She turned toward the tent. A sickening, eerie feeling overtook her.
“Don’t,” a voice said behind her.
Neena jumped, despite knowing it was Josie. “I wasn’t going to,” Neena insisted. But Josie was right to warn her not to touch anything. An hour earlier, Neena had even been concerned about strangers pawing through her own unguarded possessions.
Josie’s hands settled on her hips. “I guess they’re still out backpacking.”
Neena assumed this, too, despite the fact that the campsite felt abandoned. But perhaps every dwelling felt this way as soon as humans left it behind. Perhaps nature reclaimed its territory faster than she gave it credit for.
The frightened sensation dissipated . . . and yet, the memory of the footsteps bothered her. She could still hear them disturbing the underbrush. Heavily. Steadily. Maybe it had been a deer, after all—an imposing buck stacked with antlers. In the tenuous light of dawn, the grass at the edge of the pines looked as bright as spring. It seemed possible now that the grass was always greener on the other side of night.
The girls returned to their own belongings. In their absence, a few pine needles had fallen upon Neena’s pack.
ONLY A SHORT hike beyond where they’d traveled the previous evening, the Wade Harte Trail was finally freed from its claustrophobic tunnel and opened to the sky. At last, the surrounding mountains revealed themselves, layered and endless in every direction. Low clouds lent the impression of a distant mountain lake. Water trickled down a craggy rock face. Josie marveled, once again, at how the Blue Ridge Mountains were actually blue.
Pale blue, dark blue, purple blue. Her father had taught her that these colors were created by isoprene exhaled from the breathing trees. How peculiar that the same spectrum that made her surroundings so thrilling and wondrous had also warped her mind into such a vast and sucking hole. Her outlook had been blue for a long time.
She already knew how the rest of this trip would go: They were stuck, and they were stubborn, so they would be polite. When Neena dropped her off at home, they would lie stiffly about having had a nice time. A handful of bland texts would be exchanged before Neena moved away, and another would be exchanged during the first month of school. And then they would never speak again. Josie had been through this before with Sarah, her best friend before Neena. Finality loomed. Their friendship was heaving its last breath.
The elevation remained steady, and the atmosphere strained, as the girls trekked southward along the stony ridgeline. They were in the Misty Rock Wilderness now. Neither of them fully understood what was meant by this particular definition of “wilderness,” but it had something to do with a federally preserved area of land. The Misty Rock Wilderness was still inside the Pisgah National Forest.
It did feel different, though. The temperature rose along with the sun, but the exposed high ridges were cooler and windier than the humid woods below. The terrain was sparser. The shrubbery had grown dense, but the deciduous trees had thinned. Everything looked a little thirstier.
Josie’s blisters pulsated, and her heels were as raw as ground beef. What if she was creating permanent damage? Would trekking poles have helped? How did those even work? They made people look as if they were trying to ski across dry land. Vaguely, she cast about the trail for a big stick like a wizard’s staff. Or a crutch.
The gentle but persistent up-and-down felt like walking across the spine of a dinosaur. The girls traversed the glistering-white, quartz-crusted summit of Misty Rock Mountain without celebration. The intense exercise had tempered their emotions. Rests were fleeting, and silence kept them moving. Moving was better than talking.
After another brief dip, the elevation increased more significantly as the ridgeline trail headed toward its next peak. By the time they entered into the treeless balds, exhaustion forced the girls to take a real break. They perched atop a rocky outcrop and ate prepackaged trail mix with an unusually high percentage of M&M’s. Rolling mountaintops extended beyond them in every direction. The Appalachians were one of the world’s oldest mountain chains. Once soaring to majestically Himalayan heights, they had been gradually sinking for millions of years. In time, they would vanish completely.
“Good trail mix,” Neena said.
“Yeah,” Josie said.
“How are you doing on water?”
“Good.” Josie checked her bottles. “I have about a liter and a half left.”
“Me too.”
“That’s good.”
Good, good, good. What an empty word.
* * *
• • •
The girls unshouldered their packs at Burnt Balsam Knob around eleven. They guessed. They couldn’t check their phones. Despite their aches and pains, the long hike to the turnaround point had been far less grueling than the previous day’s shorter, steeper hike. Six hundred feet of altitude had been gained since the campsite this morning, but it had been across a distance of about five miles. The gradual incline made a difference. They were making better time. Somehow, this only made Neena feel more despondent. This summit was the literal high point of their trip, and it felt anything but.
They ate turkey jerky on an expansive grassy bald with yet another sweeping view.
“Do you think there was a forest fire?” Neena asked, wishing Josie would make the effort to start one of these stilted conversations herself. The bees were loud, droning and swarming from wildflower to wildflower. With a wrong move, she might get stung.
“Hmm?”
“Burnt balsam.”
“Oh. Maybe.” Josie ripped into a hunk of leathery jerky. She chewed slowly. Swallowed. “Or maybe it’s because that stand of trees looks kind of black.” She pointed toward the dark swath of forest beneath them.
