DURING the sweet, short summers of college, I worked at a backpacking camp just north of Yellowstone National Park. My third summer on staff was my second season serving as camp cook. I loved the job, but still welcomed the one week per summer we support staff were granted out on the trail. The secretary (also my roommate), Naomi, and I were given the honor of leading the annual women’s backpack—usually a Midwestern group, ranging in age from 35 to 60—who’d be led on an abbreviated loop of the surrounding Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.
Taking a group of adult women out on trail came with its own set of hopes and expectations. As young women just entering the cadre of adulthood, we wanted to appear mature and fun and strong and, most of all, capable. In return, we wanted to be passed the wisdom and love and knowledge we thought every adult woman wanted to bestow. These women would surely have the secret keys to the confounding tumbler locks of real life. In previous years, we’d seen leaders of the women’s backpack showered with heartfelt letters and shipments of cookies, and photo albums. This would all belong to us soon.
Imagine our surprise when they refused to get out of their minivan.
The window of the dusty blue Windstar opened a crack. “Are there bears?”
“Where, right here?” I laughed as if they’d made a joke and turned to look. The most menacing thing in the parking area appeared to be a group of mediocre hackey sack players.
“There aren’t any bears here?” the woman asked through the crack.
“Oh sure, there are bears around, but…” I will spare you my very long speech about how, at camp, we left the bears alone and, so, the bears left us alone, even though the bears did live in the wilderness and it was their home first. A big group makes a lot of noise, I explained. And bears tend to be introverts unless there’s something wrong. I finished with the camp approved statement on the matter: “It’s unlikely we’ll see any bears during our trip.”
The side panel opened, though the women remained pressed inside like tuna in a can. I could already tell it was going to be a long week. It was late—time for dinner—and they didn’t take well to being told they’d have to strike their own tents in the meadow afterwards.
“You’ll just do it, though, right?” asked the leader of the pack.
“We’re not outfitters,” I tried to explain magnanimously. “This isn’t a glamping trip. Think of us as more like teachers.”
One of the women extended her toe from the van, as if when she touched the ground she’d turn into some sort of wilderness Dorothy Gale. But the dinner bell rang, and they conceded to the promise of dinner.
• • •
Almost ten years later, I found myself at a baby shower for my college roommate in San Francisco. After college, I made a failed attempt to live there myself. After I fled home to Montana, I showed my love for old California friends by showing up for random, large life events, completely losing track of people in between. My old roommate had launched a successful law career, cultivating a new set of friends—one of whom would throw my old roommate a baby shower at her miniature castle. I was staying with another mutual friend, whose wife had volunteered to help the queen of the castle with party prep. So naturally, citing my large group cooking experience, I volunteered to tag along and help.
When we pulled up to the castle, I briefly considered running away on foot. At least I was underdressed enough to work in the kitchen. Inside, the poor queen was at her wits’ end, fretting about something I couldn’t understand. I volunteered to do anything at all. I tried to tell her about camp. She had zero interest in my qualifications.
As a kitchen control-freak myself, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt when she gave me a full once-over. “These oranges need to be sectioned. Do you know how to section oranges?”
“I think so,” I said, with a self-effacing giggle.
“You think so? Fine, I’ll show you.” And she did. She was small and stylish and deft with the knife, despite her exasperation. I sectioned oranges until she decided she would section them instead.
“Do you know how to make tea sandwiches?” She heaved a great sigh. I had no idea what I had done wrong with the oranges. I wished I could sink into the grout of the blue tile of her gigantic kitchen.
“Yes,” I said, this time with more conviction. Tiny sandwiches. How hard could that be?
“Fine,” she said, and showed me the bread and the fillings.
But as it turns out, tea sandwiches make me crazy—the crust leavings are so sad and such a waste of food, something drilled into me being raised by my depression-era grandparents. I cut rectangles maximizing the surface area of the bread, though not strictly speaking identical.
“What are you doing?” she gasped on her next pass by. “These aren’t uniform at all. I’ll do it. Just. Just go do something else.”
I wended my way to the guest bathroom some five or ten miles away. When I emerged, having coaxed my mascara back into the general vicinity of my eyelashes, my weekend host’s wife was standing there. “Your nose is red,” she said. “You probably have rosacea. You should do something about that.” I looked it up on my phone and began sampling the wine.
• • •
After the campers of all ages had polished off their collective sloppy joes and red jello, the Trails Room manager, Andrea (also our roommate), doled out the tents and supplies to our skittish group of women. “Wait for us,” we said, as the women began to wander. “We’ll show you where to set up the tents.” But they dispersed anyway, no doubt lured by the wealth of oxtail daisies littering the meadow sloping gently down the hill. Naomi waved me ahead, staying to help the last few women find packs that sat comfortably on their hips.
