Clothing Optional (Part I)

Dixon had driven out of Janet's cul-de-sac on Friday morning with the windows down, assuming that a few hours of highway would air the car out. It didn’t. By Saturday the RAV4 still smelled like Hip, who had been massaged against her will, and Dixon had decided he liked it. He cracked a window and enjoyed both the fresh air and the reminder of the little dog.

He woke up Saturday at six. Hip was not standing on his chest like she had been every morning for the last three weeks. His body somehow now expected it. Instead he lay there in a motel bed in Oregon City waiting for six pounds of dog to arrive, and when she didn't arrive he just kept waiting, eyes open, looking at the ceiling. He said "morning, Hip" aloud out of habit. There was no reply. Then he lay there a while longer and thought about how three weeks was apparently long enough for a man to fall in love with a dog, and how one morning was not nearly long enough for him to forget her.

Now, he had nine days ahead of him. And that was actually a problem.

His next sit in Seattle didn't start until a week from Monday. That meant nine days with no dogs and nothing on the calendar. Now he once again had nowhere to be and the old feeling came back around that he was both free and unmoored at the same time. Those two words, ‘free’ and ‘unmoored,’ hit him differently depending on the moment.

He considered driving north early and landing in a motel near the Seattle house for the week. That would be a sensible plan. Sensible was resonating right now. He also considered staying in Portland near Cash, but Cash was in school and their next visit was weeks off and showing up early would not go over well with his mom.

So he called Graham instead.

Graham answered on the fourth ring, sounding like a man who had answered from a hammock, because he was, in fact, in a hammock.

"Hey, it’s the ‘between-everything’ guy," Graham said, cheerfully. "I was wondering when you'd surface."

"Yeah, I just finished a sit and I’m trying to figure out what to do this week. I've got nine days before the next one and really no idea what to do with them," Dixon said lightly.

"That," Graham said enthusiastically, "is the best thing anyone has said to me in a month. The timing could not be better." There was a creak on his end, the sound of him getting up off the hammock. "I'm taking my camper van out on Sunday. I was planning on being out for the week, give or take depending on how things go. There are some places I really love this time of year. It’ll be some time in the woods, some hot springs, you know, ‘off the grid’ kinda stuff. Oh and a thing on Saturday night that I bet you’d find interesting."

"What's the thing on Saturday night?" Dixon asked, his curiosity piqued.

"We'll get to Saturday later. Let’s focus on just getting on the road first." Dixon could hear him smiling. "We’ll head up to a place up in the Cascades to start. I love it up there in the woods. We can partake in a little clothing optional hiking, and I fully intend to exercise the option. You strike me, still, as a man who could use some ‘optional’ in his life."

Dixon looked around at the drab motel room. His options seemed to be the Bible in the drawer and the cheap painting of a covered bridge bolted to the wall versus a slightly off-kilter, off-grid excursion. He thought about the nine blank days on the calendar. Clothing optional hadn’t hurt him the last time.

"Okay," he said. "Definitely. I'm in. It’s going to be great. And maybe I will take some more ‘optional’ while I’m at it."

"Great. Love that for you." Graham paused and then continued. "We’ll be in a van. The sleeping arrangements might need to be discussed. Do you want to talk about that?"

"No. I've stopped asking about that," Dixon said, and it was true.

He hung up and felt something he hadn't expected, which was relief. He'd spent the summer learning that the road might be a little cheaper with dogs in it, and lonelier without them, but here was a week that was neither a sit nor a solo drive. He figured it would be a good chance to go a little wild. To get out of range. To put the phone in the glovebox, next to the little yellow disposable camera, and disappear into the woods for a week.

That was the plan anyway.

Bobby called before Dixon had even started packing, and Bobby called on video, because Bobby had recently discovered video and now did it constantly. He held the phone at an angle that showed mostly his forehead and the ceiling fan of whatever room he was in.

"You're going where?" Bobby asked, indignantly.

"The Cascade Mountains here in Oregon. I guess we’re gonna do some camping, go to a hippie hot springs commune place, and spend some time in the mountains. I’m going with my friend Graham," he answered.

"Graham." Bobby's forehead came closer to the camera. "The boat guy? The one from the nude beach?"

"Yep, that's the one," Dixon replied, making eye contact with Bobby as he said it.

