The Other Side of Lost

by Jessi Kirby

  We stand at the edge of the creek in one of the calmer stretches, where the water laps gently over the shallow rocky bottom. No one speaks at first, and maybe it’s because they’re thinking the same thing I am. That this is a bad idea. We should turn around, or try to find another place to cross. We should do anything but this.

  I’m about to remind them of what the man in the Wilderness Office said, that nothing out here is worth dying for, when Josh takes one of the trekking poles from his pack, extends it, and takes a few steps into the water, boots and all. I see his muscles tense to hold his footing when the water hits his calves. He plunges the pole into the water at the center to test the depth and current, and holds it there a moment, surveying the other side. Colin, Beau, and Jack join him to do the same. Vanessa and I stay on shore.

  “I don’t think we should do this,” I whisper to her, eyeing the fast-moving current.

  Vanessa doesn’t take her eyes off Jack as he ventures out farther into the middle of the river, where the water is thigh-high on his six-foot frame.

  “If it’s not safe, we won’t,” she says.

  That doesn’t make me feel any better. I don’t know whether to hope that it’s safe enough to cross, or so unsafe we have to go off trail and find another route. The boys turn and carefully shuffle their way back to where we are standing.

  “It’s safe!” Beau calls.

  Jack looks at Vanessa. “We can make it.”

  “Can we make it?” she asks. “That water’s gonna be almost waist-high on us.” I’m not sure if she’s asking for both of us, or if she’s just trying to be polite while asking about me, who seems to be the weakest link of the group.

  Josh nods. “Yeah. We’ll partner up and go slow.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  He looks at me. “I’m sure. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

  I try to focus on his words as he describes how we’re going to make it to the other side. We’ll cross in pairs at an angle, facing upstream and shuffling our feet over the rocky bottom as slowly and carefully as possible, while we hold on to each other for added stability. It makes sense and sounds reasonable until he tells us all to unbuckle our pack straps in case we lose our footing and need to ditch our packs to save ourselves. That’s when the only things I hear are the rush of the water, the ranger’s words about the hikers who were swept away, and my own heart pounding in my ears.

  “I can’t do this,” I blurt out.

  They all look at me. Everyone except Josh looks as nervous and tense as I feel, but they don’t say anything.

  Josh steps closer so that he’s standing right in front of me. “You can,” he says, looking me right in the eye. “We’ll go slow, take it one step at a time.”

  One step.

  The words echo in my head. One wrong step was all it took for Bri, and she knew what she was doing. I glance around at everyone else as they prepare to cross—making sure waterproof bags are sealed, tying their shirts up around their waists, checking the laces of their boots, gathering their courage while I stand frozen with fear. I close my eyes and take three deep breaths and try to conjure Bri and her courage, but all I see is myself getting swept down the river, toward the ledge, knowing what’s coming.

  When I open my eyes, Vanessa is there. She reaches out and puts a firm hand on my shoulder. “Girl, be brave. We’ll be okay. Promise.”

  The icy water seeps into my boots and through my socks almost immediately, and my heart pounds in my chest. I hesitate when I feel the unevenness of the rocky bottom. Josh, whose arm is hooked with mine, stops immediately.

  “You okay?”

  I nod.

  “All right. Here we go. Just like they’re doing out there.”

  I glance toward the middle of the river, where Jack and Vanessa, and Beau and Colin are paired off, doing the same slow sideways shuffle through the fast-moving water.

  We continue, and I can feel the force of the current as it swirls around my calves and then my knees, pulling hard, just waiting for a foot to slip so it can grab hold and sweep me under.

  “Left,” Josh says, and we both slide our left feet. “Right.” We do the same with the right, and my legs shake with each step.

