AROUND NOON, and before we started fishing, we laid a bottle of wine in the creek to cool. So far on the trip, we had stuck to beer and hard liquor, since he felt wine was for girls and, you know. I insisted this time, saying this was a classic European fishing tradition. Then we tried to fish, as though it would be as easy as fishing in the backwoods of Idaho. Instead, the high desert stream held small fish that were wary of our flies, if it held any fish at all. We had hoped to find the endangered Gila trout, snag it up out of the water, take a picture, measure it, and report the find to the forest service and whatever wildlife agency cared about that kind of thing. We would tell them it was an accidental catch and that we handled the fish properly, wetting our hands in the stream before touching it, and gently placing it back in the water. Of course what we really wanted to do was eat one and see how it compared to a brook or a rainbow. Would it be sweeter, cleaner, for being taboo? We wanted to know.

After a couple hours of fishing, what we would do with an endangered trout was a moot point. We had picked the wrong stream, or the wrong stretch of the right stream, and only received small bites. We took lunch with our wine against a couple of tree trunks, passing the heavy bottle back and forth. Even with sandwiches to help soak up the alcohol, all that wine left us full-bore drunk. The river twisted around me as I watched it run from right to left, and when I tried to explain the sensation he laughed.

This is why we shouldn’t drink wine, he said. It goes to the head.

The head? I said. Like, a specific head, or the uber-head?

He stood up. Save that shit for grad school, he said.

I’m getting ready, I said. Prepped. In the smart-boy mindset.

Well, save it.

He was right. In two weeks, after we got back, I’d be halfway across the country. One of the reasons for our trip, and one of many things we avoided talking about.

He started off into the stream with his fly rod.

Don’t try that right now, I said.

Why not? he said.

Because you can’t even catch them when you’re sober, I said.

You wuss, he said, and then he slipped and fell into the rocks, snapping his fly rod. I laughed at him, and kept laughing at him as he realized what had happened and grew furious, throwing the broken rod at a patch of grass where it bounced and rested. I finally got control as he saw the futility of it himself, and he blamed me for letting him fish while drunk. We decided the best course of action was to sleep it off, and we took a nap on the grass, our heads resting against our packs, my arms wrapped around his shoulders.

I WOKE BEFORE HIM, with a brilliant idea. It was now mid or late afternoon, still not the best time for fishing, but I had to try it anyway. I broke a small piece off our wine cork and squeaked it onto a new hook, still red and fragrant. I didn’t know if that would be a good or a bad thing.

He joined me by the river after I caught my first fish, an eight-inch brookie.

That shouldn’t be working, he said. But neither one of us were really that surprised. Fish were as contradictory in their behavior as people. I caught another brook trout, nine inches, and handed the pole over to him. He tried for about half an hour, then gave up to join me on the shore. You always catch more fish than me, he said.

We started up the backpacking stove and quickly cooked and ate the fish, which somehow tasted wilder and grittier than the brookies we had caught in Idaho or Wyoming. But it gave us back our energy and I talked him into hiking with me towards the nearest rounded peak. It was maybe five o’clock and the summer sun gave us hours yet to do something. We had a day pack already prepared with water and snacks and took off.

I liked walking behind him, seeing how easily his body could scramble up what seemed like a smooth rock face, how his calves stretched and sprung when he leapt from stone to stone across a stream. I thought of my own body, still young but now experienced in the world, deftly moving through our surroundings, reacting with Zen and not concentrated thought.

Close to the top, near a clearing, something started beeping. He took his phone out of his pocket and checked his messages. We had noticed this many times in the last two weeks, the way climbing a mountain somehow meant rising into the range of a cell phone tower and therefore being less alone. In the quiet of the woods I could hear the message clearly, his girlfriend, Lisa, asking how the trip was going, how she hoped to hear from him tomorrow, how she loved him, bye. He listened to the whole message, deleted it, and apologized for the interruption.

We didn’t have time to enjoy the top of our little mountain. The sun was sinking and we needed to head back down, moving faster than we had on the way up. We had forgotten to bring headlamps with us for the short trek and scolded ourselves for our foolishness. We started running back down, our long strides covering a distance that had taken four steps on the way up.

