by Zoje Stage
Imogen and Beck took turns hoisting each pack onto their backs, checking for weight and balance. It would make walking even more difficult if one side was heavier than the other, or if stuff shifted around. But of particular concern to Imogen was that her pack weigh the ten or fifteen pounds less that she’d been promised. Tilda was the most solidly built of the three of them and they were counting on her overall physical ability. Beck, the tallest, was like a slab of wood, thin and hard and strong. Imogen could still buy children’s clothes (which she did on occasion to save money).
“How’s it feel?” Beck asked as Imogen took a few steps.
“Heavy.” But she’d tried the others, and knew hers was lighter. “How’s yours?”
“Heavy.” Beck turned to Tilda. “Want to try yours?”
Tilda set down her phone and leapt across the room. “Ooh, mine looks like a big burrito.”
Hers was the only one of the three with an internal frame. Beck held it up, as if offering an overcoat. Tilda slid her arms through the straps, heaved the belt across her hips. She paced around a bit. “Not bad. Not as bad as I thought it might be.”
The Blum sisters exchanged raised eyebrows. Suppressed grins. Yup, the city girl couldn’t imagine beyond the room, the level, manufactured floor. But there was no point in telling her. If Tilda still said “not bad” after arriving at Hermit Camp, Imogen would suggest a career change to an Olympian.
“And it matches my toes.” Tilda stuck out a foot so they could admire her nail polish. Imogen rolled her eyes. Tilda ignored it, and resumed marching back and forth. “It feels good. Talk about downsizing. If I can fit all this on my back, maybe I should sell my house and live in a van.”
Afiya cackled. “Maybe taking this a bit too far.”
“Okay, Wonder Woman, don’t wear yourself out,” said Beck.
Tilda took up the superhero pose, fists at her waist, then used her invisible wrist cuffs to deflect invisible bullets. Beck shot at her with an imaginary ray gun, complete with sound effects, pkew, pkew. Imogen sank into the sofa and watched them battle it out; they used to play like that together, the three of them, silly and unselfconscious (or stoned).
“Okay children, I don’t think you should get this worked up so close to bedtime.” Afiya playacted the mom role well. Tilda and Beck groaned—disappointed, bratty imps.
Imogen joined in only when it was time to line their backpacks against the couch, ready for the morning.
“Don’t forget to brush your teeth,” Afiya said, walking her guests to their rooms.
“You’re good at this,” Beck whispered, and kissed her cheek.
After an exchange of good nights and sleep tights, Imogen shut the door to Beck’s office, glad to finally be alone. This was the last time and space she’d have to herself for a while. She plopped onto the edge of the foldout bed and took off her bra. Their alarms were set for four o’clock and she didn’t want to risk not being able to fall asleep; she dripped her marijuana tincture under her tongue.
There it was again, the framed article, with its muddy black-and-white photo. Imogen was in the middle with a smug smile (and a messy mohawk), flanked by openmouthed Tilda (holding a microphone) and Beck, the director, glaring with her arms crossed (the photographer had wanted her to look authoritative). Imogen silently chuckled. At the time, they’d taken themselves so, so seriously—simultaneous to being utterly ridiculous. We had range.
She laughed again at the thought. But it was true. They weren’t set in their ways then. They didn’t know where they were going or what life would throw at them. She realized, looking at her old self, confident without reason to be, that she needed some of that girl back. Was she out there somewhere? Perhaps, in the company of Beck and Tilda, she could find her again.
4
Dawn light slithered across the horizon, a molten stripe. The Flagstaff public radio station had been playing classical music since they left, but Imogen, in the backseat, spent most of the eighty-minute drive half asleep. She came fully awake as Beck angled her Jeep into the Hermit Trailhead parking lot, simultaneously turning off the radio.
There was only one other car in the lot, but Beck parked some distance from it. Imogen unbuckled, eager in her sudden wakefulness to get going.
“Cell phones?” Beck held out her hand.
