My friends can give you a ride to Bishop, but the driver’s on mushrooms, she says, eyeballing the tan lines that stop at our ankles, our scratched-up calves, our grimy backpacks. Other day hikers flow around us like we’re two giant boulders in a river. Aaron and I exchange looks. After eighteen days in the High Sierra, hell yeah, we’ll take a ride from a guy on shrooms. We grab our packs, socks, shoes, trekking poles, and each other’s hand, hobbling with stiff legs and aching backs behind the smooth, clean curve of our rescuer. She guides us to her friend’s car, where a woman with skin as pale as a desert mouse greets us, opens the rickety red door, and hands us each a peach before piling us in. A man with golden-orange sunset hair reaches from the driver’s seat to toss a jumbled mess of hiking gear into the trunk. We fold ourselves into the leftover space, Sunset Man looking deep into our eyes, grinning until we grin back, until all four of us are grinning, any collective shyness absorbed by an impromptu road trip.

He slaps the steering wheel and starts the car and questions us about our journey in a voice as raspy as a rusty gate. After days and days of walking, we are suddenly moving, engaged in motion no longer tied to our own effort and volition. I cup my peach gently with one hand and clutch the door handle with my other. We’re flying over cracked and rutted blacktop, the landscape speeding past as if we’re viewing it from the eye of a tornado, and is this how life has always been? A forward momentum where details can only be gleaned and glimpsed?

Aaron slurps his peach, pointing to the one in my palm and then pointing at his mouth: Eat the peach, he says, in that silent way married people talk. I shake my head. Not yet. I’m dazed and exhilarated, watching through my window as green foliage and cool rock crumble into the buttery soft grasses of the foothills, our road cutting through the splendor, efficiently whisking me away from my beloved Sierra Nevada. The towering shape of mountainous peaks and summits crowd the rear window, like a family waving good-bye, steadily shrinking into a memory. Aaron nods in understanding. Our knees touch, our eyes glazed with overstimulation, giddy as we imbibe on sensory overload. Can you believe…isn’t this just so…is this real…our hearts flutter back and forth.

Sunset Man fills the car with his tales, his fiery eyes framed in the rear-view mirror. Mouse nods, tripping along in her own quietly animated way. I want to tell them how the scent of their soap is like standing in an ocean of lavender and honey, how it collides against the wall of our sweaty stench and roils over like a tsunami. Outside, the earth opens and expands; the air paints itself in bittersweet hues of purple and burgundy. Bishop twinkles in the dry valley, a distant star looming, growing in intensity. I want to tell them how I’ve never been exhausted into happiness like I am right now. Sunset Man veers onto a gravelly vista and slams the brakes. We all spill out of the rickety red car and seep into the everywhere. I want to tell them how I can see the universe breathing in unison with me. How the sky reaches for a horizon it never meets. Mouse is humming like a little bird, rubbing warmth into her chilly paws. Aaron scurries into the underbrush to take a leak and scare the quail. Sunset huffs and puffs, circling the group like a wolf, a lone wolf afraid of being left in the wilderness. I stand to the side, my silhouette straining to stand out against time. I want to tell them so much. I do. Instead, I eat the peach.

Amy Bee contributes to the Sacramento News & Review and Good Times Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Ozy, Salon, New Ohio Review, The London Reader, and others. Her essay, The Adult Section, won the 2017 Sunlight Press Summer Creative Nonfiction Award. She's currently working on a memoir about loving what you're not good at (which, for her, is life in general). When she isn't writing, Amy likes to backpack long distances.