Happiness for Beginners (14 page)

The trail had stayed flat-ish for about half a mile, and then, as promised, it started to incline. At first, the angle was like a ramp, but pretty soon, it was more like we were climbing stairs. This was the moment that separated the boys from the girls, which was another clear insult from nature. The shorter girls had shorter legs. We had to take more steps than those tall boys to cover the same distance. The hiking group settled itself into this configuration: tall boys up front, medium-sized people in the middle, short girls at the way back. I'm five foot four, and though I don't think of myself as short, it appeared that the Absarokas definitely did.

“Straighten your leg with each step,” Beckett shouted back at us. “Then you're using your bones to support your weight instead of your muscles.”

I did as I was told, but I was still out of breath.

The girls behind me didn't mind being last. Their names were Kaylee and Tracy, but they looked so much alike no one could remember who was who. They belonged to the same sorority, it turned out, and so they referred to themselves as Sisters. It was clear within the first hour of hiking what their schtick was: They were girly. They squealed at bugs. They wouldn't sit on mossy logs. They complained loudly about the injustice of being forced to leave all their makeup behind. I couldn't imagine what on earth they were doing here. They were an even worse match for this program than I was.

“I don't care what Beckett says,” I overheard one say. “I
will
be washing my hair.”

She'd snuck in shampoo, she confessed, despite the fact that on the bus ride out, just that very morning, Beckett had reminded us again that soap of any kind was verboten—and he'd expressly forbidden bathing in streams. Just the bacteria on our bodies, he'd told us in no uncertain terms, was enough to disrupt the ecosystems of the rivers. Shampoo would be lethal to the native algae and bacteria in the waterways, which would then be lethal to the fish that ate those things, and lethal to the birds and predators that fed on the fish—and on up the food chain.

“Seriously,” one of the Sisters had said to Beckett during that lecture. “One girl having one shampoo will bring the whole wilderness to its knees?”

“Look at the rest of the world,” Beckett said. “What do you think?”

“I think I don't want to smell like a skunk,” the Sister said.

“You can wash your body,” Beckett said. “You just can't do it in a stream. And you can't use any soap.”

Somebody asked, “What do we wash our dishes with if we don't have any soap?”

“Dirt,” Beckett answered, and nobody knew if he was joking.

Having to hike at the slow end with these girls was literally adding insult to injury. I'd come here for nature. I'd come here to be transformed. And yet for that whole first day of hiking, I listened to celebrity gossip, tales of intra-sorority injustice, and diet tips. The air was thinner here, up in the mountains, and we were all panting some as we pushed relentlessly uphill. The Sisters were out of breath, too, but they didn't let it stop them. One had just finished an all-grapefruit and laxative cleanse, which had cured her acne but given her a seizure, and the other—I swear I'm not exaggerating—spent a solid hour enumerating the benefits of juicing, and listing every fruit, vegetable, or meat that could be put in a blender for any reason.

It had not occurred to me that there could be something worse than being dead last. But those girls gave dead last a run for its money.

*   *   *

Much to my thighs' relief, we stopped to set up camp midafternoon so Beckett could instruct us in proper tarp-hanging techniques, teach us how to light and use our kerosene stoves, and demonstrate a “bear hang.”

“Anybody know what a bear hang is?” Beckett asked.

We'd convened as a group in a clearing full of wildflowers for our first wilderness survival “class.” I had my journal out, taking furious notes—my inner A student refusing to accept defeat—but nobody else seemed to be writing.

Mason raised his hand. “You have to hang your food at night between two trees so the bears don't eat it.”

“Correct,” Beckett said. “And why would that be bad?”

Mason frowned. “'Cause you don't want the bears to get your food, dude.”

Hugh added, “And you don't want to give the bears a reason to come to your camp.”

“That's right,” Beckett said. “We also don't want bears to become dependent on humans for their sustenance.” Something about the way he said it made me suspect that he was more concerned for the bears—and fish, and algae—than the humans.

“Who wants to be our first bear hang volunteer?” Beckett asked.