“Are you sure we can’t—”
“I’m sure.” Beck had been ready for Tilda to try one last argument, even though they’d discussed it a dozen times. “They’re not gonna work anyway, it’s just dead weight.”
Tilda had known this was coming, it was why she’d purchased a mini digital camera. Impatient, Imogen passed her phone to Beck, and stepped out into the quiet, cold dawn. She half hoped her friend would forget to use her little camera—not because she didn’t want Tilda to have “content” to share on social media, but because wonder was its own blessed distraction. And this was a wonder. Imogen remembered her dad telling her, decades earlier, how Nature preferred to reveal her gifts to the truly attentive, and technology would sully that.
In her peripheral vision, Beck leaned over Tilda’s knees and slipped all the cell phones into the glove compartment. Imogen intentionally didn’t look to see if Tilda sighed or made some sort of pathetic frowny face. A minute later they were all at the tailgate, hauling out their packs. Silently they loaded up, tightened their belts, grabbed their walking sticks.
After locking the doors, Beck zipped the car key into an internal pocket of her fleece, ready to let the Jeep hibernate for a week. “Everybody all set?”
Imogen couldn’t wait to leave civilization behind, but the little wings of nervousness took flight in her chest—part excitement for the adventure, part fear of the journey.
“Let’s do this,” said Tilda.
They were a few hundred yards down the Hermit Trail before the view opened up. It wasn’t as expansive as the views from the tourist overlooks. But still. Hermit Trail clung to the eastern side of Hermit canyon, which meant some serious drop-offs, and impressive vistas, all the way down. The difficulty of the walking required eyes-on-feet at all times, so in order to look, really look, they needed to stop. They stood there in a row in all their gear, leaning on their bamboo poles, and took in the morning.
Tilda looked as if she’d purchased her entire sporty and expensive (and colorful) trousseau from REI, and probably had. Imogen felt a bit like a pauper by comparison in her baggy cargo shorts and faded black leggings, but they were practical. As a well-paid general practitioner, Beck could’ve afforded any specialty apparel she desired, but favored a pair of comfy old jeans. They all wore shirts, hoodies, and windbreakers against the chill October morn, but it would probably be less than half an hour before they started peeling off layers. It was a temperate time of year for the Canyon, no snow on the rim, and no blistering temperatures at the bottom. Imogen preferred a bamboo walking staff that rose several inches above her head; she leaned on it with both hands. Beck still had her tried-and-true skinny stick. Tilda had wanted to get a trekking pole like the stores sold, one that looked better suited to a ski slope, but Beck convinced her to go to a garden center and buy bamboo; Tilda’s stocky pole came just to her chin.
This was what you did in the Canyon, whether it was the first visit or the thousandth: stand.
Look.
Absorb.
There were no words, so none of them spoke.
Here was a masterpiece, and Imogen was awestruck by the Creator’s vision. How had a painter painted this? With so much depth and so many hues? Gray, lavender, sand. Smoky colors that blended and bent and rippled, and, from so many places along the rim, went on for as far as the eye could see. How had a sculptor sculpted this? With its infinite layers and formations, endless temples for countless gods. In some places the universe revealed its soul. A many-chambered heart, the inner canyons carried the tributaries of the Colorado River outward like branches, diminishing yet infinite.
From everywhere along the trail the view would be differen
t. But even if they stood as they were all day the light would change, and with each passing minute a new landscape would emerge. The artist would dip her brush into a vast palette throughout the day—pastels would bleed from blue to pink to buff to the electric shades of sunset—until finally it would be the moon’s turn, though she preferred more secretive silks, in tones of ink and silver. It was a view that reminded Imogen of the complexity of time, how water and wind and the forming continents might summon an especially pleasing surprise. And it was a comfort, this spectacularly dissimilar evidence that if the universe made everything—even this great canyon—it had made her, too.
She hoped she possessed even a speck of greatness. As if in response, her skin tingled as something inside her shivered back to life, thrilled that she was really here.
