The feeling of settling in at camp after an interminable day of hiking was like finally finding the home you’d always wanted. The home, devoid of luxuries, that you’d always needed. Watching as Tilda lay sprawled on her one-inch-thick inflatable mattress pad, Imogen knew exactly what she was experiencing: the greatest comfort of her life. No sofa after a difficult but ordinary day could compare. Nor could a prosaic view of four walls or the best in streaming television.
The feelings came back so effortlessly, as if this real world, this better world, had been waiting for her. And it would have waited forever, and welcomed her regardless, but she was glad, so glad, Beck hadn’t let her say no to this trip. They’d gone car camping a few times while Beck was in medical school, and when she first moved to Arizona they made one Canyon trip together. But in the intervening decade Imogen had become too intimidated—too poor, too indulgent-of-her-ways—to make adventurous trips. And in the last year she’d even forgone trying to visit her sister and Afiya.
Now, fully immersed in being outdoors—truly outdoors, with no easy way to go back indoors—it was easier to see the meaninglessness of her everyday life. With its to-do lists and routines, its material distractions and petty worries. At home, she was broken and useless; in the Canyon she had the same potential as the raven that flew circles above her head.
While Beck unpacked the things they’d need to make supper, Imogen did a bit of housekeeping. She secured their plastic drop cloth with rocks around its edges, as sometimes gusts blew hard through the inner canyons. They never used a tent in the Canyon, and Imogen had never experienced rain here, though they carried extra tarps for that contingency. In theory, the scorpions came out at night, but they’d never seen one; as a precaution, they always shook out their boots in the morning. But a tent would ruin everything.
It was something of a contradiction that in the city she preferred the familiar and solitary comfort of small rooms, yet sleeping outside had always ranked near the top of her Favorite Things. There was nothing like being snug in a sleeping bag and awakening in a morning fog that made her feel like she was in a cloud. And while she was never fully at ease in the dark, here—with a sky unmarred by the disease of light pollution—the celestial canopy promised wonders of its own. She was hopeful it would feel just as good as she remembered, and in a state of physical exhaustion, she might not even need her tincture to help her sleep.
As Imogen tidied up their mattress pads and sleeping bags, making neat parallel beds, she grinned with the anticipation of the nightly star show. Both she and Tilda had invested in heavier but more comfortable Therm-a-Rest inflatable pads, but Beck still liked her eggshell pad, which accordioned into a featherweight rectangular prism. Imogen made each of them a preliminary pillow using the stuff sacks from their sleeping bags, which she filled with whatever they weren’t currently wearing. It would drop into the forties overnight, but the sleeping bags would keep them warm. Until then, they’d wear their sweatshirts and fleeces as the temperature started to fall.
Tilda strolled back from the pit toilets, which they’d passed on their way into camp, the toilet paper in one hand, her camera in the other.
“Gotta enjoy the facilities while I can, right?” Once they departed for Boucher canyon in the morning, they wouldn’t have even a pit toilet again until they came back to Hermit for the last night of their trip.
“Squatting isn’t so bad,” said Beck.
“The lack of plumbing isn’t so bad,” Imogen corrected, “but my thigh muscles aren’t good at squatting.”
“You’ve got it so backwards,” said Tilda, sitting crisscross applesauce on her makeshift bed. She sniffed her underarms. “I’m still a little unsure of this whole no showering thing.”
“No one ever died from being a little smelly.” And Imogen should know: with fewer reasons to leave her apartment came less motivation for daily hygiene.
Tilda snapped a few pictures of their camp, then took a second to survey the campsite about two hundred feet beyond theirs, where a small blue tent was set up. “So some people use tents?” she said.
“Silly people.” Beck lifted her compact Swedish stove out of the saucepan it traveled in.
“Do you ever, like, go and introduce yourselves and hang out?”
“If you pass someone on the trail you say hello, maybe swap stories,” said Imogen, aware that avoiding people was probably a new concept for someone who spent most of her life trying to expand an ever-widening circle of followers.
“But at camp, people pretty much like to do their own thing.” Another reason Beck surely liked the wilderness, with its little demand for small talk.
“Don’t you ever…worry? About who’s around?” Tilda asked.
Imogen eyed the distant tent. She was tempted to say yes, but didn’t: at best Beck wouldn’t understand why she shared this concern; at worst she might kill Imogen for scaring Tilda. At home, she’d added a second lock to her door, even though it was against the rules of her lease, and couldn’t sleep with the windows open. She listened now, trying to pick up voices. If she heard women among the neighboring party it would diffuse much of her apprehension. But she didn’t hear any voices at all.
“Backpackers are a certain type,” Beck said, “especially people who do hard-core trips.”
“Like us?” Tilda asked her.
“Exactly.”
