Page 36 of Happiness for Beginners

Ourkitchen supplies? The room held its breath.

“I’m kidding!” Beckett burst out with a head shake, after the longest minute ever. “No. You don’t pack out your feces. Fecal matter is biodegradable. You’ll dig a cat hole with a stick, do your business, sprinkle some dirt on top, stir it up, then cover it. Mother Nature will do the rest.”

“Do our business?” a girl asked. “Like, out in the forest?”

“No,” Beckett answered. “We helicopter you back to base camp every time you need to go.”

There it was. We had ourselves a comedian. A sarcastic, pubescent, wilderness comedian.

Beckett looked around for other questions. I, personally, had a thousand, but I’d be damned if I’d ask them—or ever speak again for the rest of my life. When no other hands went up, Beckett slapped his palms on his thighs and stood up.

“Okay then,” he said, surveying the group one final time with a wicked smile. “Let the games begin.”

Chapter 7

At Outfitting, I tried on several pairs of boots. Beckett said it was best to rent them unless you had your own well-broken-in pair, which I didn’t, of course. The rental pairs were certainly well broken in—by other people’s stinky feet. The boots had been gelled so often with water repellent they were crusty. The laces were fraying. And every single pair rubbed me wrong in some different spot.

I snagged a side-of-the-eye glance at Jake. He was helping that blond girl Windy try on boots. I saw him yank her laces tight, then I heard her burble a delighted squeak before I looked away. In that moment, I had a vision of the next three weeks of my life: I was going to make myself miserable on this trip by being overly serious and overly self-conscious and overly self-critical. And Jake was going to make me even more miserable by being the pure opposite of all those things.

They loved him. We’d been here two hours, and he was already the king of the group. He was just one of those guys, it turned out, who always had something funny to say. Plus, he was confident without being pompous. He was interested without being anxious. He was laid-back without being a slacker. He had something for everyone. The hard-core guys could talk hard-core hiking with him. The sorority girls could ask him to adjust their pack straps. He was infinitely likable. To everybody. Except me.

I was fully aware how crazy it was, but the more they liked him, the less I did. This was supposed to be my trip! It was like he’d taken it over, somehow, and squeezed me out. We were enemies now, after all, if only in my mind. We were like the broken-up couple whose friends had to choose sides. Except we had never been a couple, and there were no sides left because everybody had already chosen him.

There it was. If he was happy, I had to be unhappy. If he fit in, I had to be left out. Especially since I still wasn’t talking to him. If he was the person everybody was gathered around, I didn’t have any place to stand.

At the Pantry, we measured and bagged up ten days’ worth of dehydrated food, as well as mixtures of spices and dehydrated milk, lemonade, and cocoa. We got the glorious, unbelievable news that butter can last for weeks unrefrigerated without going rancid, and the same was true of cheese. Each cook group would carry its own cheddar wheel so thick it had to be cut with a wire, and enough butter to last until the re-ration at the midway point. Apparently, someone was going to ride up into the mountains halfway through with a full load of replenishments on a caravan of donkeys.

“Donkeys?” that guy Mason asked.

“No cars. No ATVs. Just living, breathing nature.”

“What happens if we run out of food before that?”

Beckett shrugged. “Then we eat each other.”

There was a limit for the packs based on each person’s size, and yes—they weighed us one by one on a scale and called out the results. The big guys carried more than the small girls, which is why they got the gas cookstoves and the giant wheel of cheese. My own pack weighed in at seventy-nine pounds, which seemed like plenty. I was issued flour, dehydrated milk, a bag of homemade granola, and hot chocolate.

Packs full, we practiced putting them on. You can’t just hoist a pack that heavy straight up to your back from the ground. You have to kneel down like you’re proposing marriage, pull your pack up onto the shelf of your thigh, then wriggle it around onto your back. Beckett had us practice. I took it very slow, worrying that I might drop it, or strain something, or otherwise humiliate myself. Because the only ways I knew how to shake off embarrassment were: (a) to leave the room, or (b) to laugh it off with a friend. Since I couldn’t leave, and I had no friends, the stakes were pretty high.

I would have expected to have a simple but clear education about the wilderness by the time we finished our orientation. The basics, at least. But Beckett, for all his posturing, talked in scribbles. He gave lines of information with gaping spaces in between, and after listening to him for five straight hours, all I knew for sure was that dandelions were edible, singing on the trail would keep the bears away, and we had to drop iodine in our water bottles every single time we filled up or risk an intestinal infection called Giardia that would have us “spewing out of both ends.”

When Beckett dismissed us for dinner with instructions to meet at the lodge entrance at six the next morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had only a tiny fraction of the information we were going to need.

I asked him about it on the way out the door, but he said, “It’s all in the handouts.”

“The two handouts?” I asked.

“Don’t worry so much.”

“I feel under-educated.”

“We do experiential learning here. You’ll learn as you go.”

“But what if there’s some information I need before I have it?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“What if I don’t?”

---