The true beginning of a journey was a daunting task, almost sacred. After an appropriate amount of time, Beck resumed the lead and headed on down the trail. Imogen waited for Tilda to follow after her. For a moment, in Tilda’s hesitation, Imogen really recognized her old friend—a girl with a big personality who’d sometimes hovered at the fringes of a room, unsure if she was welcome. But a second later she strode ahead, leaving Imogen to take up the rear.
The first mile and a third of the Hermit Trail descended a toe-crunching thirteen hundred feet in elevation. Ahead of her, Tilda prodded cautiously with her walking stick and watched her feet, acclimating to the conditions. She didn’t know yet about the thing that happens to a person’s calf muscles after walking downhill for seven steep miles. The agony really couldn’t be duplicated through exercise—even by people whose workout routines required them to leave the house. Imogen remembered being barely able to squat for a pee the day after a descent into the Canyon. Yet, it wasn’t the sort of pain she feared. Unlike bullets.
“Oh my God.” Tilda came to a full stop where a section of trail became a slanting rock over an abrupt two-foot drop.
Beck was already a little way ahead, so it was Imogen who stood beside her and examined the ground beneath the drop-off. They made hesitant eye contact. Imogen could almost sense Tilda wishing that Beck were here to guide her. Imogen reminded herself she had been good at this once—good at dancing across the stones in a creek bed, good at gauging the distance her legs could handle when maneuvering along footholds.
“You can use your stick to brace yourself. Then you can step onto…” Imogen pointed with her walking stick to a rock barely the size of an eggplant. “Maybe that one. Do you want me to go first?”
She wanted to prove to herself—and Tilda—that, rusty or not, she wasn’t a liability.
Tilda studied the terrain, considering her options. “That’s okay. I’ll try it.”
“Make sure your stick is wedged tight so it doesn’t slip.” Imogen had made that mistake once—once—at nineteen, crossing a pair of boulders farther down this very trail. The pole had shifted midleap, slamming against her ear.
There’d been no one close enough to see what had happened (or hear her cry out), and Imogen had half collapsed, her ear ringing, her head throbbing, certain she was bleeding. Tentatively, she’d touched her ear canal with her pinky finger, unsure what she’d do if her brain was oozing out. It wasn’t. After a few minutes she was back on her way, but all these years later if she slept on that side too long her inner ear squawked in distress.
Apparently unimpressed with the eggplant-rock, Tilda sat on the edge of the slab and lowered herself over. Up ahead, Beck had stopped and was watching them.
Once safely down, Tilda raised her walking stick above her head in triumph. It wasn’t quite a curtain call begging for a standing ovation, but close enough. Imogen kept any uncharitable comments to herself, though she uttered an “oh dear” at Tilda’s back before nimbly traversing the drop.
“Are there a lot of places like that?” Tilda directed the question to Beck as they caught up to her, but Imogen couldn’t hold back.
“Yup. Lots. You might not be able to sit on your butt for all of them.” She hadn’t meant to sound snide, but Beck and Tilda heard it that way and shot her a cold gaze.
“She’s not as experienced as you,” Beck said, using the tone that made Imogen feel like a bad child.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she mumbled as they resumed hiking. Imogen felt herself blushing as something devilish wormed around inside her. No, the thing that had bothered her was the celebration, Tilda’s expression of conquest after crossing a relatively small hurdle. What would come next? Would they have to congratulate her after every obstacle?
In spite of the beauty all around them, Imogen was aware of an unfriendly bitterness hovering within her lungs, too easy to express. And this wasn’t the place to let something as stupid as envy endanger anyone’s safety.
Maybe she hadn’t been paid as much money as Tilda for her book, but Imogen was proud of her second novel, Esther’s Ghost. Sure, Tilda could write a how-to-live-your-best-life book filled with lots of glossy photographs and fat words of inspiration. But she couldn’t touch what Imogen had learned to conjure after years of practice and thousands of pages of effort. Esther’s Ghost’s second miracle (after finding a publisher with relative ease) was that it needed little in the way of revisions—which was fortunate, considering the state of her muse. She’d worked on it long and hard before showing it to her agent, getting feedback from Beck and a couple of online writer friends between drafts. It was a little darker than her debut novel, with a gothic feel, and she’d wanted to get it just right. Her protagonist, Esther, became consumed with finding her assailant after she was assaulted in her bed in the middle of the night. When the clues suggest her attacker was an honest-to-god ghost, Esther’s friends start to question her sanity, but she knows the rape wasn’t her imagination.
