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…

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…