Supposedly, this was the most popular section of the Wade Harte because it was the trail’s highest point, and because the knob connected to several shorter, busier trails. But nobody joined them. Neena would have killed for a noisy family with a spunky labradoodle sporting a bandana. Anything to disrupt the depressing silence.
Her heart panged for home. Her family wasn’t loud, but at least they would talk to her. At least they didn’t think she was a selfish idiot. All morning long, Neena had toggled between hurt and anger, her mind incessantly repeating the unrepeatable accusations that she and Josie had hurled at each other. Now she was too tired to launch a defense. Stretching her muscles, she searched for an area to relieve herself. Despite the vacant crest, the whole area felt exposed.
A brass gleam caught her eye.
“Hey,” she called out. “Come see this.”
Josie ambled over with a wary gait.
WADE CECIL HARTE
1894–1962
CAPITALIST AND CONSERVATIONIST
WHO DEEPLY LOVED THESE MOUNTAINS
The plaque was affixed to a stone. “The man of the hour,” Neena said. “You don’t see ‘capitalist’ and ‘conservationist’ in the same sentence very often, do you?”
Josie hmphed. “Not anymore.”
“Well, if entitled white men don’t kill us first, climate change will.” Neena paused as the wind shifted. The sweet scent of the balsam firs below rose to greet them on the breeze. It smelled like something precious that was about to be lost forever. “Nature always exacts its revenge.”
After packing up their lunch, the girls headed back the same way they came in. They were halfway done, and Neena’s gut twinged. Because the trip was a failure? Or because she was afraid of what came after the trip?
“It’s all downhill from here,” Josie said.
Neena wanted to believe that she was talking about the trail.
* * *
• • •
“Do you still want to take a different loop back?” Josie asked, about an hour later. She was standing beside a scrawny, overgrown path that branched to the right off the main trail. “We h
ave a few options. I think this is the one that Win said was his favorite.”
The sun was high in the sky. A choir of cicadas rose and fell in waves. Their winged undulations vibrated and thrummed, infusing the expanse with unsettled energy. This was the first time that Josie had been in the lead, and she waited for Neena to catch up.
For their return, they could either continue retracing their steps on the Wade Harte, or they could take one of these lesser-known side trails, created by hikers who frequented the area. The trails weren’t marked on traditional maps, but they did have blazes that could be followed. Next to this side trail, nailed into the gaunt trunk of a lone evergreen, was a triangle made out of three beer-bottle caps—one cap above two.
“Win said it drops down off the ridgeline and wanders beside a creek,” Josie said. “It’ll spit us out near Deep Fork. There might even be some places to camp down there.” The girls hadn’t decided yet where they were stopping for the night. The plan was to unload their gear wherever looked okay, whenever they were tired. It wasn’t like the previous night; there were plenty of places to camp inside the Misty Rock Wilderness.
“If we hike down,” Neena said, “we’ll have to hike back up.”
“Not like yesterday. It only goes down a little.”
Neena gestured at the bottle caps. “That’s a blaze?”
After explaining the concept, Win had quizzed them about blazes. The girls had done well, but they’d already forgotten everything. Anticipating this, he had printed out a chart so they wouldn’t get lost trying to decipher them.
“Yeah,” Josie said. “It might be fun to play follow-the-bottle-caps.” When Neena didn’t respond, heat rose up Josie’s neck. “It would give us something to do, at least.”
Neena gave a deflated shrug.
Forced to defend a suggestion she barely cared about, Josie turned so that Neena could unzip her pack. “The chart’s in here.”
Your brother found the trail, and your brother had the gear. And you lean on him like you lean on me.
Shame and foolishness reverberated inside Josie, but she held her body rigid while Neena sorted through their papers. It was the closest they’d stood all day—the position no longer natural, but invasive. The chart confirmed that the pointy-side-up triangle indicated the start of a trail.
“If it sucks, we’ll turn back,” Josie said to no one.
Neena clumped ahead, leaving Josie behind yet again.
* * *
• • •
At times, the bottle-cap trail was obvious. Other times, not so much. But the blazes were generally within sight of each other, and the girls didn’t venture far until they were able to locate the next.
One bottle cap meant continue straight.
Two vertical bottle caps—the top one just to the left—meant left turn.
Two vertical bottle caps—the top one just to the right—meant right turn.
It did feel like a game, and Neena begrudgingly admitted to herself that the distraction of the hunt was welcome. Though the trail wasn’t official—and the bottle caps, which definitely left a trace, weren’t permitted in this designated wilderness area—she assumed the forest rangers looked the other way because, without the markers, it would be easy for hikers to get lost down here, off the ridgeline and off the beaten path.
The girls had been back inside the woods for about an hour. Hidden birdsong accompanied them from blaze to blaze. Leafy trees and mountain laurel and ruffled ferns encased them once more in green. Though their view had disappeared, they still had the sky. If only they had looked up, they would have noticed it was no longer clear.
