Page 108 of Shared By the Mountain Men

I thought about my life in Ohio. All the bad things that had happened with my ex, but also all the good things. The parts that I liked.

I thought about Crested Butte. The town specifically; the coffee shops, the bars, the restaurants. The vibe of the people there. I tried not to think about my three recent lovers, because I wanted to analyze my feelings about the town without them being an influence.

But they kept crawling into my mind, no matter how hard I tried.

Jack sneakily feeding the cats and then getting angry when he got caught.

Noah insisting that I wasn’ttechnicallyhis patient, so it was okay if we went on a date.

Ash teaching a little girl how to use a mountain bike, with a nod and a fist-bump.

By day four, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

By day five, I missed them.

By day six, I was downright heartsick being away from them.

Fortunately, I was in an area of the San Juans with zero cell phone signal. That might have been the only thing that kept me from texting them.

I walked, and ate, and slept, and felt my mind reset itself like a computer that had been rebooted.

I passed mile 200. A few days later, I hit the official halfway point, which was marked with a special sign on the trail. I took a selfie with it, but didn’t pause for any longer—I had to keep moving.

In the blink of an eye, I hit mile 300. I noted it on my GPS watch with a smile, but that was it.

Occasionally, I reached an area with cell signal. I had dozens of texts from my mom, but none from Jack, Noah, or Ash. Part of me was disappointed. Sure, they were respecting my boundaries and giving me space. That’s what I had asked for.

But sometimes a woman didn’t want a man to do thenicething.

I stopped for lunch some days, and other times I ate while walking. My meal of choice was what I called a Mexican PB&J, which was peanut butter and jelly smeared onto a tortilla. It rolled up like a crepe and was easy to eat on the move.

The sleeping pad was a game changer. Unlike the first seven days of hiking, back before I twisted my ankle, now I fell asleep every night without a problem, and woke up feeling refreshed. Or at least as refreshed as a womancouldfeel in a sleeping bag in the middle of the mountains.

Soon, my mind felt completely clear. A blank slate.

And on that blank slate, I finally allowed myself to begin thinking about the future.

What I wanted out of life.

What my values were.

Who I wanted to be as a person.

Everything I had hoped to get out of this trip came to me. Not in a flash of inspiration, but slowly, one step at a time. Like the pouring of a foundation of a house that was going to be built.

And once that foundation was complete, I knew what I wanted.

But it wasn’t one thing. It was three.

It was around mile 400, four days outside of the finish in Denver, when I crawled out of my tent in the morning and came face to face with one of those things I wanted.

I gave a start. “Noah?”

51

Melissa

Noah Richardson, the doctor who had examined my ankle before becoming my lover, was sitting on a log outside my tent. I had doused my fire before going to bed, but now fresh flames were licking up around new firewood. A cast iron pan was nestled on top.

---