Page 44 of Happiness for Beginners

I stared at the ground as the guys in the back groaned with irritation.

When I looked up, Jake was in front of me. He was wearing what he’d be wearing every day for the next three weeks: dark green cargo shorts, a rich blue baseball tee with a navy collar, a blue plaid Western overshirt with pearl snaps, that crazy Gilligan hat with the fishing fly, and those heavy-rimmed gray glasses—now secured around the back of his head with a neoprene camo strap.

His eyes were kind. “Take off your pack,” he said.

I sat on a nearby rock, and he poured hydrogen peroxide over the cut, whistling at the size of it. As we watched it bubble, he said, “That’s pretty deep. Right on the kneecap, too. If we were in town, I’d send you for stitches.”

“But we’re not.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’ll be okay, though,” he said, looking up. “You’ll just have a scar. Think of it as a wilderness tattoo.”

Here he was again, being nice to me.

Under any other circumstances, we’d be nowhere near each other right now. I’d be off nursing my bruised ego, and he’d be off doing whatever it was he did. Instead, he was kneeling before me, asking me all kinds of questions about my body and touching the skin all around my knee in the most tender way.

I closed my eyes. “Why do you have the medical kit?”

“Because I’m an EMT.”

“Of course you are.”

His hands seemed awfully steady and sure of themselves. I sat completely rigid while he cut the Band-Aids into shapes and built a little scaffolding to help protect the cut while still allowing my knee to bend.

“Can we go yet?” Mason shouted in our direction.

“In a minute,” Jake replied, taking his time. Then, before he helped me up, he pulled out a roll of duct tape from his pack, ripped a piece off with his teeth, and covered the whole bandage with it. “What’s that?” I asked.

He frowned to sayduh. “Duct tape.”

At last we set off. I insisted on putting my pack on by myself again—still nervous, but this time distracted by the pain—and when we were all buckled, we started off, single file. I was relieved to get on the trail at last. The trek across this range might turn out to be torture, but at least every step I took was one less that lay ahead of me.

Did I just say I was relieved to get on the trail? That was true. For about ten minutes.

Then, those gross old rented boots started rubbing my feet. In several places. At first, I thought I was imagining it, but after a half hour, it was clearly happening: I was getting blisters. On the first day.

So I ignored them. I didn’t want to be that girl who complains and makes everybody wait.

With blisters or without, I was still going to be one of the slowest hikers there. We’d barely started when I lost sight of the person in front of me, and then got passed, one by one, by almost everybody in the group. By the time we took our first break for water and snacks, about two hours in, I could not deny that there were only two girls slower than me. It probably would have been a great time to pull Jake off and surreptitiously tend to my hot spots, but I just didn’t want to. Nobody else was getting blisters! As stupid as it was, I ignored them. I couldn’t be slowandblistered. Slow was bad enough. Beckett lectured us about sticking together on the trail, and how we were only as fast as our weakest links. When he said the words, “weakest links,” he pointed right at me and the two girls at the back.

“I know it sucks to go slow,” Beckett said to the guys, “and you may feel that these out-of-shape girls are hampering you. But teamwork is a wilderness skill, too. Remember that.”

I wanted to believe that Beckett was more clueless than mean. But some of the other boys were both clueless and mean. And juvenile. And asinine. By lunchtime, I knew that guy Mason was going to be trouble, because he constantly picked on everybody and sniffed out weaknesses. When a guy named Ron asked one too many questions about how to read a topographical map, he nicknamed him “Mapron,” his own variation on “moron.” After Hugh tripped on a branch, Mason made sure to pelt branches at him at every stop, saying “Don’t trip!” He’d insulted every girl in the group before lunchtime as well, passing them all one by one as we hiked, and saying, “Move it, heifers. Real hiker coming through.” He was a meanness overachiever. It almost made me glad to be way at the back.

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. “Iwillbe 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?”

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