It was now seven months from publication—though, the way things were going, Esther’s Ghost might be Imogen’s last book.
It abruptly dawned on her what her sister had really said: Tilda didn’t know how to do any of this—and Imogen did. If she wanted to feel good about herself, a worthy member of the expedition, she could play the role of teaching assistant. And maybe that was what Beck, disinclined toward expending too many words, envisioned for her. If Imogen wasn’t sure who she was supposed to be in Tilda’s life, at least she could do what Beck expected of her.
“This is probably the steepest section,” Imogen said now, trying to make up for her earlier cynicism. “But you should anticipate a lot of rough spots ahead, especially once we’re past Santa Maria Springs. But we’ll be able to rest there for a bit to get refreshed.”
In truth, Imogen didn’t remember every piece of the trail that well, but part of her own preparation had been talking to her dad. He knew it helped her to visualize things, so her imagination wouldn’t run amuck, and he’d happily answered her gazillion questions. Now she had a good portion of their hiking days outlined in her head.
Both Tilda and Beck glanced at her. Tilda seemed to get that she was trying to redeem herself, and flashed a grin. Beck shot her a patented look of disapproval. Imogen was tempted to shout ahead to her, “Use your words!” She was sick of her sister’s weighty judgments, made in silence, leaving Imogen to question what she’d done wrong.
She suspected Beck had avoided describing anything as painfully steep or scoot-on-your-butt rough, or mentioned that Hermit Trail was extremely difficult on a scale of already hard. Beck could be merciless in her belief that people should figure things out for themselves. As a teenager, she’d expounded philosophically about her reticence, claiming that people too easily let someone else’s rhetoric color their expectations. At sixteen, that sounded sage and geeky, but in recent years Imogen had wondered if it went deeper, if Beck really was afraid to express herself on some level.
Stop thinking! Too much baggage. Backpacking was supposed to be about packing light, but Imogen had brought a ton of extra shit, none of it useful.
Turning her attention to more constructive things, she watched Tilda on
the trail ahead of her. She placed her feet carefully, but Imogen could see her muscles straining against the fabric of her two-tone hiking tights; they’d hardly started, and Tilda was already struggling.
“Keep half an eye on Beck,” Imogen said. “See how she maneuvers down the trail. You’ll get more of a feel for the pack soon too, and how to move with the extra weight.”
“Okay. Maybe I’m stupid”—Tilda paused to catch her breath, her eyes on the scenery—“but I didn’t expect it to be quite so…”
“You’re not stupid, you’re just used to the word trail meaning something smooth and more or less easy to walk on,” said Imogen.
“Yes. That. But…it is pretty fucking incredible.”
They exchanged grins, unselfconscious for once, and continued on.
“Remember those stories we used to tell you? About tourists we’d come across who were totally unprepared. Thought if it was a tourist destination it must be as safe as Disneyland?”
“Yeah, I get it now. Honestly, if Beck hadn’t advised me I probably would’ve been the same way. Headed off on a day hike in running shoes with a little bottle of water and a protein bar—like I did in LA! I get it. This is some real shit. Some not-something-everybody-can-do, don’t-take-it-for-granted shit. And I’m glad we’re doing this.”
From the switchback below them, Beck radiated joy as she called up, “This is the real life.”
“The real world,” Imogen agreed. The better world. Nature didn’t fuck things up the way people did.
The three of them smiled in unison.
5
They reached Santa Maria Springs two hours later. The much more heavily traveled Bright Angel Trail—the route the mule trips used—had strategically placed open-walled rock houses every couple of miles where people stopped to rest. But the Hermit Trail just had Santa Maria: a mini three-walled “cabin” with a wood-slab bench.