Happy Campers Come from Wisconsin

         She holds up a pair of brown hiking boots for me to look at, her small hands almost white under the high florescent lights of the Farm and Fleet. How do you like these? she asks.
         They’re good. I turn one of them around in my hands. Are these like high tops?
         They’re hiking boots, she says. They’re only twenty dollars.
         I tell her that I’ll try them on.
         We should look at some Carhartts for you too, she says. Before I can find a place to sit and take my shoes off she’s already moving to another part of the store. I follow her and everything around me is flannel or camouflage or hunter orange.
         She stops in front of a shelf of folded dark green pants. I’m worried that they might not have any in your size, she says, picking up a stack and peering in between at the price tags. These are kind of expensive.
         Probably all I need are the shoes this time.
         She puts the stack back on the shelf. Next time, she says, we’ll get you a pair.
         We find our way back to the front of the store, passing an entire aisle of hunting knives that hang like icicles from the shelves.
         The store is so empty that only the middle checkout lane is open. I remember that it’s Monday still; I’m already forgetting the days of the week. St. Patrick’s Day is still tomorrow, even though we watched the parade yesterday. We celebrated by drinking early and playing video games. I remember the bathroom of the capitol during the parade around the square, when I slipped in the stall and banged my hand against the metal of the box that held the toilet paper. It was a surprisingly loud noise in the middle of all that cold marble and silence.
         Daddy, what was that? a little voice said in the stall beside mine.
         It was nothing, her daddy said, probably because I don’t know is a scarier answer.
         I didn’t say anything even though I felt bad. I flushed. I left the bathroom.
         The only man in front of us in line wears overalls and a red hat. He’s slowly handing the woman behind the register a hundred dollar bill at a time. His cart is empty except for a big bag of grain or mulch or something like that.
         What is he paying for? I whisper to her.
         Probably farm equipment, she says, guessing.
         He keeps handing over the hundreds and I start to lose count of how many. I look at the clock high up on the wall behind them and it’s only ten thirty.

She stops the car in the parking lot near the beach of the lake. I’m trying to get my new hiking boots on in the cramped space of the passenger’s seat. They feel loose no matter how tight I tie them so I just knot them as many times as I can. I open the door finally and the air is cool. She stands at the trunk of her car, looking out at the bluff and the blue ice covering the lake, the high trees and dead grass that didn’t survive the winter. When she turns to me her shoulder-length hair starts moving behind her in the cold wind.
         How do those fit? she asks.
         They’re good, I say. Kind of loose.
         They’re okay. They’re supposed to be a little loose for movement. She turns back to the hill. The trail goes up there, she says. This side might be icy since the sun doesn’t really hit it.
         That sounds good, I say.
         She pulls a backpack out of the trunk that’s bigger than she is and straps it to her back. I don’t ask what’s in it. Are you ready? she says.
         We head off across the dead grass to the ranger station by the parking lot. My hiking shoes move around on my ankles when I walk over the uneven ground.
         The ground is squishy, I say.
         She laughs at me. Well yeah, she says, it’s mud.

There are steep stone steps built into the hillside, all iced over still from the winter months, the ice lying deep in the cracks as if it had all been cemented together this way. She’s behind me because she knows it’s better to take your time climbing the hill. I am maybe ten feet ahead and sweating already. Halfway up I have to take off my jacket and stuff it into my backpack. I roll up the sleeves of my flannel shirt.
         We stop to rest for a few minutes. I try not to show how heavily I need to breathe, my lungs trembling, cold and raw in my chest.
         I don’t know how safe this is, I say, the end of my sentence coming out in a sort of weak cough. I mean with all this ice.
         The other side will be better, she says, taking off her sweatshirt and tying it around her waist. There shouldn’t be any ice on that side.
         I don’t realize how far we’ve climbed until we’re at the top of the hill, looking out on the small parking lot and the ranger station where we came from. The frozen surface of the lake is blue enough to be a reflection of the sky. Big cracks have started stretching across the thin surface where it will break apart when it finally gets warm enough. Wow, I say.
         Isn’t it great? She hands me her water bottle and pulls a camera out of her bag.  She says quietly, Look.
         What?
         She takes a picture and points at something out in the woods.
         What? I don’t see it.
         She takes another picture and says, There.
         Oh, it’s a squirrel.
         It’s a red squirrel, she says, and takes another picture.
         The squirrel finally disappears behind a large rock on the side of the hill and she gives the camera to me. She walks ahead for a while and I take pictures of her walking. Her long bare legs and hiking boots frozen in a kind of vertical march, her light brown hair up on the back of her head stuck in time, swung to one side or the other. I take pictures of her standing at the edge of the bluff on a rock. The angle makes it look like a deadfall but it’s really more of a steep hill. In the picture, behind her the lake sits like the icy floor of some distant planet. She takes the camera from me and puts it back into her bag. We keep walking.