Per usual, her sister was calm and reasonable, and Imogen perhaps found more comfort in her words than Tilda did, as she knew Beck was right—and once upon a time she’d felt just as carefree. People who loved nature were different. Except for hunters. And maybe survivalists.
Imogen loved to binge certain kinds of reality television. Beck would refute its value as “preparation,” but over the last few months she’d watched every season of Alone, in which contestants tried to survive on their own in an unforgiving wilderness with nothing but a handful of tools. Living vicariously through their adventures, she’d admired some of them for their incredible skills, their knowledge of plants and how to build a shelter. But sometimes the show broke her heart. The squealing squirrel at the end of an arrow. The duck, sick or injured, that sat alone on a cold beach. Imogen wanted to help it, to cuddle it and soothe away its pain. The hungry contestant had other ideas; she stepped on its neck and it pooped toward the camera while it suffocated. While Imogen understood that people needed to eat, she was glad that backpackers weren’t trying to win out over starvation.
“Need help with anything?” Tilda asked her.
Imogen appreciated the diversion. “You can get out the bowls and mugs and utensils. I think they’re all in your pack.”
Beck had set up their kitchen area so the stove was sheltered between two rocks, which would help keep it ablaze if it got windy. The stove was about the size of a thirty-two-ounce can of tomatoes and consisted of only a few elements: the bottom section held the Coleman fuel below the burner; above that, three prongs could be turned outward to stabilize a lightweight pot; and the keylike mechanism that would ignite the flame. Beck struck a wooden match and lit the fire-starter—a gel she’d squirted in the indentation beneath the burner. Tilda brought the utensils and plastic dishes over and set them within reach.
“Anything else?” she asked, genuinely eager.
“You can fill the pot with water if you want,” said Beck.
Sometimes Tilda acted like a little kid, with big gestures and silly voices and over-the-top reactions, but this version—the intrepid kid, the ooh what’s next? kid—was actually kind of endearing. Imogen struggled to reconcile this person with the Tilda she’d come to know online, who always looked more like an advertisement than a real person. Admittedly, part of Tilda’s persona was acknowledging the breadth of her mistakes—“That’s how we keep growing!”—but Imogen always found something disingenuous about it, as if such admissions were just another way to earn points.
Tilda splashed most of the contents of a canteen into the pot. Looking quite satisfied with herself, she affixed the lid and balanced the pot atop the delicate prongs of the now-roaring stove.
“After this boils, it’ll just be a few minutes before supper’s ready,” Beck said.
“Great!”
Tilda loped over to see what Imogen was doing just as she finished burrowing through the last of their backpacks. Beside her lay a mound of every speck of food they weren’t consuming for supper: snack baggies, freeze-dried dinners, oatmeal packets, the noncrushable container that held their crushable crackers, a half dozen self-contained Cup Noodles, even the coffee and tea bags. The sun was starting to set and she wanted to get the food hung while there was still enough light to see by. She whipped open a blue nylon drawstring bag and started shoving everything in.
“What’s all this for?”
“We can’t leave the food in the packs overnight,” said Imogen, “so I’m going to find a tree to hang this from.”
“That’s so the bears don’t attack you while you’re sleeping?”
Catching the gleam of mischief on Tilda’s face, Imogen suppressed a giggle, impressed by Tilda’s easy acknowledgment of her own naïveté. “If we were in a forest that would be the reason. But here, the problem is squirrels, and other little creatures that might like to chew through our packs and eat up our food while we’re none the wiser.”
Tilda squatted beside her to help—and promptly let out a squeal of pain, followed by a laugh. “Oh, my poor body—see why I thought a shower was a necessity? A hot bath would be even better.”
It made Imogen feel a tiny bit better to know that even someone as fit as Tilda wasn’t immune to the Canyon’s physical demands. They both staggered back into upright positions. Imogen’s legs were as zonked as her friend’s, but she knew come morning it would be even worse: after tightening overnight, her muscles would feel as pliable and soft as barbed wire.
“What are we having?” Imogen called over to Beck.
Beck picked up two freeze-dried dinner bags. “Chicken à la king.”
“My favorite!” said Imogen.
“And—”
“Even more chicken à la king?”
“Actually, chicken and rice.”
“Still good, a close second.”
Imogen felt a little bloom of victory when Beck chortled approvingly: Imogen’s love of freeze-dried chicken à la king was a long-running joke in the family, but she was getting less good at predicting her sister’s reactions. Way back when, on that disastrous trip, after their parents finally made it to Hermit Camp on their second day of hiking (Beck had, in fact, ventured back up Cathedral Stairs in daylight to ferry down their mom’s pack), they’d all enjoyed a hot meal at last. Imogen had declared the chicken à la king so delicious she planned on serving it once a week to her future husband (such was her thinking as a thirteen-year-old, optimistic about love, pessimistic about cooking).
