He means search and rescue. “I did a summer ten years ago. You?”
“Fifth year.”
“Last one, then?” The park has a policy about how long you can be on the team. Five years is the limit, then you have to move on unless you become a ranger.
“Guess so.” He smiles, his face crinkling around his eyes and mouth. “Maybe I’ll find a way around that, like Brian.”
“Bri’s still here?” I say, laughing. Though no one would ever confirm it, Brian was probably the reason for the rule. He came to the park every summer to be part of the team, then couch surfed for the rest of the year, living off his network of climbing buddies and women who found him charming for a few months at a time. The last time I’d seen Bri, he’d been doing naked yoga as the sun rose, giving me a full salutation as a goodbye.
“He’s dying in the valley if he can manage it,” Ben says.
“So he always said.” I shake my head. “Some things never change.”
“You spend a lot of time in the park?”
“I grew up in Mammoth. It was our backyard.”
“That’s cool. How come you only did one summer?”
I shiver despite the heat. “I decided to go to college.” That was part of the truth, but if he hadn’t heard the whole story, I didn’t need to tell it.
We pass the turnoff for Mammoth, and this all suddenly feels more real. My mother still lives there—another person I left behind. I turn the heat up a notch. The valley we’re traveling through is wide-open, the purple-streaked sky impossibly high, the massive mountains a darkening outline against it.
Ben glances at me. “Nervous about coming back?”
“A bit. It’s been a minute since I worked in a wilderness setting.”
“How’d you get the job, then?”
“I reached out to Jenny. We worked together ten years ago.” Jenny Evans is the emergency services coordinator, in charge of the search and rescue teams and their staffing. “Someone dropped out last minute, and I was available.”
“Gotcha. She’s a good boss. What’d you do after college?”
I quell the voice in my head telling me not to answer. His questions are normal, not probing. We’re going to spend the summer together. I need to get used to sharing some details. “I moved to Manhattan.”
“What made you want to come back?”
I laugh. “Have you been to Manhattan?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Too many people, too much ambition, too much of everything.”
He nods slowly. “Sounds horrible.”
“It has its good parts, but… it was time to go.”
“Now that, I get.”
Time to go, I’d said, and it was time. Past time.
“What do you do in the off-season?” I ask.
“Vegas.”
“As a rigger?” Lots of climbers work in Vegas in the winter, doing the rope work needed to mount conventions and Cirque du Soleil shows.
“Yep.”
I was in Vegas once years ago for a bachelorette party. I remember the smoky hotel casino lobbies filled with blinking lights and pumped-in air, the impossibly long strip where people handed out playing cards advertising strip clubs and brothels, and the people wandering onto the hotel elevator drunk at nine in the morning. “You must hate it there.”
“It’s not that bad. Plus, there’s great climbing up at Charleston and Red Rock.”
“I’ve heard that. Never made it up there.”
“You a climber?”
“Isn’t everyone on the team?”
He smiles at me. “Where do you get to climb in Manhattan?”
“Mostly in the gym these days. I’m looking forward to getting back on some real rock.”
“Hear, hear.”
We crest a hill. On Ben’s side of the road, there’s a collection of trailer homes and RVs that I don’t remember huddled between the asphalt shoulder and the mountainside. Most of the houses we’ve passed since we left Bishop have been large, meant to impress, sitting on the tops of hillocks, with massive windows pointing toward the Sierras. In contrast, this place has a down-on-its-luck air to it, with rusted-out cars and cement blocks in haphazard piles between the dwellings.
“You hungry?” Ben asks.
“You mean, after I scarfed down that chocolate thing at Schat’s?”
He grins. “You want to stop at the Mobil?”
“Do they still have the best tacos?”
“Oh yes. Also mango margaritas.” He slows the truck as we approach a Mobil gas station that contains the Whoa Nellie Deli.
Memories crash into me as we drive up the hill. Laughing over drinks and food with Jenny. Dinners with Bri. Looking at the message board fluttering with posters of Cameron’s face, begging for information on whereabouts of her and her boyfriend, Chris, who went missing along with her. “Shouldn’t we be checking into the park?”
“Doesn’t matter what time we arrive tonight. So long as we’re at roll call tomorrow morning. Plus… did you get supplies in Bishop?”
“No.” I’d meant to, but it had taken longer than planned to get to the post office.
“There’s not much to be had at the Meadows, in case you don’t remember.”
“Right. Good idea.”
He gives me that grin again—the one I’m sure has gotten him out of a lot of trouble—and parks the car. It’s nice to have a man smile at me like that: interested but not predatory.
The light is almost gone now, just a sliver on the horizon, and I shiver when we get out of the truck. I pop into the back and grab my puffy along with a beanie, then follow Ben inside.
The Mobil sells T-shirts and the usual gas station supplies, including a couple of aisles of groceries. There’s also a food counter where you can order tacos and sandwiches and yes, margaritas. The last time I was here, I’d had three of them, the second one giving me a brain freeze that felt like it was splitting my head in two.
I’d left Yosemite a week later and gone to college in Colorado, trying to leave the guilt I’d been attempting to blot out behind.
“Why don’t you pick up what you need for the next week, and I’ll grab dinner?” Ben says. “Carnitas okay, or are you veggie?”
“Not veggie. That sounds good. And thanks.”
He walks to the counter, and I take a basket and wander the aisles, checking prices as I go. One of the odd things about my new job is that I’ll only get paid if I go out on a rescue. I’ll have a camping spot and unlimited access to the park, but that’s it. I’ve budgeted fifty dollars a week for food, which isn’t going to get me anything that’s fresh or healthy, certainly not in a gas station. I fill my basket with mac and cheese and ramen noodles, spaghetti, and canned sauce.
In Manhattan, I never checked the price of anything, just tipped whatever I wanted into my cart without a care. When I think of some of the things I’ve left behind—clothes with the tags still on, shoes I never felt comfortable in, the thousand-dollar phone I threw in the trash—I feel ashamed. But that life’s gone now, so I can spend a week eating like a college student and hope that next week’s shop will be healthier.