TRAIL MIX

I remember that night. We were driving down a deserted highway when he suddenly pulled over onto the shoulder and came to a grating halt. With the engine idling, he jumped out, sprang open the passenger door, and said, “Quick, I need to show you something.”

Stephen guided me to the headlights, still beaming, leaned against the hood, wrapped his arms around my middle from behind. He pointed to the sky with its vast pinpoints of stars.

“See what looks like the brightest star in the sky? That’s Jupiter trying to kiss Earth,” he said. In a hushed voice, as if in the sanctity of a chancel, he narrated the formation of stars without names, the moons of Jupiter, the mystery of galaxies.

Stephen relaxed for a moment and said something I will never forget for as long as I live.

“I want to show you the world,” he said with a sigh.

Our first camping trip was a hike through the Gila National Forest. I exited the cab of his pickup and drank in the fragrant pines scratching the sky. Sporting cute little brand-new hiking boots, I shifted the weight of his brother’s old backpack around until it rode comfortably above my hips. It was paired with a sleeping bag, and a camera was suspended from a long, nylon lanyard around my neck.

Stephen grabbed the waterproof backpack he had stitched together and wrapped it around the midsection of his black Labrador. Nyx would carry her own dog food.

Stephen carried a tall backpack resting firmly on his hips, a tent, sleeping bag, and nested cookware in a drawstring pouch.

Before long, while hiking six miles to the first camp with Nyx in the lead, a light mist began to fall. It was a cooling respite from the August heat.

We forded streams easily in spite of slippery moss-shrouded rocks beneath tame currents. Nyx, being the water-loving dog that she was, splashed us at every opportunity.

After setting up camp that evening, Stephen cooked an Italian meal with tortellini and a tube of tomato paste. He whipped up a batch of strawberry cheesecake in a round cake pan and left it chilling in the stream. The hike had worked me up an appetite, and so, my mouth fell open when Stephen tripped and spilled the lovely tortellini across the loose soil.

“Ah, nothing a little water won’t cure,” he said, shrugging.

He gathered up the pasta, walked over to the stream, and washed the dirt off. The dinner was a bit gritty but nonetheless satisfying. He served me first, a sweet gesture he would repeat throughout the next 30-plus years.

The next morning, I stretched and yawned, picked up the little shovel and roll of toilet paper, and headed for some trees that were far enough for modesty’s sake.

Just as I was finishing up my business with shorts and underwear pooled around my ankles, a man strode by, stabbing the dirt with a walking stick. I froze.

“Good morning!” he said cheerily, continuing his hike.

I smiled at him weakly and replied, “Good morning.”

As I was pulling up my shorts, here came a man with his son.

“Good morning!” they greeted me, waving.

“Good morning…” my voice trailed off as I flashed my most glorious smile.

I yanked my shorts up and scrambled back to camp where Stephen was holding his sides from laughing hard. He had witnessed the entire incident from afar, watching me do my business on the trail.

On the trail!

“Boy, I tell you,” I said after breakfast, rubbing baby calluses on my feet. “That was a wonderful hike yesterday! And I slept so good! Ready to head back?”

Stephen’s eyes bugged out.

“We’re not done yet! I want to show you my waterfall,” he said, eyes shimmering at the prospect.

“Your waterfall? How far is this waterfall of yours?”

“Not far at all.”

Famous last words.

Through the misting rain, we forded streams where I fell five times in the rising currents, climbed rocky slopes, hugged trees. We made each other laugh until our bellies ached. I snapped pictures along the way, loving our first date in the woods. Along the way were breaks for lunch and snacks. We came to a full stopping point at midnight, and the Eagle Scout in him expertly set up camp for the night.

My tailbone was sore from the falls in the currents. My water-logged boots strangled my feet. Yet not once did I complain.

“I’m so sorry,” Stephen said, hugging me. “I’m sorry it took this long. I underestimated the distance.”

“That’s okay,” I said, shrugging off my ill-fitting backpack. I smiled and kissed him for an extra cushion of reassurance.

I swept the small clearing with a flashlight to scrounge for dry branches, a difficult task considering it hadn’t stopped misting, but Stephen managed to kindle a fire out of my meager offering. Nyx collapsed by the warmth. We squirreled away some kindling to save for breakfast.