In the morning, in her bed covered with the pillows that she had sewn herself, watching me with her bright green eyes she had asked me the same question. She looked up at the white sunlight coming through the cracks between the dark blue blinds and said, Do you know what kind of bird that is?
         I shook my head against the pillow. I don’t know, I said even though it was a scary answer.
         She stands by the edge of the trail in her short shorts with her binoculars pressed against her eyes. That’s a chickadee, she says. She turns to me, her round eyes bright in the sunlight. They make that sound like cheeeeseburger, she says. Listen.
         I listen for it. When I can’t hear it anymore I tell her that my favorite is that simple one. The two note one.
         She lets the binoculars hang from her neck. The white throated sparrow, she says. The simple part is only the first half. The other part is O Canada, Canada, Canada.
         I like that one, I say.
         My ankles have started to hurt by the time we’re on the other side of the lake, from the climb down the other side and the muddy, uneven walkways. I’m already thinking about my bed at home and how tonight I get to sleep on the ground. I have to remember that this trip is a kind of probation. She’s been afraid since the beginning that we’re too different, that I will never be into any of this like she is. I’m here to prove that I can be the lumberjack she wants me to be. I’m hoping the flannel shirt will help.
         She makes her way through a field of small and large boulders all over the hillside by the lake. I can see the bluff almost directly across from where we are now and I wonder how long we’ve been walking.
         There are still patches of snow on the ground here underneath the trees, entire walkways covered in dead pine needles. I hang from a thick branch that runs above the path. It’s high enough that I can reach it and pull my legs up so that they’re not touching the ground. I hang like this until she takes a picture of me.
         That’s a good one, she says after I jump down, showing me the back of her camera.
         I think I ruined my hands, I say.
         
We make four trips down to her car and back since her Geo can’t make it up the muddy hill to our camp site. We walk up into the open field from the cool, wooded area where she left her car near a creek and a small house. We struggle through the prairie grass to get to the cleared area she picked for our tent. She leaves everything in a pile and walks a few feet away towards the trees.
         How about we dig a fire pit here? she says, standing in the middle of a big patch of snow, her hands pointing to the ground at each side of her.
         I tell her that it sounds like a good idea and she hands me the shovel. I’ll go start setting up the tent, she says.
         I spend twenty minutes pretending like I know how to dig a fire pit and the shovel keeps getting caught on all the small roots in the ground, hooking around the edges like the earth is fighting against me. I chop at them to break them apart and eventually I have something like a hole.
         She comes over after she’s done with the tent and puts a tarp down over the snow by the fire pit. It’s a little deep, she says, but it’s good. She buries the cans of cherry soda with the bottle of Southern Comfort we bought in town in a smaller patch of snow near the tarp. There, she says. It’s a cooler.
         I rub my sore hands against the back of my jeans and ask her, What now?
         The sky starts to get dark quickly, the feeling of the colder air bringing back the winter months. Our fire burns weakly, dying two or three times before it gets going strong enough to be warm.
         I take the bungie cord from around the bundle of blankets and pillows she brought from her bed. I lay two blankets down over the tarp by the fire and a pillow for each of us to sit on. She brings over two cans of soda and the bottle of Southern Comfort. She drinks from her can and fills it in with whiskey.
         I’m going to need some of that, I say.
         A cold breeze comes down the hill and the fire and blankets aren’t nearly enough to keep it out. I get up to put on my winter jacket over my sweatshirt. I keep wondering to myself what we’re doing outside so early in the spring. When I sit back down I can feel the cold of the snow underneath us, the way it’s melting from our body heat and turning into ice. I adjust my pillow.
         Everything is quiet except for the fire. The sky is moonless and dark blue. She says she hears a wolf and I tell her that I don’t hear anything. I remember the animal skull we found near the woodpile. It’s probably a deer, she said to me when she saw it but I thought it looked like it could’ve been a dog.
         Beyond the fire all I can see is our tent, a gray, unnatural landmark in the dark. She lays back on her half of the blanket, her feet trying to get warm at the edge of the fire. I take a long drink of my cherry soda and pour more whiskey in.
         She tells me that I should put on some music. I set the small speakers somewhere behind us and start playing Sun Kil Moon at a low volume. The quiet guitar sinking underneath the noise of the fire, the words then coming through clearly.
         I put my feet up on the coffee table, Mark Kozelek starts to sing.
         I like this song, she says.
         I stay up late watching cable.
         I like old movies with Clark Gable, I sing quietly. Just like my dad does.
         She sits up to finish the last of her drink, setting her empty can in the snow where the wind blows it over. She leans her head against my shoulder and my face feels cold when I turn from the fire to look at her.
         Do you want another one?
         She shakes her head.
         Still hurting from last night?
         A little bit, she says, resting a hand on her stomach. I think I just drank too much yesterday.
         Mark starts singing about Salvador Sanchez and Pancho Villa and a log finally burns through and falls into pieces in the middle of the fire. It pops and burns quietly.
         Mexico city bred so many, he sings, but none quite like him. Sweet warrior. Pure magic matador.

