I was 26 and I thought I was expired and I knew that was irrational, but I also wondered if there was a reason I was still alive and I just hadn’t figured it out yet. I said it wasn’t a big deal when a guy apologized from the window of his pale Isuzu Trooper for running down the pathetic estate sale sign I’d just pitched. That was before I realized I was talking to Pete.

We cached Dad’s Sasquatch trove in the garage, deciding that was the best spot to stage it so Pete didn’t have to haul it around in Mindy until he was headed back out to the Peninsula. Though there was plenty of daylight left after migrating the boxes downstairs, Pete and I called it a day soon after. We tried to battle furniture for a while, but didn’t last long on that detail. We’d gotten as far as inventorying all items that would be a two-man job and thought momentarily about moving those bulkier pieces toward the door, but lost motivation…

I left the house around 6pm, still without any sign of Pete and Elliott, but I knew they couldn’t have been far from Challis at that point. Normally, I wouldn’t have felt the need to let anybody know where I’d be in the event that we might miss each other. And I suppose it wasn’t necessary in this case. Pete and Elliott were both acute observers and knew as well as anybody what to look for to guess at my whereabouts within a reasonable confidence interval. When I was at the Challis house, my running shoes and hydration pack lived…

“What if you had come all the way up here and I was like, ‘Oh man, I forgot the ashes?’” I said it as Elliott offloaded his pack and began to crouch down next to me. “I mean, I would be pretty fucking irritated, but since I’m sticking around Challis, it would just be something stupid that you’d never live down.” We’d each done Borah many times in our lives, together and independently. Proximity had made it easy from a logistics standpoint. The drive was about 30 minutes since our house was closer to the trailhead than Challis proper. Finding…

I hadn’t managed to figure out if Elliott was up on Dad’s Sasquatch dealings before we left the Borah trailhead for the house. When I asked Pete who else knew, he hadn’t mentioned Elliott. But since Elliott and Dad’s last conversation seemed to have covered everything under the sun, it didn’t seem entirely improbable that the detail had come out then. Nonetheless, Pete had packed away the Sasquatch files before Elliott and I got back. Pete was in the house once I’d come in from checking the garage for Dad’s material and I didn’t know if I should initiate conversation…