The Woman Who Waited Out the Squall

Her name was Dana, and she came up the trail at a near run with a storm building fast behind her, the kind of squall that announces itself with a wall of gray moving across the drainage rather than any gradual buildup. I’d already logged it and was watching the fire finder when I saw her on the switchbacks below, moving with the specific urgency of someone who’s done the math on how much daylight and dry weather she’s got left and doesn’t like the answer.

She made it up with maybe ten minutes to spare before the rain hit, introduced herself out of breath on the catwalk, doing a long solo section of trail that had brought her within sight of the tower and she’d made a call to detour up rather than get caught in the open. I get that more than people might think, a handful of through-hikers a season deciding the lookout is worth the extra mile and elevation if it means a roof during weather. I don’t mind it. Most of them stay twenty minutes, dry off, and keep moving once it clears.

Dana stayed closer to two hours, because the squall didn’t clear fast and because once we started talking neither of us was in a hurry to end it. She’d been out eleven days by then, solo the whole way, and had the specific quality I’ve noticed in solo through-hikers, a kind of easy directness that comes from not having had anyone to perform small talk for in a while. We sat on the platform railing once the worst of the rain passed and I got the Hive set out, the bakelite tiles, the whole thing weighing less than the water she was still carrying, and we played two games while the last of the weather blew through below us.

She won the first one. I won the second, though I’ll admit I was distracted for a chunk of it watching the sky clear over the ridge to the west, old habit, hard to fully turn off even mid game. She asked good questions about the job, not the ones I usually get, not how do you not go crazy up here, but more specific ones, what do you actually watch for, how do you tell a real column from a dust devil, whether I’d ever called in a false one. I told her about the two I’ve gotten wrong over the years and she laughed in a way that felt earned rather than polite.

She left when the trail dried out enough to be worth it, wanting to make a few more miles before dark, and I gave her a couple of the good granola bars from my own stash, which I don’t do for everyone but felt right that day. I’ve thought about her a handful of times since, wondered if she finished whatever section she was on, whether she remembers the tower as more than a place she waited out a storm. Probably not with the same weight I remember it. Two hours out of an eleven day stretch isn’t much to her. It was most of my human contact for that particular week, and I don’t say that to make it sound sadder than it was. It was a good afternoon. I’d take another one exactly like it.