"Dixon." Bobby put his whole hand flat on his own chest, like a man wounded in the field. "You are heading into the wild with a man known to drop his pants at any chance, and meet his likely very interesting friends, and you did not invite me. I am not happy with this turn of events." He said this with great emotion, as if he were literally dying from the insult.

"What do you mean? You’re in Atlanta and we’re leaving tomorrow morning. You’d never make it here on time," Dixon protested.

"No, that is so not the point. Do not deflect this. You didn’t invite me. To come with you," Bobby said, waving his arms dramatically, causing the camera view to move wildly around the room.

"Bobby, you would hate this . . " Dixon said calmly.

"I beg to differ! I would thrive," Bobby interrupted, further offended. His forehead swung away and the ceiling fan went by and then the forehead came back. "What are you even talking about? I love the woods. I was literally born in the woods. I love clothing optional. I contain multitudes man. I would be the life of those hot springs."

"Oh jeez Bobby, you'd last ninety minutes," Dixon said, furrowing his brow. "First of all, you were born in New York City. There will be no bottle service. There won’t even be cell service where we’re going. You’d miss TikTok the instant we went into the woods. And. . . and. . . somebody's probably going to hand you kombucha they made in a closet in Southeast Portland and ask about your relationship to your father, and you're going to want to get in the van and drive to a Marriott."

There was a pause while Bobby digested this. On the little screen Bobby's expression moved through several emotions and landed on honesty.

"Okay, that's fair," he admitted. "That last part's fair. Send pictures. Tasteful ones. Above the collarbone ones." The forehead tilted, and the voice softened a notch, something Bobby did with his voice maybe twice a year. "Are you okay, though? Real question."

"I'm good, Bobby," Dixon said with a little chuckle.

"It’s just, you're doing a lot of weird stuff lately," Bobby said.

"I'm aware." Dixon answered.

"I like it though," Bobby said. "I want it on the record that I do, in fact, like it." And he hung up before Dixon could decide whether to be touched, which was also a Bobby move, because Bobby could only stand sincerity for about eight seconds at a stretch and he had just used all eight.

Graham's van was a fully equipped Sprinter the color of a storm cloud. It had four-wheel drive and solar panels and hot water and air conditioning. It had a queen-sized foam mattress on a sleeping porch in the back, a high-end two-burner stove and a canvas awning that delighted Graham to no end. He drove the way he sailed, which was to say lazily, as if the destination was an afterthought and the journey was the real point of the outing. They went east out of Portland on Sunday morning into the Columbia River Gorge with the river wide and blue-gray on the left and the walls of the gorge going up sharply, green and wet on both sides, waterfalls occasionally cascading down the steep faces. Graham talked easily and listened well, and Dixon felt the tension loosening in him, in a way he only felt around people who did not want anything from him.

At Hood River the wind was up and the river was covered in sails. There must have been two hundred of them. Windsurfers and kiteboarders, the kites hanging up in the air like a flock of enormous bright birds on strings, the boards cutting white lines across the chop. Graham pulled into the parking area at the end of the strip of fancy restaurants and coffee shops along Portway Avenue. Graham had figured out somewhere around Troutdale that Dixon was a man who needed to be let out of a vehicle when something interesting was happening outside of it.

Dixon got his camera out, the good one this time. The Nikon with the big lens. He walked down to the rocks and shot photos of the windsurfers against the brown wall of the Washington side, and then turned and shot them against the sky, and then waited for one kiteboarder who kept launching off the tops of waves and hanging there, ten feet in the air over the river, and got him at the top of it, black against the silver. Dixon brought the image up on the screen. That one was a keeper. He knew it the way he had known when he saw the shot of the bridge across the Mississippi River way back in St. Louis.

He had written Cash about this scene when he had left Portland in June. ‘Whole gorge FULL of windsurfers. It looked COLD,’ he had said then. He’d been sitting in a parking lot further east along the river in Mosier that day with a postcard on his steering wheel, struggling to come up with something true to put on it. He hadn’t been a man who pulled over for things yet. He’d been a man who noticed them, but he’d just kept driving.

Graham and he got coffee, decaf for Dixon, at Stoked on Portway and then Dixon bought a postcard of more windsurfers for Cash and a pen, because he had, again, no idea where his pens were. He put the card in his bag to write later. He figured he’d probably have some new things to write about in a few days.

