The Hiker Who Stayed for Two Hours

Most people who make the four miles up to the tower stay about ten minutes. They come up the last switchback breathing hard, ask if that’s Idaho over there, it usually isn’t, take a picture of the catwalk, sign the visitor log if I’ve left it out, and head back down before their legs stiffen up. I don’t mind it, it’s part of the job, and some seasons it’s the only new face I see for a week at a stretch. But Teresa didn’t do that.

She showed up a little after two in the afternoon, sweating through a shirt that said something about a marathon she’d apparently run once, and asked if she could fill her water bottle from my jug, which I let her do, and then she just sort of stayed on the top step of the catwalk instead of turning around. I figured she was catching her breath. She was, but she also had questions, and they weren’t the usual ones. Not what’s the view like, or do you get bored, but how do you actually decide something’s smoke and not just dust or cloud, and what happens if you’re wrong, and did I have to train for the radio protocol or figure it out on the job. Practical questions. The kind somebody asks when they’re turning an idea over for themselves, not making conversation to be polite.

Turned out she was training for something longer, a solo stretch somewhere out west she was cagey about the specifics of, and she wanted to know what it actually felt like to be alone with a job to do instead of just alone. I told her the two aren’t the same thing, that having the smoke checks and the log and the radio schedule gives the days a shape that just being by yourself doesn’t, and she nodded like that was the answer she’d been hoping somebody would give her.

We talked for close to two hours. I made coffee on the propane burner, she had a granola bar she split with me, and at some point she asked to see inside the cabin, which most visitors don’t think to ask, and stood in the doorway looking at the whole fourteen by fourteen feet of it, the cot, the Osborne Fire Finder, the shelf of paperbacks, like she was trying to picture living in it. She said it was smaller than she’d guessed from outside. Most things up here are.

When she finally headed back down toward the trailhead lot she left a little bag of loose tea on the counter, said she’d brought too much and didn’t want to carry the extra weight the rest of her trip. I still have some of it. I use it sparingly, the way you do with something you know won’t get replaced.

I don’t know if she finished whatever hike she was training for. There’s no way for me to know, no signal up here to check, and she never gave me a way to reach her even if there were. Every day up here has a few moments with a little more weight to them than the rest, and that one has stuck the way the ordinary ten minute visits never do. Every so often when the radio’s quiet and I’m making tea I think about those two hours on the catwalk, somebody genuinely curious about how a person builds a life around solitude instead of just falling into one, and I think it was a better conversation than most of the ones I have on purpose.