Trail Closed · Part 3: Swamper

Previously: Emma, the trail crew lead who pulled you off her closed section, spent the storm night with you and took you up for a summit sunrise. At the trailhead her supervisor was waiting by your car: "Emma. Who's this?"

"Who is he?" her supervisor says again.

"The hiker I pulled off the closed section," Emma says, chin up, voice flat. "I put him in the crew shelter overnight rather than drown him at the creek. My call. Write it up against me, not him."

He writes it up against her. A formal reprimand, a fine out of her season pay. She signs it without a word.

You pull her aside by the truck. "Let me pay the fine. It's my fault, I ducked the tape—"

She rounds on you so fast you step back. "Don't. Don't you dare try to rescue me. I don't need a forty-one-year-old line cook riding in with his wallet. I handled it."

"Emma—"

"Go home. Cook something." She shoulders her pack and walks up the trail toward the truck, and she doesn't look back, which is how you know it cost her something.

A week later you're standing at the trailhead at six in the morning with a volunteer waiver in your hand and work gloves in your back pocket. She comes off the truck, sees you, and stops dead.

"What is this."

"You need someone to carry rocks."

"I need that like I need a second storm."

The crew boss hands you a hard hat. "You're the swamper? Grab the rock bar."

Emma picks up a pulaski and doesn't say another word to you for two hours.

She punishes you all day and you let her. The heaviest rocks, the longest carries, the ditch work in the sun. By noon the crew is calling you "the new swamper" and by two o'clock you've hauled a rock the size of a microwave up a switchback while she watches with her thumbs in her belt.

"You're going to hurt yourself," she says.

"Carried a lot of stock pots."

Halfway up the last carry, she takes one end of the rock without being asked, and you carry it together, and when you drop it in the cribbing she's grinning at you, wide, and she can't stop it.

After shift, the crew truck rattles off without you two. She leads you off-trail instead, up through the pass, and there it is: an alpine lake, flat and turquoise, ringed by granite, nobody for miles, the evening light coming in low and gold.

She strips first. Boots, shirt, everything, dropped in a pile, and she walks into the water like she owns it, looking back over her shoulder.

"Swamper. Get in here. That's an order from the crew lead."

The water is snowmelt-cold and you both yell, and she swims to you and wraps around you, laughing, skin sliding against yours, and kisses you with lake water running off both your faces. You wade out to a sun-warmed granite slab at the edge, wide and flat, the heat of the day still banked in the stone.

She lies back on the rock, naked in the gold light, wet, and opens her knees, and she says, plainly, like an order on the trail:

"Now. I've been thinking about this since the shelter, and I want it rough. I'm telling you so I don't have to tell you twice."

You go down on her first because you can't not — she tastes like lake water and salt, and she's loud now, no roof, no radio, no reason to be quiet, her hand fisted in what's left of your hair. "Yes — fuck — just like — don't stop—" She comes on your mouth with her back arching off the warm stone, shouting it at the pass, and the echo comes back and you both hear it.

"Oh my god," she pants. "The mountain heard that."

"The mountain's heard worse."

"Not from me it hasn't."

She pushes you onto your back on the slab and straddles you, and this time she's rough with you, nails in your chest, riding you hard enough that water splashes off her skin onto your stomach with every thrust.

"Grab my hips — yes — pull me down on you —" Her voice is filthy and delighted and completely her own. "God, you feel good, I use you for this all summer, you understand me? Volunteer list. Every weekend. This is the job now."

"Best job I've ever had."

"Shut up and fuck me." You get a hand up into her short wet hair, take her hips, and drive up into her, and she gets loud, louder, unashamed, until she comes apart on top of you swearing gloriously, and you follow her, groaning, her name in it, and she holds you through it with both hands on your face.

Later you both lie on the warm slab until the sun drops behind the pass and the stone gives its heat back slowly. Her head is on your shoulder, her thumb moving over your burn scar.

"You know what the write-up cost me," she says. "You know what I signed up for when I took you up that mountain anyway."

"I know."

"I'd do it again. That's the part I'm not saying nicely."

You dress in the last light and walk back down the path together, her hand in yours, then not in yours, then in yours again. At the junction with the main trail she stops.

She pulls a roll of orange tape from her pack — TRAIL CLOSED, the same roll, her roll — and strings it across the path behind you both, tying it off to a lodgepole pine, making the little world on your side of it closed to everyone else.

Then she steps back under it with you, looks up, and smiles.

"Section's closed," she says. "Nobody else comes through. Now — are you going to stand there, or are you going to come talk to me?"

The tape flutters once in the evening wind and holds. Below you, the lake keeps the last of the light. She's still smiling, waiting, hers being the only signature that matters on this mountain.