"You're smiling," Graham said, when he got back to the van.

"My kid would like it here," Dixon said, grinning. "He wouldn't admit it. But he'd like it."

Graham put his arm around Dixon’s shoulder. "It’s OK to miss him, man. Don’t worry, he’s ok."

Dixon looked at him sincerely. "I hope so. That’s all a dad ever wants."

They climbed up out of the Gorge and turned south toward the towering Mt. Hood, into forest that got older and darker as the road narrowed, Douglas fir rising up two hundred feet on either side, the light coming down through them in long columns of light diffuse at the edges. Dixon had grown up an hour from forests like these in Seattle and had somehow spent the last thirty years not visiting them.

Graham slowed the van on a rare straight patch of road.

"Look," he said quietly, and lifted two fingers off the wheel to point ahead. He turned the music on the stereo down with his other hand.

Playing in this sceneGrey Fox (Instrumental)The Sit Boy Soundtrack Collection

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Instrumental

A grey fox stood at the edge of the road. Dixon thought that it was a dog or a coyote at first. But then he realized this was something different that he had never seen before. It was small and silver-grey with a rust-colored throat and a black-tipped tail, and it had stopped halfway across the asphalt to look directly at the van. Graham brought them to a stop. The fox did not run. It stood still in the middle of the road and held them in its gaze, a flat sparkling attention that studied them, but asked for nothing. Then it turned and finished crossing the road, unhurried, and disappeared into the ferns on the other side. Just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

Dixon realized he had been holding his breath. "Wow. That’s. . . magical. He just looked right at us." Dixon quivered a bit as he said this.

"They do that," Graham said, easing off the brake. "The grey foxes do that. I think the red ones are the ones that run. The greys take a good long look at you first."

Dixon didn't say anything for a quarter mile. Graham let it stay quiet.

"Nothing's ever looked at me like that and then just kept walking," Dixon finally said. "Dogs come to me. Kids come to me. People in foreign countries ask me for directions. Drunk people always seem to find me. That creature looked right at me and, you know, it felt like it didn’t need one single thing from me."

"No," Graham agreed. "Because it didn’t."

"I liked it," Dixon said, a surprised tone in his voice.

At the next pullout, he got out his camera again and photographed the forest floor. There were mushrooms coming up everywhere, many coming right out of the sides of the trees. Mushrooms with clear gold bases and white tops. Brown ones growing in clusters. And more orange-gold ones in clusters at the base of the firs. He crouched in the mud and shot pictures of them for twenty minutes while Graham made coffee in the van.

"These are Chanterelles," Graham said, crouching beside him with a paper bag, already picking some of them. "Don't tell anybody where. People get killed over less in this state."

"Well, I don't know where we are," said Dixon.

"Perfect. Keep it that way." Graham held one up, gold and ruffled, and smelled it like a man smelling a wine cork. "Mm. Apricots. That's how you know. That, and not dying when you eat them."

Dixon scrolled through the photos on the little screen. Some of the mushrooms had dew drops held in suspension on their edges, and they were beautiful. Tiny pieces of the forest with outsized beauty.

"You've got a good eye," Graham said, handing him a cup of decaf, because Graham had asked the night before and then packed a second bag of grounds just for him, which was the kind of thing Graham did. "Especially for a man crouched in the mud."

"I've been told I have a good eye before. Mud may not necessarily be required," Dixon said, and with that he thought about the night in Atlanta and the mailboxes in the gallery and the woman whose name he yearned to know, but he did not say any of that. He drank his decaf.

Dixon’s boss, or rather his boss’s boss’s boss called a few minutes after they had started off to explore a trail leading out into the woods.

They were parked about half-way up the slopes of Mt. Hood in dense forest and very little cell service, when Dixon's phone, down to one flickering bar, buzzed with both a calendar alert and a call at the same moment. Apparently, people that high up in the organization could schedule you and call at the same moment. Dixon hit the button on the screen and to his dismay, the caller was on camera. It always seemed to be video these days.

The Chief Creative Officer wanted fifteen minutes. He wanted to talk about some reorganization, some new structure, something that was far from Dixon’s mind as he stood on an exposed granite shelf with the whole Cascade range stacked up blue behind him and answered the call, because technically he was still on the payroll. The job was still the job and the job was the source of his paycheck. He angled the phone so the mountains were behind his head and not the trailhead sign or Graham, who was fifty feet down the trail taking off his shirt and shorts in the sun for no reason Dixon could identify.

