“I can’t say. I feel sorry for him. He wants to be her son. I mean, he is and he isn’t, you know? He wants to be a hero and solve her problems. Present her with a big, oversized check, like on a game show. Maybe a little payday for himself, say, an agent’s fifteen percent. What the hell. You can’t expect anybody’s motives to be pure. He feels like he’s owed something. He feels like he has to prove something.”

He stood up then. “People are complicated, don’t you think? Good thing, too. Otherwise, robots could write poetry. You better get on home and finish packing. I’ll let you know what the doctor says.”

Into the Woods I

The official name of the conference was Imagination and Environment: Intersections. Although as Gil said, unloading a week’s worth of wasp spray, there were some intersections that the nature lovers at the conference really weren’t into.

The whole time I’d been texting back and forth with Gil, I’d assumed Gil was a man. No one had told me any different, or anything at all, really. So that when I reached our rendezvous point, a Chevron station just east of Sacramento, I was confused when a woman came toward me, speaking my name as a question. Gil was short and sturdy, freckled and sunburnt. Older than me, I couldn’t tell by how much. She pointed out her own truck, a big black GMC with a dirt bike in the bed. A man sat behind the wheel. “That’s Rog,” Gil said. “He’s not really here. I’ll explain later.”

I followed them on U.S. 50 as far as Placerville, where we stopped at the forest ranger station and then at an In-N-Out. “The food up there’s pretty good,” Gil said. “They bring in a kitchen crew all the way from some place in Tahoe. But everybody has different weird food ideas, so it’s stuff like beet and watermelon salad. Tofu tutti frutti.”

Rog was doing his best not to be there. He was tall and skinny and silent, giving all his attention to his cheeseburger. He had sandy hair and pale blue eyes and near-invisible eyebrows and appeared to be fiercely shy. Gil did all the talking for the two of them. Rog wore jeans, high lace-up boots, and a T-shirt with a picture of a buck and the words eatin’ local before it was cool.

Gil said that the two of them lived in Sacramento and worked in warehouses when they needed cash. They spent as much time as they could camping, hunting, and fishing. Sometimes they found caretaker jobs, like the conference. But Rog was a bowhunter. Which of course would give the nature lovers fits because they were all about walking lightly on the earth, and so on. So Rog was not here. Get it?