The late morning birthed an overcast sky. Stephen’s cheerful whistling and killer four-egg omelet we shared helped defray my gray mood. How a carton of eggs made it this far, I will never know.

We packed up and continued the trek. Stephen called out the names of trees and vegetation. Ponderosas. Douglas firs. Junipers. Despite sporadic rainfall and hair plastered to my neck, I retained my sense of humor and gratitude, mile after excruciating mile.

With a short break from the wet and gray, the sun’s eastward descent brought slanting shadows as the three of us clambered up over a rocky escarpment to a hollow on the face of a cliff. The space was cramped but enough to accommodate us into a sitting position. We let the sodden gear slide down our backs and slump over. With Nyx squashed between us, Stephen draped his arm around my shoulders and with his free hand, pointed across the way.

There it was. His waterfall.

Water gushed over the ledge in waves of pearl-white and russets, like the lacy, undulating veil of a runaway bride. Its roar split the dusk as it crashed upon a rabble of boulders below. The air was thick with the musty brew of freshwater, moss, the heady pitch of pinons in the green embrace of the Gila National Forest.

Like the whispering family of conifers, I was an eavesdropper privy to the ancient secrets of the waterfall. It was every bit as exquisite as Stephen had promised. He grinned at me, then looked away, eyes moist from seeing an old, cherished friend from scouting days. I lifted his arm from my shoulders and kissed the palm of his hand, a show of my deep appreciation.

We rose at first light and re-traced our steps. More rain had fallen overnight, and a chill crept into my bones through the slicker. I pulled the hood over my head, stuffed my glasses into a zipped pocket of the backpack, said a little prayer.

We forded streams that now swelled from the rains. What I had easily waded through mid-calf at the outset, pulled and tugged at my chest. The undertow grabbed my ankles and sucked me under several times. I began counting the streams as a form of mental distraction.

My sense of humor dried up after emerging from yet another watery struggle at the eighty-third crossing. I was cold. My feet felt like bricks. My backpack weighed me down like a bag of wet cement. Stephen had forged ahead while I refused to budge, sobbing like a child. He glanced back, turned, and walked back to me.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” he said with a kiss to my forehead. “I am so sorry. I forget other people’s strengths are not the same as mine.”

“I-I thought I could make it,” I hiccupped. “I’m sorry for being such a big baby.”

“Jennifer,” he said, “if it’s one thing you’re not, it’s being a big baby. I have never met anyone like you. Ever.”

With that, Stephen removed the backpack from me and added it to his payload. Now he was burdened with two backpacks, a tent, both sleeping bags, and clinking cookware. He also unhooked the knapsack from Nyx, so that she could swim freely, and added its weight to his slender frame. I was left with the camera, rendered useless from multiple submersions.

“Stephen, you don’t have to do this! This is too much for you to carry!”

“This is my way of saying I’m sorry for putting you through this mess, all for a dumb waterfall.”

I gazed into his soulful blues, clouded with regret.

“That waterfall was worth it all, Stephen,” I said. “And so are you.”

Continuing the hike, I gazed at his bootheels ahead of me, steady in stride, and thought of my first glimpse of the strongest man I know.

I was told I would be with someone who was tall.

A coworker sat down in the chair next to my desk and said, “You would love my brother.” Even though a half-carat diamond engagement ring from another man winked on my finger, Karen continued.

“I’ve been having these visions of seeing you guys together,” she said, then showed me a photo from her wedding reception.

He was in mid-stride, oblivious of the camera. Long legs in jeans. Cowboy boots. Unbuttoned casual jacket. Walnut-brown hair, layered and parted in the middle. Clean-shaven. Tear-drop frames. Were those…were those dimples?

I perked up when I shouldn’t have.

Before the invention of swiping right on Tinder, it was Karen who would go on to extol her brother’s virtues. Romantic. Brilliant. Self-employed. Hard worker. Eagle Scout. He had a sweet girl, a beautiful black Lab named Nyx.

Well, that cinched it.

On our first date, Stephen sat across from me at Pizza Inn and removed his glasses to wipe the sweat from his brow with a cloth napkin. When he raised his chin, I felt like a dragonfly pinned to a corkboard. His ice blues held sway over me. My mouth opened, then closed. He chuckled, casting his eyes down in a moment of shyness, and that’s when his dimples deepened.

