We detoured onto a trail that ran through a forest. The trail was cooler with the shade and went upward between the trees, steadily upward for a few miles, and finally evened off before dropping to a clearing from where we could see rolling, green meadows and flat, yellow fields.

Robin and I were kneeling at a stream replenishing our canteens when we heard music simmering beyond the woods.

“You missed the opening,” Robin said. “That’s what you had to write about?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m wiped. Go on without me. I’ll camp here and catch up with you tomorrow.”

I was disappointed at missing the kickoff, but I couldn’t abandon her. “Smell the smoke, Robin.”

She sniffed. “Somebody’s doing a joint.”

“There’re people all around us who didn’t make it. I’ll interview them.”

I took off with my pen and notebook. The freaks scattered around were upbeat and neighborly. The sole unhappy camper was the curly-haired Miss Phyllis Goddard of Pound Ridge, New York, who was clad in what can best be described as a tie-dyed ball gown, complete with a plunging neckline and a bow at the waist. She said, “I promised to call my mother the second I got here, and I can’t find a phone. Do you know where there’s a phone?”

Pointing toward Route 55, I said, “Saw one at a general store. But that was six or seven miles ago.”

“My mother’s gonna kill me.” My last sight of her was with tears on her face as she stumbled through the woods, tripping over the ruffled lace hem of her gown, and calling out, “Has anyone seen a phone?”

While I was gone, Robin had shampooed her hair and organized a campsite under a stand of pines. Our sleeping bags were spread a few appropriate feet apart, and a fire was going. Her long raven hair hung wet and straight, and she had exchanged her sweat-soaked guayabera for a gray Barnard T-shirt. We smoked a J as I heated Chef Boyardee spaghetti over the fire, and I was so starved from the hiking and the dope that it tasted like the homemade pasta at Grotta Azzurra.

After dinner, Robin mixed Gatorade and vodka in her canteen. “Instant buzz,” she said. “But no damage to your electrolytes and no hangover.”

It was a decent drink once it deadened your taste buds, and as Robin and I passed the canteen, she said, “Don’t you think I’m ironic?”

“I think you’re high.”

“And ironic. I want to change the world and I can’t even lose three pounds. That’s ironic.”

“Or crazy.”

“Crazy I got from Phillie and Esther. Since grammar school, my father’s been showing off my report cards to strangers in restaurants. And all my mother cared about were my clothes and my weight. Mainly my weight. Like she was worried that because I wasn’t a size six, I’d be mistaken for an elephant and shot for my tusks. Every summer she used to send me to a camp where the daily caloric intake was lower than Auschwitz.”