They decided to hike down the path through the green belt rather than drive or walk along the road. It was faster, more fun, and would take them to a less-populated section of the creek. Tritia made them salami-and-cheese sandwiches on homemade bread, and Doug carried the ice chest while she and Billy hauled the folding chairs. To their right, the low gentle slope of the land graduated into a steeper rise, dirt and light sandstone giving way to darker granite. The vegetation changed from pine and manzanita to aspen and acacia, with long vinelike tendrils of wild strawberries growing parasitically over the rock face, intermixed with ferns and bottlebrush and poison sumac. The trail itself was lined with the tiny red flowers of Indian paintbrush. To their left, the level ground swooped downward to meet the creek, and the path followed this descent in its own late unhurried way.

They heard the creek before they saw it, a low continuous gurgle that sounded remarkably like the peal of distant thunder. As they grew closer, the amalgam of sounds became differentiated and they could hear birds and bugs as well as water. This section of the creek was flanked by saplings—aspen and cottonwood and sycamore—that grew in chaotic abundance between the boulders that ran like a second stream along the side of the creek, and they had to walk quite a ways past the bend before finding a flat spot of dirt close enough to the water to set up camp.

They set down the ice chest between their chairs. Billy had worn his cutoffs and, after grabbing a can of Coke, immediately jumped into the creek, splashing wildly to cool himself off. The water level was low, but still deep enough for him to swim. He dogpaddled for a few moments, dunking his head and pushing from rock to rock, then, bored, stood up and began wading upstream.

“Don’t go too far!” Tritia called out.

“I won’t!” he yelled back.

Doug sat down on his chair. He had brought along the latest Joyce Carol Oates novel to read. He found Oates, as a person, unrelievedly pretentious and phony, and most of her books boring and much too long, but there was something compelling about her as an artist, and he found himself inevitably reading her novels and short-story collections as soon as they came out. He didn’t like either her or her work, but he was a fan.

Strange how that worked, he thought. Hobie was a hardcore Clint Eastwood fan, and he was not. Yet when it came down to it, he liked more Clint Eastwood movies than Hobie did.

Life was full of paradoxes.