litigator. I work for a great firm, but it’s pretty dry to tell you the truth.” He sounded self-conscious. “The thing I like most is the pro bono work. I do some volunteer work for a couple of youth organizations.”
Gwen turned around in her seat and looked at him. “Really? I work for a youth organization down in South LA.”
“Tracy mentioned that. I’d love to hear more about it.”
And so Gwen began to tell him about the kids her agency helped, and Todd asked questions that seemed genuine, if clueless. (“But why do the kids join gangs?” “Why don’t the families show up for services, if they’re free?”) Oscar was a little irritated at Gwen—she talked as if Watts were the only tough place in the city. So he spoke up about Highland Park and Cypress Park, the poverty and crime, his own friends who’d been lost to gang violence. He described what had changed and what hadn’t in the last few years, the mixed blessing of gentrification. And while this was mostly directed at Gwen, he was annoyed at Todd too, for being so Westside sheltered.
But Oscar decided to go easy on the guy. It didn’t make sense to write him off, not yet. Not when they were north of Castaic now. Not when they were actually on their way, and there was so much anticipation in the small shared space that it seemed like the car might lift off the road and fly. Oscar grinned as they passed Pyramid Lake, with its namesake land mass rising out of the water. Then they drove on to Tejon Ranch and down the other side of the mountains, where they were treated to a bird’s-eye view of open plains flanked by hills as they arrived at the southern gate of the Central Valley.
Which wasn’t, Oscar remembered now, anything to write home about. They passed a clump of gas stations, hotels, and fast-food joints, and stayed on the 99 while most of the traffic veered away on the 5 toward San Francisco. They were entering a different California. Oscar had only driven on the 99 once before, and again he was struck by the contrast between the state’s heartland and its cities on the coast. Near Bakersfield they started to see the antiabortion signs, one of which bore an image of an aborted fetus so graphic that Oscar had to look away. Other signs blamed the current drought on the Federal Reserve. All of them towered over a landscape that was stunning in its flatness. Once they passed Bakersfield, they were deep into farmland—fields of onion and alfalfa and groves of olive trees. The vibrant green was dotted here and there with spots of color—farm workers, surely Mexican, toiling in brightly colored clothes in the sweltering summer sun. Late-model cars were parked at the edge of the fields, and some rundown trailers too; the people clumped around them looked so destitute that Oscar felt a lump in his throat. His own grandparents had been migrant workers; they might have worked these very fields. But before he could think too much about the workers, the car was past them.
He saw haphazard stacks of pallets, discarded farm machinery, ads for irrigation systems and pest control. He saw motels that looked like they hadn’t had a guest in his lifetime. They passed signs for an Indian casino and a half-built housing development, and trailers and RVs dumped in empty fields. Twice they passed huge cattle pens maybe half a mile square, full of cows jostling each other for food and moving around in their own slop. And the towns, or what were called towns—low-profile clusters of buildings that were all some shade of brown. Near one of them was a billboard boasting, Guns! Next Exit! with a silhouette of an assault rifle. Scraps of tire tread and tumbleweeds bumped against the guard rail, and every few miles they passed a gruesome bit of roadkill, a cat and several skunks and a brown, bloated dog. Hanging over everything was a haze of more brown—dust and smog and insecticide and God knew what else. No wonder crystal meth was such a problem here, he thought. As if boredom weren’t enough, you could die of ugliness.
And yet, and yet. Out the window, to the right, Oscar saw a line of white against the skyline. “Is that the mountains?” he asked.
The others turned and stared out the window.
“Looks like it!” Gwen said from the front seat.
“That’s them!” Tracy confirmed, and as they looked closer, Oscar could see the dark shape of them, the uninterrupted mass, the very tops covered in snow.
“Wow,” he said.
“They don’t look real,” Gwen said. They were so startling, so incongruous with the ugly terrain, that it was as if someone had rolled in the wrong backdrop.
“They’re real, all right,” said Tracy, grinning. “They’re very real. And that’s where we’re headed, kids. Right into the heart of ’em. Right into the heart of it all.”
They were quiet for a moment. “How far are we going, again?” Oscar asked. He was so used to letting Tracy take the lead on things that he hadn’t paid that much attention to details. But suddenly he felt a flash of concern. The one time they’d had a beer together to celebrate the closing on her house, she’d let slip that she was bored of Sport-Zone, the neglected housewives and the midlife-crisis men who were trying desperately to hold on to their physiques. He had the sense that what qualified as interesting to her might be beyond what the rest of them were up for.
“It’s a thirty-mile loop,” Tracy answered. “We’ll start out near Redwood Station and take the Cloud Lakes trail clockwise.”
“I looked at a couple of trip reports online,” Todd offered. “It sounds pretty challenging—almost five thousand feet elevation gain.”
“Yeah,” Tracy said, “it’s going to be a butt burner. But this is the real deal, guys. No simulated experience, no obstacle course, no artificial Tough Mudder bullshit.”
“Should we think about taking one of the less strenuous trails?” Oscar asked.
“They’re all going to be strenuous,” Tracy said. “Personally, I’d rather do a route that has a bit of challenge. Get away from the day hikers and car campers, you know? But suit yourself.” She shrugged. “If you’d rather take one of the easy trails, we can. It just won’t be a real wilderness experience.”
Annoyance flared up in Oscar’s chest. Tracy did this during workouts too, subtly or not so subtly challenging one’s bravery or manhood, and his knowing this didn’t make it any less effective. He’d signed up for Tracy’s class because he’d thought she was cute, but that had worn off fast. He remembered the crazy grin she sometimes got when some poor bastard was pushed so hard he started to retch.
“I’m game,” Todd assured her. “I just want to know what we’re getting into.”
“We’ll be fine,” Tracy said. “This trail’s established and there’ll probably be a few other people. It’s not like we’ll get turned around, and besides, you can’t get that lost in the Sierras. Walk two or three days, and eventually you’ll get out.”
“I brought a GPS,” said Oscar.
“Cool,” Tracy said. “See, Todd? We’ll be fine.”
“What about bears?” Gwen asked suddenly, and Oscar realized she’d been listening with growing anxiety.
“What about them?”
“Are there bears on this route?”
Tracy smiled. “Yes, but it’s nothing to worry about. They just want our food, and as long as we use our bear canisters, they’ll generally leave us alone. They’re kind of like stray dogs, you know? Just need to be shooed away.”
Oscar wondered if Gwen was having the same thought that he was—stray dogs, in his neighborhood, were often of the unneutered pit bull variety.
“I took this trip two years ago where the craziest thing happened,” Tracy continued. “I was alone in the backcountry north of Kings Canyon, ten or fifteen miles off trail. I was camping at one of those lakes up there that doesn’t have a name. One afternoon a huge thunderstorm rolled in, crazy torrential rain, and all the little streams that fed the lake swelled up into rushing waterfalls. There was a big-ass bear across the river from me and I was keeping an eye on him. Then a deer comes tumbling over the falls, legs and head flailing. It fell about two hundred feet. At first I thought I’d