"Dixon, where are you? That doesn’t look like Atlanta," he barked in Australian accented English.

"No, I haven’t been in Atlanta for months. I'm out in Oregon this week," Dixon answered calmly, as if this should have been common knowledge to all. Nothing to hide here.

"Looks incredible. Is that a national forest?" bossman asked, leaning in to peer closely at the screen.

"Oh probably. There’s a lot of forests out here," Dixon said. Down the trail Graham had fully undressed and folded his clothes with great care, setting them on a rock. He was standing at the edge of the overlook in nothing at all, arms spread, greeting the mountains like an old friend. Dixon kept the phone very level. "So, you had some thoughts on the reorg?"

They talked for twelve minutes about a role that was Dixon’s if he wanted it, about the machine humming along fine without him. Dixon said the right things. He had said the right things in worse conditions than this. And the whole time some part of him remained at a distance while he watched the man in a black hoody, two thousand miles away in a stark white conference room, explain to him the future of a company and his place in it. All while he remained a man standing on a mountain, as if almost on another planet, who was, also, working very hard to keep a naked lawyer out of frame.

"Great to see your face," Dixon’s boss’s boss’s boss said. "Enjoy the trees."

"I will," Dixon said. With that he ended the call, looked up, and saw Graham watching him with interest. He was still naked, now glistening mildly in the sun.

"Boy that sounded a thousand miles away. Sounds like a really different life," Graham said.

"Yeah, it is a different life. It's my other one, I guess," Dixon replied distantly.

"Which one's real?" Graham asked.

Dixon considered the question for a good while and decided he didn’t have an answer right then. "I don’t know. I guess I'll let you know," he said, and put the phone in his pocket. They walked back down the trail through the forest. Graham naked in front of Dixon. Dixon laughing quietly at the sight of his naked friend as he walked behind him. He thought about the conference call and laughed all the way to the van.

Bend was going to be for "resupply," Graham said, and he said it the way a general says it to his troops.

They came down off the mountain in the late afternoon and over the crest of the Cascades onto the dry side of Oregon, and the country changed in about fifteen miles from dripping green trees to red dirt and juniper and a sky that had suddenly gotten much bigger and wider. Bend sat in the middle of it, a town that looked like it had been designed by a committee of very fit people, bent on enjoying every bit of it. Bend sits on the Deschutes River, which is calm and beautiful as it passes through its downtown. It is flanked by mountains off in the distance. The Sisters and Mt. Bachelor among them. Graham parked the van in front of a dispensary and looked at Dixon with a mildly sinister grin.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "I have a list I need to fill. Go find your soda."

"How do you know about my Caffeine-Free Diet Coke situation?" Dixon asked.

"You mentioned it at Rooster Rock. Twice. A man doesn't mention a soft drink twice unless it's a situation." Graham put his reading glasses on his face. "Go, little one. Be off on your hunt." He waved his fingers at him as if to send him on his way.

So Dixon went and hunted.

Caffeine-Free Diet Coke is not a beverage so much as a rumor of one. He had been tracking it across the country since June the way some men track elk or bass. He had once found it at a Sinclair gas station in Cheyenne and a tiny bodega in Chicago, but it was often nowhere else. He had learned not to get his hopes up. He went into a local grocery store first and was looked at with pity by a young woman who informed him they were a Pepsi store. He went into a gas station and found a cooler that contained eleven kinds of energy drink and a single can of something called Yerba Buzz. Then he walked four blocks to the Safeway and stood in the soda aisle, running his eye down the shelf the way he used to run it down a lighting plot.

Then he spotted them. The sacred gold cans. They were on the bottom shelf, to the very far left, behind a display of pumpkin-spice something, almost to the dog food. There sat two twelve-packs. It was as if he had found a unicorn, in Bend, Oregon, twice. He yelped quietly to himself.

He bought both, of course. He carried them back down the street, all twenty-four cans tucked in his arms like a sacred treasure. He got to the van at the same time as Graham. Graham carried a paper bag and a bottle of wine and had the expression of a man whose week was now fully provisioned. He grinned very broadly and mouthed the words "so fun" very slowly.

