We're Still Young (excerpt from upcoming novel)

We’re bringing in all these things that should leave no trace when we do. Garbage bags and snack bar wrappers, a propane tank, wet naps for our faces in the morning and our hands after cooking the summer sausage. The same kind my mother used to sizzle on tepid summer mornings, sun swallowing the sweat on her brow. Ours too, now a thousand feet up the mountain and so far from flat cattail marshes. You’ve packed too much, I tell him, but he’d do it next time and ten years later even though I remind him of today. Civilization is important in the wild. But he’s not scared of me, not so much as I am the bears.

Bears, mountain lions, wolves, bobcats, badgers, even the wind knocking us down the canyon because the tent stakes don’t really go that far into the ground, do they? I pounded them in myself, but what should my mind care for the works of my hands? All my fear and an aerosol can for a ton of muscle and teeth and claws; if I wake up and crouch over a hole near the side of the cliff and turn to see one, I’d throw it and run anyway. Shit would come out either way. He’d wake up too, then, and look big to scare it away. I’m scared, I say, after it gets dark and the wind picks up and any flap of the tent tarp whips it taut.

But there are lights just outside, so close my finger could swirl them around as I point out the little and big brothers of the cosmos soup. We can look at them through the mesh window—the door is too wide open, I say, just pull the velcro on the window, please just the window. It’s not right we can’t have a fire. It’s the park rules. It would be better with a fire. We don’t want to cause trouble. Nobody would notice.

We make our own fire inside the tent. It’s a gory long thing we bought as a joke, but we’ve got the screens and the dope so we look at ourselves and why not? Bears have noses eight times more sensitive than bloodhounds, so they can come if they want. Pebbles knocked loose from the slopes a hundred years ago press into my back beneath the tarp, and I can see Jerry Sienfeld, a rooster, Godzilla waving lazily in the bright red poly-something sky. He can see Godzilla, too, and a dachshund in a hot dog bun.

Asleep before the soup lights up and up before it drains, we smell irony-yellow haze around the peaks. Pack that, carry this, make room for it in your bag. There’s no hikers a thousand feet back down, they’re too smart today. I’m sweating, I’m dirty, he’s sweating, he’s dirty. All the things of our civilization go back in the car, but we’ve not made it round the sides. I’m washing, he’s washing. We’re laughing. What did we run for?