A Selkirk Love Affair
An Essay by Jaden McGinty
Rohan’s stated goal of the trip was that I fall in love. Sam walked out of the cabin and onto the porch. She was clad in running shorts and had the kind of smoothed down ponytail my mother always wore—a detail I don’t know if I am remembering or imagining but unfortunate in either case. Her legs were long and polka-dotted with wounds. I would come to learn they were from her work as a road surveyor for the Colville National Forest. She had forgotten good pants one day and came away with a pattern of bug bites and cuts from the wicked canes of Himalayan blackberry. In spite of this disfiguration, or perhaps because of it, I thought she was the most beautiful creature on the east side of the Cascades.
With that thought came a brief wave of nausea and the compulsion to chew on my cheek. My partner of three-and-a-half years, now my fiancé, was not with me, but at our apartment in Astoria, Oregon, clear on the other side of the Cascades. I know Callista would not have grudged me for finding Sam attractive. She is always checking people out, then passing her glance back to me with a smile and raised eyebrows. And I know her interest in women’s soccer is not for the love of the game alone. God help me if she ever meets Sam Coffey.
All the same, it bothered me when I looked at Sam—drank her in, as my grandmother would say—and felt my harp strings twang.
For his part, Rohan did not bring me here so that I could develop a crush for his coworker. He was working in the Colville National Forest at the time, his second season with that outfit, but the summer would be ending soon. When it was over, he would leave the Colville, perhaps forever, for Harvard, of all places. I had driven out to stay with him at the bunk house in Newport, Washington. Just for a few days.
It was urgent business, this trip; urgent and ardent as only Rohan can make things. See, the great cosmic drama of our relationship is that he hails from the soggy woods of Portland, but has taken the dry side of the Northwest for his true home. The Columbia Plateau, the Blue Mountains to the south, and the Selkirk Mountains to the north are his “heart’s geography,” as Bryce Andrews put it. I am the direct opposite.
I was weened on the rivers of Idaho (my fiancé will roll her eyes at that line), but my home is on the wet side of the Pacific Northwest. My fiancé is from the Oregon coast. My parents fell in love at the root of the Puget Sound. And, I forgot my heart somewhere in the Olympic Mountains. I was camping, you see. Left it on a nurse log by the Queets River. When I packed my bag, it just sort of slipped my mind. It’s been sitting in a cushion of moss ever since. She will roll her eyes at that, too, but it’s true, Callista. Every word.
Having so fallen for the wet side of the Northwest, I walled off the east. I laughed at Rohan’s romantic notions of the high desert, and I greeted his love of it with a hard, absent heart.
Rohan aimed to change that while I stayed with him in the Colville. To his mind, the Selkirk Mountains were the perfect blend of our two loves. On the Washington side of things, they are dry, rugged, and imposing. Ponderosa pine, his favorite tree and a childhood friend of mine, dot the slopes in wide parklands. At night, you can lay on your back and look at the stars through the gaps.
On the Idaho side, where humid air is trapped in the valleys, is what he calls an “inland temperate rainforest, the only of its kind.” Disjunctive populations of beloved coastal species make the country there familiar to me. Sword ferns tuft the underbrush, and old western red cedars anchor the earth to the sky. All in the loaded barrel of my former state.
I don’t know what Rohan’s vision was. Maybe we’d be twin hermits. I’d raid the food stashes left by preppers in the Kaniksu National Forest and Rohan would hang out with the bears around Sullivan Lake. We’d get together on the weekends and talk about all the trees we saw.
Whatever his vision, Rohan wanted me to fall in love with the place. His plot, his plan, his one scheme to achieve this end was for us to hike the tallest fucking mountain in the east of Washington: Gypsy Peak.
Fine. Alright. Ok. I have never been able to keep up with Rohan on our hikes. He is built like an elf, long and lean. He climbs forty-five degree switchbacks without breaking a sweat, while I am like Gimley. “I am wasted on cross country. We Dwarves are natural sprinters. Very dangerous over short distances.” Except, I’m not much for sprinting either. But I can hike up Hell for Rohan. We have laughed over my frequent stops and beet-red face before. And I love him, so who cares?
Then Sam.
He announced the real plan on the morning of the hike, so I had no way to wriggle out. That is dramatic. He probably just didn’t realize strangers would be a problem for me. Although, after three years of friendship, perhaps he should have. Probably more accurately: he endeavored to push my social boundaries as much as my ecological ones. I avoid new people as a rule. But these were his friends.
Her scarred legs were very long. She wore a thoughtful, slightly distant expression. We were meeting at her lodgings near the now-defunct Sullivan Lake Ranger Station. The lake itself was a blue gem clutched in a fist of mountains. There was a small runway for bush planes that ran right up to the water’s lip. Families were splashing on the beach. Ponderosas silently judged us from their lofty heights, as they always do.
After Sam introduced herself, Mitchell stepped out of the cabin. He was on the wildland firefighting crew and well suited to the task. He was ripped, as the kids say, and handsome in a shaggy way. I pictured him listening to Grateful Dead while benching an easy two-hundred pounds.
He offered Rohan and I vegan raspberry cookies that had the crumb and texture of scones. We ate them despite our breakfast of pie. Then we all piled into a forest service vehicle. “We’re doing a trail survey,” Sam explained with a wry smile, as we drove an hour into the mountains for the base of Gypsy Peak.