By the time we got to the creek, we slowed down, no longer needing to rush. We started talking about what we would do on our drive back to Sacramento, where else we would stop. We talked about who we would see first, which stories we would tell, recounting the things we had seen on our trip in order of wonder and rarity, and which events made us seem most daring, most at home in the wilderness. We agreed, this was a good trip, one of the best, and everyone needed to know.

Someday I’m going to take my kids on adventures like this, he said.

That sounds good, I said.

Teach them to fish and all that. How to build fires, what to take on a hike. We could bring along a guitar and Lisa could teach them folk songs. She’s a great singer.

Huh, I said.

Hell, maybe we could even live out in the woods.

I laughed. Which kid are you going to name John Boy? I said.

Why John Boy? he said.

He didn’t get the Waltons reference, just like I knew he wouldn’t. Trivial pop culture facts never stuck in his head the way they did in mine, especially ones that old.

The Waltons? I said. Didn’t you fucking grow up in America?

All that stuff was inconsequential, but right then I had ridiculed him and his idealistic dream, his desire to live a life that came out of the photos in a sixties-era sporting goods catalogue. He walked ahead of me silently and let me talk.

THERE WAS SLIGHTLY over half a bottle of tequila left in the truck, and we drank it quickly, passing the bottle back and forth as we had with the wine, at the same time scrounging the surrounding campsites for firewood. This was our last night, and we needed a campfire, fire restrictions be damned. Just like the wine, everything had to be done right, according to tradition. We walked into another camp, empty, but with a stack of wood lying near the fire ring. It was imported wood, the kind you’re not supposed to bring because of foreign beetle infestations and fungus rot that could kill whole forests. So really, we were doing a benefit to the environment by burning it.

We stacked up the firewood until it looked like a funeral pyre, roaring into the night, throwing sparks on the dry needles so that we had to run around it, stomping them out, pouring water out of our Nalgenes to prevent them from spreading into the desert forest. As the fire slowed down, we could have simply sat and enjoyed it, but instead we decided there wasn’t enough to burn. There was all kinds of wood in the forest and it was going to waste. We tore at anything that was living, ripped the branches off ancient pinion and cedar trees then threw it on the fire, which by now was hot enough to burn anything. I dug a prickly pear cactus out of the ground and threw it on. All the green wood started to staunch the fire. The flame burned lower, but the world around us grew brighter. The full moon rose over the horizon, a perfect full moon, the kind made for wolves and coyotes and all the howling things.

When we’d had enough, we sat and watched the fire, and I complained about not having any more tequila. We talked about all the places we would like to see: Northern Italy, the Yucatan, the Canadian Rockies, the Great Barrier Reef, the fjords in Norway. These places were dreams we had, and sometimes we talked about the dreams generally, other times as through we shared them together. When the fire burned down to coals, we spread them out and pissed all around the edge of the fire pit. The steam clouded the hot coals and I could see their color shifting, the shades of black sinking deeper then rising, becoming red again or light gray, then sinking back to black. I was staring into the coals, trying to think of another way to fully put it out when he grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away, into the tent.

We were awake still, inside the tent, for more than an hour. Neither of us had showered for days, so certain things were out of the question. But we toyed with it, talked about it, and he even got out our remaining condom. I put it back, though. The surfaces of us, our skin, our hands, our lips, would be enough. I gripped his shoulders, squeezing the muscle like it would burst, while we kissed more deeply than we had ever kissed any woman. When we were done, we settled on our sides, facing one another and wrapped up together. His arm lay under mine as we fell asleep, his hand threaded between my arm and my side and gripping the top of my shoulder, not so much pulling me towards him as keeping himself from falling back.

WHEN I WOKE the sun was shining in our tent and I was miserably hot. It didn’t help that his arms were around me and his body against mine, our skin wet and burning where we touched. Where previous mornings I had welcomed the sweat and heat, this time I felt nauseous. I told myself it was because of the wine and tequila, an obviously bad mix. But then, why didn’t I want to look at his face, inches from mine? The last morning of our trip. When would I have this again?