She finds the zipper of the tent with the light of her cellphone and turns around at the flap to take off her shoes. I thought I brought a flashlight, she says, working at her laces in the dark. I don’t know what happened to it.
         It’s all right, I say. I shine my cellphone light into the tent behind her but everything inside is just a shadow.
         She slides in further and starts searching through her bag, underneath the blankets and pillows looking for it. I thought I at least had candles. We could play checkers if I can find them.
         I remember the board we played on before in her apartment, spotted with melted candle wax from other camping trips. I zip up the tent behind me.
         I don’t know if I even have those, she says. I can’t see anything.
         It’s fine. I’m kind of tired anyway.
         She eventually gives up searching and opens the double sleeping bag in the middle of the tent. It’s so cold I don’t even bother to take off my winter jacket. I pull both of my hoods up over my head and climb into my half, our backs touching flat against each other, the hard ground pressing into my ribcage.
         I hear the cold wind outside, the way it sweeps down from the top of the hill and through the leafless trees. The tent shakes and I watch the wall moving in and out. I hear her say my name but I’m quiet. She says, You don’t like being here, do you?
         I’m okay with it, I say. I’m having a pretty good time.
         She doesn’t say anything for a while. I feel her breath moving in her body behind me, the way she breathes in deeply before she says, I think I need to be with someone who can talk about this with me.
         The wind pauses as if it’s listening. I feel her legs move at the bottom of the sleeping bag. I mean someone who will talk back to me about nature and being outside. Someone who will start the conversation.
         I don’t mind when you talk about it, I say. I watch the dark night through the mesh window on my side of the tent, the cold sideways world.
         I don’t know, she says after a while. I think that’s what I need.

She’s already up and outside of the tent in the morning. She has her hair down and her brown hat on. She sees me putting on my shoes at the tent flap and smiles at me. I know she does this because she feels bad for me.
         I stand up and put on my black hat to cover my morning hair. I can feel now that the inside of my shoes are still wet from all the mud. What’s the plan? I ask her.
         We could hang out around here longer and do some more hiking, she says. There’s a trail not far from here I wanted to check out. I put my hands in the pockets of my winter jacket and she smiles at me again and says, Or we could just go back to Madison.
         Let’s go back, I say.

It’s warm enough on the road to drive with the windows down. She has a half-ziplock bag of soy nuts open in her lap, taking two or three at a time in her hand and eating them slowly. I hold my box of multicolored Goldfish crackers over to her. She shakes her head. These are better for you, she says, handing a soy nut to me.
         These don’t taste like anything.
         They’re good, she says. I also have some oranges in my bag.
         I ask her where it is but I find it in the back behind my seat, both of them flattened on one side. I start to peel them and remember how she can do it so that it all comes off in one piece. I dig in with my finger and pull off only a little bit of the peel. I finish with one and hand it over to her.
         She says she wants the peel too and laughs when I give her a handful of small pieces. She changes the radio station and starts to eats the fuzzy white part from the inside of one of the peels.
         Hey that was a good song, I say.
         She drops the peel out of the window and bites at another piece. She holds it in her mouth and says, I don’t really like the Talking Heads.
         I thought you said LCD Soundsystem reminded you of the Talking Heads.
         Yeah, I don’t really like them either, she says, and drops another orange peel out of the window.
         She starts singing along to some song I don’t know. I stuff a large handful of green and purple Goldfish in my mouth and watch the road for cars ahead, for anything that could be a sign about this long, empty highway and where it ends.