Page 26 of Wild About You
I chug as instructed while one by one, the remaining teams check in. Zeke and Enemi somehow ran from their campsite fast enough to come in first again, passing the two teams with earlier go times before either of us had even hit the main AT, and I almost don’t want to know what their prize will be this round. If it involves soap, I might get violent. Harper and Evan were next, and after us were Meena and Cammie, Daniel and Luis, then Karim and Max. Jay and Tia were ranked last in the cooking challenge yesterday, and once they showed up last to the checkpoint, Burke delivered the news that they’d been eliminated.
We say our goodbyes to them, and temporary goodbyes to Zeke and Enemi, who are off to get massages at a fancy mountain spa. I’m not at all a simmering pot full of jealousy, closer to boiling with every minute I spend in this unrelenting sun.
The rest of us are hanging out by the shelter, and we’ll camp as a group once again tonight. While the others split off, some building their tents so they have a place to rest, others digging into the snacks brought out by production, I’m plotting.
“What’s that expression for?” Finn’s voice is wary as he approaches, carrying an open can of Pringles in one hand and using the other to pop the chips into his mouth.
I don’t know what expression I’m making, but I know what the mission in mind is. “Where can a girl go to bathe around here?”
Chapter Ten
“Just when I’d started to think an e-reader wasn’t the most useful secret weapon on the trail, the power of pocket-sized literature proves me wrong,” I say as we lay eyes on the creek for the first time.
Harper, who had only needed to hear the word swim before joining this excursion, nods. “We’ll have to get you repeating that on camera sometime. See how many e-reader sponsorship opportunities roll in.”
It was Finn’s idea to break out the AT info books I apparently mentioned at some point in my ramblings, back when I thought he was ignoring everything out of my mouth. Since Wild Adventures doesn’t give us regular trail maps, we hit up my e-books to see about locating a water source. There are spigots at the shelters, which he did propose as an option—use one to fill a bucket or empty bear canister, and sponge-bathe out of it.
But I couldn’t shake the desire to be surrounded by cool, refreshing water, dunk my head under, rinse all the stickiness away, and Harper felt the same. So we got producers’ permission to take a little field trip in our camera-free, obligation-free downtime, and wandered until we found the nearby creek that was described in one of the books. We brought our sat phones in case we got lost, plus a few other necessities.
“Make sure you put all of that somewhere it won’t fall in,” Finn warns with a pointed look at my toiletry bag as he approaches the creek bank, waterproof hiking sandals strapped on and ready for action.
“Okay, relax, Captain Planet,” I call back, taking in the scene before us. “Even if I was a monster who didn’t care about polluting the environment with all my harmful chemicals, this is, like, three paychecks’ worth of products. I definitely don’t want any of it floating away.”
I was envisioning a creek like the one that runs through the horse farm where I grew up—a small, gentle stream that trickles through a skinny ravine and only goes up to my knees at its deepest point. As a kid, I used to kneel down at its banks or wade around ankle-deep for hours, looking for fossils or other interesting rocks and trying to catch crawdads.
But this creek is much wider and looks deeper—definitely above kid Natalie’s head, at least—and rushes over and around big boulders. The water is also super clear, which is helpful in my effort to trick myself into thinking it’s shower-level clean.
“Why even bring it, then?” It’s getting harder to hear him over the rushing water as he moves farther away and I look for a safe, dry spot to keep my change of clothes. Harper, who just wore a one-piece swimsuit, shorts, and sandals that look like a smaller version of Finn’s, hangs her camping towel from a tree before shucking the shorts and hanging them too.
“So I can moisturize right when I get out of the water. It’s most effective that way. I also might do some biodegradable shampoo and rinse action on land, if I’m feeling frisky. We’ll see.”
As I turn my back to both my companions, I’m pretty sure I catch Finn muttering the words “feeling frisky, what the hell” to himself, followed by the sounds of water splashing as he steps in.
“This feels a little like hanging out with my parents before their divorce,” Harper deadpans just as I spot a dry, sun-dappled boulder that looks like the perfect stuff holder.
My cackle probably sends some fish scattering while I walk toward my target. “He’s not divorcing me at least until we win this thing.”
Just after I say it, I second-guess myself. I think I have a decent grasp of Harper’s dry, sometimes darkly funny wit, but what if you’re not supposed to laugh at the divorced parents of the friend you’ve only known a few days?
“So do you live with one parent, or alternate, or…?” I turn my head slightly to the side so my raised voice will carry back to her, trailing off as I wonder if I’ve now taken things to way too serious of a place. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, of course.”
Harper’s short laugh sounds closer, like she’s heading toward the water too. “It’s fine, it was a long time ago and we’re all way better off since. I don’t live with either, now that I have an apartment near school.”
Duh, Natalie. I’ve reached the creek finally, slowly hobbling in my thin rubber flip-flops, but stop short of wading in. “We’re all way better off,” she said. Even though my parents are together, I can relate. I’ve always been hyperaware of the fact that they only got married once they knew they were expecting me, an antiquated sense of propriety rather than love driving the wedding that my mom and her more traditional parents pushed for. Granny Star always tried to tell me that both Mom and Dad loved and wanted me, but that was hard to reconcile with all the moments when one or the other would let something slip in their weariest moments, or in the heat of a fight, about the life they could have had. The unfinished end to the sentence being, “if we hadn’t had Natalie.”
There’s no way they’d even still speak to each other if not for me. But me telling them they should divorce, that we’d all be better off, would only make them more determined to stay married forever.
“I alternated every other week at each of their houses in high school,” Harper says, reclaiming my attention as she wades into my line of sight. “They lived close together. But I try to divide visits equally-ish. You can take the legal adult out of the custody agreement, but you can’t take the custody agreement out of the legal adult. Isn’t that the saying?”
“Something like that, yeah,” I call back with a smile, grateful to find someone else who deals with the hard stuff through humor. She’s now knee-deep in the water about ten feet ahead of me, so the temperature can’t be that bad.
I wiggle my toes. After days in hiking boots, the freedom is refreshing.
When I take my first step into the creek, it’s a few degrees past refreshing.
“Shhhhitballs, that’s cold!” I squeal, but I don’t jump back out. The only way I’ll get used to it is to keep going. Eventually, my feet will be numb and I won’t care what the temperature is.
“Welcome to the mountains,” Finn calls from upstream. He’s mostly hidden from me by a boulder but I can hear the smirk in his voice.