I ultimately took Pete’s tip on the therapist/astrologer once I was out on the Peninsula. She went by Tully, and though I had initially contacted her through a personal email, I did look her up through official channels where she was listed as Maeve Tully. From that, I found out she was indeed licensed to practice psychiatric medicine in the state of Washington.

I got back to the government area and had just made it into my room when I heard two sets of feet beelining for my door, their turnover so fast it sounded like a single organism scuttling across the floor with an uneven gait. Bridger and Ian, two of my fellow seasonals, were outside my door before I could finish commenting that they were like dogs. “We were taking bets about where you were,” Ian said. “You must understand this has been a long and suspenseful process for us,” Bridger said. “I’m confused. Do you expect me to report my…

Bridger and I were the novices, so our respective first four-day assessment trips out to the second-growth area were accompanied by Ian, who was tasked with showing each of us the ropes. Those ropes, from what I gathered about an hour into the drive to our trailhead on my first hitch, consisted mostly of the sacred art of shooting the proverbial shit. That notion felt unspoken until there was enough daylight that I could see a sun-stained note taped to the glove compartment in the cab of the government rig, a 1999 Tacoma. It simply read, “GO EASY DON’T FIGHT…

Ian and I had returned on a Friday from four uneventful days in the backcountry. I defined uneventful minimally: We hadn’t been impaled by any trees or limbs during a day of high winds, Glorified G still seemed to like me enough not to bite or spit on me when I approached his enclosure, the cabin hadn’t caught fire, I hadn’t murdered Ian out of frustration or vice versa, and Ian hadn’t come onto me again. Once we returned to the government area, I opted out of what promised to be a debaucherous start to the weekend: a trip north…

It struck me even in my earliest memories of visits to Ayla and Pete on the Peninsula that, compared to my home area, there were substantially less large predators near the coasts. There was never any shortage of fucking deer though. It made total sense—almost no predators, tons of verdant growth. There could never be any risk of overgrazing. Or, so it still seemed. I knew all bets were off these days. If I’d felt ambivalent before, the relative post-melt bareness on Borah at the beginning of June had reinforced my cynicism about what was left of the planet’s intact…

Aside from Glorified G’s disappearance, the remaining days of my first solo assessment had been uninteresting. I got back in early enough on the last Friday of June and considered using that weekend to explore a different part of the Peninsula. But I knew that on Monday I would be going straight back to the second-growth treatment area for the second of three consecutive weeks. It would’ve ordinarily been Bridger’s week since he and I were set to alternate field weeks until his season ended in August, at which point Ian would be taking over Bridger’s trips until the proper…

“Let’s hear it for the woods!” Ian yelled after another round of handclaps, this time from Bridger and not me. “What?” Bridger asked, sliding awkwardly over a wet rock compacted into the trail. “He thinks you’re giving it up for the woods. Like an ovation,” I said. “Yeah, man. That’s your guys’ shtick, right? I know you Sagittarians love communing with the earth and shit,” Ian said. Ian was deliberately trying to get a rise out of me. He and Bridger had asked what my conversations with Tully entailed. I had said they were difficult to boil down, which clearly…

“Callahan, you’re quiet today,” Ian said from somewhere behind me. He wasn’t wrong. I’d gotten back to sleep eventually during the night, but woke at such frequent intervals that it hadn’t felt like I slept. I’d been looking down through our entire walk back to the trailhead. We were probably half-way along. I explained that I’d slept like shit and felt nasty. “Yo, you slept like shit, too?” Bridger asked, audibly bounding to where I was. “Yeah, did you?” I stopped to face my coworkers behind me. Bridger had gotten a little carried away and was face to face with…

If not for the nerve-numbing effects of a long run immediately after I’d returned with Ian and Bridger to the government area, I wouldn’t have lasted an hour alongside my buzzed neighbors without having some kind of a breakdown. Our coworker Ben’s partner Cassie had just outlined the painful process that led her to conclude that I was “actually the fucking GOAT,” right after Bridger had finished giving me shit about only eating grilled vegetables and macaroni and cheese, right after tipsy-but-not-yet-bombed Russ had lectured me on the importance of letting people love me. I knew Ian saw me roll…