Stephen excused himself to use the men’s room, and while in the single-toilet facility, he blew his nose. Loudly. Loudly, in that the whole restaurant echoed with his honking. The spell was broken.

If one were to look deeper though, like I did, there were layers upon layers of charisma and kindness and ingenuity with a stubborn streak of rebellion. To a sheltered girl, he embodied a sort of spontaneous it’s-great-to-be-alive madness I craved.

The moon was high and lit up the last mile to the trailhead where Stephen’s Isuzu P’up awaited. The rainfall had ceased, and the monastery was damp and still. I had followed his long shadow and hulking shape throughout the night, trusting his compass-like brain on a path he hadn’t seen in eight years. When he tried to turn over the engine of the pickup, not a whimper. We crawled into the bed with a tarp stretched over us, then we crashed. Nyx crept under the truck and curled up on a soft heap of tribal blankets.

We managed a jump from a kind stranger the next day. We found a payphone to tell my boss I wasn’t coming in. I had counted over 80 streams crossed on the return of a 42-miler, round-trip. The snugness of my cute little hiking boots would eventually cause the loss of both big toenails, which grew back in three months’ time.

Fast forward. Decades. Four children grown.

Stephen is a million miles from the free spirit I met on our first date. He had harrowing brushes with death during the span of his life. Gunshot blast to his midsection. Dragged down to the bottom of a river. Twenty-foot plummet to the concrete below. But in his mind, those were merely speedbumps. He thinks he’s 16, but his body begs to differ.

Stephen wakes up every morning in pain. He puts eggs on boil for my breakfast. I see him through the picture window, filling feeders with birdseed at different stations, then he serves me peeled eggs with half an avocado, sliced. He adjusts my oxygen levels, if needed.

He spends his days as a conductor with the orchestra of herbs, wildflowers, and vegetables, nourishing, coaxing, fine-tuning. He comes in to prepare lunch based on my sugars. Some snacks I post photos of on Facebook because he took the time to form cheese sticks and avocado slices into a sunburst pattern. When I wake up from a nap, a fresh bloom in the antique vase leans forward to greet me. For supper, he prefers cooking on a grate over an open fire than on a gas-fueled grill. He wheels me to the bathroom, makes sure I don’t fall getting in and out of the shower. He is gentle combing tangles out of my wet hair.

I pray for blessed relief as I massage his broken feet and rub pain gel into the back of his neck and arthritic joints. The scars in his heart are harder to reach, from bullies and other childhood wrongs, but they have silvered with the muscle of time, patience, and love.

We read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences. There is no end to the treasury of inside jokes. We nearly topple over in lawn chairs around a firepit from laughing until our faces hurt. We reminisce, like long-married folks do, and marvel over gray hairs and kids and grandkids and where has the time gone? Stephen grandly sweeps his hand across the moon and the constellations, as if I were in a private unveiling, and continues the narration of the billions-year-old saga of the universe, a bedtime story I never tire of. That’s what 35 years is with my walk on the child side.

Stephen steadies my hand as I climb shakily into the passenger seat, packs the wheelchair and oxygen for our next foray into the Colorado landscape. In my mind, he carries still two backpacks, a tent, two sleeping bags, the pouch of cookware. The strongest man I know, and as promised, showing me the world.

Albert Einstein once said there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Years ago, I stood at a register in Walmart, picking up packets of film developed from rolls that had been stored in a Ziploc bag through several moves. I lifted the flap of one packet, withdrew a stack of photos. The first picture slammed the brakes.

I leaned closer, brow furrowed, then let out a gasp. There he was, through swirls of green, Stephen hugging a tree. The next one showed our tent with Nyx on her haunches, a hand-sewn knapsack of dog food strapped around her torso.

I blinked back tears, fingers trembling. These photos, taken 20 years prior, were not forever ruined after all by swift currents in the Gila National Forest. Flipping through the glossies, I remembered that night, the night Stephen led me out of the wilderness.

While his body may have slowed, Stephen never lost his sense of wonder. And I, in turn, never lost my wonder of him.