Graham looked at the soda. Dixon looked at the paper bag.

"So we're both set," Graham said.

"Yep, I guess we're both set," Dixon said slowly.

"I want to be clear that mine is entirely legal in the State of Oregon, with appropriate paperwork, of course."

"I never doubted it," Dixon said. He loaded the cans into the van like a man loading a boat for a long voyage, which in a way he was. He cracked one open, sniffed it like a fine wine, took a drink and let out a long "aaahhh." Graham groaned. "Sometimes, Dixon, I wonder if you are the biggest geek in the world."

"I know people that would take offense to that," Dixon answered. They both laughed.

They drove west out of town into the open country leading back toward the Cascades as the light went long. The Three Sisters stood up off to their left and the sky out the windshield did a thing Dixon had only ever seen it do west of the Mississippi, the whole upside down bowl of it going orange and then a deep blushed pink, every cloud lit from underneath. He asked Graham to pull over. Graham pulled over. His shot would be in color, because a sky like that did not want to be black and white. He took a few shots and then he put the camera down and just looked, because the camera was never going to capture it as big as his memory would.

"You do that a lot," Graham said.

"Do what?" Dixon asked.

"You stop. You shoot. Then you stop shooting and just look." Graham had his arms folded on the wheel. "Most people do one or the other."

"I didn't used to do either," Dixon said. "I used to just drive past things. Now I have to do both. I feel the need to do it in my soul. I feel like I owe it to the world to stop and look at it."

They camped that night at a place where the mountains rose steeply in the distance, a view that ran a hundred miles in every direction, with not one light in any of them. Graham parked the van on a flat spot among the sage, set the awning, lit the two burners, and started cooking with the same total stillness he brought to his legal briefs. Dixon offered to help and was handed a can of his own soda and told to sit.

Dixon sat on a folding chair and watched a corporate lawyer cook the wild mushrooms they had picked that morning in nothing but his hiking shorts, soft music coming out of the van’s speakers.

Graham sautéed the chanterelles in butter first, a lot of butter, with thyme he had brought from home in a little tin, and the smell came up off the pan and went out into the sage and Dixon's whole body leaned toward it. Then he added eggs, soft, folded around the mushrooms. Then bread he toasted right on the burner grate with his fingers, flipping it without a fork, a man who had burned his fingertips enough times to have stopped noticing. He poured himself a glass of wine. He handed Dixon a plate of the food.

It was one of the best things Dixon had eaten all year, and he had eaten a broth in Madison that he swore a grandmother had wept into.

"Man, you could do this for a living," Dixon said, with his mouth full.

"I already do something for a living," Graham said. "This is the part I'd do for free, because I fuckin’ love it." He sat on another folding chair with his plate on his knees and his glass on the ground and looked at Dixon with his lawyer look. "So. Three weeks in a stranger's house. Tell me the part you haven't told anybody."

Dixon thought about it. He thought about the wax, wine, ropes catastrophe with Winter. He decided this was not what Graham meant.

"There was a little dog," he said finally. "Her name was Hip, short for Hippo. She is all of six pounds and at least thirteen years old. She shakes when someone comes toward her with a washcloth." He put the plate down. His hands wanted to show it, so he let them, the crook of the arm, the small slow circle of a thumb. "So I cleaned her eyes every day anyway. Real slow. Talked to her the whole time about nothing. A guy in Amarillo. The songs I have been working on. And by the third week, Graham, she would go and stand in front of the cabinet where I kept the washcloth. Just stand there and wait for me."

Graham didn't say anything. He took a drink from his wine.

"That's the part," Dixon said. "I produced a show for twenty-five thousand people last spring and I haven’t thought about it. Not once. But I think about that dog standing at that cabinet every day now."

"That tracks," Graham said.

"Does it?" Dixon asked, surprised.

"You spent a whole afternoon at Rooster Rock telling me about your ex-wife's shoes and your father’s Rolex and your kid and the estate sale, and the only time your voice got soft was when you got to the dog you drove to Oregon." He shrugged. "I notice what changes people's voices. It's most of my job."

Dixon picked his plate back up. He did not have anything to say to that, so he ate.