Nobody raised a hand. I looked around and was pleased to see that everybody looked about as dead tired as I felt. Finally, Jake raised his hand. “I'll do it,” he said.

“Good man,” Beckett said.

After dinner, we combined all our food together in one big nylon bag. Then we followed Beckett and Jake as they scouted a spot.

I'd taken careful notes on the bear hang. It wasn't just enough to hang your food from a branch. Bears were smart enough to figure that out. You had to climb a tree with one end of a rope while another person climbed another tree with the other end, and then tie that rope from tree to tree, attach your food bag to it, and then pull it to the middle point between the two trees. Bears were awesome, but they weren't tightrope walkers.

“Watch,” Beckett said, “and pay attention.”

It was starting to get dark now. Setting up tarps and cooking dinner had taken us, as Beckett had pointed out, “way too long.” As Beckett and Jake started to climb their trees, I wondered about Jake's night vision. But it didn't seem to hold him back. In fact, the bear hang wasn't supposed to be a race, but as Beckett noticed how quickly and easily Jake was pulling himself up, hand-over-hand through the tree branches, Beckett started to do the same. And people were cheering.

Hugh came to stand next to me, and said, “My money's on Jake.”

I sighed. “Mine, too.”

We both watched, arms crossed, mouths open. I'm not sure if Hugh was marveling at the sight, but I sure was. There really didn't seem to be anything Jake couldn't do.

Jake and Beckett stopped midway up, tied their ropes with special knots around the trees' trunks, and then Beckett attached the food bag with a carabiner to the rope and slid it out to the middle. It slowed at the halfway point, then stopped. Everybody cheered, even me, and then Beckett and Jake shifted into reverse to climb back down.

It hadn't been that dark when they started, but in the twenty minutes that had elapsed, day had tipped over into night. It might have been the darkness. Or maybe it was just bad luck. But somehow, halfway down, Jake missed a branch or lost his footing. There was a fast, unnatural rustle as he dropped the final six or so feet to the ground that made me gasp when I heard it. He landed on his feet, but he held stock-still for a few very long seconds. He was really hurt, I thought.

But, then, he raised his arms over his head in victory and turned to the group, which erupted in cheers. With that one gesture, he rewrote the moment. He hadn't fallen—he had won the race. The nonexistent race. And he wasn't hurt, he was victorious. I stared in awe. Only Jake could make falling out of a tree into something awesome.

*   *   *

That night, I lay my sleeping bag under the tarp next to Windy—and as far away from Mason as I could get.

I was way too tired to change into the T-shirt and shorts that were my designated pj's for the trip, but Beckett had warned us that we absolutely could not sleep in the shirts we'd hiked in that day. They might feel dry now, he said, but they retained sweat and moisture, and if we didn't change into different clothes, we'd shiver all night.

It was my first experience changing clothes while lying down in a sleeping bag, and let's just say that my tired muscles weren't exactly up to it.

“You look like a ferret,” Windy said, shining her flashlight on me. “A ferret with convulsions.”

“That's about how I feel,” I said.

Windy turned on her side to give watching me her full attention. When I finally pulled my clothes from the day out of the bag and tossed them on top of my pack, she said, “So, no book, huh?”

“Kind of regretting that now,” I said. “My fantasy of this trip was a little—”

“Off target?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“I'll let you borrow my book, if you want,” Windy said.

“Your textbook?”

“It's very fascinating.”

“I'm sure it is,” I said, not meaning it.

“It's for my Positive Psychology seminar.”

“Are you a psychology major?”

She nodded. “Double, actually—in psych and sociology.” Then she looked up and smiled. “I'm going to be a pet psychologist.”

I coughed a little. “For real?”

“Actually, a dog psychologist.”

“That's a job?”

Windy nodded. “A lucrative one.”

“I have a dog,” I said.

“Don't tell me,” she said, squinting. “A cocker spaniel.”

“No,” I said.

Windy looked surprised to get it wrong. “A labradoodle?”

I shook my head.

“I'm usually really good at this,” she said, squinting again. “Havanese!” she declared at last. “National dog of Cuba.”

