That night before bed, he gave me a clothbound book called Basic Wilderness Survival. I pushed it into a drawer in my nightstand, but took it out again as soon as he left the room, scanning the chapter titles. “Signaling.” “Sustenance.” “Shelter.” “Knots and Lashes.” I stayed up past midnight devouring it. There were step-by-step instructions for testing the edibility of plants and bugs, setting traplines, building hobo shelters, catching fish with your hands. There was map and compass nomenclature to learn, field bearings and terrain considerations, fire building, personal protection, wound care, adaptability, overcoming stress and hypothermia and fear.

I didn’t understand why I was drawn to these scenarios, at least not then, but they spoke to me on the deepest level. Hap was a wise man. He must have guessed from the beginning that this would be the way to talk to me, survivor to survivor.

—

Pulling into the small lot at the head of the trail, I double tie my heavy boots, zip up my anorak to my chin, and head off, skirting the main trailhead to follow a lesser-known route out to the headlands loop. Half a mile in, I come to a dense cypress grove and duck through a narrow break in the trees, holding one hand in front of my face to catch the cobwebs I know are there, though I can’t see them. My fingertips are still sticky with the strands as I press inside, and then time is sticky, too. I’m ten or eleven, being shown the secret way into the grove for the first time.

“Krummholz” is the word for this kind of vegetation I remember from one of Hap’s lessons, a German term that means “bent wood.” Over many decades, hard weather has sculpted the trees into grotesque shapes. The salt-rich north wind kills the tips of the branches, forcing them to dip and twist, swooping toward the ground instead of the sky. They’re a living diagram of adaptation, of nature’s intelligence and resilience. They shouldn’t be able to keep growing this way, and yet they do.

In the grove, I feel a sudden, sharp ache for Hap. For all the loveliness he showed me, and the ugliness, too. For how he peeled back the world, over and over, trusting me to let it in. Being here makes me feel closer to him, and that much closer to the answers I’ve come for, the way I might put myself back together like a scattered, shattered jigsaw puzzle.

I close my eyes, trying to hold it all still—the spare sifting light, and the dense smell of moss. But the moment I do, a thought springs up as if on a blackened movie screen. A flash of afterimage, quick and dark. This is a perfect place to bury a body.