I trotted down the hill, behind five or six of our group. “So pretty,” said one. A few pulled out flower and bird guidebooks. Then I heard another exclaim, “Look! A puppy!”
We were 30 miles from the nearest patch of pavement and thirty more miles from the closest town of 1,600. The chance that whatever they saw was a puppy wasn’t quite zero, but close enough. They realized they were looking at a bear cub while my eyes were still searching to find the animal they’d seen. And then the women began to run, cameras emerging from thin air.
“Stop,” I yelled. I don’t know why I expected them to stop. If anything it made them run faster.
• • •
The remainder of my old roommate’s baby shower was a blur—and not only because of the wine. I spent the entire afternoon feeling sorry for myself—and, what’s worse, ashamed. I didn’t know anything about living in a castle and I didn’t even know how to care about the uniformity of tea sandwiches. I was working in the financial industry, which was tanking at the time, and no one wanted to talk about it or my job or how much I hated that job and wanted to write. I was partnered but not married. I didn’t know how to be a mother or how to want be a mother or even how to engage with people who wanted to be mothers. I was happy for my roommate, but I had no advice to impart or empathy to give. “I can’t believe you came all the way here for this,” she said. And by that point in the day, I couldn’t either.
• • •
The cub was beautiful, if oblivious, cinnamon pelt ruffling in a breeze that was undoubtedly masking our scent and voices. Of course, the thing about bear cubs is there is almost always a bear mother not terribly far away. And though there is safety in numbers when it comes to bears, any number of humans between a mother bear and her cub is too many. I didn’t have time to stare long—some of those women were faster than they looked. Luckily I was, too. I played loose-head prop for our intercollegiate women’s rugby team and what I lacked in stamina, I made up for in short bursts of speed and strength.
I was too busy setting women down by their fanny packs to see the cub disappear into the bushes that ran along Upsidedown Creek. Presumably his mother called or maybe he finally noticed all our commotion. But when it was all over, the leader of the group dusted herself off and gave me a withering glare. “You said there wouldn’t be bears.”
The phrase became a sort of refrain pulled out whenever we suggested something the women did not like.
“The campsite is only another couple of miles.”
You said there wouldn’t be bears.
“Dinner will be ready in an hour.”
You said there wouldn’t be bears.
“Naomi is hypothermic because we spent an hour in the creek helping you cross it and she weighs considerably less than I do. Let’s get her warm.”
You said there wouldn’t be bears.
“Why do you have candy bars in your backpack?”
You said there wouldn’t be bears.
“There will be bears if there is candy in your backpack.”
It rained a lot. I assured them it would stop. (You said there wouldn’t be bears.) Hadn’t they looked up at the breaking clouds, at the mountains around them? Why had they come at all? At some point the women threatened to mutiny, to hike back to camp and stay in the cabins. We explained there weren’t enough cabins at camp for them to sleep in with a full camp already in session. They said they’d sleep in their van.
This was not the estrogen love fest I had been promised. I had gone from feeling strong and useful to belligerent and then more belligerent. I was petrified of losing the battle against the worst part of my personality—an angry, barking tyrant. Didn’t they understand that this was supposed to be a two-way street? Where was all the elder-woman wisdom we were supposed to be getting? What had life done to them to make them so scared? It hadn’t occurred to me I might need the same support at 41 as I did at 21. The revelation was both empowering and terrifying.
We told them they were going to tough out their last couple of days with us. Maybe they were cold and scared, but we had their backs. Maybe they were tired and sore, but they’d prove themselves stronger than they felt. Maybe their feet were blistered, but had they looked up at the magnificent stars? Maybe they felt small, but they were enough.
• • •
The day after the baby shower, I packed my things and spent a few hours at the bookstore and coffee shop I liked to hang out at back when I lived in the Bay Area. I felt safe there, even though it had been years since I’d called the space my own. I sat at my favorite table, pulled my cardigan tight, and thought about bears.
How had I become so frightened? Those women from the backpack finally made sense. I had expected to know everything by now and it was in fact the opposite. It was likely the same for the queen of the castle, trying to keep up appearances she was undoubtedly judged upon. It was likely the same for my host’s wife, trying to welcome a woman whose relationship with her husband predated her own. It was likely the same for my roommate, welcoming her first child, taking her first steps to motherhood.
I reached for my 21-year-old self and she was right where I left her, dirty hiking boots and all. It will be okay, she said. You’re stronger than you think.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Camille Griep lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her nonfiction has been recently featured in Synaesthesia Magazine, Hippocampus, and Punchnel's among others. She is a senior editor at The Lascaux Review.
BT #010 © 2014 Camille Griep. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, July 2014.