I eased out of his grip and walked outside in my underwear. I knew one of the grocery bags in the back of the truck had a box of granola bars in it, and I searched until I found them. The only ones left were peanut butter flavored, which I hated, so I settled on a banana that was barely still yellow. I threw the peel into the woods and sat watching the stream run, I don’t know for how long. It was a pretty river, in its own way. Perhaps I just felt that way because it was the one source of life in this otherwise dried-out hellscape.

I wondered, do I even like fishing? Does he like it?

He had more energy when he woke up. He started the stove and made us some oatmeal, which he brought to me as I sat near the stream.

Are you hungover? he asked.

No, I said. Just got too warm.

He moved closer to me, and I remembered the heat of the tent and felt nauseous again. I got up and went to roll up my sleeping bag and pad. He came back from the river to do the same, and I felt sick again looking at him. I took my fly rod to the river and fished while he cleaned up breakfast and broke down camp. I fished for nearly an hour, slicing at the warm air, whipping the line back and forth, more intent on perfecting my cast than hooking a fish. He finished his work packing our things and I could feel him watching from the truck, content to wait for me.

I gave up on the river and we took off down the mountain, heading West, aiming ourselves across Arizona. We were both quiet, him driving while I scanned through radio stations for something tolerable. After a while he started to talk, simple things about where we would stay that night, if we should stop to get groceries or just find fast food. I said fast food. He stopped at a diner.

We ordered burgers and fries anyway, treating the place like a Wendy’s. All around us, old people ate plates of hash browns and eggs, sucking down their thin black coffee. Everyone paired up, man and woman. They’d probably been out on the reservoir, or planned to later. One of them, a big, tall, broad man in his sixties, pushed his plate aside and flagged down the waitress. He said something to her, and a minute later she came back with a tall vanilla malt, in one of those classic malt glasses.

I went up to the counter, smiling at the older man back there. Between the friendly expression, his age, and the dirty apron, I assumed he was the owner. I asked for a vanilla malt. He picked up one of those same glasses, placed it under a machine, and out came the malt. He put it on the counter in front of me, then ceremonially plopped a big red cherry on the top. The straw came last, gently piercing the malt.

Two straws please, I said.

He paused, eyes flicking from our table and then back to me. He stared at me as he pulled a second straw from the box behind the counter and shoved it in the malt.

I brought the malt back to our table.

It’s 9:30, he said. You really going to eat all that?

It’s for both of us, I said.

He turned sideways to me, looking out the door.

I’m full, he said.

I got two straws.

I’m not hungry.

So I started on the malt alone. I took a big pull, staring at him as I drank, well aware he could see me. I sat back, swallowing.

He sighed and shook his head before facing me and grabbing the malt. What is this? he said. He took a drink.

It’s a malt, I said.

I feel like you’re ambushing me.

I thought you liked malts.

You know that old man is staring at us, right?

I was by no means oblivious to the old owner behind the counter, still giving the evil eye.

I bet he’s never left this town, I said.

Probably not, he said. A lot of people don’t leave where they’re from.

Doesn’t mean they have to be assholes, I said.

There’s people like that everywhere. Even Pennsylvania.

I’m well aware of that.

You’re the one who’s moving.

And if I wasn’t?

You are.

But if I wasn’t? What would happen then? More fucking Brokeback Mountain trips? I said, making sure to pronounce the title of the movie quietly. What are you going to tell Lisa next time?

You are the one who’s moving, he said slowly, giving each word the kind of space that can only be found in the West.

I reached for the malt, not sure who drank last, not caring which straw I put in my mouth, but needing a way to pause my side of the conversation. I was hoping he would be the one to speak, to put words to what we found, but knowing full well that he was waiting for me to do the same.

As I put down the malt and as he opened his mouth to speak, the owner showed up to clear our plates. He didn’t ask how we liked our meals and we didn’t offer any compliments. He slapped the check on our table, right between us, next to the half-finished malt. Then he tried to grab the glass, like we were done. I reached out, clamping my hand over the top of it, and said, We aren’t done with that. The owner shrugged and walked off.

You were going to say something, I said.

He pulled the glass out from under my hand and took another drink.