Wish I had known that.
“I just thought wilderness camping was exhilarating,” he explains. “You’re alone out here with your thoughts. No stress or pressure. No timetable. You could read all day, if you wanted to. Just set up your camp and do whatever. And I liked doing it all myself. At home, everything is provided for you. School is scheduled, dinner is served. You turn on the TV and everything’s programmed. But out here, nothing happens unless I do it myself. And that may sound weird, but I feel like I’m doing something real when I build a fire and cook over it. Like, yeah, if the end of the world came, I could actually survive. Most of the people at school would die in the wilderness after a week or two, struggling to stay warm or forage for edible food, or getting attacked by wild animals.”
“You were pretty impressive with the bear last night,” I admit. “If you hadn’t told me, I would’ve run and probably ended up as bear dinner.”
“Bear attacks aren’t common, but if you follow a few basic rules, you’re fine. If you were aggressive to a mama bear around her babies, then the chances of you being mauled are higher. It’s basically just common sense.”
“Still. You knew what to do.”
“The trick is avoiding them altogether,” he says. “But when you can’t, and the people you’re camping with are blockheads—”
“Not all of us,” I say.
“No,” he agrees, a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth. “But when you can’t avoid animals, you just have to treat them as a real threat and respect that they have the upper hand.”
That makes sense. “So you got into camping because you like making fires and outwitting bears?”
“I feel like I’ve accomplished something that’s measurable. I can feed myself—”
He figured out how to make coffee out here, which is pretty much the pinnacle of cooking in my eyes.
“—and find my way without a computerized voice telling me which way to turn. I know first aid basics. I know how to collect water if there’s no river in sight. I know how to build a lean-to in the woods. And that’s . . .”
“Not nothing.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s being a capable human being, which is something I think a lot of people have forgotten how to do.”
“So you come out here to feel like a manly man,” I say.
“Right,” he says sarcastically. “Big, burly lumberjack. That’s me.”
Well, he has the big part down. When I walk by his side, his tall frame keeps the sun out of my face.
“I come out here because of all that, and because look at this place,” he says, gesturing toward the trees. “It’s serene. When Ansel Adams said, ‘I believe in beauty,’ he was here, in the Sierras. Maybe even walking this same path.”
I have a weird sense of déjà vu, because this sounds like the Lennon I know, rattling off obscure quotes and talking about the city lights over San Francisco Bay as if they were magic. So maybe I do understand why he’d be attracted to hiking.
He becomes self-conscious now, and laughs a little. “Besides all that, you never know what can happen out here. And that’s the thrilling part. A million things can go wrong.”
I groan. “No, that’s what I don’t want to hear. I like all my things to go right.”
“That’s not how the world works.”
“It’s how it should work,” I say. “I like plans that go smoothly. That’s the beauty I believe in. Nothing is better than when things go exactly how I expect.”
“I know that’s what you like,” he says, eyes squinting out the sun to peer down at me. “And there’s comfort in that, sure. But there’s comfort in knowing that when your plans fall apart, you can survive. That the worst thing imaginable can happen, but you can get through it. That’s why I like to read horror fiction. It’s not about the monsters. It’s about the hero surviving them and living to tell the tale.”
“It’s nice that you feel that way,” I tell him. “But I’m not sure I have that same level of comfort. Some of us weren’t meant to survive.”
“You survived the group abandoning us.”
“For the time being. It’s only been a few hours. I’m weak. I may not make it through the night.”
He chuckles. “That’s why I’m here. If you can’t survive on your own, hire help.”
“I hope you know that the Everharts are broke as a joke and you will get no reward for bringing me back alive.”
“Alive or dead, then. Excellent. That actually takes a lot of pressure off me,” he says with a devilish smile. “Oh, look. Here’s the trail that leads to the caves. Am I good or what?”
A wooden post with several vertical symbols carved into it sits where our trail crosses with a wider one. It appears that the caves are a mere five-hour walk. In the midday sun. Uphill. Fantastic. It all looked so much simpler and kinder on Lennon’s homemade map.
We walk until early afternoon, chatting occasionally about landmarks in the surrounding area and the places Lennon’s hiked previously. But when I fail to answer a question because I’m staring too hard at the rocky path, worried I might be close to passing out, Lennon makes us stop for lunch.
We take off our jackets and sit on them, and after draining half my water supply, I break out my mom’s gifted turkey jerky while he pulls out roasted peanuts and dried fruit. We decide to share. He informs me that high-calorie, high-salt foods are the best things to eat when you’re hiking. These are pretty much my favorite foods, so maybe hiking and me will work out, after all.
After lunch, we fill up our Nalgene bottles with filtered water from a nearby creek and hit the trail again. The land here is rockier, which sucks, because an hour into
