Jenny and Jed met, literally, with the wrong foot forward.

He had been pushing a small herd of empty saddle and pack horses, hard, to make it home to the shelter of barn and cabin before a threatening storm broke. Jed’s mood was as droopy as the clouds, which seemed a facade of heavy grey cardboard cutouts suspended against a staged backdrop. In other words, it was one of those days when nothing seemed real, and a person viewed himself from out-of-body. And, what was worse, the drama of the life portrayed by stilted characters, was boring.

Jed had delivered a family, bag and baggage, to Meadow Creek Camp. He had pitched their tent, dug a latrine, and promised to return in exactly one week.

What depressed Jed thoroughly was how damn happy this family appeared. Instead of complaining about the impending storm, the wife and mother had expressed a delight in the possibility of sharing an adventure with those she loved. Jed thought she could have at least bitched about the mosquitoes acting up, as they always do when a low pressure front is approaching.

As he figured it, women put a cramp in a man’s style. This one proved Jed was wrong. She was pretty, too. And, being married, unobtainable. All Jed got for his mournful looks, full of suggestion, was a tin cup of lemonade and home baked cookies. How was it that he had not married a girl like this? That unanswerable question made him feel even more alone.

Jenny, quite simply, was lost. It had taken her time to rent a car at the small airport serving Cascade City, and to make a detour to the ranger station for wilderness entry permit and map. Then, at the end of the road, shouldering her pack in the failing afternoon light, she had missed the access trail leading to the survival camp. She was instead, unknowingly, headed for Jed’s pack station on a path he considered to be a private thoroughfare.

When the access road, and wilderness area trailhead was built, Jed and his dad had figured it best to hide the entrance of the “quick” route to their private meadow. Paying passengers —even those visiting the pack station —were met at the parking lot, and taken on a backwoods version of a taxicab ride around Times Square. As the meter, however, ran by the day and not the mile, and the point of renting horses was the ride, not the destination, the gentle deception of the wilderness being endless was done under the best of intentions.

Occasionally, on a circuit not far from a road when someone heard a logging truck headed down a hill on compression (a dat-tat-dat sound) and assumed the noise to be made by a bear, that had always been good for a chuckle shared between Jed and his old man.