Dating : First Day Off

We all had breakfast and then Sandy left and then Max left and her father went up the hill to work out of the barn. I had a coffee in my chair. As I read the morning news — agents in Portland, coronavirus nearing four million in the US — I noticed a tree frog walking up the window and I realized that she was inside.

I watched her climb the glass. She had yellow legs and a green body. So far we had found crickets and spiders and wasps inside but I had never found a tree frog or even seen one up close.

I trapped her in a glass. When I freed her outside she jumped off the railing into the leaf litter below.

I texted Max. She replied: “Did you pet it?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t pet frogs.”

Afterward, I found myself alone with a morning ahead of me. I had just returned from eight days in the backcountry. We had cut over two hundred logs from the trail. We had hiked almost twelve miles every day. My glasses broke on day two, my belt on day four, and it had rained through the latter half of the week. It looked as though it might rain today. It felt humid enough.

Feeling the great ache of returning home and being clean and dry I decided to air out all of my gear while we still had the sun.

I laid my pack in the driveway and hung my sleeping bag and inflatable pad over the fence. My tent had been dirtied by rain splash so I cleaned that with the hose. The spigot was beneath the railing where I had seen the frog land but, as I cleaned my tent and bear-bin, I saw no sign of her.

Mark came down the hill as I was laying everything in the drive. I had been careful not to block his truck, or Sandy’s spot, and with the heat on the asphalt I was sure the gear would be dry within the hour.

Mark came down the hill, sweating, and said from afar, “The gear. The worst part of any trip.”

“It needs it,” I said. “And they pay us half an hour for gear maintenance anyway.”

Mark looked at my equipment spread across his driveway.

“Tent hold up?”

“Floor got a little wet, just from the ground being flooded. No holes or any of that.”

“You get a lot of rain? We got a lot of rain.”

“Sure. We got a lot too. Sunday. Monday too. Actually, when we were packing out of the first site we heard this noise in the hills. A siren blasting and someone on a speaker. One of the guys said we were being invaded. You always wonder what’s going on in the world when you’re that far out. Anyway, we got to the river and they must have let the wheels go because that water was moving.”

“The dam whistle.”

“Exactly.”

“What river? Where’d you go this week?”

“The Ocoee.”

Mark remembered something. I knew he was grinning by the way his shoulders rolled forward. Neither of us looked at one another when we talked. We both stared at the equipment laid out in the driveway but I could tell he was grinning about something and then he said it.

“Man, on the west fork, on the Tuscagee, even if they let one wheel go, eight or nine or so, every few days or something in the morning, well there’s a lot of fishermen there near the banks and they blow the dam whistle and they gotta get out because when the water comes it’s coming as six-foot wave above you. Man, that’s fast stuff there when you’re paddling.”

“I bet.”

“It is. It sure is,” Mark said. “It only takes a little bit of rain to make that water run.”

He pointed to my tent and said, “You ever think of getting one of those, oh…”

“Footpad? Footprint I mean.”

“That.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“Extends the tent life,” Mark suggested.

I agreed and then I asked Mark what he was doing up at the barn. He said he was actually on his way to a disc-golf match and invited me and when I asked when we would leave he said in ten minutes. I passed. It looked as though it could rain later on. He understood that I was probably exhausted from the woods.

I finished laying out the last of my gear and when Mark’s truck pulled out I checked what little I could see of the horizon through the trees and then I went inside to shower.

After I showered I sat on the front steps and clipped my nails. The neighbors’ dogs were barking in the hardwoods on the other side of the drive. The space in between those trees looked dark. I felt the water dry off my back and, after a while, sitting, staring at the walkway, thinking nothing, thinking of a better way to lay the stonework down there so that the walking felt comfortable, I heard thunder developing out to the north and when I looked that way the sky looked almost purple. Most of my gear had dried. When I looked above the garage I saw clouds overlapping. Some looked grey. The higher clouds loomed over the others and looked grey against the grey. I decided to move what was still wet into the workshop which had a fan and dehumidifier.

I had finished then and later, as I read a story from Chile and had my second coffee of the day, I heard the first taps of rain on the roof. Then the roof started sounding. I noticed this but it took another moment before I registered the sound. I could barely see the barn through the windows. The rain clapped against the roof and when I listened I could hear a different sound of rain through the fireplace.

My phone chimed. Max had texted. The first text read: “You’re missing out.” Then she had sent: “P.S it’s dumping over here sheesh.”

I replied, “It’s so bad the frogs are coming in.”

The room felt large to be in. My chair sat in the corner of the room inside the smaller living space we had made out of our unpacked boxes.