A Rucksack Rumination

An essay by Jeff Darren Muse

Photo by Dave Hoefler

One of the generalities most often noted about Americans is that we are a restless, a dissatisfied, a searching people. We bridle and buck under failure, and we go mad with dissatisfaction in the face of success. We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it. 

—John Steinbeck, Paradox and Dream

The spray paint surprised me. Neon orange. Unnatural. The slashes crisscrossed beneath my boots, contrasting with the emerging greenery crowding both sides of the trail. Chilled, I rezipped my collar. Scraps of clouds ascended the mountainside.

The paint marked the end for a fifty-four-year-old woman shot dead in that very spot the previous August. I’d forgotten about the incident, my mind on footfall in loose gravel, a much-needed break from the journey I’d been making from rural Rockport, through Seattle, to the tidal coves of Olympia on the southern tip of Puget Sound. And back up I-5 at week’s end. I was seven months into a new job, a renegotiated ma…