"How'd you end up out here anyway?" Graham asked after a while, waving the fork at the desert, at the van, at the whole situation. "The actual how. Not the estate-sale version. A guy like you doesn't just wake up one day and sell his new espresso machine."

"An astrologer told me it would happen," he said flatly.

Graham's fork stopped. His mouth opened slightly.

"Yeah, it was a pretty crazy thing. The astrologer, she's in Hawaii," Dixon went on. He had not told this to anyone in months, and it came out easier than he expected, the way things do in the dark with food in front of you. "It was a birthday present. The astrologer looked at my chart for like eighty-five minutes and then she said, just totally casually, your life is going to completely change. She said it would start in 2023 and that I wouldn’t be able to miss it. She said that a first phase of this change would wrap up by the middle of 2024. Then there would be more. And by early 2026, I would mostly know where I was headed." He took a drink of the soda. "Graham, I literally painted my garage floor on the last day of June 2024 and drove out of Atlanta on the first day of July. I wasn't trying to. It just happened that way. That’s exactly the middle of the year."

Graham looked at him over the top of his reading glasses for a long moment.

"Who gave you the present?" he asked.

"She did."

Graham let that sit. He was good at letting things sit. Then he nodded once, the smallest nod, and went back to his food.

"So basically, your life has been entirely flipped upside down and yet you've got about sixteen months more ahead of you until you know where you’re going," he said.

"Roughly. Yeah. That seems to be the case," Dixon said, sounding both concerned and a little sad at the same time.

"Well ain’t that a dandy. Heck, don’t worry about it Dix. I've got clients who pay me to not know things for longer than that." He finished his wine. "Do you believe her?"

"I believed her the minute she said it," Dixon said. "I just couldn't imagine it though, you know. When I’m at work, I can see a place that doesn't even exist yet. But I could not see my own life just changing so completely, so suddenly." He looked out at the dark. "And now I have no idea where I’m going to end up."

Graham let that sit too.

Graham took the bed in the van, because it was his van after all. He invited Dixon to share it with him. But Dixon, who had been house sitting for the last few weeks, and driving for months before that, and sleeping in a great many beds that belonged to other people, said he wanted to sleep on the ground under the sky. Graham gave him a look that said he had heard men say this before, and handed him a tent and a sleeping pad and a bag from the storage area in the back of the van.

Dixon pitched the tent on a flat spot of decomposed granite and got into the bag and lay there feeling every particle of the planet through his spine.

Then the sky came out.

He had seen a lot of big skies recently. He had seen the Montana storm and the sunset from the airplane leaving Vegas and the tapestry of stars over the High Sierra that had stopped him on the shoulder of the road. He had not seen this though. Out here with no town for an hour in any direction and no moon to speak of, the Milky Way came up across the whole black bowl of the sky. A bright dusty band, close enough that it felt less like looking up than looking out. He lay on the ground with the tent flap open and could not stop looking at it. His breath fogged. His back sent up a small complaint he chose, for now, to ignore.

He thought about Mama Honu. He had just said her name out loud for the first time in months and now here she was, unhurried and certain, floating in the sky with the stars. Once it starts you won't be able to miss it or stop it, she had said. He did the arithmetic he kept doing. Sixteen months. He was a long way into it, so much had changed, so many questions remained. The not-knowing had stopped feeling like a wound. Somewhere out past the edge of the light, something enormous was turning very slowly. It did not need his help. For the length of one held breath under that sky, that was fine.

He pulled out his phone, set the exposure to two seconds and placed it securely on the ground. The sky was dark enough and filled with enough stars that the phone captured an image that, honestly, was stunning.

He lay there looking at the Milky Way. A shooting star dropped from the sky and he silently made a wish. He wished to be OK.

The ground, it turned out, was not a bed and his back was not presently OK.

He learned this at about twelve-thirty. There was a rock. He had, of course, checked for rocks. He had run his hands over the whole flat spot of granite like a man reading Braille, and there had been no rock, and now there was a rock, directly under his left hip, and it had apparently been waiting for him to fall asleep before it came up out of the earth. He moved. The rock moved with him. He rolled onto his back and the rock relocated to a spot between his shoulder blades with the efficiency of a thing that knew where it was going.

