Nantahala
from morning typing, Feb. 17, 2006
The college student packs his camping gear in an old car, grabs a coffee and heads for the mountains. He’s meeting an ex-girlfriend in Asheville, they both recently are single again. She’s taking him rock climbing. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and they’ll have to huddle in the tent together, eat pumpkin pie filling out of a can and drink Wild Turkey.
He’s envisioned the whole weekend on the drive, smoking a joint as he fights the traffic. It’s the best part of the weekend, the anticipation, he knows it, knows there’s a chance he’ll be made a fool of, make a pass at her and get a blank look and a pullback.
The car is ashy and dirty, old fast food containers on the floorboards, but it’s here, listening to Bob Weir on the tape deck, that he has the best sense of the woods.
When he’s in them, the woods will just be where he is with his emotions, but now, in the car, the woods are brown and shadowy, inspiring, perfect. And he knows he’s stupid to get his hopes up, but what if, what if she is just as excited, what if they get lucky. Every now and then people come together equally, no one is compromising or just trying to fill a need, some times people just come together in complete good faith, that this is now and this is what I want, nothing else.
In the woods they’ll make camp he’ll build a fire, and she’ll wear her old Patagonia fleece and her hair back in a ponytail. They’ll get on their mountain bikes and ride, and she’ll fall and he’ll help her. In the tent she’ll drink the bourbon and say how her father is dating her old biology teacher from high school, the one all the guys were in love with, she’s 32.
The girl is 22. She works at On the Border and is taking a semester off.
She gets emotional and thinks the bourbon is making her sick, but then she goes outside the tent and it’s cold and wet and dark, a squirrel makes a rustle in the leaves, but she doesn’t know it’s just a squirrel, God knows what it is, and she’s not wearing her boots or even socks, it’s freezing, but she’s not nauseous now, just drunk and full of wonderment, and she’s here in the woods now, not in the tent with the horny boy, she’s here now, completely. The same cold wind that shakes the pines blows against her fair unwrinkled cheek.
Soon she’ll give in and be in the tent and maybe marry that guy, but tonight she’ll stay out and be uncomfortable in the now, cold and shivering but not a second ahead of herself, not a bit of her anywhere else.