For the sake of my pride, let me skip over the hike. It started out nicely enough. We talked about the only things Rohan ever wants to talk about—books and trees—but that suited all of us just fine. When Rohan told them I was a writer, Sam asked for my recommendations for nature books. A good half hour was spent beneath white pine, passing titles back and forth between us like a soccer ball.
Most of it though was me huffing, my face feeling like it would burst from the blood pressure, and leaning against a tree saying, “No, no. Go on, go on. I’ll catch up.”
I did not catch up.
Not until I clawed my way to the top of that mountain, a very fucking tall mountain indeed, and there were the three of them, arrayed like the photo on a band’s debut album. Rohan stood, hands clasped behind his back, observing the peaks that rolled away into Canada. Mitchell was leaning against a slab of granite. Sam was sitting, straight-backed, at the very top, her long legs splayed out in front of her.
I joined them there and I didn’t say a word because my mouth was tacky. Rohan put his arm around my shoulder. “What do you think, Jaden?”
It was gorgeous. My criticism of the dry side, from an aesthetic point of view, is that it is so bare. Beneath pine groves are sheets of yellow needles. The hills rolling to the Columbia River are nothing but waves of desiccated grass. Stone erupts from the soil, unadorned by moss. The wet side is the exact opposite. It is a riot of life, a chaotic sprawl of sensory expression, every hill, wetland, and wood a painting from a coked-up expressionist.
Up on Gypsy Peak, I was a made a fool. The land was not bare, but spare. There was a beauty to its economy, a stiff-lipped nobility. Those rounded mountains had seen so much more of the world than the Cascades. The forests below knew restraint, and in their restraint was a beauty of longevity and purpose. The west side seemed like a bacchanalian fling, by comparison, an E trip that would leave you drained of serotonin come winter.
“Don’t you just love it?” Rohan asked with giddy expectation.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, evasive, because you never want to admit to a friend that they were at least sort of right, which makes you at least sort of wrong. And because I fear to concede love for this place would revoke it from the other.
We made our way down the mountain, with less difficulty, to stand around in Sam’s cabin. It felt like we were waiting for something to happen. Nothing did and we were tired. Well, I was tired, so Rohan said, “We should probably get back to Newport before it gets dark.”
“Well, Mitchell and I were thinking of taking a dip in Sullivan Lake if you wanted to join us first,” Sam said.
Of course not. Even though slipping into cold water would feel like heaven, even though I wanted to spend just that little longer with Sam, there were practical concerns. Namely: I had no swimming clothes. None of us did. I would not be skinny dipping, not with strangers, and probably never with good friends either. I guess I could simply go in my work pants and undershirt, but that would mean an hour’s car ride sopping wet. So, no thank you. I appreciate the offer. It was good to meet you. So long.
“Sure!” Rohan said.
We made our way to the lake. A little dam plugged the drain into Harvey Creek. There was a bridge across it and kids were jumping into the water from its railing. Kids were swimming at all the open beaches too, so we made our way down to where the airstrip met the water. We set our stuff down, and I watched to see what the others would do.
Mitchell stripped off his shirt, revealing muscles I believe would best be described as shredded. Or as Griffin McElroy once said, he was “all bumpy like a lobster.” Mitchell stopped with the shirt and waded into the lake still wearing his cargo shorts.
Rohan slowly and methodically removed his socks, then got in with his pants and long-sleeved shirt still on. I have never seen this man’s chest, even though we once shared a room in college.
Then I glanced, out of the corner of my eye, at Sam. She was stripping down to her underwear. Her whole body was long. She was built like an elf, too. Beautiful, I thought. And strange. Here she was with three men, and her the only one going into the lake in her underwear.
Guilt welled in me. It felt wrong on basic feminist principles, but there was something else too.
All day, I had felt like a voyeur. I had consumed the beauty of the world and given nothing in return. I desired like a lech and a rake. That is good enough, I think, for pornography and RV camping. The bugs can’t bite you and the woman in the washing machine won’t extract herself to say you haven’t been initiating enough recently. Unless that’s your thing, I guess.
But that will not do for the mountains where your best friend’s heart lies. It will not do for the beautiful girl gliding into the water in her underwear, her long, scarred legs slipping beneath the surface.
I think, in some small way, I was in love with Sam and the Selkirk Mountains. My heart rested in the slowly rotting hollow of a nurse log, yes; it sat propped up on a pillow in the bed Callista and I shared. But maybe it will always be a couple steps ahead of me too. Maybe it ranges out in front, finding all the little love affairs that make life interesting and warm. Then it comes home, to its nurse log and pre-marital bed, to offer up all the passion it gathered along the way.
Love, I think, might be a lot simpler than we make it out to be. Love, I think, in some ways, is just an exchange. Here is a gift. Here is something in return.
So, I unbuttoned my flannel. I breathed in and let the high mountain air fill me. I slipped my shirt over my head. I undid the clasp of my belt, then my fly, and stepped free from my pants. I stood there in my boxer briefs, exposed. Terribly exposed. Awareness ran to my stomach, my pimply legs, my bulge, but I fought the instinct to turn away. Instead, I waded into the water, and I hoped they liked the sight of me.
Jaden McGinty (he/him) is an emerging writer from Boise, Idaho, currently working on a habitat restoration crew in Thurston County, Washington. With roots in an eclectic family of hippies and Irish Catholics, McGinty draws creative inspiration from the landscapes and cultures that have shaped him—including Idaho, the Oregon Coast, the Puget Sound, Arizona, and Galway, Ireland. His work has appeared in Dark Mountain, Tahoma Literary Review, and Sky Island Journal. In the fall, he will begin the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington.