a trickle of water that slipped over mossy stones before disappearing under a mess of tree limbs. It was so meager we had to take turns cleaning ourselves, which we did politely. All we could do was splash the worst of it off our faces and arms and legs, not anything like a real soak that would have done the job.
Rory tossed our gear out of the truck bed as if it weighed nothing, leaned our packs up against the birch trees, and locked the doors of the cab. This was it. We were into it now, the wild green world—about to shed even the truck and vanish into the forest. The sun lingered at its apex, warming the tops of our heads. I could feel it beating into the part of my hair. Pia sprayed herself with Off! and we all copied her.
“We’ll get to the river tonight,” Rory said as he rummaged in his pack and pulled out a rag. He soaked it in the stream and wiped his face. “We can really get washed up there.”
Something metal glinted from the side pocket of the pack where he’d gotten the rag. I hadn’t seen too many in my life but knew it was the handle of a gun. I looked away but felt Rory’s eyes burning into me as he stuffed the rag back over it.
Pia hoisted her pack over her shoulders, clipped the belt, and laughed. “We’re going to be so beautiful by the time we get this mud off.”
“Impossible,” Rory said. “You ladies couldn’t get any more beautiful.” The rest of us chuckled politely, but Pia actually perked up at this comment. Rachel gave Rory a long, hard look as she downed a few swigs of water. Sandra grimaced, cursing softly as she worked a wide-toothed comb through mud-hardened hair.
“You know what,” Rory said, “I really like how you all handled our situation back there. You jumped right in, no hesitation. Well, most of you.” He winked at me, and I felt myself redden. “That’s a survival skill.” He knifed a piece of apple and slid it in his mouth.
Rachel wandered over to the entrance of the trail, a subtle opening in dense green forest. “So does anyone, I don’t know, live out here?”
“I doubt it. Bear, moose, that’s another story. If you see a bear, don’t run, whatever you do. Especially a cub. Speak in a low voice and back off slow and gentle.”
Rachel plunked her hands on her hips, her kinky curls in a muddy topknot on her head. “Seriously, Rory, how many bears have you seen out here?”
“None. But I know what their scat looks like, and I’ve seen plenty of it.”
Rachel snorted. “Bear poop? Come on, how do you know it’s—”
“Last year an older couple came out here to camp—a mile away, maybe, near the river—and spotted a cub on the ridge. They got real close. Theory was they wanted to take a selfie with the thing, or that’s what their last Facebook update said, anyway. Too bad mama was watching; you know, just biding her time.”
Sandra put her comb down, eyes wide. “What happened to them?”
Rory snapped his shoulder straps together across his broad chest, yanked them taut. “Nothing good.”
My jaw tightened so hard I got light-headed and had to lean against my backpack for a moment. Rachel took a step toward the trailhead and peered into it as if she could find the answer there. “So come on, what?” she said breathily, her forehead shining with sweat.
“Pieces of them were found, that’s it. So the moral of the story is, don’t do stupid shit, and listen to what I say. Are we good? Ready to roll, ladies?”
We all nodded as we gathered our gear, the only sound soft grunts as we heaved our packs onto our shoulders.