Two Miles In, Cedar Shade

The cedar shadow falls across the path and I step into it without deciding to.

The trunk is still damp from last night's rain — I can feel it through my shirt the moment my back settles against the bark, a cold that spreads between my shoulder blades and stays there. The whole mountain smells like this: wet wood, crushed fern, the particular green of a Vancouver morning that hasn't finished deciding if it's done raining. I put my hand flat against the bark beside my hip. It is rough and soaked through and real in a way the trail isn't, in a way the two miles behind me aren't.

I count the switchback above. Empty. The one below, the one I just climbed: empty. A varied thrush calls from somewhere I can't see, a long single note that trails off into the canopy, and then nothing answers it, and then the mountain holds exactly the kind of quiet it has been holding since I left the car.

This is what I came for. Not the summit.

I have known it since the second kilometer, when the last group of hikers turned back and the trail closed behind me like water. The knowing settled low in my stomach, not urgent yet, just present — a warmth that had been there through the climb, that the climb had made worse. My thighs have been pressing together with every step for the last twenty minutes. I told myself it was the grade.

The thrush calls again. Closer.

I look up the switchback one more time.

My right hand leaves the bark.

The waistband of my shorts is loose — that was not an accident this morning, choosing these, the ones that sit low and give easily. My thumb hooks inside it and I stand very still for a moment, back against the wet cedar, feeling the cold bark and the warm skin and the specific pressure of nylon across both thighs. The hem sits at mid-thigh. I am aware of how I look from the trail: just a woman resting against a tree, one hand at her hip. The distance between that and what I am about to do is the part I cannot explain to anyone and have never tried.

My stomach pulls tight.

I exhale — not the breath I planned, but a shorter one, cut off before I finished it, swallowed back into my chest where it becomes something else entirely.

The hand moves.

The fabric shifts. The cold from the bark is still spreading between my shoulder blades, and underneath the waistband the skin is warm in a way that surprises me even now, even knowing it would be, and I press my left palm flat against the cedar to keep myself from shifting my weight. I need to be still. I am good at being still when it matters. The mountain is holding its breath and so am I, and my right hand is already inside my shorts, and the thrush has gone quiet, and the cedar shadow holds me like it has been waiting.