After that, I left the house and got down to the school in a hurry. I was scheduled to spend the morning with Mr. Howe before anyone else got there, going over our supplies and maps and timelines.
The plan was for all nine of us to drive out to the remote town of Cecilville, where we’d camp for the night, right on the Salmon River’s south fork. In the morning we’d drive to the trailhead and begin the backpacking portion of the trip. The route we’d plotted would have us hiking the steep trail to Hunters Camp, then climbing on toward the thin air and high altitude of Grizzly Meadows. This was where we’d set up camp Saturday night, right at the base of a towering waterfall fed by the looming Grizzly Lake.
The lake itself we intended to reach Sunday morning, taking time to ascend the massive Grizzly Falls and the rocky scramble overlooking the meadow. Trails twisted up from there toward the mountaintop, but it turned out it wasn’t possible to climb much higher without ice axes, even in warm weather; Thompson Glacier guarded the peak year-round. But at 7,100 feet, we’d get a full view of the summit. This was also where we planned to spend our Sunday afternoon, practicing map reading, finally packing up before too late, and heading back down for the drive home.
Before everyone else arrived, Mr. Howe and I loaded up his truck with food and gear. I liked working next to him. It was a good kind of effort, both sweaty and silent, and those brief hours ignited me with rare sparks of hope. Got me dreaming that maybe I’d have an aptitude for this physical stuff and I could get a job after high school doing something outdoor related. Be a rafting guide on the Trinity River in the summer. Bring the ice climbers out in the winter and snowshoers in the spring. Teyber would still be home—I didn’t have a choice in that—but maybe there could be moments for me elsewhere, in other places, all offering the chance for something bigger in my life, something better, like joy.
All this fantasy vanished fast, though, dissolving easily into despair. Because while it didn’t make sense to feel bad about wanting to feel good, I knew well from experience that dreaming too much could often become a helpless sort of thing.
“You sure you’ll be okay, Ben?” Mr. Howe asked. He was double-checking the first aid kits and I knew what he meant. Technically the trip was school-sponsored and seeing as he was the adult in charge, we had to give him any medications we might need ahead of time so he could administer them if necessary. He was looking at all the drugs I used to fight my migraines: Zomig in both pill and nasal form; Zofran in case of nausea; and Tylenol 3 for pain. I refused to get a prescription for anything stronger; but when I was younger and my headaches would last for days, I sometimes ended up in the ER getting shots of morphine.
“It’s just in case.” I slipped the flare gun I was holding into the backpack with the other emergency supplies. “I won’t need all that.”
“You still get them a lot, your migraines?”
“Not as much. Maybe twice a month now. Or if I’m really stressed.” Or if I ate MSG or drank too much coffee or the pressure in the atmosphere changed too quickly. I hated the look on Mr. Howe’s face, but all the teachers knew about my headaches, so there was no point avoiding it. They had to know, obviously: how they could come on without warning, in the worst cases leaving me unable to speak or with the sudden need to vomit. But they really were better than they used to be. Right after my injury, I’d gotten them three or four times a week, but they were fading now with distance. Like a memory.
“Shame how that happened,” Mr. Howe said.
“I know.”
“You deserved better.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything else. Deserving better meant I hadn’t gotten what I deserved, and even then I wasn’t so sure that was true.
9.
I’VE READ THAT “travel is a state of mind.” But as appealing AS the thought is, to me it’s always felt a little like proclaiming sex to be overrated to a roomful of virgins. No one wants to hear that about something they haven’t had a chance to do. And while most people wouldn’t consider driving into the mountains, one county over, to be true travel, in any sense of the word, for me, who had never once left the cool fog and homegrown haze of Humboldt, I might as well have been setting off into the Amazon jungle or the Australian outback.
That’s all to say I wasn’t filled with any metaphysical bliss or deep philosophical insight as our small caravan departed Teyber sometime around noon. There was nothing profound running through my veins as I stared out the car window and watched the familiar landscape slip away, abandoning the only world I’d ever known: those cool, shaded rivers and wet, fern-lined canyons, that dark earth rooted deep with redwoods, solemn giants whose thick canopies spread wide to fan the forest floor before stretching toward the heavens.
I was nerves and instinct. My bones rattled with each bump and sway of the road as we wound east and upward, moving away from the coast and into land that was drier, hotter. Far more foreign. There was true pain in leaving, I found. It was in the dryness of my throat, the sweat of my palms, the dizzying race of shadows spinning across my forearm.
The miles whipped by, and before long, we approached the county line, prompting me to hold my breath—a superstition I didn’t know was in me. Only rather than the expected road sign announcing our entry into rural Trinity—a landlocked county with a single stoplight to its name—I spied a large green placard that had been erected on the shoulder. In the center of it was a yellow circular seal inscribed with twin Xs. The words WELCOME TO JEFFERSON were painted above in black.
My lungs deflated with a whoosh. I knew what that sign meant. If intent mattered more than the law, then we hadn’t just left Humboldt County; we’d crossed out of California altogether. The “State of Jefferson” was the name chosen by a group of disenfranchised counties looking to secede from the Golden State in order to become the fifty-first in the Union—all in the name of personal liberty and freedom, which, from what I could tell, mostly involved being able to walk around in public with a loaded gun.