The boss was not my real boss and the lawn was not a real lawn. The boss was the head honcho, my boss’s boss, and he had hiked in fifteen miles to make this rare appearance because of me, because of my recent email, or at least we guessed that was the reason. He wasn’t saying much. I sat cross-legged on the porch like I did every night at quitting time at Bridge Creek, the backcountry cabin where the trail crew stayed in the shoulder seasons, spring and fall, when snow kept us out of the high country. The weathered fir deck was splintery and gray, except for one small knothole, that had long since filled with lime green moss, beside my right knee. Jason, my only remaining crewmate this late in the year, approached and sat beside me, our shoulders touching, our backs against rough board and batten. The last light of day was seeping from the sky.
“Have you watered the lawn?” Jason asked.
“Not yet.”
I pulled out my Nalgene bottle and splashed some drops on the moss. This was our nightly ritual over drinks: gin and a vitamin-drink packet mixed with icy stream water in dirty plastic cups. We watered the lawn. We made up stories. We laughed. We inhabited our own small world in the big woods: giddy with insularity, punchy with exhaustion, easy in our place. It was my line, I knew, my turn to suggest a game of croquet on the lawn or some badminton, but I wasn’t quite up to it. The boss hovered behind us in the dark cabin fiddling with his pack, choosing a bunk. I worried about what he might say. I worried that he’d be too persuasive: he might offer another position, more challenging than trail maintenance, or a temporary detail in another district or another park, a change of scenery, a chance to let whatever had got ahold of me run its course. I worried that I’d lose my resolve to quit this job I loved, a permanent job with benefits, a job I’d worked ten years to get then held for only four.
The boss strode past us off the porch and stood facing the dark ring of trees surrounding us. He’d never much liked me, not in all those years. Not that I couldn’t do the work, just that he found me distrustful, all that college, all that reading. I suppose I seemed too much like someone who might, at any time, toss off years of training in sawing and rigging and blasting to go teach or travel or, hell, write books. It didn’t help matters that I was about to prove him right.
“We’re gonna have to mow again on Saturday,” I said.
“I know it,” Jason said.
The boss turned back around.
“What the hell are you two talking about?”
“It’s our lawn,” I said, pointing at our knothole. “We take good care of it.”
Silence.
“You’re really going through with this?”
I did not look up. I brushed the pad of my index finger back and forth across an inch of moss.
“Yeah, I am.”
And that was it. One minute I was watering the moss lawn, the next I was adrift.
I stood and stepped off the porch to go stand on a wide boulder overlooking the creek. The shadowy calendar views of glaciers and streams and backlit cedars suddenly seemed gaudy and oppressive. I saw the scene for what it was about to become, idealized and unattainable, and it terrified me to think I’d no longer keep the woods at the core of me, under my skin literally like the granite fleck that shot up once while I pounded a rock with a sledge and lodged itself in my arm. I’d never again arrive home brush scratched and tool bruised with my voice raw and ragged from hollering over the creek-roar while installing a cable bridge. When I returned to the woods from now on, I’d be a stranger. I was sure of it.
But I was wrong. I misunderstood the same thing at middle age that I had when I left home at 18. You think you’ll back out the driveway and never return, at least not as the same person, but the truth is the sameness resides in that place and resides in you. I walk in my mother’s house, and within three days I’m twelve: surly and silent, glued to the television. That fact, that instant reversion, has always annoyed me, but now I’m learning the flip side: the freedom it offers to keep on shedding skins snake-like and growing new ones with abandon. You’re still the same underneath it all. These days I can hike into the woods, and in three miles, I am grubby and exuberant, competent and carefree, foulmouthed and sure-footed, steeped in pitchiness and gleeful with ridiculousness.
The moss in the knothole has survived without watering for five years now. No surprise, I know. But I check anyway, each time I arrive, first thing.