by Zoje Stage
“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 religi
ous 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.
7
How’s work?” Tilda asked Beck, interrupting long minutes where the only sounds had been chewing and satisfied mm-mm-mms.
“Good. The same. Too much paperwork, not enough healing work.”
“Our priorities are so screwed up.”
“Indeed they are.”
“How’s your work?” Tilda asked Imogen, somewhat to her surprise.
“Good. Just finished the copyedits on my second novel, Esther’s Ghost.”
“That’s awesome, congratulations! Sorry if I missed your announcement online.”
“Thank you.” She opted not to say more than that. Tilda either hadn’t seen, or chose not to acknowledge, any number of announcements: the deal itself, the cover reveal, the book’s acquisition by a UK publisher.
“She couldn’t post about it but she got a raise, on her advance,” Beck said, chewing as she spoke.
“A little one.”
“And they’re going to send her on a book tour.”
“A little one,” Imogen said again. It wasn’t that she wanted to downplay her achievement, but it had started to bother her when people assumed that being published automatically earned certain benchmarks of success—like making the New York Times bestseller list, or selling the movie rights. Most books lived in a liminal place of near obscurity.
“You really stuck with it,” said Tilda. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you.” She appreciated Tilda’s better-late-than-never support, but it triggered some guilt at her own hypocrisy. “Congrats on your book deal—I meant to tell you before, but…”
And then she didn’t know what to say. Tilda’s announcement had come via Instagram a few weeks earlier and Imogen hadn’t “hearted” the post. From the wording, Tilda was being paid six figures to write a feel-good, you-can-do-it-too book inspired by her post–American Idol career. At a minimum, that meant Tilda was being paid five times what Imogen had been paid for her first finally-got-the-damn-thing-published novel.
It had made their impending reunion in the Canyon that much weirder to think about, and Imogen had found herself too often at the losing end of her tug-of-war with the green-eyed monster. It was every variety of petty to be upset by someone else’s success, but sometimes her mind morphed into a vindictive screensaver blinking words from the most flawed part of her heart—former waitress, aspiring-but-retired singer (quitter), reality-TV star, social media influencer. And then, more urgently, and in bold, capital letters: NOT A WRITER! NOT A WRITER!
In the conversational gap, Imogen heard laughter—high-pitched, a woman’s—drift up from the neighboring camp. She imagined a trio of women backpackers in their midthirties, lifelong friends, all of them having a great time. In this trio, it was Tilda who finally came up with a response.
“I know it has to seem funny-not-funny, seeing how I’ve never written anything.”
“But you worked really hard,” Beck said, perhaps oblivious to the tension.
“I’m really happy for you, Tilda, I am. But you know…I have this belief, about how two diametrically opposed things can exist in the same space?” Judging by her face, Tilda had no idea what Imogen was trying to say. “That means I can be happy for you—sincerely happy—but also be jealous.”
Tilda let out a gush of breath, as if she’d been holding it. “Thank you.”
Beck looked up from her dinner, unable to track the subtext of the conversation. “You’re happy that she’s jealous?”
“No. She’s happy I admitted it.”
Tilda nodded. “If the situation had been reversed, if you announced out of nowhere that you’d gotten a big record deal I’d be like what the fuck?”
“I would too ’cause Imogen can’t sing.”
They laughed, but without heart.
“I was almost afraid to be with you this week,” said Tilda. “I know I’m not a writer, I don’t have any of your talent.”
“Sometimes books aren’t about the writing.” Imogen was trying to say something conciliatory, but it didn’t sound right. “I mean, I understand it’s a completely different kind of book. This is your life, your thoughts, your words of wisdom. I’m sure it’ll do really well.”
“If I can write it. It’s probably the most daunting thing I’ve tried to do.”
“Except for this,” Beck offered.
“You might be relieved after this to get home and only have to write a book.”
This time their laughter was more genuine. Imogen was glad it was out in the open, and she recognized Tilda’s efforts to understand her perspective. But it still didn’t feel quite okay. Tilda’s if was a reminder of her own predicament. What would Imogen do when she got home? Even the poems and short stories she’d dabbled with over the past year were unfinished. She’d always prided herself on her discipline. At times she thought writing about the shooting would help her process it, and at other times she considered trying her hand at something light and uncontroversial—a children’s book, perhaps. But all she had to show for a year of effort were dozens of mostly empty Word document
s.
“How’s the volunteer stuff going?” Beck asked, nimbly—or obliviously—changing the subject.
“Great.” Tilda’s whole demeanor changed, to something with a high but soft wattage. “I have so much respect for Jalal and everything he’s doing. I feel purposeful in a way I never have.”
Imogen was clueless. Jalal she knew about, though hadn’t met; Tilda had been dating him for over a year, but she didn’t share much about him online.
“What kind of volunteer work are you doing?”
Tilda turned to her, still beaming. “I’ve gotten involved with the immigrant resource center. Originally I thought I’d mostly be helping recent immigrants tap into the resources they needed, but now we’re also trying to keep people from being deported. It’s gotten so merciless—parents who’ve lived here for a generation, paying taxes, all their kids born here. The kids go to school and worry that their parents won’t be there when they get home. They’ve even deported people who were adopted from other countries as babies and have never lived anywhere else. Jalal helps on the legal end, but sometimes we’re literally just ferrying people around, hiding them from the authorities.”
“Oh my God.” Imogen thought of all the dystopian novels she’d read. “This is worse than a horror novel.”
“I don’t understand what’s happened to this country. But I wish my Spanish was better.” She sighed. Imogen remembered how annoyed Tilda used to get in high school when people assumed she spoke Spanish or came from somewhere else. She hadn’t been shy about screaming that her mother was from Texas and her father was from Brooklyn and “We speak English!”