“Nope.”

“I give up.”

“A dachshund,” I said. “A partly bald, wire-haired dachshund that's fat as a tick and hates everybody, including me.”

Windy frowned. “I wouldn't have pegged you for a dachshund person.”

“She's an ankle-biter, too,” I said. “And she'll eat literally anything. Toilet paper rolls, sponges, lady products. She's been to the vet for swallowing popsicle sticks, barrettes, Sharpies. She has no sense of self-preservation. And she has a skin disease,” I added. “Her tail is all hairless, like a rat. She looks terrible.”

“I bet,” Windy said.

“I put the medicine on, but she licks it off and then it gives her diarrhea. All over my seagrass rug.” I shook my head. “So many other rugs in the house, but she chooses the seagrass.”

I shined my flashlight on Windy's face, which was compressed into a sympathetic frown. “Sometimes they have a favorite place to be sick.”

“She chews the furniture, the rugs, and the electric cords. She hates all dogs and all humans. She lunges and growls at everybody who comes into my apartment and everybody who walks by. I have to wait to walk her until all the other people and pets have gone to bed. And you have to guard your ankles at all times. She's totally vicious. She's a dog piranha.”

“Not good,” Windy said.

“I thought getting a dog would get me out more. You know, that I'd visit with the neighbors on walks in the evenings. Go to the dog park. Befriend the world of dog lovers. But, actually, it's the opposite. It's isolating. She's so bloodthirsty, I just have to keep her in all the time—and I feel guilty for going out.”

Windy wrinkled her nose. “Not fun.”

“She makes my life a living hell,” I said. “She's the worst pet in the world.”

Windy read my face, and then broke into a smile. “But it's too late now.”

“That's right,” I said. “It's too late. Because I already love her.”

Windy was still smiling as she shook her head. “Isn't love awful?”

I shouldn't have gone on and on like I did—but Windy was such a good listener, asking question after question, that it all came tumbling out. How I'd become obsessed with the idea of getting a dog, and how I'd gone to Petfinder.com every night for months and months, scrolling through the rescue dogs listed there, looking at their pictures, their videos, their personality profiles. I'd wanted something fluffy and adorable and sociable and hypoallergenic, and I'd scoured the poodle mixes ad nauseam. Windy's guesses hadn't been that far off: I bookmarked endless labradoodles, cockapoos, golden doodles, malti-poos, schnoodles. I'd made lists of traits for my ideal dog and done searches by color, fur style, temperament, age, and proximity of foster home to my apartment. I'd danced right up to the edge of getting several different ones—all of them blond and fluffy with bright eyes and little smiley dog mouths.

Finally, one night, I was ready. I'd found the perfect pet. I'd e-mailed one of the rescue groups to make an offer on a smiley yellow pup named Lola, and filled out an application and been accepted, and set a date to go out and meet her later in the week, and I was finally, finally going to take the plunge at last—when somebody abandoned Pickle by tying her to a street post on the sidewalk in front of my building.

The first time I saw her, with that mottled fur and skin tail, I thought she was a possum.

As soon as it was clear she was a dog, it was also clear she'd been abandoned. And mistreated beyond belief. Her fur was matted, her skin was scabbed over, she was covered in fleas. She didn't bark at me—or anyone—that day. All her fight was gone.

I couldn't leave her out there like that. I found a vet clinic with late hours and took her in. It turned out she had a broken leg, too. It was going to be three hundred dollars to fix it.

“What if I can't afford that?” I asked.

The vet looked at Pickle, then back at me. “Then probably the kindest thing would be to put her down.”

I paid the three hundred dollars. And with that, she was mine.

As she recovered her strength, she also recovered her abiding hatred for all living creatures. In theory, I admired her moxie, but in practice she was a grade-A pain in the ass.

“It sounds like she's got some post-traumatic stress disorder,” Windy said then.

“We're talking about a dog, of course,” I pointed out.

“Whoever tied her up to that pole outside your apartment really did a number on her. The defense strategies she developed when her life was unsafe made sense at the time—but now she can't let them go.”