  The water creeps up over my knees, pushing hard against my legs, which tense in response to the force and the cold. Slowly, we inch our way out into the middle of the creek, and I begin to relax the tiniest bit into the rhythm we’ve got going. We’re making it. Just like we’ve made it up the snowy mountain passes, and through the rainstorm, and over more miles than I’ve ever gone in my life. All of these things seemed insurmountable to me before I took a chance and tried them, and now it’s the same with this. I glance up and see Beau and Colin hit the shore, followed by Jack and Vanessa, and I smile, thankful for the way being with them all makes me feel braver.

  “Left,” Josh says. I slide my left foot just like I’ve done each time he said it. But the second I do, my foot slips down the side of a large rock, and I pitch forward so hard I yank Josh too.

  He tenses and plants both of his feet just as my other foot slips out from under me. In an instant, the water takes both of my feet, heavy with the weight of the soaked boots, and sweeps them behind me. I gasp as my knee smacks a rock and my chest hits the icy water. Josh’s arm squeezes around mine hard, and yanks upward to keep my face from going under, and the force of it rolls me onto my side. Immediately, I feel the weight of my pack shift and then tip into the creek.

  “Hang on!” Josh yells.

  I feel the pockets of the pack catch and begin to fill with water.

  Josh bends over me and shifts so that his leg braces both of mine. The current pins my legs against his, and I feel him hunker down to fight the pull of the water on my pack, which is getting heavier by the second.

  “Hang on,” he says again through gritted teeth.

  I hear Beau’s voice. “Oh shit!”

  There’s splashing. Jack’s and Colin’s voices.

  “Mari!” Vanessa screams.

  Josh’s eyes lock on mine. “I got you, okay? Just hang on to me.”

  I can’t breathe or speak, but I nod.

  “Your feet,” he says. “Can you get them under you?”

  I shake my head. My feet are lead weights trying to drag me down the river.

  “You have to try,” he says. “On the count of three. Dig your feet into the bottom as hard as you can, okay? On the count of three. One . . . two . . . THREE!”

  When he says it, he braces and I use all my strength to try to do what he says and dig my heels into the rocky bottom of the creek. One of them catches, and the force flips me onto my back just as Jack, Colin, and Beau reach us. Colin grabs my free arm, and the other two get ahold of my pack, lifting it up so I can get both feet beneath me and stand up again.

  Water pours from it when I do, and even with Josh and Colin helping me, the weight is unmanageable.

  “Can you guys get the pack?” Josh asks them.

  “Yeah. We got it.”

  Josh looks at me. “You’re gonna take it off, okay? One strap at a time. And you’re gonna hold on to me as you do it. Got it?”

  I nod, still unable to speak, already shivering from the cold.

  “Here we go.” He helps me with one arm and then the other, and Jack and Beau take the weight of the pack. As soon as I’m free of it, Josh hooks his elbow with mine again and we inch toward the shore, which isn’t far off at this point. Colin joins the other guys to help with my soaked pack, and in what seems like just a few steps, we reach the safety of the shore and all of us flop down on the granite slab where Vanessa is waiting.

  “Oh my god,” she says. “Are you okay?”

  I lie on my back, eyes to the blue of the sky and exhale a shaky breath. “I think so.”

  Josh finds my hand and squeezes. “You sure?”

  I turn and look at him lying next to me, cheeks flushed and clothes soaked, and I know I am alive because of him. “Really,” I say. “Thank you. That
was . . .”

  “Pretty damn impressive,” Beau says. “Do you know how much this thing weighs right now?”

  I sit up and look at where my backpack sits like a soggy monster, water streaming from its pockets, in the middle of Jack, Colin, and Beau.

  “You guys are superhuman,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Colin bumps shoulders with Jack. “It was Hulk over here who dragged that thing out.”

  Jack, who’s still out of breath, laughs.

  “I think you just earned yourself a trail name,” Beau says.

  Vanessa kneels behind Jack, slides her arms around his chest, and tucks her chin into the space between his neck and shoulder. “I think you did, Hulk.”