The trail didn’t follow beside a creek, like Josie’s brother had described, but instead crisscrossed over numerous slivered tributaries. Wild blueberries flourished under the canopy in unripened clusters. The berries should have darkened and sweetened in July, but the changing climate meant they were still pale and sour. Surreptitiously, Neena tried to eat one. She spit it back out. It needed at least another week to ripen.
She touched the nail in the center of a blaze. Continue straight.
The nail was rusty, the bottle cap faded. They were all Cataloochee Light, a cheap regional brand with a distinctive logo—red with tiny white stars inside a blue X. Neena considered the type of person who proudly drank Confederate-flag beer, and perhaps her shudder was visible, because Josie gave the tree a second look. Josie’s eyes bugged, but she wasn’t looking at the bottle cap. She had zeroed in on the trunk. Claw marks gouged its rough bark. Tufts of black fur had snagged in the stubs of missing branches.
Neena tasted the blueberry, still sour on her tongue. She thought about hungry bears.
A thunderclap rolled and shook the mountains. The girls jolted as if struck by lightning. They had been so absorbed with their task that the graying light had escaped them. Though it was early afternoon, it looked like dusk. The sky was ominous with heavy clouds.
“What do we do?” Neena asked as they scurried to the next bottle cap.
“I don’t know,” Josie said, equally helpless.
The sky opened. The rain poured. They were drenched by the time they reached the next blazed tree, and the rain still pummeled them even underneath its boughs. The roar was loud and all-encompassing. Their hair was plastered against their cheeks. Neena squinted to keep the water out of her eyes, and Josie’s sunglasses fogged.They hunched together, gloomy and immobile, as the minutes dragged by—the sky dark, the rain unabated.
“Fuck it.” Neena had to shout to be heard. “We’re already soaked. Wanna keep going?”
Josie rotated, shoving her wet pack into Neena’s stomach. “Get my glasses first.”
Neena grimaced. Reflexively, she pushed the bag away, and Josie tottered.
“Hey!” Josie said.
“I couldn’t reach them.” Neena’s peevishness increased as she dug. Her entire arm disappeared. “Where the hell . . . Why’d you shove them all the way down here?”
With a glare, Josie whipped around and snatched them up. The lenses fogged instantly, but at least they weren’t tinted. She stomped toward the next bottle cap.
“Hold on!” Neena stumbled behind her, arm still attached. “I have to zip you up.”
Locating the blazes no longer felt like a game. Progress was slow and arduous. The bottle caps were harder to see in the storm, and they had to travel farther to find them. The distance between blazes seemed to be growing. Josie was limping again.
“Blisters?” Neena finally asked.
“Blisters and regret.” Perhaps yesterday this might have been funny, but Josie was churlish as she wiped her glasses again. “Where the fuck is the fucking blaze?”
Neena pointed ahead toward a circular nodule. But when they reached it, it was only a knot of bark. The blaze was nowhere in sight.
“We should backtrack,” Josie said. “I think we’ve gone too far.”
Hoping their mistake would soon become obvious, they returned to the previous blaze before searching in another direction. This pattern continued for what felt like ten minutes . . . twenty . . . thirty. They still had no phones and no real sense of time. The rainfall was relentless. Their shoes stamped the muddy forest floor with zigzag treads.
“I still think it’s the orange plastic ribbon,” Neena said, referring to an earlier discovery on a nearby trunk.
“I told you that just means the tree needs to be cut down.”
“Yeah, but who’d bother with that out here?”
“The rangers, if the tree is diseased and they don’t want it to spread. What else could it mean?”
“I don’t know. To keep going straight, I guess.”
“We’re not following a ribbon.”
“Okay. Fine.” Neena seethed. “What do you suggest?”
“Ten more minutes. If we don’t find it, we turn around.”
; “Turn around?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Yeah, we follow the orange ribbon!”
“That’s not a better idea!”
They were shouting again, but not because the downpour, finally weakening into a drizzle, made it difficult to hear. The cease-fire had ended. Neena clutched at the sides of her head. “We should have gone home,” she said. “I wanted to go home.”
“So this is my fault?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well,” Josie spat, “I’d rather be home, too.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Because you made me! You wouldn’t shut up about it until I agreed to come.”
“Because you’ve been miserable all summer! What are you gonna do when I’m gone? You have no other friends, no interests. You won’t even drive. Just because your dad died in a freak accident doesn’t mean that you will, too.”
A cold wall slammed between them.
Josie turned away and started walking. Neena watched her recede for several seconds, furious that they were still dependent on each other. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” Josie said. She didn’t stop.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“We can’t go your way. We have to turn back.”
“You’re the one who wanted to take this stupid detour! I’m not turning around now.”
“We don’t know where we’re going.”
“We’ve been down here for, what, two hours? That’d be so much backtracking.”
Josie spun to face Neena. Her expression was dark and impenetrable.
“Let’s just go a little farther and see what we find,” Neena said.
“In what direction?”
Neena pointed at the biggest gap between the trees, a natural pathway that seemed like a logical place for the trail to continue. “That direction.”
“Why?”
The Woods Are Always Watching Page 9
