The Day the Mule Comes

There’s one scheduled packstring a season, mid August most years, the real drop, planned and logged weeks ahead, different from the smaller stuff that comes up the trail on its own timeline, a book left in the cache, something a trail crew guy carries up because he was passing through anyway. The mule drop is the one dispatch puts on the calendar, and I’ve come to understand that the date of it organizes the whole summer more than I’d have guessed going in. Everything before it is leading up to the drop. Everything after it is living off what came up on the mules until October.

The wrangler who’s brought it the last three years is a guy named Ott, older than me, doesn’t say much, which suits the job fine since most of what needs saying is logistics. Where to stack the boxes, what’s fragile, whether the trail washed out anywhere between the trailhead and here that I should know about. He usually stays twenty minutes, has water, and heads back down before afternoon thermals start kicking up wind on the exposed switchbacks, which is smart, I wouldn’t want to be leading three loaded mules through a crosswind up there either.

The boxes themselves are half staples, dry goods, batteries, the specific brand of stove fuel that’s the only one dispatch will authorize, and half whatever I put on the request list back in June, which by August I’ve usually half forgotten asking for. There’s always one perishable box packed in with dry ice, and it’s always the best twenty minutes of the whole season, going through it before the ice gives out. Onions. An actual orange. Butter, which I portion out over the following weeks like it’s something rarer than it is. By week eight of a season the taste of fresh anything gets disproportionate in your head, and I’ve caught myself thinking about a single onion with more anticipation than the situation probably warrants.

There’s mail too, when there’s mail, which some years is a handful of letters and some years is nothing because nobody I know is much of a letter writer. I don’t fault them for it. I’m not much of one either, though I try to be better about it once a season, sitting down the week before the drop is due and writing back whatever came the year before.

The strange part, and it takes new lookouts by surprise every time I’ve talked to one about it, is how much you dread the drop a little even while you want it. Three mules and a person on the trail below the tower for the length of one morning is more traffic than a lot of weeks get entirely, and by the time Ott’s untying the last box I’ve usually said more words out loud than I have in the four days before it. Then he’s gone, and the trail’s empty again, and I’m alone with an onion and a stack of mail and the particular quiet that comes right after a stretch of not being quiet, which is its own kind of loud for the first hour or two.

I’ve learned to ration the good stuff slower than my instinct wants. Eat the onion the first week and you’re back to canned and dehydrated for the other seven. Eat it the last week and you’ve had something to look forward to the whole time instead. Small management, but up here it’s the kind that actually matters.