The sleeping pad was supposedly an inch thick and claimed on its label to be self-inflating. It had inflated itself to roughly the thickness of a tortilla. Dixon lay on the tortilla-thin pad and tried his right side. He tried his stomach, which put his face in the granite. He tried his back again with his knees up, which worked for eleven minutes, and then his feet went cold in the bag, and he had never once in his life thought about his feet being cold inside a sleeping bag, and now it was the only thought he had.

Around one-thirty he sat up and looked at the van.

The van was forty feet away. The van had a floor. The floor was flat and made of something that was not granite and there was, he was fairly sure, a rug on it. He sat in the tent flap with the galaxy hanging over him, the single most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and he looked at the van and thought about its floor with real longing.

He didn’t give up on the tent. He had made a whole speech about sleeping under the sky. Graham would not have said a word, and that was exactly the problem.

So he lay back down and negotiated. That was the word he had landed on in August, lying on the deck of a houseboat. A bed was a negotiation between your body and a place, and he never stayed anywhere long enough to win one. He had been treating all those beds as interchangeable. The Hampton Inn with Magnolia in the center of it. The air mattress. Rhonda's bed under the angels. Janet's guest room with the tiny stairs for Hip. He had lost count somewhere along the way. He had told himself he could sleep anywhere. Lying on a rock in Oregon under the Milky Way, he understood in his hip and his shoulder and his cold feet that this was not true. A bed was not a luxury. A bed was a thing his body had been asking for all summer, and he had been too busy moving to hear it.

"Okay," he said out loud, to the rock. "You win. I hear you."

His phone buzzed. One bar, flickering, found from somewhere.

A woman in Dallas who'd seen his profile on Trusted Housesitters. She had two golden retrievers. It was for a week in November. They messaged back and forth a little in the dark, his face lit blue in the tent, the galaxy ignored overhead. She asked a lot of questions. She asked the one that always came eventually, some version of how do I know you're a real person, and he answered honestly, the way he answered everyone now, and the three dots came and went and came and went and then stopped. She never wrote again. He put the phone facedown on the tent floor. You don't get them all. Some doors you knock on don't open and it isn't personal and it isn't a verdict, it's just a door.

He slept a little, near dawn. His hip did not.

He woke to Graham crouched outside the tent with two cups, the decaf held out to him, and an expression Dixon couldn't read.

"Don't move fast," Graham said quietly. "Look past me. Down toward the meadow."

Dixon looked.

There were elk in the meadow below them. A lot of them, thirty maybe, moving through the damp morning grass with their heads down, and one enormous bull standing off to the side with a rack of antlers you'd need a permit to build, and as Dixon watched, the bull lifted his head and let out a sound Dixon had never heard an animal make, a high strange rising whistle that broke at the top into something almost mechanical, a bugle, thrown out across the whole cold valley to nobody and everybody. The sound went up Dixon's spine in a way the cold ground never had.

"Rut," Graham whispered. "He's telling everyone he's here."

They drank crouched in the bushes and watched the herd move through and out of the meadow and up into the timber, the bull last, unhurried, king of his country, totally unbothered by either of them. Dixon did not take a picture. He'd learned that much by now. Some things you just experience.

"How was the ground?" Graham asked, when the last of them had gone.

"The ground was a rock," Dixon answered.

"It often is." Graham stood up and his knees cracked. "You can have the van tonight. I'll take the rock. I'm not proud."

"I'm not taking your bed," Dixon said firmly.

"It's not a bed. It's a shelf with a foam pad on it." Graham looked at him. "You walk like a man who lost a fight with a sidewalk. Please, at least take the shelf for one night."

Dixon took the shelf.

They came back over the mountains on Wednesday and dropped into the deep wet Cascade forest on the west side, down a gravel road along a green river, to a cluster of old cedar cabins and a lodge and steaming pools set into the rocks with the water coming up hot out of the ground itself. It was, Graham had said, a hippie place, and it was, gloriously, entirely a hippie place. There were prayer flags. There was a schedule of things called ‘offerings.’ There was a communal dining hall that served no meat and a bulletin board advertising sound baths and ecstatic dance and a man named Sky who did bodywork by donation. Nobody wore very much and a lot of people wore nothing, and it was all so completely natural to everyone that within an hour Dixon had stopped noticing, the way he'd stopped noticing at Rooster Rock, the nakedness turning from an oddity into simply the way it was here.