  Josh gets to his feet and walks over to my backpack so I do the same, despite the pain in my knee. The flow of water from the pack has slowed to a trickle that makes its way down the granite slope to rejoin the creek. I loop my hand through the top strap and pull up to test the weight.

  “There’s no way,” Josh says. “We’re gonna have to let it dry out.” He looks at the others. “I’ll stay back with Mari, if you guys wanna keep going.”

  Beau smirks.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I say quickly. “I’ll be okay. I don’t wanna set you guys back any more than I already have. You should all keep going.” I try to mean it, but I don’t want them to go. I don’t want to be alone right now.

  “Stop,” Vanessa says, glancing from me to Josh. “Both of you. We’ll take the afternoon off, stay here tonight, then catch up tomorrow.” She looks around at the rest of the group. “Sound good?”

  They all nod, and without giving it another thought, spread out to find a good place to make camp.

  Josh looks at me and smiles. “I think you’re officially part of the crew, whether you want to be or not.”

  I watch as Jack and Vanessa, and Beau and Colin pick their way over the boulders on the shore, and then I look back at Josh.

  “Good,” I say. “Because I want to be.”

  What We Came Looking For

  WE FIND A clearing amongst the pines about ten yards away from the creek, complete with a wide, flat expanse of granite. After Josh helps me drag my pack over to it, I get to work unloading and spreading out the contents to assess the damage and let things start to dry out on the rocks in the midday sun.

  As it turns out, bear canisters are not only bear-proof, but waterproof as well, so the bulk of my food is safe. Most everything aside from my sleeping bag, tent, and clothes is packaged up in the Ziploc bags, the way Bri had originally sent them, so those things are safe too. All in all, I count myself extremely lucky—not just to have my life and my pack, but not to have lost anything to my unintentional dip in the creek.

  And then I spot Bri’s journal.

  It’s still there in the pack, but when I take it out, and see that the leather on the outside is completely saturated, my stomach drops. I sit down and cradle it in my lap, hoping the pages with her writing were somehow spared, and that the water didn’t make it all the way through.

  But when I open it, all I see is watery, blurred ink.

  I feel Josh watching me as I turn the wet pages, hoping that something, anything is left.

  “Your journal?” he asks quietly.

  At first I nod. Then I shake my head.

  “No. My cousin’s.”

  “Oh no.”

  The note of sympathy in his voice releases the tears I’ve been holding back since he dragged me out of the water.

  “Maybe we can save it,” he says quickly. “Let it dry out in the sun with the rest of your things?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, looking down at it. I wipe at my eyes and try to tell myself things could’ve been much worse. I could’ve lost everything. I could’ve been swept down the river like those other hikers, but this feels almost as tragic. I look at Josh.

  “It had her plans in it—for this trip—these daily things I was following, and now . . .” I look down at the blurry words on a page I hadn’t even gotten a chance to read yet.

  “You asked the other day why I was out here,” I say. “It’s because of her. When we were kids, we talked about doing this hike together when we turned eighteen, but things changed, and when she—” I pause, and bite my lip. “We weren’t close anymore when she died, but I thought coming out here with her things and her plans might somehow help me find . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense, but . . .”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Josh says, and there’s something in his tone that makes me believe he really thinks so.

  He’s quiet a moment, then he looks at me. “A few days ago, you asked me why I’m out here.”

  He gets up and goes to his backpack, unzips it, and pulls something out. When he comes back and sits down, he’s holding a Ziploc baggie with a picture of a guy who looks just like him, dressed in old school–looking hiking clothes, standing on an impossibly tall rock ledge high above what looks like Yosemite Valley.

  “This is my dad,” he says. “He did this hike with his best friend when they graduated from high school, and he said it was one of the best experiences of his life.” He looks down at the picture. “It was right after my mom told him she was pregnant with me. He said all he’d wanted to do when he found out was escape because he wasn’t ready to be a dad, or a husband. So he left, thinking he might not ever come back. But by the time he made it to Mount Whitney, everything had changed. He’d had enough time to figure out what he wanted, and he couldn’t get down that mountain fast enough to tell my mom it was a life with her—and me.”