“Sounds very…chickeny. Do you need help tying this up?” Tilda asked as Imogen slung the heavy nylon bag over her shoulder.
“Sure.” Imogen handed her a length of cord, and they ambled away from their campsite.
“What are we looking for?” Tilda followed along behind her like a puppy. They hadn’t passed any other in-use campsites, so proximity to people wasn’t the problem.
“A branch strong enough to hold this high enough off the ground, but not so high we can’t reach it.”
A dubious, confused look settled on Tilda’s face as she took in the growing things around them, none especially hale or sturdy. The ground beneath their feet was sandy, spotted with rocks and low, spindly shrubs that Imogen identified as brittlebush and Mormon tea. The trees weren’t much better. Runty acacia with narrow trunks and fingerlike branches that seemed likely to bend under the weight of their food bag. The cottonwoods didn’t look much stronger, though they flourished elsewhere in the Canyon. Imogen supposed they were too far away from the creek to draw much water through their roots, but their leaves were well on their way to pure autumnal gold.
Above them, the sky was drifting toward purple; she had forgotten how quickly it darkened in the inner canyons. “I think this’ll do.”
They stopped beside a tree seventy feet from camp where a branch a few inches thick umbrellaed over their heads. Imogen tied a couple of half hitch knots around the gathered top of the bag, then hoisted it onto her shoulder and let Tilda do the rest. It took Tilda a couple of tosses to get the nylon rope exactly where she wanted it.
“How do you do the knots?”
“Here, you hold this.”
They switched places and Tilda held the bag. When Imogen was done tying it off, the bag swayed about two feet away from the tree’s trunk, and three feet off the ground.
“Well. Better than nothing.” Though a picture came to Imogen of an especially tall squirrel standing on its hind legs, cackling as it nibbled through the bottom of their bag.
“I like all these little rituals,” Tilda said as they headed back.
“There’s a certain way to do things, living outside. Carrying all your stuff.” Imogen liked the rituals too, and liked that Tilda had named them aptly. Beck practically lived for them.
They might not have been traditionally religious as a family, but in many ways the wilderness had served as the synagogue of their youth. There, they were reverential, whispering gratitude and prayers. As a child, Imogen had taken the commandment of tikkun olam—repair the world—as a quite literal command to not litter, to protect the earth’s water and air. As an adult, she came to learn that tikkun olam often invoked social justice, with mitzvot as simple as being kind, being generous, being compassionate, and, in more recent years, joining protest movements. That understanding—the healing of the human world—drove much of her desire to be better at being Jewish.
“Hearing it described, it sounded…like a pain in the ass,” Tilda said as they strolled toward camp. “But actually doing it—with the water tablets, and packing all these little plastic bags within bigger bags. And how everything’s rolled and fits together in a certain way, and then unrolled. I don’t know, there’s something very appealing about it. Like your daily life is a physical puzzle. And everything you have is important.”
Imogen grinned a reply. She’d been cognizant of her loneliness, but for the first time since befriending the early-bird congregants of Etz Chayim she felt open to the possibility of deeper relationships. And Tilda, once a best friend, was an ideal start.
Pleased as pudding and fully in her element, Beck held out two vintage Tupperware mugs as Tilda and Imogen made themselves comfortable on the ground near her. “Hot chocolate appetizer?”
“Never say no to chocolate,” Tilda and Imogen said in perfect sync. It made them all laugh. Imogen couldn’t remember the precise origin of the chorused words, but at some point in high school “never say no to chocolate” became a thing, perhaps because they smoked a little too much weed and often had the munchies. They thanked Beck and took their mugs, stirring up the powdery chocolate with the same slightly bent spoons they would soon eat dinner with.
Maybe it was the old spoons, or the place, or the company, but Imogen sensed a shift in reality, as if they’d gone back in time. It was a good shift—to an age before the hedgerow had sent even an investigatory tendril through the topsoil. An age before The Thing. Once upon a time the three of them had spoken the same language, and maybe some of it still lingered in their subconscious.
“Dinner will be served in three minutes. Give or take,” said Beck.
“How can you tell? Without a clock?” Tilda asked, blowing on the steaming mug. The Blums didn’t allow technology of any kind on their wilderness expeditions; a watch was even less useful than a cell phone.
“When the chicken’s not like pebbles anymore?” Beck shrugged.
“Or the rice,” Imogen chipped in.
“I see, so this—backpacking—is a mixture of precision and winging it.”
“Exactly!”
“You got it.”
A few minutes later they divvied up the reconstituted pouches and hungrily dove into their bowls. The chicken à la king was just as delicious as Imogen remembered.