The hot springs compound received no cell signal, which everyone there considered the best thing about the place. There was also a sign at the gate, hand-painted, with a picture of a dog inside a red circle with a line through it.

Dixon stood and looked at that sign for longer than a sign deserved his attention.

"No dogs," Graham confirmed. "Hot water, bare feet, wildlife. It's a whole thing."

"I don't think I've been anywhere with no dogs since June," Dixon said. He was trying to think of one. "There's always a dog. There was even a dog in the laundromat in Sioux Falls."

"Well, there's no dog here. You'll have to make do with people," Graham said and patted Dixon on the shoulder.

This turned out to be harder than it sounded. Dixon walked through the retreat that first afternoon and for the first time in his adult life nothing crossed the space to get to him. Nothing towed its owner across a parking lot. Nothing put its chin on his knee. People smiled, people nodded, a woman in nothing but a sarong offered him a slice of melon, but it was all at a normal human distance, the polite kind, and he felt the lack of the dog energy the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue.

He loved the place anyway. He'd expected to feel like the one person that obviously didn’t know the drill, and instead he felt the tension he'd been carrying since Atlanta, since before Atlanta, come loose one vertebra at a time in the hot bubbling water. He sat in one of the hot pools at the edge of the forest with the river rumbling below in the distance and Graham beside him greeting people by name, and he was, for a while, nobody's caretaker and nobody's employee, just a warm body in warm water under enormous trees. His hip stopped hurting for the first time since the night on the rock. Two pools over, a man was earnestly asking a newcomer about her relationship with her father. Dixon thought about Bobby, and about the ninety minutes he'd given him, and decided he'd been generous.

Which is exactly when his phone, jammed into his boot on the rock with his folded towel, lit up with a video request from a family in Knoxville who wanted to interview him for a Thanksgiving-week sit and were, the message said, hopping on now, was that okay?

There was no signal at the pools. There was, according to a hand-lettered sign, exactly one place on the entire property you could sometimes get a single bar of service, which was a particular stump at the top of the parking lot, and Dixon, dripping, wrapped in a towel that did not fully cover his situation, jogged up the hill in borrowed rubber sandals to go stand on a stump and be interviewed for a job by strangers while a naked man played a hand drum forty feet away.

He made the stump. He actually got two bars. He held the phone up, framed his own face next to a cedar tree, and became, instantly, the calm competent professional the family needed to see, a man who absolutely had his life together and would treat their home and their Cream Retriever with total responsibility.

"You caught me on a little getaway," Dixon said warmly. "I’m camping this week in the Cascades. Unfortunately, the reception's a bit spotty out here, so if I freeze, I'm probably still with you."

They loved him. Of course they loved him. He was good at this. He treated this interview for a dog sit with the attention that he would give a multimillion dollar proposal request. And it deserved his attention. This was personal to him in a way that was different from his work. He assured them that their dog would get his full attention and that was entirely true. He answered their questions about his experience and his references and how he couldn’t quit thinking about Hip, while behind him, out of frame by a margin he was managing with the precision of a man defusing a bomb, the hippie retreat conducted its afternoon business. The drum kept going. Somewhere a bell rang for something.

"Is that a drum?" said a small voice off to the side of their screen. A kid, maybe eight, leaning in. "Dad, is that man at a concert?"

"Sorry, it’s the people camping in the next site," Dixon said smoothly, and smiled, and did not turn around, because turning around would have put the drummer in the shot, and the drummer was wearing nothing but a feather. "It’s a very musical campground," he added, giving emphasis to the word musical in a sing-song kind of way.

The family emailed that night and said he seemed like exactly the person they'd hoped for, and he penciled a week in November into the calendar app between the golden retrievers who never wrote back and the question mark over January.

He came back down the hill to the pools with the towel in one hand and the phone in the other and Graham looked at him and said, "You have a face you make for those."

"What face is that?" he asked.

"The one where you're lying by being completely honest," Graham said. "It's a good face. I use it on partners' calls." He tipped his head back into the steam. "You know what I noticed about you at Rooster Rock? You're the most relaxed uptight man I've ever met. You're wound up like a spring and yet you've decided to enjoy it."

"That's the nicest and worst thing anyone's said to me in a long time."

"I'm a lawyer," Graham said, eyes closed. "I bill for both."

Published August 23rd, 2026 from Park City, Utah