Summary
A skinny guy named Hugh sits next to Helen on the bus the next morning. He compliments what she said the day before and whispers insults about each of the young hikers as they board. Beckett explains the group of twelve hikers will cook and sleep in groups of four. Helen is in a group with Mason, Windy, and Hugh. At the trailhead, Helen buckles under the weight of her pack and slices her knee on a rock. She wants to ignore it, but Beckett says it’ll get infected if they don’t treat it. Jake attends to it because he has the medical kit: it turns out he is an EMT (emergency medical technician). Helen starts getting blisters after half an hour. She ignores them, despite Beckett saying earlier that they have to be dealt with immediately lest they become debilitating.
Helen falls to the back of the pack. Up ahead, Mason makes no effort of hiding his annoyance with slower hikers and people who ask questions about reading maps or accidentally trip. Kaylee and Tracy, sorority sisters, are behind Helen; they don’t mind being last. At mid-afternoon, they stop to set up their sleeping tarps and make dinner. In a clearing full of wildflowers they have their first wilderness survival lesson: a “bear hang” to keep food high up and out of reach of bears. Jake and Beckett scout two trees, and each climb one carrying an end of a rope. They tie the rope between and slide the group’s food out to the middle in a bag attached by a carabiner. Jake breaks a branch and falls the last six or seven feet, but he lands on his feet and raises his hands over his head in victory.
That night, Helen sleeps next to Windy, who asks if she regrets not bringing the “one book” each of them was allowed to bring. Windy explains that she intends to be a dog psychologist, calling it a lucrative industry. Helen tells her about Pickle, who Helen found abandoned outside her building with a broken leg. Windy believes Pickle has trust issues from her abuse, and that becoming an “alpha” won’t work, because it is the psychology of wolves, not dogs, the difference being that dogs love humans and want to be with them. They need love, not to be dominated. Helen thinks to herself that for all of Pickle’s behavioral issues, she is “surprisingly good at love,” and her closest companion.
In the morning, Helen’s body aches all over and her broken blisters feel like acid has been splashed on them. She finds Jake making coffee at his camp. He guesses she is having an altitude heartache and advises extra hydration. She asks him to change her bandage. He pretends to have forgotten her name. They walk together to a log and he says the scab is forming well. She admits she has blisters, showing him the four bloody welts. He gives her a hard time, saying she should have brought them to his attention earlier. She notices a red scratch and a bruise under his arm. She points out the hypocrisy of him not acknowledging that his fall left him injured. She realizes it was his night blindness—the reason he earlier gave her on the way to Wyoming for not driving in the dark—that led him to miss the branch. He asks her to keep that a secret, admitting that he didn’t pass the medical: he has a friend in med school who faked his report. He says it’s fine because they don’t hike at night. Beckett calls Helen out in front of the group for not dealing with her blisters when they were “hot spots.” From then on, she becomes his go-to example for what not to do while hiking in the wilderness.
Helen comments that her favorite part of the first week is hiking with Windy. Although she could be leading the pack, Windy falls back to hike with Helen. Helen admires and envies Windy’s fit body, and makes an effort to ask her questions about herself. Windy talks about her study of positive psychology: the idea is to focus on what it is about happy people that makes them happy, as opposed to looking only at people’s problems. She says that happy people tend to remember the good things that happen, while unhappy people only remember the bad. She advises writing down at the end of the day three good things that have happened in the day. Windy says her mantra for the trip is Appreciate Everything, and she rifles off several small positive moments from the day so far. Helen is impressed and hopes to be able to come up with her own mantra. Windy confesses to having a crush on Jake, saying that the moment she met him, she thought, “This is the man I’m going to marry.” Hiding her jealousy, Helen insists that isn’t how love works. Windy hints at the “feeding frenzy” the Truth or Dare game became, and says Helen would think differently if she’d been there.
Helen comments that everyone grows accustomed to hiking as the week goes on. She reads the BCSC handbook Beckett lends her in two days. She re-reads it and takes notes. They wake at 6, hike until 2 or 3, eat dinner at 5, and are in bed by 7, exhausted. Some people earn nicknames, such as Flash for Mason and Heartbreaker for Windy. Helen doesn’t; more often people mistakenly call her Ellen. Helen tries to focus on the positive. Eventually Beckett explains that he is breaking the group into three pods of four to hike the same route but staggered apart: tall guys up front, Jake and Windy and two others in the middle, Hugh, Helen and the slow “Sisters” last. He complains that no one will learn anything if they are just following him. Before they set out, Beckett finds Helen’s folded list she keeps in her bra on the ground. Thinking it is litter, he reads it aloud. Helen won’t claim it. Beckett lights it on fire, threatening to burn the whole forest down if people don’t take his no-littering policy seriously. Jake gives Helen a folded Pablo Neruda poem to hold in the list’s place; he says she just can’t read it.
As they set off in separate groups, Helen misses Windy but becomes pals with Hugh. Hugh, who confirms the speculations that he is gay, falls into the Sisters’ gossip about the guys in the group. They say Jake is the best kisser in the group, but it’s tragic, because he is “taken.” Helen is confused, assuming Jake had said this because he was smitten with Helen. But the girls say he and Windy both like each other. Helen sees Hugh stepping on fallen tree trunks, even though they were warned not to do it. She doesn’t say anything.
