Turning
Large, wet, un-welcomed flakes fall with belligerence and weigh down the crease in my hood. I tilt my head, letting the slush slough off onto the trail; a lonely stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail in Crater Lake National Park. It’s so late in the season that no fool, except the fools I am with, would go hiking here.
Our breakfast server, a young woman who wears a 4-month-old baby on her chest in a sling, tells us that the park gate will be closing unexpectedly this afternoon.
“The weather is turning,” she promises. The expression is lost on me as the weather turns every two hours in New England.
We leave our more snow-able car at a trailhead inside the park. James and his Hiking Buddy are walking briskly. 30 minutes nonstop and we are maybe 2 miles in. Suddenly the snow is turning.
“Did anyone check if they might close the gate early?” I offer. It sounds stupid as the park entrance hut is empty.
“Or maybe the weather? This snow is 6 hours early, yes?” Again, not relevant as we have almost no cell service.
Abruptly HB stops. “I don’t feel good about this. I couldn’t find my winter gear when I packed and I left my sweater in the car. I’m getting wet and cold.”
Fool.
We stand in silence. I smartly have on a hat and a hood so my field of vision only includes James’ armpits and large white flakes. The snow is melting on contact and I watch it drip down his army green, therefore camouflaged, unlined raincoat. Under that he is wearing a thin vest and a cotton shirt.
Fool.
“It is snowing really hard. I want to go back and get the car out of the park. What do you two want to do?” HB is sounding a little urgent.
“I think we will be….okay,” James sounds incredibly nonchalant and far away in the heavy snow.
HB is not convinced. “This is a lot of snow! You guys could lose the trail, and it is still 7-8 miles to the highway.”
No one is entirely sure of our planned distance as James forgot his map and used a tourist guidebook to navigate to the trailhead. He is also one of those “doesn’t add on the spur trail” kind of guys. This means the 1-mile access trail from the PCT to the parking lot has not been factored into our total.
The armpits twist towards me.
“Claudia, what do you think we should do?”
“Excuse me?!” I am incredulous. These two are members of an elite hiking club in Oregon and have taken hundreds of people on hundreds of hikes.
“You two are the experts. I don’t know these woods.”
“Forest…” mumbles HB. We’ve been having this semantic joust for 2 days.
“That proves it. I don’t know this forest!”
However, my ego and I have prepared for the worst in any treed environment. I have mole skin and vet wrap. My trowel has the mildest serrated edge. It will not cut a branch, but maybe I can saw off one of James’ limbs if I have to eat him.
“I have two merino base layers.” I’m sort of smug about this, as if it helps. “He’s wearing the fabric of death!” I raise a sodden arm towards James, ratting him out to HB.
“One time we went into the backcountry and all James brought was beans and a can opener.” HB and I uselessly commiserate like biddies over a fence.
James stands evergreen silent with fogged up glasses and an odd colonial-looking beanie that has three points. His children have forbidden him to wear it in public. Ice slurry streams down his raincoat.
‘What,’ I thought back when I first met James, ‘can he bring to the table?’
I rotate between my ill mother, my launching-ish children, the house, and aging cats as a weary widow. I am less spry than the 2-headed waitress. I need a knight in shining, but not dripping wet, armor. If I have a guy circling my life, I bargain, he’d better have a solution to my tech issues or be able to build a snow fort and save me in a blizzard. So far James is a tech problem, not a solution. 1 year and he still texts my landline. Can he salvage his knighthood with a snow fort moment?
I deftly swivel my day pack off and rifle the outer pocket.
“I have a compass.” I bark with cynical impatience.
HB is suddenly animated. “Oh good! You can get to the park road. Or even keep heading north if you lose the trail.”
James and I resolutely turn north and HB retreats wearing my wool mittens. He gets back to the car 4 inches of snow later. He needs 4-wheel drive to get out of the park.
Many miles later James has downshifted. The snow has changed to rain and my feet are sloppy wet. I slalom around James, my drenched pants falling down from the weight, and start hauling. James chirps for the third time in the last 45 minutes that we are 2 miles away. So much for satellite data. Where is my tech genius knight?
I am pushing the pace and James lags. Somewhere behind me he yells,
“Claudia! You are doing great!”
“Thanks James!” I shout back in a sing-song voice. I sort of want to punch him or saw off a limb with my dull trowel blade. Instead, I laugh.
No knights, or colonialists, are coming to save me. My table will continue to have items of failure: tools in disarray, obsolete maps, useless tech gadgets, ultra-heavy hiking gear, clothes that don’t fit anyone, pictures turning to dust. My still-life before I had to change course to widowlandia.
What James brings to my table is the constant reminder that although I want a knight, I don’t need a knight. My snow fort, in my woods, is solidly built with a flimsy trowel and vet wrap and layers of merino. Luckily it has an ante room for cats and a text-impaired fool with a deep voice and endless enthusiasm for me.