For 94 Days I Talked to Her Every Night on a Fire Lookout Radio. I Didn’t Know What She Looked Like. On the Last Day of the Season, She Said She Was Coming Up the Mountain

I said yes before I thought about it.

Then I thought about it all night.

I hadn’t shaved in nine days. I hadn’t had a real haircut since May. The cabin smelled like woodsmoke, coffee and a man who’d been living alone on a mountain for four months.

At five in the morning, I was scrubbing the floor.

At six, I was shaving with a bucket of cold water and a mirror the size of a playing card.

At seven, I was standing on the catwalk with my binoculars, watching the trail that comes up the north ridge, feeling like a sixteen-year-old waiting at the end of a driveway.

It had been seven years since I’d felt anything close to that.

It scared me more than any lightning storm.

Here is what I knew about Nora after ninety-four nights.

She laughed at her own jokes before she finished telling them.

She’d read every book Wallace Stegner ever wrote, twice.

She knew the name of every star in the summer sky and made up names for the ones that didn’t have any.

She’d been a nurse for twenty years in Portland, and then she wasn’t.

She never said why.

Once, in August, during a thunderstorm that lit up the whole Bitterroot range, I’d told her about Kate. The diagnosis. The hospital. The insurance company that denied the experimental treatment, the appeals, the letters, the way I’d spent Kate’s last good weeks on the phone with claims adjusters instead of sitting beside her.

Nora had been quiet for a long time.

Then she’d said, “I know those phone calls.”

That was all.

At 10:40 a.m., I saw movement on the north ridge.

A figure. Walking slowly. Stopping every few steps.

I lifted the binoculars.

She was walking with two trekking poles. A big pack. A blue bandana over her head.

Under the bandana, there was no hair at all.