shake

When Kit shakes, it’s an earthquake. A shiver that starts at her tail and racks through her body, it’s not uncommon to see one paw lift and then the other, a surge of physical release so enveloping to her that she just about levitates.

I love watching her in the wilderness. In January, Kit and I hiked 75 miles on the Arizona trail, south of Sonoita. I was struck by how little of this section I remembered from when I thru hiked in 2018. I guess I had night hiked a decent bit of it – the short days had caught up to my pace, the border was imminent, my responsibilities were a fire on my heels. This time, with Kit, I crawled. 10 miles most days, a couple closer to 20. Kit is 3 now and capable of long walks but she isn’t conditioned and it felt wrong to force her on a march she can’t say no to, so I kept our days short and our rests longer.

When we’re in the wilderness, Kit is a different dog. At home she’s often high strung and easily anxious. She barks at lights, bugs, neighbor kids. She pulls toward squirrels and birds, her entire body weight straining, not caring what happens to her. 

But she’s different when we’re backpacking. She seems to be aware of her job, aware she’s responsible for walking with me. She’s alert but only to things that matter. She doesn’t bark at noises or people or squirrels. She checks in with me, nose twitching, and lets the little things go.

One night, walking into twilight, she tells me she’s had enough. We’ve done 17 miles and the sun is almost gone. Just above Kentucky Camp, we have a ridge line and a 360 desert valley view to ourselves and I’m being selfish. I’m thinking about sunrise even as the sunset is still blazing red all around me, looking for the best spot possible with the most easterly view. After a few minutes of walking back and forth from various flat spots, she lays down and stares at me. Not goin no further. I comply and set up my tent, she pads inside and curls up, dinner forgotten (until a vague crinkling from my food bag brings her back out).

We cross a cattle guard one morning and she still hasn’t figured those out, so I scoop her into my arms and walk across it. Some RVers are parked in a turnout a few yards away and they watch the whole thing and laugh. What a princess, they say. Kit, indignant, trots away.

I’m thinking a lot about shaking things up while I’m out there. It’s January and I’m ready for sea change. Two years at a job that’s not getting better, three years in a partnership that’s stalled, I’m thinking about all the ways my life would change if I let the shiver inside of me explode out. 

For months, I’d felt a denouement gliding toward me. A slow ending. All signs pointing to a break. 
It wasn’t like I was miserable, I wasn’t. I didn’t feel stagnant or asleep the ways I have other times I’ve shaken up my life. I just felt like more was possible. Incandescence, maybe, was possible.

On my best days I still believe to be giddy is something I deserve. Most days I manage to believe that my ex, at least, deserves that chance.

A shake is a release – but it’s also a scattering. Flinging pieces into the air without any way of knowing where they’ll land. I had to let things fall where they would and not every piece remained intact. I wasn’t right about everything.

Kit and I crossed a sparkling stream early one morning, freezing cold, dawn. I could tell she didn’t want to get in. She lingered at the bank while I took my first few steps. When Kit is worried, she narrows her eyes and her ears go back. She whined at me and I stood in the middle and coaxed her to follow me. She wouldn’t. Sighing, I went back a couple of steps and picked her up.  When I turned back with her in my arms and started to cross again, I startled something – a big, brown figure thumped off through the trees in front of us. I stopped cold in the middle of the stream as the steps receded into the forest.

I didn’t get a clear look at it, it might have been a deer, but the steps sounded too thuddish. Kit may be the dog that cries wolf at the Prime truck but she also has some deeper programming and I gave her some good girl pets to let her know I appreciated her.

Our last day on trail, everything felt off. A storm teased us all day – fast-moving clouds lingering just over the next hill but never breaking. The wind picks up periodically, thunder peals nearby. I’m planning to camp in a valley but when I get there, I hate it. Every square foot has is covered in cow patties, the earth torn up by huge hooves. Flies buzz around me when I stop to take out my phone and I know I can’t sleep here. I head up the nearby hill where there’s a cattle guard and a barbed wire fence, the air starts to clear up and just as I approach a flat spot, I’m smacked in the face by the smell of rotting flesh. A cow carcass is knotted in the fence just a few feet away. A coyote looks up at me from behind it, and takes off. I leash Kit and walk past the body. The coyote’s face peeps from behind bushes on the ridgeline, it tracks us back down the trail. Instead of camping, I head to the road and hitch out.

When I get to my car, the sunset is magnificent. Clouds are stuccoed across the sky, pink, orange, blue splatters. The storm that never was left a sensational mark. Kit and I curl up in the back of my Fit at the trailhead and watch the stars come out.

The next morning, I open the car door and Kit jumps out. She stretches and I say “big stretch” on autopilot. She looks up at me, lifts her nose to the air and smells the wind. And then she starts to run. Back and forth, from the edge of the trailhead lot to the car. The zoomies, the runarounds, the joy of existence has lodged a takeover of her little furry body and she can’t help herself.

By the time she’s done, I’ve managed to shake off my melancholy, unable to stop grinning at the little clods of dirt kicked up by her little paws, a subtle stamp that we were here. We drive out of the forest clear-eyed.