Hugh falls, hard, his foot crashing through a rotten log. He screams and passes out when they move him. Helen goes ahead solo to get help, realizing soon that they had been hiking in the wrong direction. She goes the correct way, hiking alone for hours. The other groups, when she finds them at 6 p.m., are eating dinner. Beckett and Jake asks medical-related questions about Hugh’s condition; Helen isn’t able to answer them because she didn’t think to check things like his pulse or whether he could wiggle his toes. Beckett decides they will do an evacuation of Hugh in the morning, advises everyone to get as much rest as they can.
Helen ends up sleeping next to Jake. They stay up talking quietly. Helen, surprising herself, talks about Nathan, her brother who drowned the year before Duncan was born. They were at a lake house, and Helen wouldn’t go with him when he wanted to go run around the docks at the marina. Jake tells her it wasn’t her fault: she was only nine. Helen explains that her frantic mother got pregnant right away, to replace Nathan. But Duncan needed a lot of attention, their parents soon separated, and Helen’s mother’s life fell apart as she struggled to raise Helen and Duncan alone. Eventually GiGi took them in.
Helen says she and her mother have coffee occasionally, but are estranged enough that she wasn’t at Helen’s wedding. She is less estranged from her father, but she never expected as much from him. Helen admits that she hasn’t forgiven Duncan for not being Nathan, who she was very close to. Helen realizes Duncan’s acting out and irresponsibility were always a cry for attention. They lie down, holding each other’s gaze. Helen thanks him. Jake apologizes for “the kissing thing,” saying he got confirmation of some “bad news” and was reeling from it. He won’t tell her what the bad news was. Helen says she knows about him kissing all the girls on the trip. He says it was a game. Helen says her ex called and asked her to come back. Jake gets frustrated and demands to know what she told him. Helen says she won’t tell him until he tells her his news. She turns over to face the other way.
Analysis
Center builds on the themes of control and support as Helen begins her three-week hike. A harbinger of what might be worse injuries, Helen cuts her knee open when she slips while putting on her heavy pack. Looking to control the situation and avoid negative attention, Helen attempts to hide the wound; however, it is soon discovered. In an instance of situational irony, Jake tends to the cut, as it turns out that he is trained as an EMT and so is in charge of the group’s medical kit. She has no choice but to accept his help.
The theme of abandonment arises during Helen and Windy’s discussion about dog psychology and what might work to help solve Pickle’s behavioral issues, which came about because the dog’s previous owners abused and abandoned her. Windy posits that it is outdated to look at dogs as being like wolves in need of a controlling alpha; she believes it is best to view dogs as needing the type of loving support humans crave. As Helen reflects on Pickle’s capacity for love, Center makes clear the dog’s symbolic significance: Pickle’s history mirrors Helen’s, as Helen was mistreated and emotionally abandoned by her ex-husband. Together, they can offer each other loving support, overcoming their trauma-informed distrust.
The theme of control comes up again when Helen and Jake privately break their stranger routine and discuss their injuries. While Helen has been concealing her blisters out of shame, Jake admits that he faked the results of the medical exam each hiker had to pass before being accepted on the trip. Just as he couldn’t drive at night on their way to Wyoming, Jake can’t see very well in the dark. But rather than accept it as a disability he is powerless over, Jake attempts to control the situation by lying about his medical exam and concealing the disability from others.
The theme of appreciation arises during Helen’s recapitulation of her chats with Windy. As a student of psychology, Windy is a proponent of positive thinking, which she believes can rewrite an unhappy person’s neural pathways. Her advice to Helen about attaining happiness is to stop associating happiness with the achievement of desires. Instead, Windy advocates for making a habit of appreciating what one already has. While Helen enjoys Windy’s wisdom, her admiration is undercut by insecurity as Windy reveals she has a crush on Jake.
Center returns to the themes of abandonment, resentment, and powerlessness with Jake and Helen’s nighttime conversation about her “family tragedy”—the death of her brother Nathan. Helen lowers her guard with Jake to discuss the subject, which she never talks about with anyone, and she admits that she carries guilt for not having prevented Nathan’s drowning, even though she was only eight when it happened; he had asked her to come with him to the docks, and she has perceived her decision not to go as an abandonment of her brother. Jake encourages Helen to understand that she was powerless to stop what happened. Helen also realizes for the first time that her resentment of Duncan is largely to do with the fact he isn’t Nathan, but the second son, who was conceived and born amid the family’s dysfunctional grieving period.
Although Helen is able to see past her and Jake’s psychological struggle for control long enough to be vulnerable with him and recognize the support he is giving her, the couple’s power dynamic goes on. When Jake won’t tell Helen about the bad news he recently received and that has been disturbing him, Helen ignores his jealousy by dangling over his head the fact that Mike asked her to come back home. In this way, Helen quickly raises her guard again, instinctually shielding herself from anyone who tries to get close enough that they could wound her emotionally.
