It’s the kind of day when the weather could go either way. She was up and out the door before the paper arrived, so she hasn’t seen the forecast — not that it matters, since she’ll be going out on that boat whether it rains in obliterating sheets or the sun hangs up there in the sky as if she were transported back to the beach in Guam. She hasn’t thrown up yet, and that’s a positive, but then she hasn’t put anything on her stomach either. She’s watching the ocean as she drives, the islands fading in and out of visibility through the dirt-spattered windows, whitecaps kicking up as far out as she can see. It’ll be rough, rain or shine. And she’ll vomit. So what else is new?
Annabelle is waiting for her in the parking lot, her feet propped up on the dashboard of her two-tone Mini, sipping a Starbucks chai latte and leafing through the newspaper. She glances up when Alma pulls in beside her, her face neutral — she must not be wearing her contacts — until she recognizes her, gives a little two-fingered wave and slides out of the car. “All set?” she asks, already smiling in at the window as Alma frees herself from the seat restraint and twists round to extract her backpack from the rear seat.
She’s running through a mental checklist of the things she’s packed, feeling the first stirrings of the excitement that always steals over her when she has the chance to get out from behind her desk and back into the field, which is where she belongs. Tim might not think so. But then Tim didn’t do three years in Guam either. “Yeah,” she says, emerging from the car to weigh the backpack in one hand and slam the door with the other, “I guess I’ve got everything. Think it’s going to rain?”
Ducking one shoulder to readjust her strap, Annabelle winces momentarily before straightening up and arching her spine to readjust the weight. She’s wearing her backcountry outfit — a fawn jacket and matching shorts that look like they came off a mannequin at Banana Republic, three-hundred-dollar hiking boots, a red bandanna and a Tilley canvas, also in fawn. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” she says, as they simultaneously swing round to click their remotes and lock their cars behind them before starting off across the lot for the boat, not a protestor in sight.
“So where’re all our friends?” Alma wonders aloud. “In church?”
Long-legged, striding, her hair pulled back in a swaying ponytail that fans out across her lollipop-red High Sierra pack, Annabelle gives her a grin because they’re on the same page here, equal opportunity targets. “It’s Saturday.”
“Right. I guess they must be sleeping off their hangovers then. I mean, what time did you get up Saturday mornings in college?”
“Oh, I don’t know — ten?”
“More like noon,” Alma puts in.
“Noon? How about one? Or two, do I hear two?”
And this is funny, very funny, at quarter past seven on a forty-ninedegree February morning with the refrigerated scent of the sea riding in off the water and the prospect of three days on the island unscrolling before them, three days free of condo, supermarket, office and car, and as they descend the ramp to the boat, they’re laughing. Or no: giggling. Like schoolgirls on a field trip.
The Park Service boat is substantial, no question about it, but it’s a whole lot smaller than the Islander and doesn’t have anywhere near its stability. At first, Alma sits at the table in the main cabin with Annabelle and the three college girls on their way out to relieve the three college girls who’ve been tending the caged foxes for minimum wage and course credit for the past two weeks, but everything seems closed-in and overheated and she has to go out on the stern and stand in the wind till the nausea passes. It’s cold. The sky, which seemed so promising earlier, is beginning to cloud over. Dolphins ride the wake, surfing the swell and leaping up to surf it again. A pair of humpbacks — or are they great blues? — spout off in the distance, wild things in a wild place, the mainland rapidly falling away and the waves gloomily slapping at the hull as if the boat has been hauled out here in the middle of the channel for the sole purpose of intercepting them. After a while she has to choose between nausea and freezing to death, and so she makes her way back into the cabin and sits there rigid at the table, staring off at the horizon and willing herself to think of anything but decks and boats and the sea until she hears the engines decelerate and the long dun pier at Prisoners’ comes gradually into view.
Frazier is there to meet them in the battered Toyota Land Cruiser some kind soul donated to the Conservancy and they all cram in for the three-mile run up to the main ranch, where they drop off Annabelle. They sit there in the middle of the dirt drive, engine idling, while she hoists her pack to one shoulder and then leans into the driver’s side window to bring her pale pretty face into the sun-blistered orbit of Frazier’s as if they’re about to compare hat sizes. But no: they’re kissing. And this is no mere ritual of greeting between two well-meaning colleagues, no glancing peck to the cheek or coolly affectionate salutation, but something very like the hungry soul kiss of separating lovers. As if that isn’t awkward enough, they all have to sit there for an extra sixty seconds so Frazier can watch her sway over her hips all the way across the expanse of the lot and in under the shade of the oaks to where she’ll be staying in one of the airy, clean, well-appointed rooms in what was once, before its makeover as a kind of early California ranch-style B and B for the Conservancy’s big donors, the bunkhouse of a working ranch. Then he puts the car in gear and they continue another quarter mile on up the rutted dirt road to the field station, where the rooms are not airy, clean and well-appointed, and where they’ll all unfurl their sleeping bags and try to stake out a little space for themselves amidst the working chaos of the place.
There’s a flurry of hugs, snatches of gossip, truncated hellos and breathless goodbyes as the girls exchange places and Alma ducks into the back room — a single, with a worn but serviceable mattress laid out on a makeshift bedframe — to lay claim to it before anybody else does. She’s bent over the bed, smoothing out her sleeping bag and replacing the suspect pillow (who knows how long it’s been there and what use it’s been put to?) with the one she’s brought from home, when she becomes aware that she’s not alone. She turns round to see Frazier standing there in the doorway. He’s dressed in his bush clothes: khaki cargo shorts and matching shirt, the felt hunting hat with the teardrop crown and a yellowed pair of boar’s tusks worked up under the leather hatband, thick-grid hiking boots and Gore-Tex gaiters to keep the foxheads out of his socks. Gaiters, especially, are a necessity out here and she’s brought along her own pair, having learned from experience that you can’t really cover much ground with half a dozen needle-like seedpods working their way through your socks and into your flesh, and if the foxhead isn’t a perfect example of dispersal adaptation, then she can’t imagine what else is. Aside from deer ticks, maybe. But there are no deer ticks out here because there are no deer to entertain them. “Well,” Frazier says, his smile heating up like kindling set to the match till it’s not a smile at all but a kind of maniacal ear-to-ear Kiwi grin, “are you going to take all day or do you want see some pig action?”
El Tigre Ridge lies approximately three miles south of the field station, rising in elevation to 1,484 feet above sea level amidst a tapering wall of eroded peaks that falls away precipitously into the cleft of Willows Canyon to the west. It’s a thousand feet lower than the island’s highest mountain, Diablo Peak, across the central valley to the northwest, and more than three hundred feet below the top of El Montañon, ten miles to the east, which represents the high point of the barrier ridge between the Park Service and TNC properties. Still, it’s a climb, and though there’s a bucking lurching potholed semblance of a dirt road winding up and away from the ranch, the Island Healers vehicle — a miniature pickup with a cramped two-person cabin and the steering wheel on the wrong side — can only take them so far. Especially now, in winter, when a succession of storms has rolled in off the Pacific to wash away everything but the rocks so that the road looks as if it’s been bombed. Repeatedly. After one especially jarring plunge into a spewing crater and a fishtailing climb up and out the other side, Frazier jerks the wheel hard to the left, pulls just off the road and kills the ignition. “From here, we walk,” he announces, flinging open the door to swing his legs out and plant his boots in the mud. If anything, he’s grinning wider now, as if all this were a grand joke at her expense, and as she slides out the other side she can’t help wondering if he’s been hitting the flask already. She steals a glance at her watch: it isn’t even noon yet.