  I smile. “I love that.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Me too. It worked out pretty good for all of us.”

  We both look down at the photo of his dad. Josh shrugs. “Anyway, I guess I was hoping I might figure out what I want, like he did.”

  “Have you?” I ask.

  He laughs. “Not really. I guess I’ve more figured out what I don’t want.”

  “What don’t you want, then?”

  “Hm.” He takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Well, I definitely don’t want to go home and get back together with the girl I was dating,” he says.

  We both laugh, and he shakes his head. “That’s a long story, with lots of good, hard-earned life lessons at the end.”

  He picks up a pebble and tosses it into the middle of the creek, and neither of us says anything as we watch the water flow over the spot where it disappears.

  He takes another deep breath.

  “I guess mainly, I don’t want to have one of those ordinary lives that no one plans on having, but most people end up with,” he says. “And I don’t want to forget what it feels like to be out here like this—so I want to keep doing things that remind me.”

  He pauses. Looks at me. And then a slow smile spreads over his face.

  “And now you know all my secrets. It’s that damn trail phenomenon that happens, where you tell people things you never would in real life.”

  I laugh. “Is that what it is?”

  Josh nods. “Most definitely. Anyway,” he says. “As long as we’re being philosophical . . . I don’t think that what we came looking for is as important as what we end up finding out here.”

  I look at him, then back out at the creek, and think about what I’ve found so far. What I’m finding, every day I spend on the trail—strength and gratitude and wonder—all of these things I didn’t start out looking for.

  “Thank you,” I say. I reach out and take his hand in mine, and we sit for a few minutes in the silence and the sunlight of a place that feels like ours alone.

  But, like always, the trail has a way of bringing you back to the present moment no matter what, and in the back of my mind, I know that there are only so many hours of sun left, and that I have to deal with the rest of my stuff if there’s going to be any chance of it drying before nightfall.

  Josh helps me out with my tent, and we put it up to dry e
ven though it sags with the dampness still in the fabric. My sleeping bag is trickier and takes longer, but Colin figures out a way to hang it from a tree, propped open with a few of the trekking poles, and I hope it’ll be okay by bedtime. Next, I work on the rest of my things that got wet—clothes, boots, and everything else—I spread it all out on the warm granite to soak up the sun.

  I grab the pack to do the same, and that’s when I see Bri’s dreamcatcher still attached to one of the zippers, which feels like a small miracle after my plunge into the river. I reach for it, and my eyes well up when I take its sunflower center in my hand. The thin leather cords that hang from the bottom are tangled and damp, but it’s otherwise intact.

  Carefully, I take it off the pack and lay it down on the rock in front of me so I can untangle the cords. At the end of each one is a small bead that represents one of the four elements—a leaf for earth, a feather for air, a shell for water, and a star for fire. As I lay each one out, I see us—sitting on her porch at the edge of the meadow, my matching dreamcatcher in my hand, and Bri explaining how it would guide me where I needed to go and protect me along the way.

  And now hers is right here, doing exactly that.

  I pick it up and press it to my chest, then lay back against the warm rock and whisper my thank-you to the sky.

  For the rest of the day, we lounge in the sun, wade in the water, and make the most of our unexpected afternoon of rest. After dinner, we sit huddled around a crackling fire, sipping hot chocolate, still surrounded by the entire contents of my backpack laid out on the rocks all around.

  “I’m beat,” Colin says as he stretches in the dying firelight. “I gotta hit the sack.”

  Beau yawns. “Right behind you, honey.”

  They both get up and hobble to their tents, arms around each other for support, and disappear without another word. Vanessa looks over at Jack. “You ready, babe?”

  He nods, and they do the same, and then it’s just me and Josh and the smoldering embers in front of us.

  He looks over at me. “I can stay up with this until it goes out if you wanna turn in too.”